Selected Readings

Selected Readings

Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine, 1970.

-------. Positively Black. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

-------. “Playing the Dozens.” Journal of American Folklore 75 (1962): 209-20.

Albee, Edward. The Death of Bessie Smith. New York: Coward-McCann, 1960.

Botkin, B.A. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945.

Broonzy, William (as told to Yannick Bruyoghe). Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story. New York: Macmillan, 1955. London: Cassell, 1955.

Calt, Stephen, and Gayle Wardlow. King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton. Newton, N.J.: Rock Chapel Press, 1988.

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Co., 1959.

-------. The Bluesmen: The Story and Music of the Men Who Made the Blues. New York: Oak Publications, 1967.

-------. The Legacy of the Blues: Art and Lives of Twelve Great Bluesmen. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977.

Cobb, James. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Cohn, David L. Where I Was Born and Raised. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

Courlader, Harold. Negro Folk Music U.S.A. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.

-------. A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore. New York: Crown Publishers, 1972.

Cowley, John. “Really the ‘Walking Blues’: Son House, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Development of a Traditional Blues.” Popular Music, 1:57-72 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

-------. “Shack Bullies and Levee Contractors,” Part One and Two. Juke Blues, nos. 3 and 4, Winter 1985-Spring 1986.

Daniel, Pete. Deep’n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

-------. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

David, John R. “Frankie and Johnnie: The Trial of Frankie Baker.” Missouri Folklore Society Journal 6 (1984): 1-30.

Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937.

Dorson, Richard M. American Negro Folktales. Greenwich, Con.: Fawcett, 1956.

Dundes, Alan, ed. Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Evans, David. “Afro-American One-Stringed Instruments.” Western Folklore 29, no. 4 (1970): 229-45.

-------. “Black Fife and Drum Music in Mississippi.” Mississippi Folklore Register 6, no. 3 (Fall 1972): 94-107.

-------. “African Elements in Twentieth-Century United States Black Folk Music.” Jazzforschung 10(1978): 85-110.

-------. “The Origins of Blues and Its Relationship to African Music.” In Images de L’africaine de l’antiquite au XXe siecle, edited by Daniel Droixhe and Klaus H. Kiefer, pp. 129-41. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987.

Ferris, William. Blues from the Delta. Series edited by Paul Oliver. London: Studio Vista Limited, 1970.

-------. Afro-American Folk arts and Crafts, special edition of Southern Folklore Quarterly 42, nos. 2 and 3 (1978). Revised edition, Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1982; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

-------. Local Color. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992.

-------. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Charles Wilson, co-editor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992.

-------. “You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All”: Ray Lum’s Tayle’s of Horses, Mules, and Men. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.

Handy, W.C. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography by W.C. Handy. Edited by Arna Bontemp. 1955. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1985.

Hawes, Bess Lomax, and Bessie Jones. Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941; rev. ed., 1958.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935. Reprint. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Jackson, Bruce, coll. And ed. Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Jones, Lewis W. “The Mississippi Delta.” Unpublished monograph, Fisk University Social Science Institute, Nashville, Tenn., 1941.

Jones, Lewis W., et al. “The Ecology of Counties.” Unpublished monograph, Fisk University Social Science Institute, Nashville, Tenn., 1941.

Joyner, Charles. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Kardiner, Abram, and Lionel Ovesey. The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro. New York: World Publishing Co., 1962 (first edition, 1951).

Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Kennedy, Stetson. Southern Exposure. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1946.

Leadbitter, Mike. Delta Country Blues. Sussex, England: Blues Unlimited Publications, 1968.

Lee, Peter, ed. Living Blues: A Journal of the African American Blues Tradition. University, Miss.: Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi, 1991.

Lomax, Alan. Mister Jelly Roll. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949. Reprint. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

-------. The Rainbow Sign. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1959.

-------. The Folk Songs of North America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960.

-------. “I Got the Blues.” Common Ground 8 (Summer 1948): 38-52.

-------. “The Homogeneity of African-Afro-American Musical Style.” In Afro-American Anthropology, edited by N. Whitten and J. Szwed, pp. 181-201. New York: Free Press, 1970.

Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax. American Ballads ad Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan, 1934.

-------. Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly. New York Macmillan, 1935.

-------. Our Singing Country. New York: Macmillan, 1937.

Mitchell, George. Blow My Blues Away. Baton Rough: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

Moore, John Hebron. The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Odum, Howard W. Rainbow Round My Shoulder: The Blue Trail of Black Ulysses. 1928. Reprint. New York: Krause 1972.

-------. “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes.” Journal of American Folklore 24 (July-September 1911 and October-December 1911).

Olds, H.N. Report of Preliminary Sanitary Surveys of Labor Camps Maintained by Contractors Engaged in Mississippi Flood Control Operations, 1929-30. U.S. National Archives, Record Group 90, United States Public Heath Service Files for 1924-1935, Box 43.

-------. The Story of the Blues. London: Barrie and Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1969; Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1969.

-------. Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues. London: Studio Vista Limited, 1970.

-------. Shelter in Africa. New York: Praeger, 1971.

-------. Songster and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Oster, Harry. Living Country Blues. Detroit: Folklore Associates, 1969.

Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.

Peabody, Charles, “Notes on Negro Music.” Journal of American Folklore 16 (1903): 148-52.

Powdermaker, Hortense, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Atheneum, 1969.

Ramsey Frederic. Been Here and Gone. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1960.

Rooney, James. Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters. New York: Dial Press, 1971.

Rosengarten, Theodore, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. New York, Knopf, 1974.

Sackheim, Eric, and Johnathon Shahn. The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.

Sacre, Robert, ed. The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues, Traditions, Influences, and Comparisons. Liege, Belgium: Presses Universitaires Liege, 1987.

Savory, Theodore H. “The Mule.” Scientific American 223, no. 10 (December 10, 1970): 102-9.

Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Collier Books, 1978.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black America: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971.

Stearns, Marshall and Jean. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Schirmer, 1964.

Thompson, Robert Farris. “Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1973).

-------. African Art in Motion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.

-------. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

Titon, Jeff Todd. Early Down Home Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Whitten, Norman, and Szwed, John, eds. Afro-American Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1970.

Wilkins, Roy. “Mississippi Slavery in 1933.” Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races 40, no. 4 (April 1933): 81-82.

Wilson, Al. Son House. Collectors Classics, Blues Unlimited, Bexhill-on-Sea, 1966.

For further bibliographical references concerning the blues, see the following:

Hart, Mary L., et al. The Blues a Bibliographical Guide. New York: Garland, 1989.

Herzhaft, Gerard. Encyclopedia of the Blues (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992).