John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network | Kristin Turner interviews John Minton Episode: John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025) Release Date: October 9, 2025

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Overview of the Episode

In this episode of New Books in Music, host Kristin Turner interviews folklorist John Minton about his exhaustive new book, Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives. The discussion delves into the monumental Work Projects Administration (WPA) project of collecting oral histories from thousands of formerly enslaved people during the 1930s. Minton's decades-spanning research catalogs every mention of music in these narratives, analyzes their significance, and places these musical traditions in broader American, African, and transatlantic contexts. The episode is an essential listen for anyone interested in American music, folklore, Black history, and the complex dynamics of cultural exchange under slavery.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Background to the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives

• Origin of the Narratives: Minton outlines the origins of the WPA project, originally a Depression-era work relief program, which included the Federal Writers’ Project. Out-of-work writers were tasked to gather oral histories from Americans, leading to the ex-slave narrative initiative supervised by John Lomax.
  • "[The material] got back to Washington. And people were just amazed by these interviews... at the time, John Lomax... was actually on the employ of the WPA, helping to supervise these projects. He also had more experience collecting African American folk song than anyone alive at the time.” (04:18)
• Scope & Access to the Collection: Minton discovered the narratives as a graduate student and describes the monumental 41-volume “American Slave” collection, comprising roughly 20,000 pages of firsthand accounts. For decades, access was limited, with the full breadth becoming available only in the latter 20th century.
  • "It totals about 20,000 pages of TypeScript. So like I say, it was just absolutely intimidating when I first found it. No index, no annotation..." (07:32)

2. The Nature of the Narratives: Folklore vs. History

• Folklore over History: Minton emphasizes that these narratives are best seen as folklore—products of oral tradition—rather than academically rigorous history. Much information was passed along orally, subject to re-shaping and embellishment.
  • "Much of it is centered on folk music. The problem, though, was it was locked up in these archives..." (06:49)
  • "They get better because people craft them for their audiences or they restructure them to reflect their values or to transmit a particular lesson..." (12:39)

3. Understanding Slave Culture Through Music

• African Retentions & Influences: While North American slave culture was heavily shaped by day-to-day proximity to whites and acculturation, Minton underscores the persistent, if submerged, African influences in musical practices.
  • "African influence is just as persuasive as it is in places like Brazil or Cuba or Haiti... but you really have to dig for it a lot more than you would in other areas..." (15:17)
• Negotiating Identity and Joy: Despite oppression, music was a vital element of social life, joy, resistance, and communication for enslaved people.

4. Challenging Myths in Scholarship

• Spirituals as Code: Minton challenges the popularly held belief (uplifted by scholars like Miles Fisher) that spirituals were encoded messages for resistance or escape. His reading of the narratives finds no such evidence.
  • "I really found no evidence for that... they did it pretty much the way common sense would tell you. They whispered it one on one." (18:59)
• Work Songs as Communication: There is some evidence that work songs were used for signaling, such as warning about the approach of an overseer, but not in spirituals.
  • "Old Hog around the Bench was... what they'd start singing that the white boss was coming down." (20:44)

5. Life Experience of the Narrators

• Age and Experience: Contrary to common assumptions, many narrators interviewed were in their teens or twenties at emancipation, with significant firsthand experience of enslavement. Emancipation did not erase de facto slavery for decades in some regions.
  • "Just looking at the birth dates, actually the majority of the ex slaves were born in the 1840s... so most of them were in their teens or early 20s at the time they were freed." (26:53)
  • "Many of the children and grandchildren of slaves who were interviewed described plantations that were exactly like antebellum plantations where they'd grown up." (28:24)

6. Music as Control and Resistance

• White Surveillance and Use of Music: Enslaved people’s music was both a site of joy and a tool for white surveillance and control. From the demanded performances to the policing of musical gatherings (like “Saturday night frolics”), music-making took place in a state of constant oversight.
  • "Slave music was always very, very carefully supervised... slaveholder would be there, and there really was often an attempt to reinforce the subservience of the slaves through these." (32:06)
• Psychological Operations and Humiliation: Whites used music to humiliate slaves, enforce submission, and perpetuate psychological and physical control, including through stories that inspired supernatural fear.
  • “You can use musical performance as a way to humiliate people. And slaves were constantly put in situations where they were forced to perform in... humiliating a manner as a way again of keeping them down, of subordinating them.” (34:26)

7. African Retentions and Cultural Hybridity

• African Musical Principles: Minton discusses the generally “African” character of slave music—call and response, percussion, hot rhythms, syncopation, expressive vocals—though not always directly traceable to a single African culture.
  • "The African traits you are most likely to find in the United States are the kind of traits that all African cultures share." (41:12)
• Adaptation of European Instruments: Enslaved people adapted European instruments (like the violin and eventually brass instruments) to African musical sensibilities.
  • “The most important instrument among slaves was the violin... but it also needs to be mentioned that the violin is just as important in Africa as it is in Europe…” (42:32)
  • “Jazz is played on European brass instruments. It does not sound like European brass music. What they did was... figured out how to play them like African horns." (44:46)

8. Minstrelsy and Cultural Cross-Pollination

• Minstrelsy’s Complex Role: Minstrel shows appropriated Black music and dance, then shaped and fed traditions back to Black communities. While minstrelsy was demeaning, it created unexpected cultural exchanges and blurred the line between black and white musical idioms.
  • "One of the primary minstrel instruments was the banjo, which was an African instrument. They picked it up from blacks... you find black banjo players who are clearly imitating minstrels." (45:46)
• White Music Rooted in Black Culture: Square dancing, often seen as quintessentially white, may have Black origins; significant white musicians (Hank Williams, Bill Monroe) learned their craft from Black mentors.
  • “Most of the earliest reports of square dance callers, they are slaves or they are f. Free blacks." (49:22)
  • "You can't understand the blues without understanding country music, just like you can't understand country music without understanding the blues." (52:17)

9. The Significance of “Shouting”

• Shouting in Black Religious Life: “Shouting,” a mix of singing, dancing, and religious ecstasy, was frequently mentioned in the narratives and is a key element of Black evangelical tradition, both sacred and social.
  • “You didn't just sing spirituals, you danced the spirituals while you were singing them.” (56:25)
  • "Shouting comes from the Old Testament... American evangelicals, both black and white, picked up on this term shout as kind of a catch all for singing and dancing, basically for trance dancing..." (54:30)

10. Personal Reflections and Scholarly Achievement

• A Life’s Work: Minton candidly shares the daunting scope and enduring doubts of working on this book, emphasizing perseverance through decades of research.
  • "There was a time when I thought about writing a book like this... I thought about going to the moon... but I don't know if it's just stubbornness or perversity or obsession. I just kept on at it." (58:58)
  • "For young scholars or people working in this direction, keep at it... There were a lot of very bleak mornings while writing this book, let me tell you." (59:38)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "[The WPA ex-slave narratives] is the largest collection of African American folklore in existence. Much of it centered on folk music." (06:42) — John Minton
• "The spirituals, they do contain a lot of themes about escape. Freedom is a primary theme, that there are a lot of hidden hopes and forbidden messages in them. But... this kind of conventional interpretation of spirituals, I just could not find any evidence at all to support it." (19:25) — John Minton
• “White music, black music, it's the same damn thing.” (52:58) — John Minton, quoting Ray Charles
• "You can't understand the blues without understanding country music, just like you can't understand country music without understanding the blues." (52:24) — John Minton

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:40 | John Minton’s background and how he discovered the WPA narratives | | 11:43 | Why the narratives are folklore more than factual history | | 14:46 | Defining features of U.S. slave culture, African retention | | 18:20 | Dispelling the myth of “spirituals as coded escape songs” | | 21:40 | Where and why enslaved people made music; work songs | | 26:43 | The ages and firsthand experience of ex-slave narrators | | 31:08 | Music, control, and violence: racial terror and surveillance | | 38:00 | Evidence and limits of African retentions in music | | 45:38 | Minstrelsy and cross-pollination between Black and white culture | | 49:06 | Black roots of “white” musical traditions like square dance | | 54:16 | The importance and misunderstanding of “shouting” | | 58:48 | Personal reflections and advice for scholars |

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Conclusion & Final Thoughts

Minton’s research shines a light on the complexity, contradictions, and resilience embedded in the musical lives of enslaved people in America. His work challenges long-standing assumptions and invites scholars and listeners to reconsider the boundaries between folklore and history, Black and white musical traditions, and the power of culture under oppression. As he says, despite the daunting scale of the work and the bleak moments while writing it, his book seeks to “map out a significant part of the subject matter” and serve as a foundational resource for future scholarship.

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Host: Kristin Turner
Guest: John Minton, folklorist and author
Book: Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (University Press of Mississippi, 2024)

Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Kristin Turner]

Hello, I'm Kristin Turner and this is New Books in Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. My guest today is John Minton, author of Folk Music and song in the WPA Ex Slave Narratives, published in 2024 by the University Press of Mississippi. From 1936 to 1938, employees of the Work Projects Administration interviewed thousands of people born in enslavement, and these first person accounts are an invaluable resource about the history of the United States. In this exhaustive book, Minton examines every mention of music in the narratives. A combination of bibliographic information and analysis. Menton contextualizes and scrutinizes the vocal and instrumental music the narrators talked about, explains the various musical and cultural influences on black folk music, and discusses the place of music and dance in the lives of enslaved people. In the course of all this, Minton also helps his readers understand the lives of the narrators and the conditions in which they lived before and after emancipation. Thank you so much for joining me today and talking about your book.

[John Minton]

Oh, it's great to be here, Christian.

[Kristin Turner]

So how did you get interested in this topic?

[John Minton]

Yeah, let me back up. You said a little bit about the narratives themselves, but let me give a little Quick background on the narratives, because that explains kind of how I got into them. Most people are aware of the wpa. Just about everything about the WPA is a little confusing. But it was originally the Work Projects Administration. It became the Works Progress Administration, but it's just the wpa. This was a Depression era relief program, but it was designed to provide people with relief through work. So instead of just giving them a check, they were building bridges, all these wonderful libraries, prairies and dams and other public projects. But there was another division of the wpa, the Federal Writers Program, that basically did that with writers that out of work writers were hired for various projects. And one of the things they were assigned to do was just to go around and interview Americans, what we would now call oral history, although they didn't have the term term then. So throughout 1936, simply as part of this general mission, they began interviewing ex slaves. And this material got back to Washington. And people were just amazed by these interviews. These were people that obviously had just these incredible stories to tell. And at the time, John Lomax, who was in the process of becoming America's greatest folk song collector, was actually on the employ of the wpa, helping to supervise these projects. He also had more experience collecting African American folk song than anyone alive at the time. So he was the one who seems to mainly have hatched this project of, or this idea of doing a specific project on the ex slaves, simply going out, collecting their life histories. So this formally began on April 1, 1937. The federal part of it ran through 1938, and the states sent most of the material they collected to the National Archives during this period. Some states, though, continued collecting through 1939 and even into 1940. Some of them kept back much of the material they'd collected in 1937 and 38. So in addition to the national collection, there were these huge collections and state archives that remained unseen for nearly half a century after that. So this is the project itself. Like a lot of the wpa, it was done on a shoestring, on the fly, with very little planning or financial support. The people who did it, though, just did a fantastic job. This is the largest collection of African American folklore in existence. Much of it centered on. On folk music. The problem, though, was it was locked up in these archives that some of it had gone to the Library of Congress. Benjamin Botkin, another great American folklorist, had basically organized the materials that had been sent to the federal government, put them in the reading room of the Library of Congress, published an anthology called Lay My Burden down with excerpts of the narratives. But for decades, this was the only material that was available. Either Botkin's book or you had to go to Washington, to the Library of Congress, to the archives. And some of the state materials were also available. But it was during the 1970s then, and this is how I got into the narratives. A professor from Washington University in St. Louis, a man named George P. Raywick, decided he was going to publish all of these narratives. And he began with the national narratives, simply publishing facsimile editions. So all you're getting is the typescripts. They're unedited, unannotated, no indexes. It's like you're in the archives. But then he and his collaborators went around to all the state archives and discovered what I just said, that people had long assumed that most of the material had come to Washington, but most of the material had been withheld by the states. So Ray Wick and his collaborators got all of this together. It eventually became this 41 volume monster called the American Slave. And I found it when I was a graduate student at the University of Texas. If I went in the UT library, I remember where they still had it. Two and a half shelves, very, very intimidating. But along with a couple of other volumes that came out later, this is the complete corpus. All the material that was gathered from approximately 3,500 ex slaves. It totals about 20,000 pages of TypeScript. So like I say, it was just absolutely intimidating when I first found it. No index, no annotation. Raywick provides introductions. But you're basically just in the archives with this stuff. So, like a lot of people, I think I initially approached it piecemeal that I just started browsing through it sometimes not looking for anything in particular, but if you're looking to trace something back to the 19th century, to black tradition, this is an obvious resource. And often just by flipping around, you can find the song you're looking for or something on the instrument. But it was always very frustrating. I mean, is this the only version of this song? Are there two dozen others that I'm not seeing? Is this the only example? Is this the best one? Or if you didn't find something, does that mean that it's not there or you just haven't found it? So at that time, it seemed absolutely insane to even contemplate reading these books, start to finish. But really, I think probably at that time, subconsciously, I hatched the idea for this book on top of it. When you're looking through this, even if you're looking for something Specific, I was seeing all this other incredible stuff. I ought to be taking notes on all of this, that this is obviously a big missing piece of American folk song that ought to be out there, that people ought to know about. So that was basically how the project was conceived. And I think I really started in earnest when I did sit down and I read the narratives all the way through. I've made it through a couple times now and read some of them many times throughout. Of course, besides just cataloging everything that was in there and identifying that the other part of the project, as I say, was putting this piece in the context of American folk song. So looking around for corroboration, going to folk song collections, sound recordings, but I really emphasized sources from the 19th century or even the 18th century, trying to really trace this stuff back to its own context and situate it that way. So, as I say, I think I started this in earnest back in the 1990s when I was still a new assistant professor. And I didn't necessarily plan it this way, but I'm not kidding, it actually worked out this way. Maybe I did this subconsciously. I finished the manuscript on January 31, 2022, which was my 65th birthday. So maybe I did that unconsciously just so I could retire or whatever. But this really was a long term project that consumed a lot of my career on and off. I was working on other things at the time, of course, and teaching, but simply getting through all this material, finding everything I wanted to know about, finding other sources, as I say, to sort of contextualize it and place it back in the period of enslavement. These narratives were collected in the 1930s. What you really want also is information from the antebellum period saying, yes, this stuff was really current then as well. So that's a very long winded account of the inception of the project.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, it is a. Is clearly a work of a lifetime. It's very big and very exhaustive and I think an incredible resource for anyone who is interested in the ex live narratives and also in folk music in the United States. One of the things that you also were saying in your answer here and that you write in the introduction, is that you think of these as properly being folklore and not historical documents. Can you talk a little bit about how you see those differences and why is it important to understand them as folklore instead of history?

[John Minton]

Yeah, well, part of it, I think was. Was just the way Lomax shaped the project, that he was the one that designed the questionnaire that most people use that Reflected his research interest in black folklore and folk music. So I think part of it was that, But I think also a lot of it was just the nature of slave culture, that this was almost entirely an oral culture, that they estimate that maybe slave literacy was around 10%. So there were literate slaves, but generally all information, all knowledge, all art was passed word of mouth or by customary example, which is the definition of folklore. So I think part of it was just the nature of the material. Folklorists had always been interested in this material, really since the 19th century. In fact, the first serious book of American folk song is Slave Songs of the United States from 1867, which is a collection of spiritual. So there had always been this connection between black culture and folklore. As far as the difference between this and history. A lot of it is historical, and some of it is factually verifiable. But like a lot of oral history, as things are transmitted by word of mouth, they're not written down. There is not any standard to regulate them. There's not any fact checking. People tend to change things that if you know any storytellers, Even when they're telling stories about things that supposedly really happened, they change over time. They get better because people craft them for their audiences or they restructure them to reflect their values or to transmit a particular lesson or message that they want to. So certainly there's a lot of material in the slave narratives that we would describe as historical, and a lot of it can be verified, but a lot of it has been reshaped in this way that it's not the sort of history you expect from an academic history book, but rather people giving their judgments about history. Well, it's almost like historical fiction that, yes, it's based on history, but you're going to do something else with it as well.

[Kristin Turner]

I thought I'd ask a few sort of broad questions, and then maybe we could dive into some of the specific, specific topics that you cover in the individual chapters. And maybe first, can you talk a little bit about what you learned or what. Or what you think of as slave culture from reading all these slave narratives? Like, how would you describe slave culture?

[John Minton]

Oh, my. Yeah. Well, as I say in the book, that when you're talking about the western hemisphere as a whole, that the different conditions that enslaved Africans experienced in the western hemisphere, that it became such a complicated question. The extent to which they acculturated, the extent to which they were able to retain their African culture, even in some cases, the extent to which they interacted with Native Americans and adopted indigenous cultures. So in North America generally, slaves lived in fairly close association with whites, in much closer proportion to whites than they did in places like the West Indies or South America, where you might find a more pronounced African influence. So in. In talking about slave culture in, in the US the white influence is very, very dominant. The impetus to acculturate. Whether whites were deliberately trying to force you to forget your African heritage and adopt white customs, or just because of day to day the fact that you were living in a situation where you are in constant contact with. With whites, it was obviously good to imitate them. There were negative consequences if you defied them. So at looking at slave culture in the US And I talk about this in the book, the African influence is just as persuasive as it is in places like Brazil or Cuba or Haiti, where you may often find a group still worshipping, worshiping African gods in the original African languages, perpetuating these traditions that are essentially still African. Much of the slave music in. In the United States, they were playing European instruments. Often they had assimilated elements of. Of European music. They were often performing for whites. In fact, this was really the best gig playing for Weiss. That was the best pay, that was the best prestige. But there is still just this incredible African influence. But you really have to dig for it a lot more than you would say, someplace like Bahia in Brazil, where, as I say, you still have Yoruba people from West Africa who identify themselves as Yoruba and speak the Yoruba language and still practice African culture in more or less its original form. So I'm not sure if that's exactly what you were asking, but that is one element of slave culture in the US that really struck me that it is very, very African. But you really have to dig a lot more for it than you might in other areas of the New World.

[Kristin Turner]

Was there anything in the slave narratives as you were reading them? Probably you know them better than maybe anyone in the US or certainly very few other people have read them to the extent that you have. Was there anything in that you thought, oh, this really upends conventional wisdom? This is, you know, this is not at all what has been reported in other secondary literature. And I can see that this is happening over and over in these narratives.

[John Minton]

Yeah, there were. There were certain things, a lot of conventional wisdom about some slave traditions. For example, spirituals. There is this conventional interpretation of spirituals that they were used as a code, that the slaves used these to transmit information about meeting times or to give directions to how to escape or what to do once you got out, how to keep headed north. And as I say. Well, I think a lot of this goes back to Mark my Miles Fisher, a very distinguished African American scholar who wrote a book on slave music where he really elaborated this. But this has become almost conventional wisdom about spirituals that they were these kind of encoded messages. I really found no evidence for that. That the slaves, when they, they wanted to meet secretly or they were planning to escape, they did it pretty much the way common sense would tell you. They whispered it one on one. This wasn't something you were going to be singing out in. Especially if this was kind of some kind of shared code, the snitches would know it too and, and they'd immediately run and tell. So a lot of this notion that spirituals were somehow used as how to. Manuals on how to escape or as, as maps, things like that, it really, I, I, you have probably come across that if you've read much about spirituals, I, I just found no evidence for that. That the spirituals, they do contain a lot of themes about escape. Freedom is a primary theme, that there are a lot of hidden hopes and forbidden messages in them. But this kind of conventional interpretation of spirituals, I just could not find any evidence at all to support it.

[Kristin Turner]

Yeah, that is interesting. I noticed that as well in what you were writing that you don't talk about spirituals as being sort of coded messages. And in fact, if anything, if that was anywhere, it seemed like it was in work songs that you found some evidence for communication between enslaved people through that medium and not through spirituals.

[John Minton]

Sure they, yeah, they did. They did have work songs that when the, the boss was coming, one guy would know. I think one of them was Old Hog around the Bench was, is what they'd start singing that the, the white boss was coming down. So yes, they did use songs that way, but I just did not find it with, with spirituals either in the ex slave narratives or anything else I looked at. Like I say, if you read the, of course the memoirs of fugitive slaves or ex slaves, these were a distinct genre of American literature in the 19th century. So there are detailed accounts of how they escaped and what they went through. And you know, they, they did like Allied prisoners in the Second World War. I mean this was a very business like dangerous sort of thing you were undertaking. So you didn't, you didn't take chances. You weren't going by symbols or anything like that. You were, it was, it was very hard headed.

[Kristin Turner]

Well that brings us actually to sort of another big question you had mentioned. You know, I mentioned work songs. You mentioned spirituals. Tell us more about where enslaved people made music and. And under what circumstances they. They did that.

[John Minton]

Yeah, it. Well, they're almost always reported making music, and this is. Is just part of the world they've lived in. In fact, if you go back a few generations, just everyone sang and made music. Music a lot, because that's how you had music. You made it at home. But with enslaved people, there were. Well, you just mentioned work songs that we can look at work songs. Part of this is a continuation of a African tradition. In fact, the tradition of singing while working does not occur throughout the world. It does in other places, but it seems to be distinctly African American. And there are certain techniques like coordinating labor by using call and response singing, setting up a rhythm that goes along with the rhythm of work. This was something that was very distinctly African. So some of this you can see as a continuation of their African heritage. Some of it was a direct response to their enslavement. So a lot of these songs were songs of protest, are songs just describing the miserable conditions they were in. Some of them were used strategically. You just mentioned the warning songs or to communicate long distances, things like that. Some of them were actually demanded by whites that whites actually used work songs for surveillance, that if you were. Were with the Teamsters, for example, were constantly expected to sing while they were moving with their animals, just so people would know where they were and that they were moving on so you could keep track of them and make sure they were working. So something like even work song, it becomes very, very complicated, the kind of functions and motives behind it. But I think that is true of a lot of. Then the songs that the slaves sang. Some of them were for themselves, and. And sometimes that was purely recreational, just because, like all. All people, they love making music. And that was a good way to express themselves and release. Some of it, though, was to deal with the situation that they found themselves in. Some of it was highly functional. So work songs, religious songs, lullabies, things like that that went along with whatever task you were assigned or whatever you were doing. A lot of it was demanded by whites, and blacks were expected to be performers. There are lots of accounts in the books about how in the evenings, the whites would call the slaves up to the big house and they were expected to sing for them, even if they were, you know, dead tired from working in the fields all day. You would have to sing and dance for the entertainment of the slaveholder family. So As I say, like music in, in the pre modern world, it was everywhere. It was. It was homemade, it was in all sorts of situations. But you do find these kind of different functions or underlying motives. The intersection of black and white music is, Is. Is. Is very interesting as well, that a lot of the slaveholders were themselves musicians and either played for or with the slaves. So you have this kind of interchange going back and forth. Even I think in the book, I have several accounts of black children actually being kept almost as house pets to entertain slaveholders. You find things like that. So as I say, some of the music the slaves made, they made it for themselves. Even then there were different functions and various reasons for it. Some of it, it was demanded of them. It just really varied from case to case.

[Kristin Turner]

One thing that occurs to me that you also address in the book is that I went into reading this book having at least heard or questioned my own mind how, how much the narrators or the subject of these interviews could really have remembered about enslavement. Because this was done in the late 30s and surely they were very young children. But you were able to. One of the things you did is really track every one of these interviewees and their date of birth and so forth. Can you talk a little bit about how much experience these, the subjects of the. Or the narrators had with enslavement?

[John Minton]

Sure. And that's often been a criticized criticism of the ex slave narratives, that there is this kind of conventional wisdom that most of the people, if they were interviewed in the 1930s, they must have been very, very young during slavery, so they couldn't really know what it was like. Well, and a couple of things I found just looking at the birth dates, actually the majority of the ex slaves were born in the 1840s, so they were. Or early 1850s. So most of them were in their teens or early 20s at the time they were freed. A lot of them, though, were born in the 1860s. A lot of them were infants. There were. Even though some that were born in the 1820s or the 1830s, there were some very elderly individuals. They all also interviewed quite a few children and grandchildren of slaves. So you really do have this very wide kind of age range in it. And as you say, their actual experience with enslavement would vary. But one thing that I do point out in the book are a couple of things. One thing is this is a culture where children as young as 8 were often sent to the fields to do adult labor. That when you were 8 or 10 years old, you started As a plow boy, you started picking cotton, you started churning milk and taking care of the babies. People married and became parents in their teens, often died before middle age. So this is a culture where most of these people reached some version, or what they would consider a version of adulthood under slavery that you got there very, very young. So you can say that some. Some people were still infants during slavery. There were also some people who were in their 30s or 40s when they were freed, but most of them were probably in their teens and twenties. But nonetheless, they, believe me, they got their share of slavery. They certainly learned what it was all about. But the other thing is this illusion that slavery ended in the 1860s, that the emancipation Proclamation or the surrender at Appomattox or Juneteenth. I grew up in Texas, so Juneteenth was always very big. The arrival of federal forces in the Southwest to free the slaves. In some places, for practical purposes, slavery outlasted the Civil War for decades. Many of the ex slaves went on living on the plantations where they'd been slaves under simply identical conditions. Many of the children and grandchildren of slaves who were interviewed described plantations that were exactly like antebellum plantations where they'd grown up. In fact, many people born in the 1870s actually referred to themselves as slaves and referred to their landlords as master. So, like I say, the notion that slavery disappeared at the end of the Civil War, in some places it did. In some places, it just hung on for decades. So that would be my response to that. As I say, that has long been conventional wisdom that most of the ex slaves that were were interviewed by the WPA really didn't experience slavery to any degree. I don't think that's true at all. As I say, for. For both those reasons. One, because just their ages, they may have seemed young when they were freed, but this was a culture where people had to grow up very, very fast. But also. Well, you could even argue that prison farms and sharecropping kept slavery going past the Second World War. World War. It was not something that went away very quickly.

[Kristin Turner]

And I think that's really power. That point is powerfully made in the book by the quotations that you use from the narratives as they talk about the constraints on their lives, the lack of pay, the lack of any kind of security in terms of, you know, they were not covered under the law. So basically, they, you know, that there was really no one they could turn to if they were being misused or mistreated. And so I think.

[John Minton]

I think that as well, as racial terror, of course, both before and after. There's an entire chapter which was maybe the hardest to write, the chapter on slave music and racial terror about. Well, they called them the patrollers before the war or after the war, they became the Klan. But just the use of torture and murder to keep the. Them in line, it was just. Yeah, absolutely horrible.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, maybe we'll stick with this part of the. Of the book for. For a moment before I move on to other things. How would you say that white people used music, which in other parts, I think, of the lives of enslaved people was very much a moment of joy and a moment of freedom and liberation as a. As a mode of surveillance and control? Because that also happens.

[John Minton]

Yeah, and certainly a lot of this comes out in the chapter on. On slave music and racial terror. But really throughout the book, that slave music was always very, very carefully supervised. So most slaveholders did observed the institution of the Saturday night frolic, as they called it, which was a Saturday night dance you gave for all your hands. But these things, they were very closely supervised. The patrollers would be around. Often the slaveholder would be there, and there really was often an attempt to reinforce the subservience of the slaves through these. They were basically being forced to perform in. In many cases. Well, a lot of this was recreation, and they enjoyed it and looked forward. But they realized it was all happening at the behest of the slaveholders and that they really were kind of on this very short string. Of course, if they held unsupervised dances, they ran an incredible risk of flogging or even even death in some cases, but they still did that. They still got together and partied on their own. But as you say, a lot of this, it all had to take place in. In basically a police state. And that's how I often describe the plantation world. It operated like very much like any other police state where there was this constant surveillance. There were snitches and spies everywhere. Not. Not all slaves were on the team. Not all were on the same side. So you had. You had to watch out for that. There were these constant pressures, what we would now call psychological operations. But whites, for example, use supernatural tales. The reason that the Ku Klux Klan dressed as ghosts was for decades whites had been telling these ghost stories to African Americans. If you venture out after dark, the devil's going to get you. And so this is why they dressed up as ghosts and went to slave cabins and perform these little supernatural dramas to, you know, keep them home and. And working. So they wouldn't go out and, and party without permission and things like that. So behind all of this, of course, was the threat of violence. As I say, torture or death was a very real thing all the time. But it just, just the constant pressure, the constant expectations that as I also say, and, and this is not, not particular to this situation, but you can use musical performance as a way to humiliate people. And slaves were constantly put in situations where they were forced to perform in, in just humiliating a manner as, as a way again of keeping them down, of, of, of subordinating them. So the uses of music, as I say it, it's very, very complex. Could kind of change in, in a, in a minute. You know, it could be just all, all good fun and, and the slaves, the happiest memories they had concern music and dance and getting together and having a good time. But at the same time, some of the worst memories they had had to do with this kind of treatment that they often received where they, as I say, be called up to the big house and essentially treated like circus animals or, or whatever.

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[Kristin Turner]

I was struck by how the descriptions that the narrators gave are so reminiscent of a lot of other instances of music used in highly oppressive situations. Indian boarding schools, concentration camps like this plantation culture was replicating and then bequeathed to all sorts of different highly oppressive violent situations. And how music can become entangled in those things. And also how disorienting it is for people who are experiencing that to be doing something that is both joyful and highly regulated at the same time and how hard that is to, I guess, regulate or to understand and integrate into their own lives. Looking back. So that was very obvious. One of the other things about, you know, we already talked about, there's this question about the use of spirituals as secret communication, which you did not find evidence for. But there are also other debates within the field of folk music and black music in particular that these narratives also can speak to. And one of them is the idea of African retentions. Like how much do you see of retentions of African musical traditions and other kinds of traditions and how much of it seems to be influences from other things. You talked about native and indigenous cultures, you talk about white culture. So can you talk a little bit more about the evidence that you see for African retentions in the narration?

[John Minton]

Narration, sure. As I say, you very seldom in North America generally outside of the New Orleans area, which is almost an outpost of the French West Indies or the Atlantic Sea Islands. In some of these areas, you do find very, very direct African influences, much as you do in Latin America and the Caribbean, as I say, where you actually find people playing African instruments or in some cases worshiping African gods, speaking African languages, or at least singing songs that are still in African languages. That was not particularly common, as I say, in North America outside the Sea Islands and the New Orleans area. And also just sort of the demographics of the slave population in North North America. In Latin America and the Caribbean, you had slaves being brought directly from Africa through the mid 19th century. And in Brazil, slavery was only outlawed in 1880. In the US, of course, slavery was banned after 1808. You still had the illegal slave trade. But even before then, more slaves were coming from the West Indies than coming directly from Africa. So many slaves arrived in the United States already somewhat acculturated. They had often been mixed together, the different cultures had been thrown together, and in some places they were able to reform their communities or somehow retain their identity. But in North America, this really didn't happen. By the middle of the 19th century, most of the North American slave population was native born. As I say, you still had a few illegal slave being imported from Africa and the West Indies. So the result is that as opposed to someplace like Latin America where you could actually, as I say, find people speaking a language, practicing rites, enacting musical traditions that you can trace back directly to a specific culture in Africa. The African traits you are most likely to find in the United States are the kind of traits that all African cultures share. And Africa really is one musical area where you find the same sorts of musical principles, the same vocal styles, same instruments, the same sort of performance techniques or approaches throughout the continent. So North American slave music, it seems to have been generally African, that there were these basic principles that really defined the music and not just African American music. Of course, whites assimilated many of these, these musical characteristics as well, that a lot of African American music became just, just American music. But as I say, it's very, very African. You can, you can things like call and response singing, the importance of percussion, but also hot rhythms, use of syncopation and things like that. Various Vocal techniques, the use of rough or very expressive vocals. You find all of that in. In North American black singing. But as I say, these are, these are things you find throughout Africa. You don't trace them just, just to one culture. So I'm not sure that was exactly what you're. You were asking, but that's kind of my reaction. It's this more sort of general African character that, that in itself is. Is. Is very, very interesting. You know, how. How were they able to keep it alive in this situation where, as opposed to say, in Brazil, you know, you arrived from Africa, you might be taken to this interior project where you lived among thousands of other recently arrived Africans with very little contact with whites. It was very easy in that situation to keep African traditions alive in their more or less original form in the U.S. no, I mean, you were, as I say, much closer association numbers in much closer proportion, much more surveillance and control. So you weren't going to find that the sorts of very conspicuous African influence. You'll find some place like Brazil, but it's still there. It's just. It had to go under the surface or assume other forms or they had to combine it. Well, I talk about in the book, and I think this is an important point. The most important instrument among slaves was the violin, the European violin. And part of this is because it was the most important instrument among whites. And so that was, as I say, that was a primary audience. Those were the people you wanted to please. Those were the people who'd pay. So if they wanted to hear violin music, sure, you'd give them violin music. But it also needs to be mentioned that the violin or the fiddle is just as important in Africa as it is in Europe. It takes a very, very different form in Africa, but it arrived in Africa the same time it did Europe. And so all of these Africans arrived in the U.S. familiar with African fiddles, which, as I say, are very, very different from the European violin. Usually they have a single string. You don't press it against a fingerboard. You stop it. And there are all sorts of differences in it. But they were able to take that African heritage, apply it to the European violin and continue the tradition that way. So that's the sort of thing that I think you find more, more in North America that slaves had to look at. How, okay, what, what European equivalent is there for this, that we, we can combine them and keep our heritage alive that way, whether it was conscious or not.

[Kristin Turner]

Yeah, I mean, it was quite. I was more familiar with that sort of retention with the banjo and sort of the history of banjo. And it's interesting to see that the fiddle was another such interest instrument quills, which is a sort of pan flute, another instrument, horns as well. Like, there's all these ways that enslaved people are exposed to European instruments, But they're finding ways to create their own ways of using those instruments that are pulling from multiple cultural influences. You see a lot of these exchanges happening.

[John Minton]

Sure. I mean, jazz is played on European brass instruments. It does not sound like European brass music. What they did was they got a hold of European brass instruments and they figured out how to play them like African horns. And if you listen to a lot of African horn music, you get, you know, the imitation of the voice, the kind of ruff like qualities, the special effects, all of the things that we hear in jazz. So that's. That's. That's it exactly.

[Kristin Turner]

Let's talk about a particular white influence that I thought was really fascinating that came up in a couple places, and then you had a whole chapter on it, which is minstrelsy, you know, and the sort of back and forth between, you know, black musicians and dancers, white minstrels who are performing in blackface, and then what they're doing back into enslaved communities. Can you talk about that more?

[John Minton]

Yeah. And this is one of these, I think, an excellent example of how you see these African musical ideas being taken up and either reshaped in response to white tradition or sometimes being reshaped by whites and fed back to blacks. Because, of course, one of the primary minstrel instruments was the banjo, which. Which was an African instrument. They picked it up from blacks. Most early minstrels made a point of they wanted to be authentic. So, yes, I learned to play this from slaves, and this is the authentic plantation tradition. That wasn't always the case. But of course, then you find at the other end, you find black banjo players who are clearly imitating minstrels. They. That they are not playing in the older black style. Instead, they're playing songs that came from the minstrel stage in a style that was developed by professionals. So, yes, the. The minstrel stage, it's a lot of it is very, very tough to take. Now that a lot of it was just incredibly demeaning. But the fact that that blacks appeared, appear to have oppressed, appreciated it, or in some cases, even performed as minstrels, it was fairly complicated as far as the attitudes contained in it. But this, I think, was just such an important conduit for the public at large, because outside the south, people had no exposure to black Music really, or very limited to exposure to black music. So the minstrel stage was very important, I think, in. In kind of taking this to the world and not just to America. They toured England and Europe and all these places. But then, as you say, the way it sort of reinvigorated or counter. Influenced a lot of the black traditions that they claimed to be representing, and in some cases they actually were representing, it did become this very, very weird kind of circle. But other instruments, the bones in tambourine, again, these were instruments that blacks were playing already. And minstrels apparently picked them up from blacks. But then in later years, much of the black tradition was derived not from the older tradition, but from the minstrel show. So you had these different strains kind of coming together.

[Kristin Turner]

Yeah, I think one of the things that struck me was both I was surprised to see the minstrel back to enslaved people, back to newly free communities. That was, you know, I didn't really think about that conduit back. But also we see other people. Rhiannon Giddens comes to mind, really trying to show that there are traditions that I think most people think of being exclusively white traditions. Square dancing, you know, the string trio, that a string. That sort of thing are actually coming straight out of enslaved communities. Can you talk a little bit more about. About that phenomenon of things that have become so associated with white culture? But the. The narratives show that.

[John Minton]

Yeah, absolutely. So much white country music really is rooted in the 19th century. Part of it in slave music, part of it in. In 19th century white folk music. But the extent. Well, you. You mentioned square dancing, there is a very good argument that square dance calling originated with African Americans. That most of the earliest reports of square dance callers, they are slaves or they are f. Free blacks. This makes perfect sense because they were basically the musicians of the era. If you wanted to hold a square dance, you wanted a black fiddler, because they were the best fiddlers. And so it would make sense that a square dance calling, which went along with this kind of. This fiddling, was also a black creation. So you have something, as you say, that has now become just almost the quintessential thing, symbol of Anglo American, Anglo Saxon culture or whatever. Square dancing that has this very strong black component. The extent to which white musicians and black musicians learn from one another, you have all of these stories. And certainly many black musicians learn from white musicians. But in later years, people like Hank Williams, he was tutored by a. A black. A guitar player. Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, got his start playing guitar behind a Black fiddler who was the one who taught him most of the hoedown tunes that most people assumer Anglo American hoedown tunes. But Bill learned them, learned them from a, a black fiddler, things like that. Even in the period of Jim Crow, uh, musicians were notorious for disregarding the color line and playing together. So this, this kind of cross pollinization. Yes it was there. Now one of the reasons people may not be aware of it, as you mentioned though, is especially in many commercial settings, they kept the black influence quiet. You, you wanted the, the white faces on tv. You weren't to. Going, going to acknowledge the black roots of it. So Hank Williams went on the a Perina hour, but you weren't going to bring the black guys. He, he learned from along. And so I, I think that may have been, been part of it. But yeah, it's just there is this conventional and, and I've. Throughout my career, I guess I've kind of defied the, the convention on this. There is this almost traditional division of labor that you either study black music or you study white music. And for analytical purposes, if you're going to write a book on the blues, sure, you may be focusing mainly on black music, just as if you write music on country music, you may be focusing mainly on white musicians, but you can't understand the blues without understanding country music, just like you can't understand country music without, without understanding the blues. And I've always felt that to try and talk about these two halves of the whole separately, it really is a distortion and it's very difficult. So. And as you're suggesting with your questions, while this is mainly a book about black music and about slave music, references to white versions of these songs or to white musicians who knew this, or to this kind of interaction, this cross pollinization between black musicians and white music, it's, it's throughout the book because you just, you cannot get away with it. In, in fact, you know, Ray Charles is, is famous for saying that his biggest selling album, I mean he was the King of Soul, but his biggest selling album is still a modern sounds in country western music. And, and his view was white music, black music, it's the same damn thing. And I think he had a point.

[Kristin Turner]

So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And it is hard to, as you say, most people tend to focus on one sort of racialized aspect of this music and it makes twice the work when you're trying to as a scholar trying to pull in from both of those, you know, from all of those Sides. So. And this book really shows how hard, you know, how that is a divide that is born of segregation and is born of the commercial imperatives of mass culture. One of the things that you said in the book one is that music is referred to basically maybe in all the narratives or, you know, the vast.

[John Minton]

Well, no, not necessarily all of them.

[Kristin Turner]

But most of them, yeah, the vast majority. But then you also say that kind of music that is more often referred to than any other kind in the narratives is shouting. So we must talk about shouting because of that.

[John Minton]

So, yeah, this is. Well, this was a really fun chapter to write this. This was one of the places where I really think I did take down the conventional wisdom. There has grown up this argument about shouting, or the term shouting, that it is African or actually Arabic in origin, that it derives from the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, and this procession that takes place at the end of it. And this was always kind of a really strained kind of left field argument, but for some reason people picked up on it and for decades have been arguing when it's really obvious. Shouting comes from the Old Testament. There are all of these passages in the Old Testament that refer to people shouting and singing and dancing. One of the most famous is the Israelites shouting down the walls of Jericho, where they go around the walls of Jericho and sing and blow the trumpets and dance and bring it down. There's the description of King David singing and dancing and shouting before the Ark of the Covenant. So American evangelicals, both black and white, picked up on this term shout as kind of a catch all for singing and dancing, basically for trance dancing, some of which was organized and choreographed, some of which would be brought about by spirit possession and might also coincide with things like a speaking in tongues or. Or visions and things like that. So this was a devotional tradition. It just occurs throughout the narrative. Slaves are constantly talking about just a tragedy when they had some triumph, when they had some moment of religious epiphany, just at regular meetings. Slaves, when they were emancipated, when the federal troops arrived, you shouted that. You didn't just sing spirituals, you danced the spirituals while you were singing them. So as I say, this was one place where I kind of took down the conventional wisdom as far as the terminology itself was concerned. But yeah, shouting itself it very, very mysterious. The some of it does appear to have been really motivated by mysterious experiences, by visitations, but maybe by spirit possession. Some of it was done socially. People shouted to show off their clothes or to just be part of the crowd. But it is this element of. And it. It still occurs. If you go to. To many black churches today or to gospel concerts or conventions, people are often taken aback by it that someone will suddenly jump up. I remember I got to see Aretha Franklin perform again not long before she died. And at one point during the performance, she was singing a spiritual and said, I think I'll shout a little. And she just shouted. Did the little shout step across. Across the front of the stage? So it's something that's. That's still around. And as I say, it's. It's very difficult to comprehend black religion, or at least the slave religion, without comprehending the shout, but getting inside it. It really is this. This religious mystery that people had this very, very personal connection to shouting of a lot of the older slaves. You know, they found themselves in the situation that they'd go to church and shout, and the young people would laugh at them and make fun of them, but they had no control over it when. When they heard the word. When they heard a spiritual, they were going to get up and dance and shout.

[Kristin Turner]

So, unfortunately, we are getting close to the end of our time together, so I. I want to just give you an opportunity to give us sort of a final thought. And, you know, I was wondering as I was looking at this enormous book and going through it and thinking about, you know, I Wonder what you, Dr. Minton, sort of thought. What are the. What is the thing that you have learned that you carry with you the most from a light, you know, from a. An academic lifetime looking at these narratives?

[John Minton]

Oh, well, I guess more of a. In more personal terms, Not. Not much. Not so much from the narratives themselves. There was a time when I thought about writing a book like this. Like, I thought about going to the moon. When I first started looking at these narratives in the 80s, even when I was a young assistant professor in the 1990s, you know, I'd look at all these big folklore books, the standard collections that had been written, written and that had kind of mapped out a part of the field and become the standard reference. And it was like, wow, you know, I'll never write one of those. I'd love to have my name on a book like that, but I'll never write one of those. But I don't know if it's just stubbornness or perversity or obsession. I just kept on at it. And I don't know if this book really qualifies as that, but as both my mother and my daughter said, when they got it well, it's a real heavy book. I don't know if they were talking about the contents. I think they were talking about the weight. But it is a, a big book that seeks to map out a significant part of the subject matter. And I'm, I'm actually, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of proud of this one. But, but mostly what I, I guess I would say that for young scholars or people who are working in this direction, you know, keep at it. I did not think I would be able to do this. There were a lot of very bleak mornings while writing this book, let me tell you, and the mornings were worse, but the afternoons, in the evenings could be pretty bad, too. It was a, it was a lot of work. But even though I didn't think I could ever do it, somehow I guess I managed to do it. Like I say, I don't know if I managed to do it, but exactly what I dreamed of doing. But I did produce a very heavy book.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, it is, it is heavy. I will attest to that, having picked it up. But it is certainly a quite an accomplishment to look back on after, after a long career. So. Thank you so much for, for talking to me today about the book.

[John Minton]

Oh, it's been wonderful, Kristen.

[Kristin Turner]

My name is Kristin Turner, and this is New Books and Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. And I've been talking to John Minton, author of Folk Music and song and the WPA X live narratives, published in 2024 by the University Press of Mississippi. Thank.