Lost Delta found: rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County study, 1941-1942

Abstract

Lost Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. By John Wesley Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. Edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 343, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, musical notation, maps, appendices, notes, indices. $34.95 cloth) Lost Found presents important writings from an uncompleted project, launched on the eve of the second World War, to document the African American folk culture of an entire county, Coahoma, in the Mississippi Delta. A collaboration between the pioneering African American college Fisk University and the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folksong, the project was to have culminated in the publication of a large field study, and to that end some forty hours of field recordings were made (including the first of Muddy Waters), one hundred residents separately interviewed, and a variety of data gathered. The project bogged down in disagreement over editing and authorship, however, and was shelved when principal researchers Lewis Wade Jones of Fisk and Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress were drafted into the military. The present volume has been assembled by editors Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov from the project writings of Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C. Adams, and Fisk University music professor John Wesley Work III. Although the only finished piece in this volume is Changing Negro Life in the Delta (Adams' Fisk M.A. thesis), all the writings are vital and illuminating, for they represent some of the earliest scholarship on African American folklife and folk music in the Mississippi Delta. At the time of the project's inception, Fisk was home to an innovative sociology department headed by Charles S. Johnson. Johnson and his associates (including Lewis Jones, but not John Work) had just published Growing up in the Black Belt (1941 ) a survey of eight predominantly black southern counties. Coahoma was depicted as a once-isolated area still dominated by the cotton plantation system but experiencing rapid mechanization and urbani/ation. Folk culture was not documented or studied for the book, but when Alan Lomax, who had been making field recordings throughout the South, Northeast and Midwest since 1933, visited Fisk in April, 1941 to take part in an anniversary celebration, a joint project was discussed, and Coahoma was subsequently chosen for further study. A brief preliminary field-recording trip was made at the end of the summer, with Johnson and Work present at some sessions, but most of the field recording was done the following summer by Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones. Working independently of Lomax and Jones, Samuel C. Adams and Fisk anthropology fellow Ulysses Young collected interviews and data on paper based on a prepared questionnaire, a method developed by Johnson. In Lewis Jones's writings for the unfinished study, he observes that three generations of African Americans shaped Coahoma County, beginning in the 187Os, and links changes in technology and transportation there with changes in the folk culture. Samuel Adams's thesis fleshes out this model considerably with song excerpts, stories, and interviews that range from poignant to hilarious. John Work, a music teacher and composer who on his own had gathered folksongs in and around Nashville with paper, pen and occasionally a disc recorder, took a less sociological approach, transcribing a sample of the field recordings and grouping them by genre for commentary. Work's analysis of blues, spirituals and game songs gathered in the field is acute and rewarding. His sections on black worksongs and balladry are less developed, though he might have had more to say in a finished study. The transcriptions are reproduced from handwritten originals that Work may have intended to develop further-some lack full lyrics, others are only melodic fragments, and none have tempo markingsbut the complete, detailed transcriptions of such performances as the group spiritual Hallelu, Hallelu (153), a contrapuntal track-lining song (175-179), and a half-spoken, half-sung sermon (66-76), provide insightful commentaries on the recordings. …