African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s-1920

As any well-organized, carefully annotated bibliography does, this work by Southern and Wright brings order out of chaos. The 2,328 entries identify books, articles, sermons, pamphlets, and broadsides, among other formats, all centered on black folk culture with emphasis on the manifestations of that culture from 1600 to 1920 through song, dance, games, sermons, and illustrations. . . . This carefully done and useful bibliography is recommended for libraries on all campuses where there is an interest in the black experience. Choice African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance is undeniably the most valuable resource available to scholars engaged in Afro-American folk culture research. An untapped wealth of primary information has been chronologically cataloged within this comprehensive, annotated guide. It covers a period of over 300 years of African-American cultural history in the United States. Materials fall into three categories: literary publications, iconographical records, and collections of song, tale, and sermon texts. Focusing on folk culture, 2,328 items were chosen for their historical relevance as well as to insure broad representation. Eileen Southern and Josephine Wright's bibliography provides researchers with the tools needed to shatter myths and stereotypes and to form concise theses supported by extensive evidence. The bibliography is divided into four major chronological sections: Colonial-Federalist, Antebellum, Post-Emancipation, and Early Twentieth Century. A fifth section, The WPA Slave Narrative Collection, includes materials (collected in the 1930s) that are essential to a serious discussion of American slavery. Within these five sections materials are classified as literature, artwork, and/or collections. Literature and artwork subsections are further divided into social activities, religious experience, song, and tale. Iconographical entries often compliment the literary ones and some themes run throughout the book. The materials are indexed by names of authors and artists, by subject, and by first lines of songs.

EILEEN SOUTHERN is Professor Emerita of Music and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and Editor/Co-publisher of The Black Perspective in Music. She has contributed articles to Journal of American Musicology, Acta Musicologica, American Music, and several other scholarly journals. She has also served as an area editor of and contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Her book publications include The Buxheim Organ Book, The Music of Black Americans: A History, and Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians. JOSEPHINE WRIGHT is Professor of Music at the College of Wooster. She has published articles in The Musical Quarterly, The Black Perspective in Music, Women's Studies Quarterly, and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. She is the author of Ignatius Sancho: Early African Composer. Southern and Wright are preparing a companion volume to the present work offering a pictorial record of Afro-American tradition (Greenwood Press, forthcoming).