Sources

Print Sources:

Abbott, Lynn and Doug Seroff. "They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me": Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues. American Music 14, No. 4 (winter 1996): 402-454. (source for quote from W.C. Handy)

Bastin, Bruce. Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. (Originally published in 1986.)

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

Booth, Ernest. Stealing Through Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929

Branch, Enobong. Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Chappell, Louis W. John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968. (Originally published in 1933.)

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. (Originally published in 1959.)

Charters, Samuel. A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Cohen, Norm. Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. (originally published in 1981.)

Courlander, Harold. Negro Folk Music U.S.A. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2019. (Originally published in 1963.)

Cowley, John. Shack Bullies and Levee Contractors: Bluesmen as Ethnographers. Journal of Folklore Research 28, Nos. 2 and 3: 135-162. (published in 1991).

Dance, Daryl Cumber. Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Dundes, Alan, ed. Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. (Originally published in 1973.)

Eagle, Bob and Eric S. LeBlanc. Blues: A Regional Experience. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013.

Ferris, William. Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Ferris, William. The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Gellert, Lawrence. Me and My Captain: (Chain Gangs): Negro Songs of Protest. New York, NY: Hours Press, 1939.

Gellert, Lawrence. Negro Songs of Protest. New York, NY: American Music League, 1936.

Haley, Sarah. "Like I Was a Man:" Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia. Signs 39, No. 1 (Autumn 2013, Women, Gender, and Prison: National and Global Perspectives): 53-77.

'Happy' Negroes Dispute Sheriff; Mississippians Write of Life in Letters to The Times. (1964, August 9) New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/09/archives/happy-negroes-dispute-sheriff-mississippians-write-of-life-in.html (Article appears on page 62 of the New York edition of the printed newspaper dated August 9, 1964.)

Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Cold Keener. 1930. Published in Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, ed. Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Jackson, Bruce. Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999. (Originally published in 1972.)

James, Willis Laurence. Stars in de Elements: A Study of Negro Folk Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. (This book was published as a Special issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology, volume 9, numbers 1 - 2, 1995, edited by Jon Michael Spencer.

Johnson, Guy B. John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. New York: AMS Press, 1969. (Originally published in 1929.)

Killens, John Oliver. A Man Ain't Nothin' but a Man: The Adventures of John Henry. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (Originally published in 1977.)

Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Delta, 1993.

Lomax, John A. and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: Dover, 1994, 1934.

Lomax, John A. and Alan Lomax. Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000. (Originally published in 1941.)

Nelson, Scott Reynolds. Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Nunn, James and W. Wilder Towle (editor). The Oral History of James Nunn, a Unique North Carolinian: Taped Conversations Between James Nunn and W. Wilder Towle. Chapel Hill, NC: Chapel Hill Historical Society, 1977.

Odum, Howard. Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes. Journal of American Folklore 24, No. 94 (Oct. - Dec. 1911): 351-396.

Odum, Howard W. and Guy B. Johnson. Negro Workaday Songs. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. (Originally published in 1926.)

Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell this Morning: Meaning in the Blues. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. (The first edition was published in 1960.)

Oster, Harry. Living Country Blues. New York: Minerva Press, 1975. (Originally published in 1969.)

Redd, Lawrence. Rock is Rhythm and Blues; (the impact of mass media). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1974.

Sample, Albert Race. Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy. Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1984.

Stuckey, Sterling. Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery. Massachusetts Review 9, No. 3 (summer 1968): 417-437. (This essay was also published in Stuckey's book Going Though the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.)

Talley, Thomas and Charles K. Wolfe (editor). Thomas W. Talley's Negro Folk Rhymes. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

White, Augustus A. Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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

Work, John W., Jones, Lewis Wade, Adams, Samuel C.; edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.

DVD Sources:

Feel Like Going Home: A Film by Martin Scorsese. New York: Sony Music Entertainment: Manufactured by Columbia Music Videos, 2003. (Part one of a multi-part series on the blues directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Sam Pollard.)

Honeyboy. Chicago: Free Range Pictures, 2002. (A documentary on Delta bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards directed by Scott Taradash and produced by Rob Perkins and featuring B.B. King, Sam Carr, Little Willie Foster, Robert Cray, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Iglauer, and Joe Perry of Aerosmith.)

Album (CD and LP) Sources:

Anthology of American Folk Music. Collected by Harry Everett Smith. Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Folkways Recordings/Sony Music Special Products, 1997, 1952. [This anthology includes a recording of the John Henry ballad titled as "Gonna Die With a Hammer In My Hand" recorded by Williamson Brothers and Curry.]

Broonzy, Big Bill, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson I. Blues in the Mississippi Night. Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records, 2003, 1947. (Rounder CD 82161-1860-2)

Classic African-American Ballads from Smithsonian Folkways. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways, 2006. (SFW CD 40191)

Folk Music U.S.A., Volume 1. New York: Folkways Records, 1958 (or 1959?). Compiled by Harold Courlander. (FE 4530) Re-released on CD in the year 2000 by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: Folkways Records

Guthrie, Woody. Dust Bowl Ballads. New York, NY: Buddha Records, 2000, 1940. (74465 99724)

Hooker, John Lee. John Lee Hooker On Campus. Burbank, CA: Vee Jay International, 1991, 1963. (VJD 81066)

Hopkins, Sam "Lightning." Texas Blues. El Cerrito, CA: Arhoolie Records, 1994. (CD-302)

Hurt, Mississippi John. Avalon Blues: The Complete OKeh Recordings. New York, NY: Coumbia/Legacy, 1996, 1928. (CK 6498)

Jail House Bound: John Lomax's First Southern Prison Recordings, 1933, Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. 2012, 1933. (This CD consists of songs performed by various prisoners incarcerated in prisons of The Mississippi State Penitentiary located at Oakley and Parchman Farm. Folk song collector John A. Lomax made these recordings in the year 1933.)

Laurie, Hugh. Let Them Talk. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Records, 2011. (R2 527497)

Lewis, Furry. Fourth and Beale. Originally released in 1971 in France on the Maison de Blues label. Periodically re-released on various other labels including the Lucky Seven Records label with distribution by Rounder Records.

Lewis, Furry. Furry Lewis (1927-1929): Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order. Vienna, Austria : Document Records, 1990. (DOCD-5004)

Lewis, Furry. Shake 'Em on Down. Berkeley, California : Fantasy, 1992. (FCD-24703-2) [This CD reissues two Furry Lewis albums, Back on My Feet Again and Done Changed My Mind, which were both recorded in 1961 at Sun Studios in Memphis, TN.]

Lewis, Furry (with Lee Baker, Jr.) Take Your Time. Silver Spring, MD: Adelphi (Genes) Records, 2000, 1969. (GCD 9911)

Robeson, Paul. The Power and the Glory. New York, NY: Columbia/Legacy, 1991. (CK 47337)

Williamson Brothers and Curry. See: Anthology of American Folk Music.

Copyright © 2013-2020 by James P. Hauser except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.