African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Natalie Curtis Burlin

It looks like this week is turning out to be a week of African American music, so I want to turn back to an important American musicologist who worked on both African and African American music, Natalie Curtis Burlin, and her book, Negro Folk-Songs: The Hampton Series, published in 1918 and 1919. 

This Dover edition combines the series of four small books into a single volume, paginated accordingly, but there is not a new introduction; it's just the contents of the books as Burlin published them, and the introduction to Hampton and to her work there is as she wrote it. Books 1-2 have 8 spirituals, while Books 3-4 have 8 secular songs. Each song has detailed notes and music for a quartet performance:

It was during her work at Hampton that Burlin met two African students there, C. Kamba Simango, and Madikane Čele, and they wrote a book together: Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent which was published in 1920. The Zulu songs and stories come from Madikane Čele, and the Ndau songs, stories, and proverbs come from C. Kamba Simango. 

I included some of the song-stories from that book in the anthology of stories in The Reader's Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive!, here's "How the Animals Dug Their Well."

So, while these books are very dated and reflect many prejudices of their times, Burlin's work is still valuable; in her time, she was an important defender of both African and African American culture generally and of musical culture in particular. You can find out more about her life and career at Wikipedia. She was killed in a car accident in 1921, shortly after completing these two books; she was only 46 years old.

 Negro Folk-Songs: The Hampton Series

by Natalie Curtis Burlin