The Work Songs Remembered by the Formerly Enslaved in Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37536/reden.2025.7.2496Keywords:
Slavery, Work Songs, Oral History, United States of AmericaAbstract
In the mid-1930s, a wide variety of programs and projects were developed in the United States as part of the Works Progress Administration to provide more employment opportunities. One such project was "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project." Between 1936 and 1938, more than 2,300 interviews were conducted with formerly enslaved individuals from around 17 states. These sources were created with significant shortcomings, which explains why scholars have long ignored them. This study seeks to fill that lacuna in the history, arguing that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. Using oral history methodology, this article aims to uncover the music that the enslaved created in the final years of slavery, focusing on work songs. While these interviews do not contain recorded musical data, they provide valuable insight into the context in which the songs were performed and the purposes they served for this group.
References
Baum, Willa. 1977. Transcribing and editing oral history. Nashville: American Association for State and Local history.
Bertaux, Daniel. 2005. Los relatos de vida. Perspectiva etnosociológica. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra.
Blassingame, John. 1979. The Slave Community. Plantation life in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Buchanan, Thomas. 2004. Black life on the Mississippi: slaves, free Blacks, and the western steamboat world. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Douglasss, Frederick. 1855. My bondage and my freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Escott, Paul. 1979. Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Feldstein, Stanley. 1971. Once a slave: The slave's view of slavery. New York: W.Morrow.
Floyd, Samuel. 1995. The Power of Black Music. Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fraser, Ronald. 1993. La Historia Oral Como Historia Desde Abajo. Ayer (12), 13-28.
Garrison, Lucy; Ware, Charles. & Allen, Wiliam. 1867. Slave songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson & Co.
Gioia, Ted. 2006. Work songs. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grele, Ronald. 2003. ‘Movement without aim: methodological and theoretical problems in oral history’, In Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson eds. The Oral History Reader.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago; University of Chicago Press
Hirsch, Jerrold. 2004. Portrait of America. A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Kemble, Frances Anne. 1863. Journal of a Residencia on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Levine, Lawrence. 1978. Black culture and black consciousness: Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merrik, George. 1909. Old Times on the Upper Mississippi. The recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863. The Arthur H. Clark Company.
Odum, Howard & Johnson, Guy. 1925. The Negro and his Songs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
_____. 1936 Negro workaday songs. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Olmsted, Frederick. 1861 Journeys and explorations in the Cotton Kingdom of America. A travellers observations on cotton and slavery in the American Slave States. Vol. I. Sampson Low, Son & Co.
Peabody, Charles. 1903. Notes on Negro Music. The Journal of American Folklore, 16(62): 148–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/533498
Perks, Robert & Thompson, Alistair. 2003. The Oral History Reader. Routledge
Portelli, Alessandro. 1981. The Peculiarities of Oral History, History Workshop, 12(1), 96-107. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96
Raboteau, Albert. 2004. Slave religion: The "invisible institution" in the antebellum South. Oxford University Press.
Stewart, C. 2016. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Thompson, Alistair. 2003. ‘The voice of the past: oral history’ In Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson edd. The Oral History Reader.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. (2015) Silencing the past. Power and the production of history. Boston: Beacon Press.
Work, John. 1998. American Negro Songs: 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secular. New YorK: Dover Publications.
References, Federal Writers Project: Slave Narrative Project
Vol. 1, Alabama. 1941, .
Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 2. 1941, .
Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3. 1941, .
Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 5. 1941, .
Vol. 3, Florida. 1941, .
Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 1. 1941, .
Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 2. 1941, .
Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 3 141, .
Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 4, 1941, .
Vol. 9, Mississippi. 1941, .
Vol. 10, Missouri. 1941, .
Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 1. 1941, .
Vol.13, Oklahoma 1941, .
Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 1. 1941, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn141/.
Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 2. 1941, .
Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 3. 1941, .
Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2. 1941, .
Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4. 1941, .
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel Domingo Gómez
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
