The Souths of Sterling A. Brown

Abstract

It is evident that culture is up. Where met only with in black belt old beliefs strengthened. But when mud traps give way to gravel roads, and black tops and even concrete highways with buses and jalopies and trucks lumbering over them, world comes closer. The churches and schools, such as they are, struggle against some of results of isolation, and radio plays a part. Even in backwoods, aerials are mounted on shanties that seem ready to collapse from extra weight on roof, or from a good burst of static against walls. The phonograph is common, television set is by no means unknown, and down at four corners store, a juke-box gives out latest jive. Rural closer to towns and cities may on Saturday jaunts even see an occasional movie, where a rootin'-tootin' Western gangster film introduces them to advancements of civilization. Newspapers, especially press, give people a sense of belonging to a larger world, and tales of returning veterans, true Marco Polos, also prod inert into curiosity. Brer Rabbit and Old Jack no longer are enough. Increasingly in churches spirituals lose favor to singing out of books or from broadsides, and city-born blues and jive take over jook-joints.(1) `Folk' has no meaning without `modern,' historian Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us. In this description by Sterling A. Brown in 1953 of technological transformation of southern black communities, expansion of modern brings into sharp relief. The extension of electricity, roads, and mass media into America's rural areas in 1920s and 1930s inspired tremendous interest in communities that lay on edge of these transformations. The term suggests that these communities are outside modern, urban, and industrial and values them as both threatened and unchanging in rapidly changing times. But in essay Negro Folk Expression, Brown chose phrase breaking up to describe an African culture that was both changing and dispersing. Migration had brought this creativity to cities; literature and music were showing its influence. Just as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were fascinated by immense lore of their friend Jim, Brown wrote, American authors have been drawn to life and character.(2) During late 1920s and early 1930s, ethnographic writings found wide audiences outside discipline of anthropology. Publishers produced a small boom of folklore collections, many published by white authors on rural black folklore. Two University of North Carolina professors collected and published The and His Songs: A Study of Typical Songs in South in 1925, and Carl Sandburg published Songbag in 1927. In critical discussions of black poetry in early 1930s, an embrace of poetry subsumed previous decade's discussion and rejection of dialect verse, a change that can be explained in part by emergence of the folk as a popular subject of writing. Over next decade, interest in rural poor and working-class people would produce collections of folklore such as B. A. Botkin's series Folk-Say and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, as well as proletarian novels, poems, narratives, and stories that drew from idioms. This interest in in writing would culminate in work of New Deal Federal Writers' Project (FWP), which published a number of compilations of folklore, oral histories, and regional guides. By mid-1930s, a discourse of had considerable currency among black and white writers of various ideological persuasions.(3) An exact contemporary of Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown was one of most admired younger poets of Harlem Renaissance. The books he published in 1930s and 1940s-- Southern Road, The in Fiction, Poetry and Drama, and The Caravan--established his reputation as a poet, literary critic, and anthologist attentive to African traditions. …