This remarkable book recovers three invaluable perspectives, long thought to have been lost, on the culture and music of the Mississippi Delta.
The Fisk University-Library Of Congress Coahoma County Study
Vanderbilt University Press
August 2005
343 pages ISBN: 0826514855 Hardcover Add to Wish List
In 1941 and ’42 African American scholars from Fisk
University—among them the noted composer and musicologist
John W. Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate
student Samuel C. Adams, Jr.—joined folklorist Alan Lomax
of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma
County, Mississippi. Their mission was to explore the
musical habits and history of the black community there
and "to document adequately the cultural and social
backgrounds for music in the community." Among the fruits
of the project were the earliest recordings by the
legendary blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. The
hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publication
of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress.
However, the field notes and manuscripts by the Fisk
researchers became lost in Washington. Lomax’s own book
drawing on the project’s findings, The Land Where the Blue
sBegan, did not appear until 1993, and although it won a
National Book Critics Circle Award, it was flawed by a
number of historical inaccuracies.
Recently uncovered by author and filmmaker Robert Gordon,
the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions
produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County
study now appear in print for the first time. Their work
captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a
way of life, and a set of rich musical traditions as they
existed sixty years ago. Until the surfacing of these
documents, Lomax’s perspective was all that was known of
the Coahoma County project and its research. Now, at last,
the voices of the other contributors can be heard.
Including essays by Bruce Nemerov and Gordon on the careers
and contributions of Work, Jones, and Adams, Lost Delta
Found will become an indispensable historical resource, as
marvelously readable as it is enlightening.
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