A "Cipher Language": Thomas W. Talley and Call-and-Response during the Harlem Renaissance

The first known study of the black musical form of call-and-response and its immense significance in African American oral and literary practices is "A Study in Negro Folk Rhymes" by Thomas W. Talley (1870-1952) in his book Negro Folk Rhymes Wise and Otherwise: With A Study (1922), a collection of black secular folksongs, unquestionably the first such compilation by a black scholar. Belonging to collections on black music and poetry published during the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement,¹ Talley and his text do not appear in studies about the period. They are absent from The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2004) and Harlem Renaissance Lives (2009), two compendiums about the era. Moreover, studies of antiphony in African American oral and literary discourses fail to credit Talley's pioneering work. Two anthologies on the subject, Call & Response (1998) and Call and Response (2011), and a study of the form in African American fiction, Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (1988, 2001), fail to acknowledge Talley's "Study." It is unmentioned in works on black poetics and prosody.² Indeed, Talley's book has been so thoroughly ignored that it is currently listed on the Forgotten Books website.³ Although this listing does not necessarily imply scholarly neglect, it is useful to note how major scholarly bibliographies, for example the MLA Bibliography, also demonstrate the range of scholarship that fails to acknowledge or discuss Talley.⁴ The neglect of this central text in the black oral and literary traditions deserves examination.

The son of former slaves, Talley was a chemistry professor, who also taught biology and science, at Fisk University. He chaired the chemistry department for twenty-five years (1902-1927). However, his groundbreaking work on antiphony best captures his indelible contribution to the Harlem Renaissance specifically and to African American oral and literary studies generally.⁵ His "Study," occupying some hundred pages (228-326), brilliantly analyzes black folklore practices with call-and-response as their basis. It is also the first original study of the praxis of prosody in black folk utterances.

Although unacknowledged in black oral and literary studies today, such was not the case when Talley's book was published, as contemporary reviews of it show, beginning with the Introduction, which was written by a Vanderbilt professor of literature, Walter Clyde Curry. Unsurprisingly, Curry laces his assessment with racist condescension; he nonetheless applauds the book for "being a pioneer and practically unique in its field" (v), specifically describing Talley's "Study" as "illuminating" (x). In his review of the book in The Sewanee Review, another white writer, J. H. Nelson of Trinity College (now Duke University), muses that (after exhibiting condescension similar to Curry's) "[t]he student of folk literature should welcome the book as a distinct contribution to [Talley's] source material. Moreover, the compiler has included a valuable study of the material and, among other things, has performed a real service in explaining 'call' and ''sponse'" (369). The Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Fauset states: "Professor Talley seems to have done for the Negro Folk Song what Mr. [James Weldon] Johnson has done for poems by Negro authors, and like Mr. Johnson's preface not the least valuable part of Professor Talley's service lies in the 'Study'" (68).⁶ Another Harlem Renaissance writer, Walter F. White, states in his review in The Nation that an "interesting part of the book is the author's lengthy treatise [the 'Study'] on the origin and development of these rhymes, and the study of the musical scores to which these verses are sung" (694). In his review in The Southern Workman,⁷ Julian E. Bagley writes: "There is a second part of the book which is a painstaking and illuminating treatise on the use, origin, and evolution of the Negro rhymes. Certain it is that this hitherto unrecorded discussion will prove a valuable source of information to persons interested in this particular phase of folklore" (248). The review in the Georgia Historical Quarterly asserts that Talley's collection of African American...