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ESSAY The Souths ofSterlingA. Brown by Elizabeth Davey It is evident that Negro folk culture is breaking up. Where Negro met only with Negro in the black belt the old beliefs strengthened. But when mud traps give way to gravel roads, and black tops and even concrete highways with buses and jalopies and trucks lumbering over them, the world comes closer. The churches and the schools, such as they are, struggle against some ofthe results of isolation, and the radio plays a part. Even in the backwoods, aerials are mounted on shanties that seem ready to collapse from the extra weight on the roof, or from a good burst ofstatic against the walls. The phonograph is common , the television set is by no means unknown, and down at the four corners store, a juke-box gives out the latest jive. Rural folk closer to towns and cities may on Saturday jaunts even see an occasional movie, where a rootin'-tootin' Western gangster film introduces them to the advancements of civilization. Newspapers, especially the Negro press, give the people a sense of belonging to a larger world, and the tales ofthe returning veterans, true Marco Polos, also prod the inert into curiosity. Brer Rabbit and Old Jack no longer are enough. Increasingly in the churches the spirituals lose favor to singing out ofthe books or from broadsides, and city-born blues and jive take over the jook-joints.1 oik' has no meaning without 'modern,'" historian Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us. In this description by Sterling A. Brown in 1953 of the technological transformation of southern black communities, the expansion of the modern brings the folk into sharp relief. The extension of electricity, roads, and the mass media into America's rural areas in the 1920s and 1930s inspired tremendous interest in the communities that lay on the edge of these transformations. The term "folk" suggests that these communities are outside the modern, the urban, and the industrial and values them as both threatened and unchanging in rapidly changing times. But in the essay "Negro Folk Expression," Brown chose the phrase "breaking up" to describe an African American folk culture that was both changing and dispersing. Migration had brought this folk creativity to the cities; 20 American literature and music were showing its influence. "Just as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were fascinated by the immense lore of their friend Jim," Brown wrote, "American authors have been drawn to Negro folk life and character."2 During the late 1920s and early 1930s, ethnographic writings found wide audiences outside the discipline of anthropology. Publishers produced a small boom of folklore collections, many published by white authors on rural black folklore. Two University of North Carolina professors collected and published The Negro andHis Songs: A Study ofTypicalNegro Songs in the South in 1925, and Carl Sandburg published American Songbag in 1927. In critical discussions of black poetry in the early 1930s, an embrace of folk poetry subsumed the previous decade's discussion and rejection of dialect verse, a change that can be explained in part by the emergence of "the folk" as a popular subject of American writing. Over the next decade, interest in the rural poor and working-class people would produce collections of folklore such as B. A. Botkin's series Folk-Say and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, as well as proletarian novels, poems, narratives, and stories that drew from folk idioms. This interest in the folk in American writing would culminate in the work of the New Deal Federal Writers' Project (fwp), which published a number of compilations of folklore, oral histories, and regional guides. By the mid-1930s, a discourse ofthe folk had considerable currency among black and white writers of various ideological persuasions.3 An exact contemporary ofLangston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown was one ofthe most admired younger poets of the Harlem Renaissance. The books he published in the 1930s and 1940s—Southern Road, The Negro inAmerican Fiction, Negro Poetry and Drama, and The Negro Caravan—established his reputation as a poet, literary critic, and anthologist attentive to African American folk traditions. He taught at Howard University for four decades, and his book reviews...

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