Negro Workaday Songs

2014 Reprint of 1926 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Negro Workaday Songs is the third volume of a series of folk background studies of which The Negro and His Song was the first and Folk-Beliefs of the Southern Negro was the second. So far as Odum was aware, none of the songs in this collection had been published and the songs were all sung or repeated by actual Black workers or singers and much of their value lies in the exact transcription of natural lines, words and mixtures. Odum intended his study of Black music as a series of pictures of the Black American as portrayed through his workaday songs. He has taken the position that these workaday songs, crude and fragmentary, and often having only local or individual significance, provide a more accurate picture of Negro working life than do conventional folk songs. Odum’s book is also an important contribution to the history of the blues in America and a collector’s item in that field.