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Blues Talk 7:
Zora Neale Hurston and southern blues culture

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Books, links, and other useful resources (listed roughly in the order they're mentioned in the video):

 

Hurston, Zora Neale.  Their Eyes Were Watching God.  1937.

------------.  Mules and Men.  1935.

------------.  Dust Tracks on a Road.  1942.

------------.  “How It Feels to be Colored Me.”  1928.

------------.  “The Ocoee Riot.”  1989.

Chernoff, John Miller.  African Rhythm and African Sensibility:  Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms.  U of Chicago Press, 1979.

Wilson, Olly.  “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music.”  In Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, and Slam Dunking:  A Reader in African American Expressive Culture.  Gina Dagel Caponi, ed.  U of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 

Wright, Richard.  Black Boy.  1945.

Wright, Richard.  Native Son.  1940.

Wright, Richard.  “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow:  An Autobiographical Sketch.”  1937.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina.  Jookin’:  The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture.  Temple UP, 1992.

Lowe, John.  Jump at de Sun:  Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy.  U of Illinois Press, 1996.

Gussow, Adam.  Seems Like Murder Here:  Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition.  U of Chicago Press, 2002.

Their Eyes Were Watching God [film with Halle Berry – first of 11 clips]

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942 [Zora Neale Hurston singing and talking]

Hemenway, Robert E.  Zora Neale Hurston:  A Literary Biography.  U of Illinois Press, 1980.

Boyd, Valerie.  Wrapped in Rainbows:  The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.  Scribner, 2004.