Series 439: Folk Music Survey Files. 1936-1941.
Work Projects Administration. Federal Writers' Project (RG 60)

Series 439: Folk Music Survey Files. 1936-1941.
Work Projects Administration. Federal Writers' Project (RG 60)

      Files from two surveys of Mississippi's folk music administered jointly by the Federal Writers' Project and Federal Music Project (overseen at the state level by Misses Eri Douglas and Jerome Sage, respectively). The music project served two purposes. The first purpose was to bring musical instruction to rural Mississippians by employing out of work musicians and music teachers to teach private and group lessons and direct small ensembles and school bands. The second purpose was to produce a survey of Mississippi’s folk music that would include actual musical notation in addition to the text of folk songs. Although other partial surveys of Mississippi's folk music had been carried out previously, most notably by Dr. Arthur Hudson and several of his graduate students at the University of Mississippi, they had gathered only song texts.

     Additionally, in 1939, the state was able to secure three months of time with the federal project's recording machine to record folk music from various contributing musicians (termed informants) who had already contributed scores and texts. The machine toured the state in the summer of 1939, shepherded by Herbert Halpert, a New York City music specialist, and notetaker Abbott Ferris.

     Files from the state music project include bibliographies of folk music research and collections of published song texts; published articles on various types of folk music and folk music preservation; project correspondence; lists of project workers and the songs they contributed; one report each on the progress of the state and federal music projects; original, handwritten sheet music and song texts for the songs collected by project workers, organized by Civilian Conservation Corps district number; and handwritten song texts organized by the county in which they were collected.

     Files from the Halpert recording tour include correspondence and lists of recorded songs; drafts of interviews conducted with informants; handwritten notes from recording sessions; press releases and news clippings discussing the tour; and the final report, comprising a complete transcript of the song recordings and informant interviews, an index of all the songs recorded on each record with their singers, and an index of project workers, songs contributed, and singers. Also included in the report is a fold-out state map showing the tour route and recording stops.

     The full set of Herbert Halpert's recordings of Mississippi folk music is available at the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center. The collection is catalogued under the title Herbert Halpert 1939 Southern States recording expedition, and is assigned the LC control number 2008700314.