A Roundup of Zora Neale Hurston recordings - Library of Congress

While Zora Neale Hurston is widely known as a novelist, she was also an anthropologist, and she spent extensive time recording and collecting black folklore materials. The Library of Congress has samples of many of her materials. Here's a roundup of some of those items.

Interviewer: How do you learn most of your songs?

Hurston: I just get in the crowd with the people and if they sing it, and I listen as best I can and then I start joining in with a phrase or two and then finally I get so I can sing a verse and then I keep on til I learn all the verses and then I sing them back to the people until they tell me that I can sing them 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 and then I carry it in my memory.

Recordings from June 18, 1939, at the Federal Music Project Office, Jacksonville, Florida
• Georgia Skin
• Description of lining track
• Halimuhfack
• Mule on the Mount
• Let's Shake It
• Dat Old Black Gal
• Shove It Over
• Uncle Bud
• Crow Dance
• Wake Up, Jacob
• Let the Deal Go Down
• Tilly, Lend Me Your Pigeon
• Gonna See My Long-Haired Babe
• Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come
• Po' Gal
• Mama Don't Want No Peas, No Rice
• Evalina
• Oh Mr. Brown

Related:
• Library of Congress and major black writers