Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University … by John W. Work III, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams Jr. (2020)

It is only with a lot of luck and after many coincidences, that the final text concerning two very important field trips to the Mississippi Delta in the years 1941 and 1942 would see publication.

This particular study of a rural region, its population and cultural accomplishment also with regard to local music was one of many similar undertakings completed in the 1930s and 40s. What made this field trip so special, is the cooperation of the African-American Fisk University, that had a unique music program that included classic studies and gospel music. On the field trip in 1941, apart from questionnaires and historical surveys of the Delta region also a number of sound recordings were produced. It was on this occasion, that one young farmer by the name of McKinley Morganfield was interviewed and recorded for the first time. He would develop into one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century under his stage name Muddy Waters.

Editor Robert Gordon, who has a good reputation from his various books on black music, particularly for his biography of Waters, found the Fisk University text misplaced while doing research for that life history. The 1941 field trip and the related study were meant to be published from the start. However, they “… were never prepared for publication. Before a publisher could be found, before even a publication agreement could be reached between Fisk and the Library of Congress, the manuscripts were misplaced, set aside, or filed away, and the authors moved to other pursuits. … That the manuscripts were found in the Lomax archives six decades later after they went missing may reveal much about how research is, and is not, shared, attributed and published.”

The Coahoma County Study, or rather the cooperation between the Fisk University and Library of Congress study on behalf of extended field trips to Coahoma County, MS took place under the leadership of famous folklorist Alan Lomax. The entire challenging project was finally credited to Fisk’s sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, even though actually mostly the brain child of Fisk’s musicologist and composer John W. Work III, whose efforts to analyze the study were simply not mentioned.

A nasty atmosphere must have been present during field work and even after finalization and documentation of the results. Gordon found “… no pretty picture of institutional cooperation; instead, there was name-calling, hostility, deception- and major accomplishments to boot.” Besides, it seems that Alan Lomax was a rather difficult person to work with, to say the least and that in light of that excursion, he in some of his other publications may have failed to capture important details too. We owe this information (and many other insights) to the excellent introduction by Gordon and fellow editor Bruce Nemerov.

The study as it is presented here is even more complete than it was originally intended, as it includes the text by Jones (and the Work findings), and also the writings of graduate student Samuel Adams, jr. from 1947. This passage was originally named “Changing Negro Life in the Delta” and contains interviews and the original questionnaire of the field trip, as the text was his master’s paper at Fisk. (One item in the appendix is particularly intriguing as it lists the contents of the juke boxes (!) found in five bars in Clarksdale, MS in 1941.)

The main part, or rather, the part deserving the most attention is John Work’s 70 page passage, that comes with an additional 100 pages of musical transcriptions of work songs, blues and hymns.
This book in its present form clearly is a precious treasure, as particularly the Mississippi Delta region with its energetic musical culture produced some of the most influential blues musicians. The sociological and musicological conclusions of Work and Adams are priceless documentations of a changing Delta and its population.
Even when leaving the complicated genesis of the study behind, the text itself (even without Work’s part) is fascinating and reveals a lot about life in the Delta. Observed through the eyes of those who were interviewed, namely black farmers and sharecroppers, most of them poor, simple people, who faced hard work every day, with modern inventions such as electricity and tractors changing their daily routines very slowly and only for those who could afford them. Their lifestyles, history, folklore, social attachments and the nature of their unique community luckily were recorded in some aspects in 1941/42.

Most impressive are Work’s and Adams’s contributions, both were ahead of their time, as the 1960s would see many similar studies, only that by then the generation interviewed in the Coahoma survey had largely passed away.

(The title was originally published in 2005; this is the first and more affordable paperback edition that also comes with more than 160 musical transcriptions and several black-and-white pictures.)

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2020

 

 

John W. Work III, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov (eds.), Vanderbilt University Press. 2020 (2005), 360 p.