Vera Ward Hall

Adele "Vera" Ward Hall (1902-1964), despite her exquisite singing abilities and her extensive repertoire, worked all of her life as a washerwoman, nursemaid, and cook. She first came to the attention of John A. Lomax in 1937, when Ruby Pickens Tartt, folklorist and chair of the Federal Writers' Project of Sumter County, Alabama, introduced them; Lomax recorded Hall during three separate sessions in 1937, 1939, and 1940, writing that she had "the loveliest voice I have ever recorded." She sang Baptist hymns with her cousin Dock Reed and other Livingston friends like Jesse Allison, but she was also willing to record blues, ballads, hollers, and "worldly songs" such as "Stagolee” and "John Henry” learned from her friend Rich Amerson (and forbidden by her family).

Alan Lomax met Hall in 1948, when he arranged for her and Reed to come New York City for an American Music Festival. (It was Vera’s first and only time out of Alabama.) Their time together resulted in six- and-a-half hours of recordings and the raw material for her oral biography, which Lomax published in The Rainbow Sign. In that book, published in 1959 (the same year Hall made her last recordings, for Alan), Vera is called “Nora” to protect her identity and honor her confidence. Five years later Lomax wrote in her obituary in Sing Out! magazine: "The sound comes from deep within her when she sings, from a source of gold and light, otherwise hidden, and falls directly upon your ear like sunlight.... It is from singers like Vera Hall that all of us who love folk music in American have everything to learn. Her performances were all graced with dignity and love."