U.S.A. South Negro folklore collection.

Format:

Other

Contributor:

Garwick, Walter C., researcher.

Alexander Street Press.

Columbia University. Center for Ethnomusicology, collector.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Garwick, Walter C--Archives.

Garwick, Walter C.

African Americans--Southern States--Music.

African Americans.

African Americans--Southern States--Social life and customs--20th century.

Southern States--Social life and customs--1865-.

Southern States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Production:

[1935-1937]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

data file

Summary:

This little known but historically significant collection documents African American music and language in the Jim Crow South, with a focus on urban and suburban communities rarely documented at the time. The collection of field recordings includes spirituals, hymns, and gospel music recorded by Walter Garwick between 1935-1937 from African Americans at various locations in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia (including St. John's Island), Tennessee, and Alabama. In addition to sacred music, the recordings include Gullah prayers, sermons, tales, Br'er Rabbit stories, and vendors' street cries in South Carolina; spells, remedies, and tales recorded in South Georgia; dialect and folk plays; and some secular and children's songs. The collection should appeal to students of African American culture, history, literature, folklore, education, and religion in the years of the Jim Crow South. In its geographic diversity and cross-sectional, almost random, sampling of the range of musical and rhetorical idioms Garwick appears to have encountered, this collection provides a strikingly different perspective on the sound of the African American south than the impression offered by field recordists who focused primarily on rural settings and teasing out remnants of folkloric genres. The significant number of tracks from Talladega and Hampton are documents of those important institutions but also of idioms of African American vocality that have barely been studied. And there are haunting and remarkable performances scattered throughout this collection that have simply never been heard beyond the small number of archivists and scholars who have ever listened to this collection, and even particular song items that appear, quite remarkably, to be unattested anywhere in the literature on African American music of this era.

Notes:

Title from resource description page (viewed June 8, 2017).

Full online collection from Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University includes field recordings and field notes.

Related Collections:

Original copies held by Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA.

OCLC:

994058797

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.