John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

New Books in African American Studies · Oct 9, 2025 · 1h 3m

In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,000 pages of unedited typescripts. This collection of oral histories is arguably the single greatest body of African American folklore extant, and a significant portion is devoted to folk music and song. John Minton’s Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (UP of Mississippi, 2024) examines the musical references in these narratives. A combination of reference information and analysis, Minton contextualizes and scrutinizes the vocal…