Alan Lomax Archive | Walter Watson and group: Working My Way Back Home (1936) @AlanLomaxArchive | Uploaded April 2020 | Updated October 2024, 1 day ago.
A work-song led by Walter Watson with Hezekiah Jenkins, Theodore (Brownskin) Richardson, and Robert Lee (Highway) Carson. Recorded by John A. Lomax as the men chipped mortar from bricks in the brickyard at Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary), April 14 or 16, 1936. [AFS 600A1]

I am workin’ my way back home...
On that Gulf and Ship Island road...
Well that Gulf is a long railroad...
Most surely my mother must be dead...
Well I can’t get a letter from home...
Alberta let your bangs grow long...
Alberta she won’t write to me...

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: We Are Not Ashamed (V.D. Radio Project, 1949)

Uncle Eck Dunford: Evening Star Waltz (1941)

Black Encyclopedia of the Air 15: The Brothers Are Calling (1969)

Black Encyclopedia of the Air 05: The Big Black Continent (1969)

$14 - When Im Gone, Gone: South Carolina, 1934–1940 This episode provides an introduction to the singers and sites visited by John A. Lomax in the Palmetto State between 1934 and 1940, on the occasion of the entirety of John A. Lomaxs historic South Carolina recordings—made between 1934 and 1940 under the aegis of the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song—being now freely available online via the Lomax Digital Archive. [Access the collection here (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940).] This collaboratively produced catalog provides free access to more than 12 hours of historic audio, accompanied by extensive descriptive metadata, documenting a diversity of Black and white folk and vernacular music in the Palmetto State: spirituals, hymns, blues, lullabies, ballads, childrens game songs, work songs, as well as stories and personal narratives. John A. Lomax made several trips to South Carolina as a guest of folklorist Genevieve W. Chandler in coastal Murrells Inlet, who introduced him to some of the renowned singers in the Gullah community there: among them Zackie Knox, Lillie Knox, and Mom Hagar Brown. Also representing Gullah traditions of the region in these recordings are Caesar Roper and the Wadmalaw Island singers who participated in Rosa Warren Wilsons Plantation Echoes program, which Lomax recorded in Columbia in 1937. White singers also contributed to the sessions at Chandlers home with childrens songs, contemporary hillbilly numbers, and ballads. Lomax recorded incarcerated men and women—at the Reid Farm in rural Kershaw County; at the state penitentiary in Columbia; and in a convict camp in Anderson County—singing group work songs, sacred pieces, and the occasional blues. Two WPA ditch-digging crews appear in these recordings, one from the Murrells Inlet area and the other from Clemson; this latter group Lomax recorded at the home of South Carolina journalist and memoirist Ben Robertson. Only a fraction of these recordings have ever been published or otherwise made available publicly. (The Murrells Inlet and Wadmalaw Island material was processed with the support of a National Historic Publications and Records Commission grant with Coastal Carolina University.) Playlist (links to catalog records in the Lomax Digital Archive): *Zackie Knox: When I’m Gone, Gone, Gone (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/murrells-inlet-737/when-im-gone-gone-gone) *Lillie Knox: I Know My Time Aint Long (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/murrells-inlet-737/i-know-my-time-aint-long) *Hagar Brown: Stay In the Field (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/columbia-1140/ill-be-standing-station) *Jonesie Mack, James Mack and Nick Robison: Corrine, Corrina (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/charleston-737/corrine-corrina) *Capitol City Laundry Quartet: Ezekiel Saw the Wheel (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/columbia-536/ezekiel-saw-wheel) *Minnie Floyd: Time Enough Yet (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/murrells-inlet-737/time-enough-yet) *Mike Maybank and group: See John the Writer (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/murrells-inlet-737/time-enough-yet) *Cleve Dynamite Wright & Slick Owens: Ain’t No Heaven On the County Road (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/anderson-county-639/aint-no-heaven-county-road) *D.W. White & People’s Burial Aid Choir: I’ll Be Standing at the Station (https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/south-carolina-1934-1940/columbia-1140/ill-be-standing-station) Works cited: *Coming Through: Voices of a South Carolina Gullah Community from WPA Oral Histories. U. of South Carolina Press, 2008. *Alan Lomaxs 1983 Johns Island recordings. (Perhaps strangely, Alan didn’t visit South Carolina on his 1959 and 1960 trips through the American South, although he does appear as an announcer on a Folkways LP documenting the 1964 folk festival on Johns Island that featured the singers of the Moving Star Hall - like Benjy Bligen, Bertha Pinckney, and Janie Hunter - who appear in the 83 footage. That festival was organized by Guy and Candie Carawan, who also compiled the gorgeous book “Aint You Got A Right to the Tree of Life, consisting of narrative segments by Johns Islanders and photographs by Bob Yellin.) *The Oxford American piece about Rosa Warren Wilson and “Plantation Echoes” has gone missing from their online archives between the recording of this episode and compiling these notes. If anyone turns up a link, please let us know!$

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Flo Anckle & Majestic Brass Band: You Rascal You, part 2 (1982)

Charlie Bristol and group: Bell A Ring A Yard O (1962)

Walter Watson and group: Working My Way Back Home (1936) @AlanLomaxArchive