About the Contributors and Editors

About the Contributors and Editors Shane K. Bernard, a Cajun from Lafayette, Louisiana, is the son of swamp pop pioneer Rod Bernard and author of Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (University Press of Mississippi, 1996). He has contributed to the journals Louisiana Folklife, Louisiana History, and the Journal ofFolklore Research, as well as to the music magazines Goldmine, OffBeat, Blues and Rhythm, and Now Dig This. Bernard also has compiled liner notes for several compact disc anthologies of South Louisiana music. He serves as historian and archivist to Mcllhenny Co. of Avery Island, Louisiana, makers of Tabasco brand pepper sauce since 1868. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in history at Texas A&M University. Dwight B. Billings is professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. He and Kathleen M. Blee have published widely on race, poverty, family, and violence in nineteenth-century Appalachia. Their book, tentatively titled Uncivil Society and the Appalachian Road to Rural Poverty, is forthcoming. Kathleen M. Blee is professor of sociology and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Women ofthe Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s and numerous articles on gender and racism. She and Dwight B. Billings have published widely on race, poverty, family, and violence in nineteenth-century Appalachia. Their book, tentatively titled Uncivil Society and the Appalachian Road to Poverty, is forthcoming . Hodding Carter III was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and reared in Greenville, Mississippi . From 1959 until 1977 he worked for the family's newspaper, the Delta DemoaatTimes . He has written two books, contributed to seven others and to numerous magazines , and is currently working on a third book. From 1980 to 1991 he was an op-ed columnist for the Wall StreetJournal and was a syndicated columnist with Newspaper Enterprise Association until 1995. Between 1977 and 1980, he was the U.S. State Department Spokesman and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. At present he is chairman of MainStreet, a television production company in Washington, D.C, and Knight Professor of Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland. Lacy K. Ford, Jr., is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 and is currently working on a history of political thought in the Old South. 470Southern Cultures Based in Washington, D.C., Roland L. Freeman is a freelance photographer whose work has been published widely and exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Africa. Since 1972 he has served as a field-research photographer in folklore for the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies, and in 1991 he established The Group for Cultural Documentation. He often collaborates with scholars, folklorists, and community activists, combining documentary photography, visual folklore, and visual anthropology in his work. Freeman has taught documentary photography at George Washington University and has received numerous fellowships and awards. In spring 1997, he will be the Eudora Welty Visiting Professor of Southern Studies at Millsaps College in Jackson , Mississippi. Steve Green served as sound and image librarian at the Southern Historical and Folklife Collections at the University of North Carolina from 1994 to 1996. He is currently librarian at the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio. Green has masters degrees in ethnomusicology and in library and information science. Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published articles and book reviews in such journals as Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, Studies in American Fiction, and the Southern Humanities Review. Among her authored books are Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991) and, most recently, T/ie Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996). She is editor of New Essays on Baldwin 's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996), and she is currently coediting the Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology ofthe African American Literary Tradition, and the Norton Anthology ofSouthern Literature. Thomas...