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John Work III: Recording Black Culture
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About John Work III: Recording Black Culture
Product Description This Grammy winning recording presents the field recordings of African American musicians made by Fisk University professor, musician and folklorist, John Work III. The fourteen recordings included in this CD represent the variety of African American folksong of particular interest to Professor Work. They also, for the most part, are recordings kept in his personal library. Most of the music presented here - blues, string bands, gospel and shape note singing - have been unheard until the release of this CD. Also included in the package is Work's interview with blues legend, McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield made in 1941 during the Fisk University/Library of Congress Coahoma County study. This recording is a companion to the book, Lost Delta Found, by Bruce Nemerov and Robert Gordon. The CD package includes rare photographs and extensive notes about the music and musicians. Review Adding notes to a Folklorist's tunes: [Work] argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of Recording Black Culture, an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim. Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on Recording Black Culture, instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll. Robert Gordon, who edited Lost Delta Found with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work's recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called I Am His, He Is Mine, as an example. 'There is nascent boogie-woogie in that music', said Mr. Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Mr. Work and Mr. Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Miss., in 1941. That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock 'n' roll. The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing If I Had My Way offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Mr. Work's recording of the Fairfield Four's Walk Around in Dry Bones presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s. This isn't to claim Dead Sea Scrolls-like significance for the music on the new CD. Black Americans, though, were making the transition from rural to urban life. Spirituals were being supplanted by music that was more agreeable to black communities in which congregations were buying pianos so they could play the songs of contemporary gospel composers like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey during worship. Mr. Work was committed to capturing these changes as they were happening rather than after the fact. Issued by Spring Fed Records, a label based in Woodbury, Tenn., Recording Black Culture demonstrates not only Mr. Work's understanding of the dynamic way vernacular music functioned in black culture but also his omnivorous musical appetite. In addition to dramatic examples of gospel singers anticipating rock 'n' roll, the selections include rare recordings ranging from black Sacred Harp singing to the virtuoso banjo playing of Nathan Frazier, performing as half of the banjo-and-fiddle duo Frazier & Patterson. Why Mr. Work did not publicize the acetates that have been meticulously remastered on Recording Black Culture remains unclear. When Mr. Nemerov found the discs in the attic of the Work home near the Fisk campus a few years ago,
