The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Nelson, Scott Reynolds. Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry. The Untold Story of an American Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  Nickels, Cameron C. “An Early Version of the ‘Tar Baby’ Story.” Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981): 364–69.

  Nikola-Lisa, W. “John Henry: Then and Now.” African American Review 32 (1998): 51–56.

  Ogundipe, Ayodele. Esu Elegbara: Change, Chance, Uncertainty in Yoruba Mythology. Ilorin, Kwara State: Kwara State University Press, 2012.

  ———. Esu Elegbara, the Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty: A Study in Yoruba Mythology. 2 vols. PhD diss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

  Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853–1861. New York: DaCapo, 1996.

  Opoku-Agyemang, N. J. “ ‘A Girl Marries a Monkey’: The Folktale as an Expression of Value and Change in Society.” In Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature, edited by Janice Lee Liddell and Yakini Belinda Kemp, 230–38. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

  Oster, Harry. “John and Old Marster.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5 (1968): 42–57.

  Page, Thomas Nelson. Social Life in Old Virginia before the War. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1897.

  Parr, Michelann, and Terry Campbell. Balanced Literary Essentials. Markham, Ontario: Pembroke, 2012.

  Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

  Peterson, Christopher. “Slavery’s Bestiary: Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus Tales.” In Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

  Piersen, William D. “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Desperation, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves.” Journal of Negro History 62 (1977): 147–60.

  Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.

  Puckett, Newbell Niles. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926.

  Rabaka, Reiland. “Preachers.” In The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. 3 vols. Vol. II, edited by Anand Prahlad, 1013–16. Westport CT: Greenwood, 2005.

  Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

  Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003.

  Rickels, Patricia K. “Martin Luther King as a Folk Hero.” Xavier Review 1.1–2 (1980–81): 65–74.

  Rico, Patricia San José. “Flying Away: Voluntary Diaspora and the Spaces of Trauma in the African-American Short Story.” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 13 (2008): 63–75.

  Roberts, John W. “The African American Animal Trickster as Hero.” In Redefining American Literary History, edited by LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward Jr., 97–114. New York: Modern Language Association, 1990.

  ———. “ ‘Railroad Bill’ and the American Outlaw Tradition.” Western Folklore 40 (1981): 315–28.

  ———. “Stackolee and the Development of a Black Heroic Idea.” Western Folklore 42 (1983): 179–90.

  ———. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

  Rocher, Rosane, ed. India and Indology: Selected Articles by W. Norman Brown. Delhi: Motilal Banarsida, 1978.

  Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

  Ross, Joe. “Hags Out of Their Skins.” Journal of American Folklore 93 (1980): 183–86.

  Ruas, Charles. Conversations with American Writers. New York: Knopf, 1985.

  Scheub, Harold. African Oral Narratives: Proverbs, Riddles, Poetry and Song. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977.

  ———. The African Storyteller: Stories from African Oral Traditions. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 1999.

  ———. The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

  ———. Trickster and Hero: Two Characters in the Oral and Written Traditions of the World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.

  Schmidt, Gary D., and Donald R. Hettinga, eds. Sitting at the Feet of the Past: Retelling the North American Folktale for Children. Contributions to the Study of World Literature No. 45. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

  Schuler, Monica. “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–65. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

  Smith Storey, Olivia. “Flying Words: Contests of Orality and Literacy in the Trope of Flying Africans.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5 (2004). Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/.

  Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

  Snead, James. White Screens. Black Images. Edited by Colin MacCabe and Cornel West. New York: Routledge, 1994.

  Southern, Eileen, and Josephine Wright. Iconography of Music in African-American Culture (1770s–1920s). Vol. I: Music in African-American Culture. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol. 2089. New York: Garland, 2000.

  Spalding, Henry D., ed. Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor. New York: Jonathan David, 1972.

  Spencer, Onah L. “Stackalee.” Direction 4 (1941): 14–17.

  Sperb, Jason. Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.

  Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (1987): 65–81.

  Spinks, C. W., ed. Trickster and Ambivalence: The Dance of Differentiation. Madison, WI: Atwood, 2001.

  Stewart, Marian. Jamaican Anansi Stories and West African Oral Literature: A Comparative Introduction. Kingston: African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, 1982.

  Stuckey, Sterling. “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery.” In Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History, 3–18. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

  ———. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

  Taylor, Diane. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

  Taylor, Yuval. Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.

  Taylor-Guthrie, Danille K. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

  Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988.

  Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

  Turner, Patricia A. I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

  Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales. 3 vols. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarium Fennica, 2004.

  Varty, Kenneth. “The Fox and the Wolf in the Well: The Metamorphoses of a Comic Motif.” In Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Kenneth Varty, 245–67. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.

  Wagner, Bryan. The Tar Baby: A Global History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

  Washington, Robert E. The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

  Waters, Wendy W. “ ‘One of Dese Mornings Bright and Fair, / Take My Wings and Cleave De
Air’: The Legend of the Flying Africans and Diasporic Consciousness.” Melus 22 (1997): 3–29.

  Watkins, Mel. “Talk with Toni Morrison.” New York Times Book Review. September 11, 1977, 48, 50.

  Wilentz, Gay. “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature.” Melus 16 (1989–90): 21–32.

  Wolfe, Bernard. “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit.” Commentary 8 (1949): 31–41.

  Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking, 1941.

  ———. White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday, 1957.

  Yenika-Agbaw, Ruth McKoy Lowery, and Laretta Henderson. Fairy Tales with a Black Consciousness: Essays on Adaptations of Familiar Stories. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.

  Joel Chandler Harris

  WRITINGS

  Harris, Joel Chandler. The Complete Tales of Joel Chandler Harris. Edited by Richard Chase. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

  ———. Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories Told after Dark. New York: Century, 1889.

  ———. Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches. New York: Scribner’s, 1887.

  ———. Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883.

  ———. “The Old Plantation.” The Daily Constitution, December 9, 1877, 2.

  ———. Review. Atlanta Constitution, November 21, 1877, 2.

  ———. Uncle Remus and His Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892.

  ———. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation. New York: D. Appleton, 1880.

  ———. Wally Walderoon and His Story-Telling Machine. New York: McClure, Philips, 1903.

  SECONDARY LITERATURE

  Baer, Florence E. Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia, Scientiarum Fennica, 1980.

  Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr. Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

  ———. Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

  ———, ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

  ———, and Hugh T. Keenan. Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977–1996. With Supplement, 1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997.

  Bone, Robert A. A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975.

  Brasch, Walter M. Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000.

  Brookes, Stella Brewer. Joel Chandler Harris—Folklorist. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950.

  Chase, Richard, comp. The Complete Tales of Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

  Cochran, Robert. “Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris.” African American Review 38 (2004): 21–34.

  Cousins, Paul M. Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

  David, Beverly R. “Visions of the South: Joel Chandler Harris and His Illustrators.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 9 (1976): 189–206.

  Evan, Robert C. “Tricksters in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.” In The Trickster, edited by Harold Bloom, 219–28. New York: Chelsea House, 2010.

  Gerber, A. “Uncle Remus Traced to the Old World.” Journal of American Folklore 23 (1893): 245–57.

  Harris, Julia Collier. The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

  Hedin, Raymond. “Uncle Remus: Puttin’ on Old Massa’s Son.” Southern Literary Journal 15 (1982): 83–90.

  Hemenway, Robert. Introduction. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. New York: Penguin, 1982.

  Ives, Sumner. The Phonology of the Uncle Remus Tales. Gainesville: American Dialect Society, 1954.

  Lester, Julius. Further Tales of Uncle Remus. New York: Dial, 1990.

  ———. The Last Tales of Uncle Remus. New York: Dial 1994.

  ———. More Tales of Uncle Remus. New York: Dial, 1988.

  ———. “The Storyteller’s Voice: Reflections on the Rewriting of Uncle Remus.” In The Voice of the Narrator in Children’s Literature: Insights from Writers and Critics, 69–73. New York: Greenwood, 1989.

  ———. The Tales of Uncle Remus. New York: Dial, 1987.

  Malinowski, Bronislaw. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. London: Allen & Unwin, 1935.

  Mixon, Wayne. “The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race: Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus in Their Time.” Journal of Southern History 56 (1990): 457–80.

  Peterson, Christopher. Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

  Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “Uncle Remus and the Ubiquitous Rabbit.” Southern Review (1974): 784–804.

  Sanders, Mark A., ed. A Son’s Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

  Stafford, John. “Patterns of Meaning in Nights with Uncle Remus.” American Literature 18 (1946): 89–108.

  Turner, Darwin T. “Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies.” Southern Literary Journal 1 (1968): 20–41.

  Walker, Alice. “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus.” In Living by the Word, 18–32. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

  ———. “Uncle Remus: No Friend of Mine.” Southern Exposure (Summer 1981): 29–31.

  Wolfe, Bernard. “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit.” Commentary (July 1949): 31–41.

  SONG OF THE SOUTH

  Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Crowther, Bosley. “Spanking Disney.” New York Times, December 8, 1946, section 2, 5.

  Frost, Jennifer. Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

  Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Vintage, 2007.

  Keenan, Hugh T. “Twisted Tales: Propaganda in the Tar-Baby Stories.” Southern Quarterly 22 (1984): 54–69.

  Korkis, Jim. Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South? And Other Forbidden Disney Stories. Orlando, FL: Theme Park Press, 2012.

  Rapf, Maurice. Back Lot: Growing Up with the Movies. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999.

  Russo, Peggy A. “Uncle Walt’s Uncle Remus: Disney’s Distortion of Harris’s Hero.” Southern Literary Journal 25 (1992): 19–32.

  Thomas, Inge M. “Walt Disney’s Song of the South and the Politics of Animation.” Journal of American Culture 35 (2012): 219–30.

  Turner, Patricia A. Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

  Washington, Fredi. “Fredi Says,” People’s Voice, November 30, 1946.

  Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  WRITINGS

  Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1942; New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

  ———. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995.

  ———. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1934; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

  ———. Moses, Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1939; New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

  ———. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1935; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

  ———. Novels and Stories. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 2004.

  ———. The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1981.

  �
��——. Seraph on the Sewanee. New York: Scribner’s, 1948; New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

  ———. Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1938; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

  ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1937; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

  SECONDARY LITERATURE

  Blake, Susan L. “Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon.” Melus 7 (1980): 77–82.

  Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

  Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner’s, 2003.

  Carby, Hazel V. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” In New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God,” 71–93. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Croft, Robert W. A Zora Neale Hurston Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

  Cronin, Gloria, ed. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998.

  Davis, Cynthia. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.

  Faulkner, Howard J. “Mules and Men: Fiction as Folklore.” CLA Journal 34 (1991): 331–39.

  Gandal, Keith. “A Shameful Look at Zora Neale Hurston.” In Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film, 45–91. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

  Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1987.

  Glassman, Steve, and Kathryn Lee Seidel, eds. Zora in Florida. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991.

  Grant, Nathan. Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

  Harris, Trudier. “Africanizing the Audience: Hurston’s Transformation of White Folks in Mules and Men.” Zora Neale Hurston Forum 8 (1993): 43–58.

  ———. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

  Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

  Hinnov, Emily M. Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2009.