Africa at the Internet Archive: The Dancing Granny

Today marks a special event: I have now featured 200 BOOKS of African folklore, mostly folktales, here at this blog. I'm working on west African stories this week, so I wanted to pick a special book for this magic number, and I decided on a book by Ashley Bryan, since I have been featuring his books all along throughout the project, going all the way back to Day 2 of Week 1, back in May. So, here is today's book, and you can see a list of links for all 200 books here.

The book for today is Ashley Bryan's The Dancing Granny, which features an Anansi story (the spider tricks Granny into dancing away from her garden so he can raid it), along with Bryan's wonderful artwork, all just a click away at Internet Archive:

In the book, Bryan conveys all the motion and movement that is part of the story through his drawings, which are in a sketch style very different from the color-rich work of his usual illustrations:

You can get a sense of the flow from the thumbnail view at Internet Archive:

The folktale type of "He Makes Them Dance" is found in western African folklore (Liberia, Nigeria) as well as in other regions of Africa and throughout the Caribbean. You can see variants collected by Elsie Clews Parsons and her notes here for a Caribbean version from Antigua. Parsons was Bryan's source, and I decided to include this in the Africa series since I posted about west African Anansi stories earlier this week. (If you're curious about Anansi stories in the Caribbean, I've published a book of Anansi stories all from Caribbean sources: Tiny Tales of Anansi.)

In 2017, the book was turned into a stage performance, with Ashley Bryan himself (93 years old at the time!) there to see it! Here's a picture of him with the playwright and the performer who played Granny:

The story is based on Ashley Bryan's own memories of his grandmother, as you can read about in the article: Come Dance with Granny!

So, for the rest of this post I will quickly review the other books by Bryan that have been part of this book so far... and I'll have a couple more of his books before this project is over, along with yet more of his beautiful books when I shift over to posting about African American books at Internet Archive! Meanwhile, here are the Bryan books from past weeks, going all the way back to the beginning of this project.

Today's book:

The Dancing Granny

From last week (Week 22):

Ashley Bryan's African Tales, Uh-Huh

From back in Week 14:

The Adventures of Aku

From Week 11:

The Ox of the Wonderful Horns

and Other African Folktales

From Week 4:

 The Lion and the Ostrich Chicks

A book of proverbs from Week 2:

The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs

A book of riddles from Week 1:

The House with No Door: African Riddle-Poems

And finally, a book from Day 2, when I really didn't know just how this project was going to turn out... I just knew it was going to be fun posting every day: and it is!

Beautiful Blackbird

Enjoy all the Ashley Bryan goodness: the books await you at Internet Archive. :-)