John Work III: Recording Black Culture
2008 Grammy Winner - Best Album Notes
1. Poor Black Sheep (Frazier and Patterson)
2. Texas Traveler (Frazier and Patterson)
3. Daniel Saw the Stone (Holloway High School Quartet)
4. Shine on Me (unnamed quartet)
5. I Am His, He Is Mine (female group, Zema Hill's church)
6. Walk Around in Dry Bones (Fairfield Four)
7. If I Had My Way (Heavenly Gate Quartet)
8. My Captain's Angry (Al Washington)
9. Egypt Land (unnamed leader and congregation)
10. Since I Laid My Burden Down (unnamed leader and congregation)
11. Amazing Grace (Elder Gray and the Pulaski Prayer Society)
12. Ain't Gonna Drink No Mo' (Joe Holmes)
13. Interview with Muddy Waters (John W. Work)
14. Great God Attend (Houston County Singing Convention)
Adding Notes to a Folklorist's Tunes
[John 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, they appeared to have been played frequently, suggesting that they were dear to Mr. Work.
Some of the recordings that he had made with Mr. Lomax, largely the work songs and spirituals favored by Mr. Lomax, had been deposited in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The rest of the performances, which have gone unheard by the public for the better part of seven decades, give a more expansive view of the black vernacular music of the time.
Professor Work had big ears', Mr. Nemerov said. The overarching theme here is just how much music there was in the black community before World War II. It just seemed to be everywhere, and in every layer of black culture.
--Bill Friskics Warren
December 2, 2007
New York Times
