Zora Neale Hurston’s Scrapbook

Collection De La Library of Congress, Washington - The Hammons Family — a study of a West Virginia Family's Traditions. Two 12” LP Record. AFS L65 - L66. Recorded and Edited by Carl Fleischhauer and Alan Jabbour. Washington, Archive of Folk Song, Library of Congress, 1973. Booklet 36 p. - Volume 6

NORTH AMERICAN FOLK AND BLUEGRASS MUSICFolk Songs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946. By James P. Leary. (Languages and Folklore of the Upper Midwest.) Madison: University of Press; Atlanta, GA: Dust to Digital, 2015. [xxi, 430 p. ISBN 9780299301507 (hardcover), $60.] Bibliography, indexes, illustrations, 5 compact discs, 1 digital video disc.Polka Heartland: Why the Midwest Loves to Polka. Photos by Dick Blau, text by Rick March. Madison: Historical Society Press, 2015. [200 p. ISBN 9780870207228 (hardcover), $29.95; ISBN 9780870207235 (e-book), varies.] Bibliography, notes, index, illustrations.The Upper Midwest is a region rich in musical traditions, but it is not as well studied as other areas of the country. So it is very fortunate that we have these two new books that enlighten us about the music of the region. At first glance, Folk Songs of Another America resembles a book, but it is primarily a collection of five compact discs and a DVD, all bound in a book-like container with extensive liner notes. The recordings were made in the Upper Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century by the well-known folk collectors Sidney Robertson [Cowell] (1903-1995) and Alan Lomax (1915-2002), as well as the lesser-known student apprentice Helene Stratman-Thomas (1896-1973). These researchers, equipped with federal support from the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, recorded nearly two thousand traditional performances in more than twenty-five languages from representative musicians and singers in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (p. 2). The present work contains 174 audio samples as well as a twenty-four-minute documentary film with twelve additional selections. These recordings document the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual music of the region.Making a similar argument as in his earlier book, Polkabilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Leary states, America's Upper Midwest emerges from these field recordings as a distinctive American region wherein, from the nineteenth century through the 1940s, a remarkable array of American Indian, Anglo-American, African American, and especially non-Anglo-European peoples maintained, modified, borrowed, merged, and composed songs and tunes from their respective and frequently shared folksong traditions . . . the depth and breadth of the Upper Midwest's folksong traditions, so complex and 'so mixed,' have remained elusive and almost forgotten (p. 3). He explains that previous publications emphasized English-language performances exclusively, ignoring the majority of the recorded material. The title of Leary's latest book is explained by his description of it as a redemptive counter-cultural project that effectively challenges and considerably broadens our understanding of folk music in American culture (p. 4).Each of the six chapters corresponds to one of the discs in the collection. The first chapter, called Pigtown Fling, documents twenty-eight pieces collected by Robertson in 1937. This collection includes performances by French Canadians, lumberjacks, Gaelic Scots, Serbians, and Finns. The second chapter, River in the Pines, contains descriptions of twenty-two pieces collected at the National Folk Festivals in Chicago in 1937 by Robertson and in 1938 in Washington, D.C. by Lomax. Robertson captured live performances on stage, while Lomax made his recordings under studio conditions at the Library of Congress. They both recorded mostly the same performers from Wisconsin, who were organized by Otto Rindlisbacher (1895-1975) from Rice Lake. Rindlisbacher, of Swiss-German descent, was a master of many of the ethnic styles from the region. The recordings include performances on accordion and Hardanger fiddle, as well as on instruments mostly hand made by Rindlisbacher: the cigar-box fiddle, Paul Bunyan harp, Viking cello made from a pitchfork (psalmodikon), and birch bark horn. …

Reviewed by: John L. Handcox: Songs, Poems, and Stories of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union Ronald D. Cohen John L. Handcox: Songs, Poems, and Stories of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 2004. Produced by Mark Allan Jackson. West Virginia University Press, Sound Archive Vol. 6, CD (1), n.n. According to Mark Allan Jackson's brief but helpful liner notes to John L. Handcox: Songs, Poems, and Stories of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Handcox (1904–92) was born in Brinkley, Arkansas. The descendent of slaves, he spent the first years of his life as a poor cotton tenant farmer. In 1934, he heard about the formation of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) and quickly signed on as an organizer for that controversial organization. Handcox used his songs and poems, some of which were printed in the STFU's newspaper The Sharecropper's Voice, to help organize black and white tenant farmers. His dangerous job as an organizer and fund-raiser first took him to Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri, and later to Chicago, Detroit, New York, and even Washington, D.C., in March 1937. STFU Secretary H. L. Mitchell encouraged him to visit the Library of Congress, where Charles Seeger and Sidney Robertson recorded six of his songs and two of his poems for the Archive of American Folk Song: "Raggedy, Raggedy," "No More Mourning," "Mean Things Happening in This Land," "The Planter and the Sharecropper," "Landlord, What in the Heaven is the Matter With You?," "In My Heart," "Join the Union Tonight," and "Roll the Union On." "Raggedy, Raggedy," "Mean Things Happening in this Land," and "Roll the Union On" would become labor standards. Handcox soon left the STFU, however, and during World War II he joined members of his family in San Diego, California. Here, he lived out of the limelight until 1982, when he participated in the forty-eighth anniversary of the STFU in Memphis, Tennessee, and rejuvenated his political songwriting with "Oh No, We Don't Want Reagan Anymore" and "Let's Get Reagan Out." He continued occasionally to attend labor events until his death from cancer in 1992. On May 15, 1985, labor troubadour Joe Glazer and historian Michael Honey were able to record Handcox's memories for the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage while he was attending the Labor Heritage Foundation's Great Labor Song Exchange in Washington, D.C. The next day, they recorded his two anti-Reagan songs, as well as the autobiographical "I Live On." Although separated by almost fifty years, all of Handcox's old and new archival recordings are included in this handy collection. In addition to the information that Jackson provides in his notes, he also supplies a valuable bibliography of works on the history of the STFU and particularly Handcox's brief role in its work during the Depression. Handcox has not been ignored by scholars, since some of his songs well captured the hardships and dreams of tenant farmers at the time, in particular "Mean Things Happening in this Land." His handful of early songs have appeared in numerous songbooks and have been recorded by artists like Pete Seeger, Joe Glazer, and many others. While this is not the first time that his early Library of Congress recordings have been released—five songs appeared in the unwieldy ten-CD set, Songs For Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs, and the American Left, 1926– 1953 (Bear Family Records, BCD 15720, 1996)—now all of his recordings and the Glazer and Honey interview are gathered in one convenient package. Presenting a firsthand account of hard times that now seem far distant, these recordings will certainly enhance any classroom discussions of the rural upheavals of the 1930s, as well as later political events. The CD will be most beneficial [End Page 363] for students who are steeped in contemporary popular culture but have little or no grasp of the historical use of music and poetry in labor and political organizing. Because the notes are brief, teachers will have to supplement the CD with additional information, possibly including other recordings, commercial and noncommercial. During his brief life as an organizer and songwriter, John Handcox played a...

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. …

Last Cavalier The Life and Times ofJohn A. Lomax, 1 867-1948 By Nolan Porterfield University of Illinois Press, 1996 580 pp. Cloth, $34.95 Reviewed by Beverly B. Patterson, a folklife specialist at the North Carolina Arts Council in Raleigh. She is the author of The Sound ofthe Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches, which is accompanied by a casette of documentary field recordings. In 1898 an unsigned article in the University of Texas Magazine closed with a romantic description of the cowboy: "no man in all the world can ever take the vacant place of 'the last cavalier.'" Nolan Porterfield believes this article, "Minstrelsy of the Mexican Border," to be John Lomax's first published commentary on matters that would "form the core of his life's work." Borrowing the image almost a century later, Porterfield layers it with new meanings, presenting a decidedly unromantic view ofLomax himself as the "Last Cavalier" in an engaging biography that reads much like a novel. One of die most obvious strengths of the book is its well-documented picture ofLomax's personality. In a short prologue, Porterfield advises die reader that "it is the extravagant character and unique mix ofopposing elements in 'John Avery Lomax' which give his life the force oflegend." Lomax, he declares, is "a horned toad produced by some mydiical mating of pond frog and turde dove," and he sets out to make his case. Like Lomax himself, die story is complex. Peppered with quotable details from an extensive archive ofLomax's papers, and from publications and interviews with family members, it offers a lively, insightful, and sometimes humorous picture of "a man who dwelt on himself in coundess letters , journals, and jottings, who saved almost every scrap of biographical paper." Incidental to diat picture is information about the culture and times that molded the man. Readers can look through Lomax's life to a whole class of southerners like him struggling to leave the farm and achieve some wealth and social standing in the middle class. In die story ofLomax's relationship with Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, we watch the operation ofracial attitudes ofthat time; in accounts of courtships, two marriages, and differences between Lomax and his children, we see changing social attitudes; in Porterfield's account of Lomax's relationship with the University ofTexas as student, staffmember, and influential alumnus, we 106 Reviews get a sobering look at the direct intervention of governors and other politically powerful people in southern academic life in a time when schools lacked the protection of tenure. While the book gives much information about the culture that molded Lomax, it shows less well the impact Lomax had on that culture. Porterfield may assert that Lomax eventually won a reputation as "a major force in the cultural history of the United States," but he cannot just assume that his readers agree. Jerrold Hirsch points out in an article on Lomax in theJournalofAmericanFolklore (Siting 1992) that some histories ofAmerican folklore studies "virtually ignore him." It would not be surprising, then, if the general public had litde knowledge of his contributions. Porterfield actually offers a great deal of information about how Lomax affected his time, and he recognizes many ofLomax's achievements, but he scatters that information piecemeal through the book. As a result the reader may reach the end without ever realizing the full weight of these achievements. Here and there we gather thatJohn Lomax was one of the first great champions and collectors of American folk music; that publications of his collections have carried numerous songs into the public domain, where they live to this day; and diat Lomax left an even larger legacy in the thousands offield recordings he deposited in the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress. All of this is given a lively presentation and careful attention, but no more attention than his work as a banker and bond salesman. In this volume, readers will not see any bold pronouncements to rival the opening sentence ofa 1997 press release from the Library ofCongress for a new compact disc on Rounder Records,^ Treasury ofLibrary ofCongressFieldRecordings: "In 1933,John Lomax drove down the road and into history." Porterfield...

Recordings from the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress

Packin' Mama: Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. By Shelly Romalis. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xi + 239 pp.; photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960) was the only person to record for both Columbia's 15000-D hillbilly record series of 1924-32 and also the Library of Congress's Archive of Folksong. Although Molly was the wife of a Kentucky coal miner and spent her later years fighting for justice for the oppressed working classes, her commercial as well as her field recordings were made in the vicinity of New York City after she had left the state of her birth never to return again. How these recordings came to be made-Aunt Molly's relationship to Mary Elizabeth Barnicle and Alan Lomax, the folklorists responsible for her recordings, and why she was so upset with them as a result is only one episode of Shelly Romalis's captivating account of the life and struggles of Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos. Packin' Mama is a biography of a remarkable woman embedded in a study of the left wing folksong revival of the 1930s. material is divided into three parts. first, The Appalachian Context, provides historical and cultural background on coal mining in Kentucky and the National Miners Union's efforts at unionizing a disgracefully exploited occupation. To publicize and counteract the violence and bloodshed that accompanied the NMU's activities, a circle of leftist writers formed the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Several members, including Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, journeyed to Kentucky to see first hand the hardships the miners were forced to endure. During their hearings in Pineville, Kentucky in November, 1931, the Committee met Molly and heard her relate her experiences and sing some of the songs she had composed about the plight of the miners. Molly's vivid narratives and stark, harsh singing awed the writers, and they urged her to come north to assist in fund raising for the miners' benefit. Two chapters of the central section of the book are devoted to Molly's biography, respectively prior to and subsequent to her relocation to New York City in December 1931. third chapter focuses on Molly's half sister, Sarah Ogan Gunning (1910-83). A full generation younger than Molly, Sarah's milieu in Kentucky was significantly different from her half sister's. That difference, coupled with a dissimilarity in personalities stark as night and day, made Sarah a completely different sort of informant from Molly. While both were women of great inner strength, active bearers of traditional mountain lore and also creators of new material within that tradition, Molly was alternately charming and devious, self aggrandizing and selfless, whereas Sarah was modest and unassuming. Molly crossed paths with a succession of folklorists-Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, Alan Lomax, John Greenway, and Archie Green-and one after another they threw up their hands, exasperated by her inconsistencies if not outright dishonesty. She insisted that she alone had composed Only a Miner, though at best she had modified an older song. She repeatedly asserted that she was the real subject of Al Dexter's 1943 country western hit, Pistol Packin' Mama, though the negative evidence was substantial. Among the more than a gross of songs she recorded for various folklorists were several Robin Hood ballads, including three that had never been collected outside of England. Greenway concluded that Molly learned these ballads from Barnicle's copy of the one-volume edition of Child Ballads and then modified them and set them to traditional tunes; she insisted she had learned them in her youth (Greenway 1956) . Molly was certainly not the first informant to tailor her repertoire to the obvious wants of her collectors, but the measure of her inventiveness was monumental. …

IN THE EARLY 1930s, JOHN A. LOMAX LOST HIS BANK JOB TO THE depression and his wife to illness. Needing to make a fresh start, Lomax returned to the vocation he truly loved, collecting American folk songs. In 1933 he persuaded the Macmillan publishing company to contract for a book of songs, lined up charitable foundations to support a collecting expedition, and enlisted the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song to provide recording equipment and to be the official repository of the materials he gathered. Then, with his seventeen-year-old son Alan to assist him and a 350-pound Presto recording machine built into the back seat of his car, Lomax set off to spend a summer collecting America's music. The 1933 trip was only the first in a series of expeditions the Lomaxes made in the thirties and early forties, when they travelled tens of thousands of miles and made thousands of recordings.

New developments in the cataloging world can help libraries better answer questions like: What music do you have for string quartets? What young adult fiction do you have by African American male authors? Do you have any diaries written by pioneer women in Oregon in the late nineteenth century? Do you have any recent movies from China? Historically, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have included terms both for what something is about (topic) and for what something is (genre or form). Many users are looking for something either as a topic, or as a genre or form, and not for the two things mixed together. Sometimes LCSH makes a clear, albeit not intuitive, distinction. Starting in 2007, the Library of Congress (LC) began work on a new vocabulary, now known as Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT), to use for genre and form instead of LCSH. In addition, they created two additional new vocabularies: Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus for Music (LCMPT) for instruments and voices and Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT) for audiences and creators. This article investigates the application and results of using these new, faceted vocabularies.

In 1928, the Library of Congress founded its Archive of American Folk Song, the first archive in the United States to record the cultural expressions of average people. The idea was to record American oral culture—as rich a culture as any in the world due to its primarily immigrant nature— before it disappeared with the rise of the radio and phonograph. The archive’s first paid employee was Alan Lomax, son of another enthusiastic folk song archivist, John A. Lomax. Starting in 1933, Alan Lomax was dispatched to all sections of the country to track down folk music traditions and songs and record them for the archive.

From the British Romantic period through the first decades of the twentieth century the literary ballad was a commonly practiced form, some working within the broadside tradition in recounting or imagining narratives with a thinly veiled socio-political aim, others imitating the ancient ballads with their mystical elements. This poetic practice was inspired by and coincided with the development of ballad studies, initiated in the eighteenth-century antiquarian work of Bishop Percy and Robert Burns, among others, formalized in the mid-nineteenth century by the unsurpassed scholarship of Harvard professor Francis Child, and reoriented, in the 1930s with recording technology and anthropological approaches to field work. It's fair to say that scholarship and poetics have often converged in the ballad, and that folk revivals are scenes of instruction as well as creativity and preservation. This is the general context for the specific moment in modern balladry that is the occasion for this essay--a moment in which the ballad captured the attention of archivist, poet, and teacher alike in their attempts to sound folk voice and put it to use. Three poetic projects of the US 1930s and early '40s brought literary and folk balladry into close proximity: the mid-1930s field recordings of Southern folk ballads gathered by John and Alan Lomax for the Smithsonian, subsequently issued in 1942; the 1939 publication of Cleanth Brooks and Robert 'Penn Warren's influential textbook Understanding Poetry, in which literary balladry serves a critical role for close-reading instruction; and the literary ballads of Margaret Walker, composed in dialect, collected in the middle section of her 1942 book For My People, and later recorded for Smithsonian Folkways. The proximity of these projects is serendipitous, insofar as it calls our attention to the ways that technology and racial politics reshaped folk voice and its representations at mid-century, whether incidentally or by design. From the many, sometimes surprising points of contact among the recordings, the textbook, and the dialect poetry, the ballad emerges as a dynamic modern form in which ideals of American folk voice were being contested. In this essay, I will begin by showing that Alan Lomax's project challenged the limitations of print as a medium for representing folk voice generally, and the ballad in particular; his appeal to the US public to attend to its folk heritage depended on his faith in sound recording as an authentic inscription of folk voice. Like Lomax, whose recordings were positioned as educational, Brooks and Warren presented the ballad as a point of entry into a scene of instruction, in which the ballad was a rudimentary poetic genre on a continuum that progressed toward complexity and ambiguity. Variations on the ballad James Harris in the Lomax recordings, however, complicate Brooks and Warren's important textbook version, highlighting how the medium of presentation influences meaning, form, and reception. This crucial difference notwithstanding, the projects converged in their assumptions about high and low art and, more troublingly, about race and voice. Margaret Walker's print and recorded work offers a provocative solution to the dilemmas presented by Lomax and Understanding Poetry. For Walker recognized that folk voice is a performance, and by giving voice to a marginalized people in her dialect balladry--written and spoken--she staged a critique of racist assumptions about black character and artistry. As I hope this essay will demonstrate, our evolving critical understanding of the ballad and folk voice benefits from an analysis of the performed as well as the written text, an. analysis that brings both under the careful scrutiny of close reading and listening.' Developments in poetry at mid-century cannot be adequately assessed without research into the variety of institutions and materials in which it manifested. Recording and reviving: the Lomax projects In 1942, the Library of Congress issued the first of a series of 78RPM albums featuring music collected under the leadership of John and Alan Lomax for the Archive of American Folk Song. …

This edition brings together representative transcriptions of folk songs and ballads in the British-Irish-American oral tradition that have enjoyed widespread familiarity throughout twentieth-century America. Within are the one hundred folk songs that most frequently occurred in a methodical survey of Roud's Folk Song Index, catalogues of commercial early country (or “hillbilly”) recordings, and relevant archival collections. The editors selected sources for transcriptions in a broad range of singing styles and representing many regions of the United States. The selections attempt to avoid the biases of previous collections and provide a fresh group of examples, many heretofore unseen in print. The sources for the transcriptions are recordings of traditional musicians from the 1920s through the early 1940s drawn from (1) commercial recordings of “hillbilly” musicians, and (2) field recordings in the collection of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, now part of the Archive of Folk Culture. Each transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing essay discussing the song's history and influence, recording and performance information (whenever available), and an examination of the tune. The edition begins with a substantive essay about the history of folk song recordings and folk song scholarship, and the nature of traditional vocal music in the United States.

Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) is a multidisciplinary thesaurus that provides indexing terminology to describe what works are, rather than what they are about. Traditionally, access to genres and forms of works has been provided with subject headings, which poses two problems: first, subject headings are by definition more properly restricted to the topic of a work, and second, the rules for application of subject headings often treat forms secondarily to the topic, thereby limiting access. This entry will explain the differences between subjects and genres and forms, and put LCGFT in the context of other vocabularies that provide genre/form access. The development of LCGFT is a large undertaking, and the project management will be described. The majority of the entry will elaborate on the principles upon which LCGFT is built (the choice of authorized terms and the syndetic structure) and the application of terms. Finally, the entry will outline developments in the provision of access to characteristics of works and expressions that are closely related to genre and form: musical medium of performance, intended audience, characteristics of creators and contributors, and time period of creation.

Nabokov Studies, 1 (1994), 21-67. JANE GRAYSON (London, U.K.) WASHINGTON'S GIFT: MATERIALS PERTAINING TO NABOKOV'S GIFT IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS' What I propose here is a review of the archival materials pertaining to Dar (The Gift) which are held in the United States Library of Congress, Washington, DC. I make no claims to any definitive judgments on the documents. They are themselves fragmentary and inconclusive and can only.benefit from exposure to other pairs of eyes, other points of view. Brian Boyd's (unsigned) checklist of the archive appeared in an early number of The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter, the forerunner of The Nabokovian.^ The items I consulted are there described as follows: Container No> 6 a) Ms. of ch. 1 of Dar, 90 pp. (Russian). b) Printed pages of Sovremenniia Zapiski version of Dar, chs. 1 -3 and 5, corrected by VN and used as setting copy (Russian). c) Ts. of ch. 4 of Dar, with ms. corrections; used as setting copy, 108 pp. (Russian). With ms., 1 p. of bibliographical note, in Vera Nabokov's hand. d) Ms., exercise book, unpublished drafts and notes for Dar continuations , 31 pp., with draft of Rusalka continuation, 5 pp. (Russian).2 * Here I would like to acknowledge the generous gift of Dmitri Nabokov in allowing me access to the archive material and permission to publish my findings. Without him none of this would have been possible. I also express my thanks to the staff of the manuscript division, and especially Fred Bauman, for the courtesy and helppfulness shown me in the limited time I had at my disposal. Nor would it without the exhaustive researches of Brian Boyd and the invaluable resource he has given Nabokov studies in his critical biography. I am grateful to him and to Don Barton Johnson for their encouragement and constructive criticism. I also thank John Hirsh for making possible my stay in Washington, Igor Golomshtok for his sensitivity to my linguistic insensitivity, and John Wieczorek who revealed a hitherto hidden talent for unearthing German lepidopteral lore. The interpretations and the errors remain mine, as does the awareness of the many loose ends and unsolved little mysteries. 1. VNRN, No. 4 (1980), pp. 20-34. 2. While the total number of pages listed here is accurate, the description is slightly misleading. See the discussion below. 22 Nabokov Studies e) Ms., unpublished "second addition" to Dar, 54 pp. (Russian). f) Ts., unpublished second addition to Dar, 5 pp. (incomplete). (Russian). It was items (d - f) which interested me particularly and prompted me to make the journey, my curiosity having been whetted by the brief tantalizing description given by Brian Boyd in the first volume of his Nabokov biography.3 Given pressure of time I did not look at item (a), the ms. of chapter 1 at all. However, my attention was caught by item (b), a not quite complete copy of the four chapters of the novel that were published in volumes 63 to 67 of Sovremennye zapiski, 1937-38,4 since it meant that I needed to correct an observation I had made earlier about Nabokov's practice of revision, namely that, whereas reworking was a feature of his writing in English, both in translation and in his original writing, it was not a feature of his Russian.5 Here I saw that in preparing Dar for its first complete book edition by the Chekhov Publishing House Nabokov made a number of alterations to his earlier text.6 No matter that the changes were minimal, it was out of a desire to remedy my earlier mistmpressfon-that F looked first at the copy of the SZ chapters (item b) and then at the typescript of the hitherto unpublished chapter 4 (item c) and propose to describe the nature of the changes briefly here. Item (b): alterations made in chapters 1-3 and 5 for the 1952 edition of Dar The alterations are made in more than one hand. Though I am no hand writing expert there is certainly evidence of Nabokov's and Véra's hand and possibly of a third person. Apart from correction of misprints and the odd...

I am running a four-ring circus-school teaching, private teaching, books, and four children of my own,” Ruth wrote in 1946. This was what she wanted, for she meant what she said to Peggy over and over--that she al ways wanted children. In 1943 when she was forty-two and Charles was fifty-seven, they had their fourth child. Her friends at the arch,ve, who saw her frequently with one to three of the other children in tow, W( re surprised. “She’s pregnant again?” Harold Spivacke asked Rae Korson at the Archive of American Folk Song. “She can’t be. She’s too old.” But the baby was wanted, perhaps more by Ruth than Charles. This time she chose her third daughter’s name, balking at any more reminders of her husband’s previous girlfriends.