Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive

1. Lyric Reading

Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 grant proposal to the WPA's Federal Writers' Project begins with a jarring example of the diverse, rich, musical culture she promises to find in her home state of Florida. Each section of Hurston's "Proposed Recording Expedition into the Floridas" introduces one of four "areas" of the state and describes the cultural products that might be collected there. The singer who heralds Hurston's proposal in the epigraph to Area I (Western Florida) with a rhythmically forced ballad lyric is neither a hardworking black laborer nor a spurned lover (like the subjects of much other Hurstonian ethnography), but a rifle-toting manhunter in search of a black victim. These lyrics, the first words in the proposal, remind us from the outset of the physical danger that Hurston—a female black ethnographer who often traveled alone—risks in undertaking this work:

Got my knap-sack on my backMy rifle on my shoulderKill me a nigger 'fore Saturday NightIf I have to hunt Flordy over.(Sung by Waldo Wishart, Ocala, Florida)

(1)

The white bounty hunter, as well as violent and appropriative white poetry and song, threatens the materials of black culture, metonymically associated in the lyrics with the black body who will be dead "'fore Saturday Night."¹ And this threat is the major provocation of Hurston's expedition: to collect those same materials in order to create a record of black diasporic culture. It might be easy to read Hurston's grant proposal, housed in the archives of the Library of Congress and later published in a collection of Hurston's Federal Writers' Project writings, as a bureaucratic document intending to persuade its readers that Hurston's preservation project deserves funding. But it is also a record of completed work and a primer for how to read, hear, and understand Floridian culture. In this dual aspect, the proposal thus exemplifies the combination of instrumental and aesthetic poetic reading practices in the early twentieth century. While the challenge of Hurston's proposal remains how to find "material worthy of preservation by recordings," the proposal must also render that material textually and provide an interpretive context for it. Positing her expedition as a response to the articulated violence of the bounty hunter, Hurston signals her interest in documenting a culture that remains "little touched" and in hearing, reading, and recording poetic alternatives to that violence (1).² Hurston's impulse to preserve by documenting exemplifies the anthropological basis of one thread of modern lyric theory, the interpretation of poetry and its relationship to other genres and media, in this case both the medium of song and the genre of the proposal itself.

Hurston's geographical survey of Florida's culture calls for a reparative reading practice encompassing the experiences of violence, sexual longing, and prayer described through poetic interludes. Along with the epigraphs to each section and other interjections of verse, song, and chant at the end of each of the three areas, Hurston offers instructions to readers who would undertake the expedition she has proposed. These research instructions are the basis of a literary as well as a collecting practice. She suggests "A serious study of blank verse in the form of traditional sermons and prayers" at the end of Area I (2) and twice iterates the suggestion as a command to "Look for the roots of traditional sermons and prayers" in Area II and to "Look for fine examples of those folk poems in blank verse known as sermons and prayers" in Area III (4). Hurston finally answers this call for prayer in the summary section, concluding the program with a "Sanctified Anthem":

O Lord, O LordLet the words of my mouth, O LordLet the words of my mouth, meditations of my heartBe accepted in Thy sight, O Lord(Sung by Mrs. Orrie Jones, Palm Beach, Florida)

Respectfully Submitted Zora Neale Hurston (7)

Here all of the other lyrics—terrifying, lusty, hardworking, and heavy with grief—become "the words of my mouth," emanating from the writing subject, Zora Neale...