The New Negro Poet and the Nachal Man: Sterling Brown's Folk Odyssey
1989; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2903991
ISSN2326-1536
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoIn 1936, the year Sterling Brown and John Lomax joined forces supervising the collection of oral slave narratives for the Federal Writers' Project (see Mangione 257-63), Lomax and his son Alan published the first extended study of an American folksinger. That singer, one Walter Boyd, alias Hudie Ledbetter, alias Leadbelly, had been the self-proclaimed King of the Twelve String Guitar Players of the World, as well as the number one man in the number one gang on the number one convict farm in Texas. He had fought his way into prison and had sung his way to freedom, to fleeting fame, and to what would be a pauper's death in Bellevue in 1949. A man of prodigious physical strength, emotional volatility, unpredictable violence, and indisputable creativity, unschooled if not unassuming, he was shaped by record, film, and the printed page into the prototypic national image of the folk Negro. For the recording industry, his songs were a golden hedge against hard times. For the generation of newly professional folklorists that the Lomaxes represented, he was a find that helped buttress the assault of the Depression era folklore radical democrats against the old aristocratic folklore scholarship. For the thinkers and artists of the black world-within-a-world from which he came, however, Leadbelly made concrete an old enigma alternately energizing and embarrassing-and one left largely unplumbed by the outspokenly folk conscious New Negro movement of the twenties. Lawbreaker, illiterate, brawler, boozer, womanizer, cottonpicker, and vagrant; singer of prison dirges, work songs, cowboy ballads,
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