Life Is Like That
We Shall Not Be Moved
Katherine Trusty, a teenage daughter of miner and labor activist Brother Elihu Trusty, sings the protest version of the spiritual "I Shall Not Be Moved," which originated with the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in Arkansas in the early '30s. (Rev. A.B. Brookins, a Black preacher from Marked Tree, Ark., has been credited with the spiritual's introduction to the STFU.)
Sorry, Sorry for to Leave You
Nothing is known of Ms. Threadgill or Ms. Johnson beyond their powerful sanctified performances documented by Lomax and Jones at the Mohead Plantation on Moon Lake, toward the end of the Fisk University/Library of Congress survey of life and culture in the Mississippi Delta. (See here for the complete collection and its background.) Our organization visited the Mohead Plantation in 2013 and hoped to find the church-house still standing; all but two of the former tenant residences and other buildings had, however, long been razed.
Dangerous Blues
Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) prisoner Floyd Batts sings a variation on "Dangerous Blues," or "Danger Blue," a theme sung by Black inmates throughout the Southern prison-farm system. Nothing is known of Floyd Batts’ origins, the circumstances of his incarceration, or when (or) if he was released from Parchman.
The Bright Light Quartet worked hauling nets aboard the fishing packets that plied the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic, from Long Island to the Gulf of Mexico. Menhaden, a bony, inedible fish processed for its oil and its use in livestock feed, provided well-paying work to African American men in the Northern Neck of Virginia and the Outer Banks of North Carolina—the industry's two centers of production being in Reedville, VA, and Beaufort, NC. When the Quartet weren't singing net-pulling chanties at work aboard the trawlers, they gave performances in churches throughout the region, and occasionally as far away as New York City.
Menhaden fishermen's chantey medley
Sitting At My Window, Sad and Lonely
The 18 songs Devall sung for Lomax were the last recordings John would contribute to the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song. Devall had cut two earlier unaccompanied sides in Dallas in 1929.
Turner Junior Johnson was a blind singer and harmonica player whom Lomax and Lewis Jones met performing on the streets of Clarksdale. Lomax describes meeting him in his diary:
I met him Sat. night [July 18] on the street in the Negro section, blowing his harp and shaking a little tin can for his collection of nickles. He has been blind since he was 16 years old when he had the swimming in the head and the wagon ran across the back of my head—both wheels—took me a solid week to loose your sight [sic]. “I suffered with a swimmin’ in my head when I was comin’ up. When I first lost my sight, I didn’t eat nothin’. My sister come and help me—my baby brother helped mama. My father was dead.” He’s the only musician in the family.
Johnson gave his place of birth as “round Senatobia,” in the Mississippi Hill Country and, upon finishing this piece, credits multi-instrumentalist Sid Hemphill (who was also blind) as his source, thus bringing this great performer and composer to Lomax and Jones’ attention. (The disc cuts out with Johnson giving the two directions to Hemphill’s home.) They would record Hemphill and his band several weeks later at a picnic in Quitman Co., Mississippi.
Sitting On Top of the World
Job, Job
Adele "Vera" Ward Hall, 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).
I’ll Get A Break Someday
This last recorded iteration of the Memphis Jug Band (who had made their first records in 1927) featured original members Charlie Burse and Will Shade, performing here a song first cut by Tampa Red in 1934. Personnel was given as Shade, vocal and acoustic guitar; Burse, guitar; Robert Carter, electric guitar; and Dewey Corley, bass/kazoo, along with Eugene Smith, who was either nicknamed “Whiskey” or brought it to the session. (Burse and Shade made later recordings in the 1960s but none of them featured a jug.)
Roll On, Buddy
The song and stories of Mary Magdalene Garland Mills Stewart Jackson, better known as Aunt Molly Jackson, were rooted in her life experiences in eastern Kentucky’s Clay, Laurel, Bell, and Harlan Counties. Born in 1880, she was a coal miner's daughter, married a miner (Bill Jackson) and became a mother, midwife, songwriter and labor activist agitating on behalf of the National Miners Union (NMU) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). She was once jailed in Harlan County for union organizing activities. She traveled to New York City in December 1931 to promote the cause of and raise money for striking Harlan County coal miners and stayed there throughout the 1930s, in part fearing reprisals back home. We are pleased to take this opportunity to present the entirety of Jackson’s Library of Congress recordings—she has recorded at various times by John Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, beginning in 1935 when Molly was 55 and extended over a four year period. (She also made a single phonograph record for the Columbia company in 1931, and was recorded by Alice McLerran at her last home in Sacramento, California, in 1959 and several months before she died in 1960.)
Working My Way Back Home
And Must This Body Die?
The somber lined-out hymnody of the Old Regular Baptists—in which a leader "lines out" a verse for the congregants to sing back, in their own fashion and their own time—is a rare hold-over of a once-widespread singing style that’s only getting rarer. Dating to the middle of the seventeenth century, lining was practiced throughout the British Isles and New England, but by 1959, they were being sung in just a handful of remote locales: in Presbyterian churches of Scotland’s Gaelic-speaking Western Isles; among more traditionally minded African-American Baptist (and, occasionally, Methodist) churches in the deep South; and in the Old Regular Baptist meeting-houses of the Central Appalachians.
Members of this Tidewater Virginia gospel group unidentified at the time of the recording, in May of 1960. (A Norfolk group under this name made some records later in the '60s, which included the names of the following singers: Clyde Burston, Percy Griffin, Jake Chambers, and Charles Russell. If anyone can confirm their involvement in Lomax's session, please let us know. Photo is culled from the group's Discogs entry, as Lomax took no pictures during the session.)
Alan Lomax later recalled: "I made this record in a little Baptist church in the slums of Norfolk, inviting a group of neighborhood girls to listen. When they began to clap and stomp out an accompanying rhythm, the Peerless Four took off and flew. Somewhere in the middle you can hear the two leaders swapping their rhythmic parts with every phrase, a feat I have [sic] never before heard quite equaled at this tempo."
Cold Mountains
Alan Lomax considered Texas Gladden one of the three best ballad singers he ever recorded (the others being Almeda Riddle of Arkansas and Scotland’s Jeannie Robertson). He wasn’t alone in admiring her—several folklorists had collected her songs in the 1930s, and, two years after hearing her sing at the White Top Festival in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt invited Texas and her brother Hobart Smith to perform at the White House. Although her singing had been diminished by ill-health, she recorded a number of shorter pieces for Lomax in 1959: love songs, some ballad verses, and lullabies sung to her granddaughter Cynthia Tuttle, whom Texas called “Baby Cindy.” Despite her popularity, she was never much inclined to travel for the concerts folk revivalists were putting on in the mid-’60s. Besides, when Lomax wondered why she’d never made much “professional use” of her singing, she replied that she’d “been too busy raising babies! When you bring up nine, you have your hands full. All I could sing was lullabies.” Texas died in 1967.
Moses Don't Get Lost
Among the members of the Spiritual Singers of Coastal Georgia that Lomax met in 1935 (see Bessie Jones’ track above) were fisherman Henry Morrison and Big John Davis, a former sailor and stevedore, and a singer with an extensive repertoire of chanties, roustabout songs, slavery-era ring-plays, and religious material. Davis told Lomax then that he knew six separate songs concerning Moses but joked that "if I give them all to you now, you won't come back." And Alan recalled that when he did return, "twenty-five years later with a stereo rig adequate to record this multipart music, I was greeted as an old friend." This spiritual, exhorting Moses not to lose heart as Pharaoh pursues him, was one of two Moses-related songs Lomax recorded in 1959 and is of obvious slavery-era origins.
When A Fellow Is Out of A Job
A song performed by quarryman, lumberman, fiddler, and folk-singer Grant Rogers, who reported that the melody was his but the lyrics learned from a "colored gentleman" in New Jersey. Learn more about Rogers at the Grant Rogers Project, an initiative to preserve and promote the expressive culture of the Western Catskill region of New York State.
