Zora Neale Hurston: Storyteller of the American Experience
Zora Neale Hurston is best remembered as one of the leading figures from the Harlem Renaissance and author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was also a well-respected anthropologist who traveled widely throughout the American South and the Caribbean to collect American oral histories.
In 1938 Hurston joined FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a researcher and editor for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project. Originally the project was tasked with collecting “life histories” for state guides. However, the project turned into one of the largest and well-researched documentation of the American experience that could be shared with future generations.
Hurston traveled throughout Florida interviewing Americans of African, Arab, Greek, Italian and Cuban descent about their lives and communities. With a large recording machine loaned to her from the WPA, she recorded songs (some she sang herself) and folktales in many languages. Her travels also took her to the Bahamas, Haiti and Jamaica, with the support of the Guggenheim Foundation. While she was in the Caribbean, she studied and recorded African inspired dance and voodoo practices.
Her research would become inspiration for many of her later works like Mules and Men, a study of “Hoodoo” practices in New Orleans and African folktales in Florida. Her other book, Tell My Horse, looks at cultural identity and voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica. Their Eyes Were Watching God was written when she was in Haiti in 1937 and Seraph on the Suwanee, a novel about working class whites in Florida, was penned in Honduras in 1949.
Here are some Hurston’s audio recordings:
“Crow Dance”
While in the Bahamas, Hurston talks about interviewing Dr. Melville Herkovitz, originally from West Africa, about why the crow is sacred.
“Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come”
Hurston sings a song she learned from a Gullah woman in South Carolina. Gullah refers to a community of black Americans living in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida who have retained their West African heritage.
“Mule on the Mount”
Hurston sings this popular song that can be heard in work camps and recreational sites.
“Mama don’t want no peas, no rice”
Hurston sings this folk song from the Bahamas.
You can hear more of both Hurston’s recordings and other WPA Florida audio recordings at the Library of Congress.