Work Songs with Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, and Langston Hughes
In the course of her anthropological fieldwork in Florida, Zora Neale Hurston collected numerous work songs and lining rhythms, sometimes in collaboration with a young Alan Lomax whom she trained in this characteristically twentieth-century art. This talk investigates the significance of work songs as a form. For Hurston and Lomax, I argue, these were multifaceted objects: essential ethnographic data for understanding the expressive folk culture of the South; poetic and musical materials that were available for artistic appropriation and adaptation; and a means to think through the aesthetics, politics, and social forms of modern labour. I will pursue several work songs through Hurston’s ethnographic memoir Mules and Men (1935), through recordings she made for the WPA, and through her literary and dramatic works. Hurston’s interest in work songs was shared by Langston Hughes, though I will suggest Hughes found in the form—including in some of the songs that Hurston and Lomax had collected—a different set of political and aesthetic possibilities. I will touch on two wartime radio ballads on which Hughes collaborated with Lomax, his translations of the Haitian writer (and work song obsessive) Jacques Roumain, and some other work songs that Hughes wrote or rewrote. Though the work song may seem to be in abeyance, and to belong to the past, Ted Gioia claimed in 2006 that it could still open ‘a window onto our working selves’ and offer a ‘much-needed opportunity to reexperience the dignity of human labor, and comprehend the potential elements of play and self-expression that are latent in all directed activities and enterprises’. In a similar vein, Hurston and Hughes’s creative engagements with the form transcend the antiquarian impulse to preserve work songs as relics of a bygone cultural stage, describing instead a living form that might be reactivated in new contexts.

Wine reception in the following weeks 1, 3 and 5; Sandwiches for week 7.
Date: 18 January 2024, 16:45 (Thursday, 1st week, Hilary 2024)
Venue: Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road OX1 3UB
Speaker: Dr Matthew Taunton (UEA)
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organisers: Professor Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford), Professor Nicole King (University of Oxford)
Part of: American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Katy Terry, Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu