[Linganth] Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories

[Patrick, Peter L]

Thanks Kerim for posting that!
Many list members may know this, but these are -- by and large --
the same interviews transcribed* and commented on in

Guy Bailey, Natalie Maynor & Patricia Cukor-Avila, eds. 1991.
The emergence of Black English: Texts and commentary. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/aavesem/texts/Resources.html#EBE

and analysed in many papers since-- see esp. Benji Wald's pointed review
in Language in Society, and David Sutcliffe's various papers adding to and
contesting the transcripts (also Rickford's, in EBE itself).

(All these references & more can be found on my AAE bibliography page,
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/aavesem/Biblio.html, c. 400 entries,
along with a couple under my own name about these recordings)

The recordings have now been mounted on the web, probably from the reel-to-reel
masters which were the source for the analyses above (they were originally
recorded in various formats, some now well obsolete), though whether from the
filtered or unfiltered versions I am not sure.

best,

	-peter p-

Prof Peter L Patrick
Dept of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO7 9RA, U.K.

E:  patrickp at essex.ac.uk
Ph:  +44 (0) 1206 87.2088
Web: privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu
> [mailto:owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu]On Behalf Of P.
> Kerim Friedman
> Sent: 28 January 2004 14:07
> To: Anthropology graduate student discussion list;
> linganth at cc.rochester.edu
> Subject: [Linganth] Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former
> Slaves Tell
> Their Stories
>
>
> Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories
> provides the opportunity to listen to former slaves describe their
> lives. These interviews, conducted between 1932 and 1975, capture the
> recollections of twenty-three identifiable people born
> between 1823 and
> the early 1860s and known to have been former slaves. Several of the
> people interviewed were centenarians, the oldest being 130 at
> the time
> of the interview. The almost seven hours of recordings were made in
> nine Southern states and provide an important glimpse of what
> life was
> like for slaves and freedmen. The former slaves discuss how they felt
> about slavery, slaveholders, how slaves were coerced, their families,
> and, of course, freedom. It is important to keep in mind,
> however, that
> all of those interviewed spoke sixty or more years after the end of
> their enslavement, and it is their full lives, rather than
> their lives
> during slavery, that are reflected in their words. They have much to
> say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the
> 1930s, and
> beyond. As part of their testimony, several of the ex-slaves sing
> songs, many of which were learned during the time of their
> enslavement.
>
> <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfshtml/vfshome.html>
>
>