Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

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Southern Mosaic affords students the unique opportunity to study the folk and blues genres, including the relationship between song and oratory. They can explore the relationship between music and literature by analyzing lyrics and the use of humor in songs. These activities will also help students to maximize the meaning they can derive from songs. Finally, the collection's materials can be used in creative writing as well.

Folklore includes customs, tales, sayings, or art forms originating from or traditional with the common people of a given country or region. Folk music, a form of folklore, is transmitted orally from generation to generation, and generally reflects the lifestyle of those people who originated and perpetuated it. Though reflecting one "people," folk music can have a variety of forms and uses including entertainment, education, religious expression, artistic expression, and communication. Challenge students to browse the fieldnotes, Photo and Audio Subject Indexes, and lyrics to find proof, such as the following excerpt, of as many different uses of folk music as possible. What uses does the music students listen to today have? Can they find proof in the collection of the folk music's oral transmission through time and generations? Why might this form of transmission be important? How does the way modern music is transmitted effect its audience and use?

Pedro Zenungia playing the guitar with his daughter Zenovia, San Antonio, Texas.

Whenever, in the old days, anything exciting happened, a poet made verses about it and distributed the composition as a broadside. Musicians made up the air or tune for the verses. Prisoners leaving on boats would make up verse accounts of their experiences,- accounts of their crimes, etc., and sell them on the streets or from the boat.

Students can learn more about folk music by searching instruments and musicians. What do images of folk musicians and their instruments suggest about their music? Also have them consider the musicians' vernacular recorded by Ruby Lomax throughout the fieldnotes in excerpts such as the following. Finally, have students note the musicians' wide-spread use of nicknames such as "Garmouth," "Little Life," "Clear Rock," and "Stavin' Chain." How many more nicknames can they find? What do they think was the purpose of such nicknames? What can they learn about it from doing a full-text search on the fieldnotes? What can they learn about folk music and musicians from the musician's names and vernacular?

Pete Steele and family, Hamilton, Ohio.

James Baker (Iron Head), Sugar Land, Texas.

. . . Doc Reed and Vera Hall, cousins who have sung together for many years, are her most dependables. They are good singers of the old style spirituals, are perfect in "seconding"- "following after" they call it,- and they know many songs. Not having book-learning they store in the back of their heads innumerable tunes and stanzas. Vera Hall is especially quick to "catch up" a new tune. And if they do not understand completely the text, they are ingenious in supplying substitutes, either from other spirituals or from their own feelings of the moment. These two, however, unlike old Uncle Rich Brown, do not substitute jargon; their texts mean something, if not always what the original words meant. Page 219, Section 16 of the Fieldnotes

Lyrics as Poetry

Included among folk music's many uses is its use as a poetic form. Students can analyze the lyrics of one of the collection's songs and consider how the poem is enhanced by its musical form. Have students choose lyrics transcribed in the fieldnotes or song text and consider the speaker, plot, mood, tone, theme, imagery, and symbolism of each song. How does the alliteration, assonance, and meter of the poem contribute to its mood and meaning? What does the music add? Alternatively, students can explore symbolism across the collection or some portion of it. For example, they might explore symbols such as the devil and the railroad in the collection's blues songs. What other words do you see appearing frequently? Is there a consistent symbolic meaning you can assign to them? How are these words used in other types of songs? Why do you think these words took on symbolic meaning for the people who sang about them? For a formal outline of a lesson on blues music and poetry refer to a Teaching Unit in The Robert Johnson Notebook site at the University of Virginia.

The humorous songs found in the Audio Subject Index provide students with fifteen examples with which to study humor. Have students analyze and compare the different ways in which humor is created in each song. Is it through words or sounds? irony or puns? Listening to very different songs such as "Old Gray Mare" and "Work Don't Bother Me" brings into relief the fact that humor is created by an artist through different techniques. Challenge students to identify what they find funny in each song, to articulate why, and identify the technique.

Dog sitting in armchair wearing eyeglasses.

Students might also search the collection for humorous images. Are the techniques for creating visual humor the same as those used in writing and song?

The Blues

In addition to humorous songs, this collection indexes those songs classified as belonging to the blues genre. Students can begin to get a sense of this genre by sampling some of these songs and considering the following questions.

• What do you think makes a song a blues song?
• What do these songs have in common?
• What instruments are used? What sounds are created by these instruments and by the singer's voice? What adjectives would you use to describe them?
• What moods are created and how?
• What are the subjects and themes of these songs?
• Why do you think this genre is called the "blues"?

Students may also want to analyze the songs' lyrics with questions suggested in the section on poetry. Then, they can inform their understanding with some research into the background of these songs, reading correlative fieldnotes and viewing images of blues musicians. What is the cultural and historical context of these songs' creation and perpetuation through time? To learn more, students can supplement their exploration of these songs with chapters from Robert Palmer's Deep Blues.

Finally, these songs can be studied in conjunction with literature by blues authors such as Langston Hughes, Robert Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston as well as William Faulkner. How do these writers' African-American characters of the South compare with the singers and subjects of Southern Mosaic's blues songs? How are the sounds of blues music reflected in blues literature? Southern Mosaic also offers the opportunity to view images of Zora Neale Hurston in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, the setting for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by searching Hurston and Eatonville. Zora Neale Hurston, Rochelle French, and Gabriel Brown, Eatonville, Florida.

Short Story

Southern Mosaic boasts numerous ballads whose lyrics tell detailed stories. Students can use one or more of these songs as a starting point for a short story. In addition to the characters, events, and tone of a song, students can draw on related images or texts from the collection to inform and inspire their stories.
Mountain woman in the hills near Austin, Texas. "The Old Woman"

Oratory

The collection highlights a variety of examples of oratory, indexed under audio subject headings such as announcements, benedictions, humorous recitations, prayers, narratives, tall tales, religious drama, and religious oratory. Less traditional forms of oratory are indexed under hollers, field hollers, farm calls, animal calls, hunting calls, imitations, and laughs. Students can sample and compare these various forms. Why do you think the Lomaxes included these recordings in their documentation of folk culture and folk music? How are these forms of public speaking related to song and what is the role of performance in folk music?