In the mid-1940s, Elizabeth Cotten (1895-1987) chanced to meet composer Ruth Crawford Seeger at a department store. They began to talk, and Seeger soon hired Cotten to work in the Seeger household.... more

American folklorist Harold Courlander compiled this series (Negro Folk Music of Alabama) from recordings he made in rural Alabama in 1950. The album is an attempt to counter the stereotypes of Black... more

Serving as Visiting Professor of Creative Literature at NYU and working as an author of various published works throughout his career, James Weldon Johnson was an artist as well as an activist for... more

Alabama farm worker Dock Reed and his cousin Vera Hall Ward were both recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Dock, by all accounts, was a deeply religious man who never sang secular... more

In an attempt to break away from the caricature of black music that was popular in America during the 1950s, Harold Courlander compiled this collection as documentation of black music in Alabama in... more