“Rosy,Possum,Morning Star: African American Women’s Work and Play Songs”

Abstract

“Rosy, Possum, Morning Star: African American Women’s Work and Play Songs” is an excerpt from a book length inquiry into, and engagement with, the song and dance of 19th-century African American women, as a source of self-authored social, literary, and historical text. The inquiry takes off from an interdisciplinary exploration of the narratives embedded in the cultural performance of early African and African American women. It explores continuities and improvisations, discursive strategies, articulations of agency, and constructions of identity in a lineage of diaspora articulation characterized by ancestral circles, acts of historical documentation and witness, and the communal creation of liminal space. Weaving together a range of study, including biography and anthropology, ethnography and musicology, poetics, art, and cultural history, on the loom of storytelling, the work also explores the symbolic range of performance inscription by reference to West African, ancient Egyptian, and San traditions, proposing an expansion of our sources and reading of diaspora literature based on the creative and theoretical inscriptions in the performed narratives of African American women.

Keywords

African American women work songs ring and children’s games African American history 19th century African Diaspora performance

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abrahams

R. D.

Szwed

J. F.

(1975). Discovering Afro-America. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Africa, the Ba-Benzélé Pygmies . (1998) . [CD]. Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records.

Beier

(1966). The origins of life and death. London, England: Heinemann.

Bleek

(1911). Specimens of Bushman Folktales. London, England: Allen.

Botkin

B. A.

(1969). Lay my burden down: A folk history of slavery. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Budge

E. A.

(1960). The book of the dead: The hieroglyphic transcript of the Papyrus of Ani. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books.

Carby

H. V.

(1987). Reconstructing womanhood: The emergence of the Afro-American woman novelist. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Davis

A. Y.

(1981). Women, race & class. New York, NY: Random.

Du Bois

(1997). The souls of Black folk. In Gates

H. L.

Jr . (Ed.), The Norton anthology of African American literature (pp. 613-740). New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

10.

Epstein

D. J.

(1977). Sinful tunes and spirituals: Black folk music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

11.

Equiano

(1987). The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African written by himself. In Gates

H. L.

Jr . (Ed.), The classic slave narratives (pp. 1-182). New York, NY: Penguin.

12.

Fisher

M. M.

(1953). Negro slave songs in the United States. New York, NY: Citadel Press.

13.

Gates

H. L.

(1988). Signifying monkey: A theory of Afro-American literary criticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

14.

Harper

F. E.

Foster

F. S.

(1990). A brighter coming day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper reader. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

15.

Hashaw

(2007). The birth of Black America: The first African Americans and the pursuit of freedom at Jamestown. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf.

16.

Hughes

Bontemps

(1958). The book of Negro folklore. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead.

17.

Hurston

Z. N.

(1978). Their eyes were watching God. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

18.

Jones

Hawes

B. L.

(1972). Step it down: Games, plays, songs, and stories from the Afro-American heritage. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

19.

Jones

(1985). Labor of love, labor of sorrow: Black women, work, and the family from slavery to the present. New York, NY: Basic Books.

20.

Joyner

C. W.

(1984). Down by the riverside: A South Carolina slave community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

21.

Katz

(1969). The social implications of early Negro music in the United States; with over 150 of the songs, many of them with their music. New York, NY: Arno Press.

22.

Larison

C. W.

(1988). Silvia DuBois. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

23.

Levine

L. W.

(1977). Black culture and black consciousness: Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

24.

Lomax

(1960). The folk songs of North America: In the English language. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

25.

Lomax

J. A.

(1947). Folk song USA: The 111 best American ballads. New York, NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

26.

Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri rainforest . (1992). [CD]. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways.

27.

Parrish

(1942). Slave songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Society.

28.

Prison songs historical recordings from Parchman Farm 1947–1948 . (1997). [CD]. Cambridge, MA: Rounder.

29.

Rawick

G. P.

(Ed.). (1972). The American slave: A composite autobiography. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

30.

Southern

(1971). The music of black Americans: A history. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

31.

Spillers

(1985). Conjuring. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

32.

Stuckey

(1987). Slave culture: Nationalist theory and the foundations of Black America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

33.

Thiong’o

N. W.

(2009). Something torn and new: An African renaissance. New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books.

34.

Thompson

R. F.

(1979). African art in motion. Berkley: University of California Press.

35.

Thompson

R. F.

(1983). Flash of the spirit: African and Afro-American art and philosophy. New York, NY: Random House.

36.

Truth

(1968). Narrative of Sojourner Truth. New York, NY: Arno Press.

37.

Williams

G. W.

(1882). A history of the Negro race in America from 1619-1880. New York, NY: G. P. Putman’s.

38.

Wilson

H. E.

Gates

H. L.

(1983). Our nig: Or, sketches from the life of a free black, in a two-story white house, North: Showing that slavery’s shadows fall even there. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

39.

Wood

P. H.

(1974). Black majority: Negroes in colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono rebellion. New York, NY: A. A. Knopf.