Richard Chan, Michael Williams, Neal Samors - REAL CHICAGO - Photographs from the files of the Chicago Sun-Times

The Frog Blues & Jazz Annual No.4 - The Musicians, the Records & The Music of the 78 era

http://www.frog-records.co.uk/

Kadir Nelson - Heart and Soul - The Story of America and African Americans

William J. Cooper Jr. - Jefferson Davis, American

Ron Johnson - North Florida Folk Music History & Tradition

B.A. Botkin - A Treasury of MISSISSIPPI RIVER FOLKLORE

James C Cobb A Way Down South - A Story of Southern Identity

Charles G Quill - The History of the Blues

Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson - Death of Innocence - The story of the hate crime that changed America

William Bearden - Cotton - From Southern Fields to the Memphis Market

In the barbeque joints and plate lunch cafes off MemphisÂ’s Front Street, one is easily reminded of the days when cotton was king, of a society of characters and cads; the big time and the small time; the rich and the richer; the hangers-on, anointed, powerful, and busted. Cotton created empires in agriculture, transportation, banking, and warehousing. It also shackled the dreams and lives of those born into slavery and sharecropping. Although many of the day-to-day dealings have moved to manicured office parks and high-rise buildings, cottonÂ’s influence still remains at the core of the Southern economy and Southern society.

Belinda Hurmence - We Lived in a cabin in the Yard

The idea of interviewing slaves about their experiences dates to the 1760s, when abolitionists first began to publish slave narratives as a way to educate the public to the horrors of slavery. From 1929 to 1932, the social sciences department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, sponsored a project to gather more interviews. In 1934, one of the Fisk project workers suggested the federal government hire unemployed white-collar blacks to undertake similar projects in Indiana and Kentucky. Two years later, the Works Progress Administration directed the Federal Writers' Project teams in four more states to begin interviewing former slaves living in their states. The project soon expanded to cover fourteen states. By the time the WPA project ended in 1938, some 2,000 interviews, representing about two percent of the ex-slave population in the United States at the time had been completed and transcribed.
The editors of the volumes listed on this page combed through the transcriptions to find the most interesting of the narratives from each particular state.

Belinda Hurmence - My Folks Don`t Want Me To Talk About Slavery

The idea of interviewing slaves about their experiences dates to the 1760s, when abolitionists first began to publish slave narratives as a way to educate the public to the horrors of slavery. From 1929 to 1932, the social sciences department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, sponsored a project to gather more interviews. In 1934, one of the Fisk project workers suggested the federal government hire unemployed white-collar blacks to undertake similar projects in Indiana and Kentucky. Two years later, the Works Progress Administration directed the Federal Writers' Project teams in four more states to begin interviewing former slaves living in their states. The project soon expanded to cover fourteen states. By the time the WPA project ended in 1938, some 2,000 interviews, representing about two percent of the ex-slave population in the United States at the time had been completed and transcribed.
The editors of the volumes listed on this page combed through the transcriptions to find the most interesting of the narratives from each particular state.

Belinda Hurmence - Before Freedom - When I Just Can Remember

During the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project undertook the task of locating former slaves and recording their oral histories. The more than ten thousand pages of interviews with over two thousand former slaves were filed in the Library of Congress, where they were known to scholars and historians but few others. From this storehouse of information, Belinda Hurmence has chosen twenty-seven narratives from the twelve hundred type-written pages of interviews with 284 former South Carolina slaves. The result is a moving, eloquent, and often surprising firsthand account of the lost years of slavery and first years of freedom. The former slaves describe the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the houses they lived in, the work they did, and the treatment they received. They give their impressions of Yankee soldiers, the Klan, their masters, and their newfound freedom. In Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember, Hurmence makes accessible to the casual reader what many scholars and historians have long known to be a great source of our nation's history. Book jacket.

Marc W. Ryan - Trumpet Records - Diamonds on Farish Street

Peter C. Muir - Long Lost Blues: Popular Music in America, 1850-1920

Elijah Wald - The Blues - A Short Introduction

Gayle Dean Wardlow - Chasin` That Devil Music - Searching for the Blues

Paul Oliver - The Meaning of The Blues

Adam Gussow - Seems Like Murder Here - Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

Francis Davis - The History of the Blues - The Roots, The Music, The People from Charley Patton to Robert Cray