Front matter
Reading edition
Please see the Transcriber’s Notes at the end of this text.
The cover image and music transcriptions have been created for this e-text and are in the public domain.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA SOCIAL STUDY SERIES
NEGRO WORKADAY SONGS
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA SOCIAL STUDY SERIES
The Negro and His Songs $3.00
Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro 5.00
Negro Workaday Songs 3.00
Southern Pioneers 2.00
Law and Morals 2.00
The Scientific Study of Human Society 2.00
Systems of Public Welfare 2.00
Roads to Social Peace 1.50
The Country Newspaper 1.50
Children’s Interest in Reading 1.50
NEGRO WORKADAY SONGS
BY
HOWARD W. ODUM, Ph.D.
Kenan Professor of Sociology and Director of the School of Public Welfare, University of North Carolina
AND
GUY B. JOHNSON, A.M.
Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina
CHAPEL HILL THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1926
Copyright, 1926, By The University of North Carolina Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Presses of Edwards & Broughton Company RALEIGH
A vast throng of Negro workaday singers, mirrors of a race
Workingmen in the Southern United States from highway, construction camp, from railroad and farm, from city and countryside, a million strong
A half million migrants from the South, Eastward, Northward, Westward, and some South again
Negro offenders in thousand fold in local jails, county chain gangs, state and federal prisons
A horde of Southern casual laborers and wanderers down that lonesome road
A brown black army of “bad men”—creepers and ramblers and jamboree breakers, “travelin’ men” de luxe
Itinerant full-handed musicianers, music physicianers and songsters, singly, in pairs, quartets, always moving on
A host of women workers from field and home and factory at once singers and subjects of the lonesome blues
A swelling crescendo, a race vibrato inimitable, descriptive index of group character, folk urge and race power