Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.: Creating Dangerously in The Land Where the Blues Began

This article focuses on the career of Worth Westinghouse Long Jr. as a folklorist in the 1970s. Having honed his skills as a folklorist while working as a field coordinator for SNCC, which brought him into contact with a host of African American artists, he developed engaged in a career as a folklorist in the 1970s. He used his well-developed state of black consciousness to salvage the scraps from the wreckage of Jim Crow, drawing the protest elements out of the blues and black folklore, putting them on display, and aiming for nothing short of the psychological liberation of mainstream America. This essay also details the extent of his contributions to the documentary film The Land Where the Blues Began. Rather than a physical place on a map, The Land Where the Blues Began was anywhere in America where African Americans had cast down their buckets, loved, toiled, bled, and struggled in hopes of achieving a piece of the American Dream.