WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central parts
of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro is not an important social or cultural
element of the Southwest, just as the modern Indian hardly enters into
Texas life at all and the Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs
and tales of the Southwest have in treatment been blended with those
of the South. Dorothy Scarborough's _On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs_
(1925, OP) derives mainly from Texas, but in making up the body of a
Negro song, Miss Scarborough says, "You may find one bone in Texas, one
in Virginia and one in Mississippi." Leadbelly, a guitar player equally
at home in the penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, furnished John A.
and Alan Lomax with _Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly_, New York,
1936 (OP). The Lomax anthologies, _American Ballads and Folk Songs_,
1934, and _Our Singing Country_, 1941 (Macmillan, New York) and Carl
Sandburg's _American Songbag_ (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927) all give
the Negro of the Southwest full representation.
Three books of loveliness by R. Emmett Kennedy, _Black Cameos_ (1924),
_Mellows_ (1925), and _More Mellows_ (1931) represent Louisiana Negroes.
All are OP. An excellent all-American collection is James Weldon
Johnson's _Book of American Negro Spirituals_, Viking, New York, 1940.
Bibliographies and lists of other books will be found in _The Negro and
His Songs_ (1925, OP) and _Negro Workaday Songs_, by Howard W. Odum and
Guy B. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1926,
and in _American Negro Folk-Songs_, by Newman I. White, Cambridge, 1928.
A succinct guide to Negro lore is _American Folk Song and Folk Lore: A
Regional Bibliography_, by Alan Lomax and Sidney R. Crowell, New York,
1942. OP.
Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer's "Juneteenth,"
in _Tone the Bell Easy_, Publication X of the Texas Folklore Society,
Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a collection of tales. In volume after
volume the Texas Folklore Society has published collections of Negro
songs and tales A. W. Eddins, Martha Emmons, Gates Thomas, and H. B.
Parks being principal contributors.