
Lost Delta Found
Rediscovering the Fisk University - Library of Congress Coahoma County Folklore Project
Vanderbilt University Press
Published on 5. August 2005
Book
Hardback
316 pages
978-0-8265-1485-1 (ISBN)
Description
This remarkable book recovers three invaluable perspectives, long thought to have been lost, on the culture and music of the Mississippi Delta. In 1941 and '42 African American scholars from Fisk University - among them the noted composer and musicologist John Wesley Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams - joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mission was to explore the musical habits and history of the black community there and ""to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community."" Among the fruits of the project were the earliest recordings by the legendary blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. The hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publication of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress. However, the field notes and manuscripts by the Fisk researchers became lost in Washington. Lomax's own book drawing on the project's findings, The Land Where the Blue Began, did not appear until 1993, and although it won a National Book Critic's Award, it was flawed by a number of historical inaccuracies. Recently uncovered by author and filmmaker Robert Gordon, the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County study now appear in print for the first time. Their work captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a way of life, and a set of rich musical traditions as they existed sixty years ago. Until the surfacing of these documents, Lomax's perspective was all that was known of the Coahoma County project and its research. Now, at last, the voices of the other contributors can be heard. Including essays by Bruce Nemerov and Gordon on the careers and contributions of Work, Jones, and Adams, Lost Delta Found will become an indispensable historical resource, as marvelously readable as it is enlightening.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tennessee
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Illustrations
14 b/w photographs, 160 song transcriptions
Dimensions
Height: 264 mm
Width: 187 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
880 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8265-1485-1 (9780826514851)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

John W. Work | Lewis Wade Jones | Samuel C. Adams
Lost Delta Found
Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942
E-Book
05/2020
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
€48.99
Available for download
Persons
Robert Gordon is the author of Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, among other books. He directed the PBS documentary ""Muddy Waters Can't Be Satisfied"" and was writer on the Memphis episode of Martin Scorsese's ""The Blues"" series. Bruce Nemerov is the audio specialist for the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, where he supervises the audio restoration laboratory and recorded media collections.