Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942
by John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C. Adams Jr.
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Book Summary Information
Author: John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C. Adams Jr.Editor: Robert Gordon
Editor: Bruce Nemerov
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-05
ISBN: 0826514855
Number of pages: 316
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Book Reviews of Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942
Book Review: Crucial for anyone dealing with race, with blues, with Lomax
Summary: 5 Stars
Nemerov and Gordon have done an immense service to the scholarship of blues, to the scholarship of race in scholarship itself, to the understanding of Black music. This book helps us understand rather than the beneficient and hallowed benefactors of African Americans he liked to picture himself, Alan Lomax perpetuated the same racism and paternalism that has been a halmark of white scholarship of African Americans since this country began.
The trips to Mississippi in the 1940s that Lomax made were supposed to be part of a joint project between between Lomax's team at the Library of Congress and a team of Black scholars at Fisk University led by the great John W. Work III, one of the greatest African American folklorists, the musical director of the Fisk Jubilee singers, and one of the major Black intellectuals of his period. The lure of Lomax to the Fisk scholars was that he was supposed to lend resources from the Library of Congress, especially portable recording equipment, and would advance the publication of the joint study. In particular, the connection with the Library of Congress would make things easier with white authorities in Memphis and in the Mississippi Delta. Lomax seemed to be after the cooperation of Fisk professors and graduate students who knew their way around the Black south, especially Mississippi.
What turned out is that Lomax demanded that Work give part of the archive of folk recordings he had achieved to the Library of Congress. While Work, and two graduate assistance wrote cogent studies, that included many transcriptions of songs, hymns, sermons, and other Black folk culture, all that came out were recordings done by the Library of Congress. Nearly 50 years later, Alan Lomax came out with a book on this trip called _The Land Where the Blues Began_ which won many prizes and set the stage for another reissue of the recordings made on this expedition.
Yet, the studies by Work, Adams, and Jones were alledgedly "lost" by the Library of Congress and Lomax, although researchers found this information in Lomax's papers several years ago. While Lomax uses photographs taken by Work, data and interviews compiled by Adams and Jones, there is no attributation to these Black scholars. Indeed, Lomax makes many mistakes and even confuses the two trips he actually made with one.
The studies by the Black scholars here that are finally seeing the light of day are important. Rather than focusing solely on remnants of the past and perpetuating the image of the Delta as a dynamic center of change, a mixing pot of Black culture, and place the traditional culture in the context of real change in the real Black community. If Lomax focuses on older Black folk singers and seems to prefer, as Nemerov and Gordon point out in their introduction, the inarticulate, who necessitate interpretation by Lomax, Work, Adams and Jones interview a very articulate cross section of Black people from the Delta ranging from high school students to great grand mothers to give a picture of Black folklore and live in the world.
As Adams and Jones were sociologists working on the equivalent of Master's Theses under the supervision of Charles S, Johnson, their papers about life in the Delta and its connection to folklore are important for anyone interested in Black history and culture in general, and life in the Delta in particular. There is none of the romanticism that non-African American blues writers like to invest Mississippi and the Delta with in their writing. There is no garbage about meeting the devil at the crossroads, but there is a lot about the growing race consciousness and growing refusal to take the oppression whites were dishing out that would explode into a civil rights movement.
Since I wrote this review, I have found the scholarship here, particularly about the changing sociology of the Delta to be extremely useful in discussing several questions that people have asked me, or thinking about other questions involving the history of the blues, banjos, old time music and the civil rights music. When I say helpful, I mean it has provided clear and documented answers to questions academics working these fields have raised with me.
This is a useful serious work written with great concision and clarity. It stands in stark contrast to the sloppy purple prosed, self centered, stereotype seeking and producing "white boy who knows Black folks" approach Alan Lomax took in his book _The Land Where the Blues Began_ which purports to cover the same material.
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Summary of Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942
This remarkable book recovers three invaluable perspectives, long thought to have been lost, on the culture and music of the Mississippi Delta.
In 1941 and '42 African American scholars from Fisk University--among them the noted composer and musicologist John W. Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams, Jr.--joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mission was to explore the musical habits and history of the black community there and "to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community." Among the fruits of the project were the earliest recordings by the legendary blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. The hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publication of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress. However, the field notes and manuscripts by the Fisk researchers became lost in Washington. Lomax's own book drawing on the project's findings, The Land Where the Blues Began, did not appear until 1993, and although it won a National Book Critics Circle Award, it was flawed by a number of historical inaccuracies.
Recently uncovered by author and filmmaker Robert Gordon, the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County study now appear in print for the first time. Their work captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a way of life, and a set of rich musical traditions as they existed sixty years ago. Until the surfacing of these documents, Lomax's perspective was all that was known of the Coahoma County project and its research. Now, at last, the voices of the other contributors can be heard.
Including essays by Bruce Nemerov and Gordon on the careers and contributions of Work, Jones, and Adams, Lost Delta Found will become an indispensable historical resource, as marvelously readable as it is enlightening.
Illustrated with photos and more than 160 musical transcriptions.
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