The Review: The musical anthropology of Zora Neale Hurston

On an amazing trove of strange field recordings. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Inspired by Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air, a popular history of the anthropologist Franz Boas’s influential group of students, I’ve been working my way through some of the classics of the Boas circle — Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), and, this week, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), which collects Black folkore from central Florida, where Hurston grew up. (The Review published an [essay]( drawn from King’s excellent book a few years ago.) Besides trickster tales and just-so stories, Hurston collected songs, like: Ah’d ruther be in Tampa with the Whip-poor-will, Ruther be in Tampa with the Whip-poor-will Than to be ’round here — Honey with a hundred-dollar bill. Hurston didn’t have the equipment to make field recordings when doing the research that went into Mules and Men, but, as the Yale scholar of American and African American studies Daphne A. Brooks explains in her article “[‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?]( Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood]( (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2010), she was herself recorded in 1939 by the folklorist Herbert Halpert, singing the folk songs she’d spent much of her career learning. And in 1936, as Brooks writes, Alan Lomax had recorded Hurston’s “high-pitched, ludic, and sugar-sweet performance of ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Bama Bama’” in Haiti. The Library of Congress has all of those recordings, and many are available [online](. Hurston described her process this way: I just get in the crowd with the people, and if they sing it, I listen as best I can and then I start to joinin’ in with a phrase or two and then finally I get so I can sing a verse. And then I keep on until I learn all the verses and then I sing ’em back to the people until they tell me that I can sing ’em just like them. And then I take part, and I try it out on different people who already know the song until they are quite satisfied that I know it. Then I carry it in my memory. That’s from her recording of a song called “Halimuhfack,” made for Halpert; you can [listen]( to it through the Library of Congress. SPONSOR CONTENT | Chime [Chime pledges 1% of equity to fund higher education opportunities for everyday Americans.]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. As Brooks observes at the beginning of her article, “Bessie Smith she was not … You’d most likely be hard-pressed to find anyone who would call her a ‘great singer.’” And yet, what Brooks calls her “weird, quirky, piercing voice” has something. In Brooks’s analysis, Hurston’s awkward, tonally imprecise, yet oddly affecting and intensely dedicated musical performance “encapsulates the oscillating Zora, the woman who was both of and in the crowd as well as whimsically positioned outside of it.” On this reading, the awkwardness and strangeness of Hurston’s vocal performances are a sort of symbol for the disorienting reflexivity of anthropology in general. Read Daphne A. Brooks on Hurston [here]( listen to Hurston’s performances [here]( and [here]( and check out Charles King on Margaret Mead and the Boas circle [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SPECIAL OFFER FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS Enjoying the newsletter? 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