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Ex-library copy of Fisk University, Rebound in library cloth. 93pp. 

Published the same year as Dorothy Scarborough’s classic Harvard study on Negro Folk-Songs, this book is far more rare, representing the “music collecting” labors of a young British-educated African who was given research facilities at Penn, the “first school for [southern] Negroes supported by Northern funds”. Established on St. Helena Island, off the South Carolina coast where emancipated Blacks who had worked as slaves picking sea-island cotton gathered after the island’s capture by the Union Navy early in the Civil War. Their community became a major center of “Gullah” culture.  Ballanta worked diligently to gather Gullah music, assembling over 100 of the Island’s old Spirituals – “many of them almost forgotten by the people themselves.”

Rarely seen outside of institutional collections, only one Internet copy offered at $450.