PBA Galleries

Includes:

• Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. The Negro and His Songs, A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South. 306 pp. Original cloth. First Edition. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1925.
• Odum and Johnson. Negro Workaday Songs. 278 pp. Original cloth. First Edition. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1926.

While earlier academic work (like Krehbiel’s, see entry above) focused on Negro spirituals and traditional folk songs, these classic scholarly studies, co-authored by white North Carolina Sociologists, collected contemporary, unpublished music “sung or repeated by actual Black workers”, some of them imprisoned convicts and laborers on chain gangs and in construction camps, with the authors providing an “exact transcription of natural lines, words and mixtures.” Odum believed these “workaday songs, crude and fragmentary…provide a more accurate picture of Negro working life than do conventional folks songs.” The two pioneering volumes also constitute “an important contribution to the history of the blues in America…”