The following guest post is by Ann Hoog, folklife specialist from
the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. To celebrate
Black History Month on this last day of February, Ann has written the
following post on the Library’s extraordinary Zora Neale Hurston
collections.
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| A smiling Zora Neale Hurston. Photo probably taken during the
Lomax-Hurston-Barnicle recording expedition to Georgia, Florida, and the
Bahamas, 1935. |
mong the American Folklife Center’s extensive collections of
ethnography, folk song, and spoken word is the recorded voice of
celebrated writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.
Included are songs and narratives recorded in Florida and Georgia in
1935 with fellow folklorists Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle,
three songs sung by Hurston for Lomax in Haiti in December 1936,
nineteen songs and narratives performed by her and recorded by Florida
Federal Writers’ Project colleague and folklorist Herbert Halpert, and
six songs of a choir she led at the 1938 National Folk Festival in
Washington, D.C.
Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, and eventually went on to
study anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. She
studied under the notable
Franz Boas,
who inspired a generation of anthropologists including Margaret Mead
and Ruth Benedict. Her fieldwork during the 1920s-1930s was primarily
conducted in African American communities of the South and Caribbean,
where she collected the stories, music, and the oral poetry that fills
the air of both work and leisure in everyday life. Hurston’s celebrated
works such as
Mules and Men (1935) and
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937) contain the songs and narratives that filled her life both as a
child and as a student of anthropology. Hurston was not only an artist
in the writing of African American folklore and oral tradition, but also
an artist in its performance.
Like her writings, her documentary performance style reflects a
personal connection to this creative cultural output in which she
embraced being both documenter and performer. Nineteen recordings of
these performances, made for the WPA, are available as part of the
online presentation
Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections. In
“Georgia Skin”
Hurston describes and sings a gambling card game she observed at a
turpentine camp in Florida during one of her 1939 fieldwork trips:
When the Principals have got their cards, and all the Pikers have got
theirs … he’ll want them to put their bets down, and he’ll say, “Put
the money on the wood and make the bet go good / And then again, put it
in sight and say you will fight.”
And so they all get the bets down and then they holler, “Let the deal go
down, boys, let the deal go down” and some of them will start singing
it.
This explanation is followed by a recording of Hurston’s performance of the full song
“Let the Deal Go Down” as
it would be sung during the game. Woven together between chorus and
verse is narration of what would be happening during the game including
conversations and arguments that might occur between the players.
[sung]
Let the deal go down, boys.
Let the deal go down.
I ain’t got no money, Lord, partner.
I ain’t got no change.
Let the deal go down boys,
Let the deal go down.
[spoken]
There you go Blue Front,
I’ll show you about getting a card and telling a lie about it.
Put up some more money!
[sung]
Let the deal go down boys,
Let the deal go down.
These recordings capture not only Hurston’s voice, but also that of
Herbert Halpert, who can be heard off-mic peppering her with a
fieldworker’s questioning, trying to gather as much about the game as
possible. In other recordings Halpert and Hurston can be heard
conversing, folklorist to folklorist, about where she learned the songs,
who she learned them from, and how the melody or verses change from
place to place. Hurston provides ready answers to each and at times
provides exact names of the people from whom she learned the song. At
other times she replies, “I just get in the crowd with people and they
sing it, and I listen as best I can. Then I start joining in with a
phrase or two and finally I get so I can sing a verse … and I sing them
back to the people until they tell me that I can sing it just like them …
and then I count on my memory.” (listen to:
Halimuhfack)
Though the audio of the original performer or the actual card game
from whom Hurston learned these songs, rhymes, and verses wasn’t
recorded, Hurston’s performance begins to sound like the performance of a
folklorist’s field notes, resulting in a richly illustrated context of a
game of cards as it is played, sung, and spoken, in a style unique to
the art and life of Zora Neale Hurston.
From: Library of Congress
Last December, National Security Adviser Susan Rice offered a
remarkably candid insight into Barack Obama’s foreign policy. “Let’s be
honest,” she said, “at times … we do business with governments that do
not respect the rights we hold most dear.”
