Getting work right

Thank you for the book review of Lost Delta Found in your most recent issue. Reviewer Elijah Wald, however, misread the text and quotes incorrectly. Dr. John Work includes the song "Motherless Children" not in the list of songs "of local origin," as Wald states, but rather in a list of songs "... place[d] in Mississippi church services at least a generation ago ..." Read correctly, this citation undermines Wald's criticism.

Further, he critiques Sam Adams for "misfiling" an Ernest Tubb song as a blues and a Memphis Minnie song as pop. What's important about these 1940s manuscripts is how Adams assessed the Coahoma County response to the songs, not how Wald subjectively files his own record collection.

Wald should consider his own advice: "check the facts."

Bruce Nemerov & Robert Gordon

Murfreesboro, Tenn.

[My main point was and is that Nemerov and Gordon have edited a wonderful, important addition to folklore literature. But ... Work includes "Motherless Children" not only in the list they cite, but also on the following page, in a list of songs he believed were of local origin because they had not been previously collected.

And no one reading the Adams manuscript can seriously conclude that he knew those songs and chose to file them where he did. He didn't have access to the reference works and comprehensive albums we have today, so made some perfectly understandable mistakes, which I thought were worth footnoting.

Incidentally, my record collection is arranged alphabetically, so I file Ernest Tubb with Tuvan throat singing.--Elijah Wald]

COPYRIGHT 2006 Sing Out Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group