Sid Hemphill and Lucius Smith September 1959, Senatobia, Mississippi Photo credit: Alan Lomax Georgia Sea Island Singers April 28, 1960, Williamsburg, Virginia Photo credit: Alan Lomax Ed Young and Hobart Smith April 1960, Williamsburg, Virginia Photo credit: Alan Lomax

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What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.
— W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

In 1933, on a mission for the Library of Congress, father-and-son team John and Alan Lomax singlehandedly created a new folk-recording genre when they ventured with their field-recording equipment onto the back roads of the southern United States, seeking the lyrical spirit of a nation. The startling music they documented would motivate countless field recordings throughout the south over the next several decades, inspire the folk revival of the 1960s, and resonate with the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. They brought to light an eloquent indictment of the unfinished business of a nation blind to, blinded by the elemental violence of its own founding suppostions.

The Lomaxes came face-to-face with the legacy of racial terror in the music they logged. An ethnomusicological treasure, the Lomax Collection's digital reissues include a resolute mix of African American work chants, riverboat songs, field cries and hollers, tall tales, lying contests, toasts, songs of love and devotion, blues, lullabies, children's play songs, spirituals, hymns, sermons, laments and testimonies of personal survival. An austere indictment of Jim Crow injustice sprung from the American south (for Du Bois, an "armed camp for intimidating black folk"), the collection presents illuminating, damning testimony regarding the unfulfilled promise of the national social enterprise.

Recorded between 1934 and 1940, Alabama took John A. Lomax, his wife Ruby Terrill Lomax, and Alabama folklorist and librarian Ruby Pickens Tartt (a local employee of the Works Progress Administration's Writer's Project) to rural Sumter County. The African American music they found so impressed the Lomaxes that they never got around to recording any white Alabama songsters. Testifying to the performers' vocal authority, all but three of the 32 tracks are sung without instrumental accompaniment; moreover, only three tracks have been previously released, making this an especially important collection. The most remarkable singer Lomax recorded was the incomparable Vera Ward Hall, who (in addition to four sacred tunes with her cousin Dock Reed) contributed six compelling solos, including a lyrical "Boll Weevil Blues" and haunting renditions of two classic levee prison-camp escape songs, "Poor Lazarus" and "Another Man Done Gone" (the latter is echoed in another version on this disc, Rich Brown's plaintive "Alabama Bound").

The Lomaxes scouted Mississippi in 1936 and returned repeatedly over the next six years, recording the music of black laborers and sharecroppers living in the Hill Country, the region south of Memphis enshrined in Faulkner's fiction. Three unprecedented titles resulted, Afro-American Folk Music, Mississippi: Saints and Sinners and Mississippi: The Blues Lineage. The last includes some of the first recordings ever by David "Honeyboy" Edwards, Son House, and House's younger disciple, McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters.

Returning to the same Mississippi territory in 1959, Lomax came away with material for two superb albums, Southern Journey, Volume 3: 61 Highway Mississippi, and a unique portrait of singer-guitarist and cotton sharecropper "Mississippi" Fred McDowell, who ranks with Son House, Muddy Waters and Leadbelly as the most important African American blues artists Alan Lomax ever recorded. McDowell sang a distinctive array of blues and spirituals; ten tracks are previously unreleased, and many he would never again record. In his remaining 13 years, McDowell's Delta slide guitar and vocals would instruct a generation of North American and European initiates, infiltrate rock and roll and quicken the living soul of blues history. McDowell, Son and Muddy are also heard on a sweeping and informative new 24-track anthology of legendary recordings, The Rough Guide to Delta Blues. The album is a superb introduction to the genius of luminaries like Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, pianist-singer Louise Johnson, Robert Johnson, Geechie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, Bo Carter, Bukka White, Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, Big Joe Williams and Skip James.

McDowell's style applied exceptional slide guitar and vocal artistry to his own compositions, and to blues classics borrowed and embellished from popular recordings and the Delta juke-joint scene. His most audible influences include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and slide guitarist Blind Willie Johnson. McDowell used a home-crafted bottleneck to create the subtle mix of rhythmic and percussive effects, melodic tension and harmonic embroidery of his fiercely personal approach to the slide guitar, antithetical to the slash-and-burn ostentation of latter-day high-amp pretenders.

McDowell's friends and family join on several numbers. Sisters Sidney Carter and Rose Hemphill float a sonorous vocal harmony over McDowell's complementary slide work on "When the Train Come Along". "Going Down the River" resurrects Sleepy John Estes' "The Girl I Love, She Got Great Long Curly Hair", with a gliding lead over rhythm guitarist Miles Pratcher's rocking underpinning, embellished with the eerie kazoo-like moan of Fanny Davis on comb. The same trio's cautionary "You're Gonna Be Sorry" features McDowell's tapping counter rhythm on the guitar soundboard and an athletic, eminently danceable improvisational figure. Drawing from recorded versions by Tommy McClennan, Bukka White and Big Joe Williams, the three combine again on a ringing McDowell signature piece, "Shake 'em on Down". (Their collaboration on "Fred McDowell's Blues" appears on 61 Highway Mississippi, which offers four additional McDowell solo tracks.)

McDowell's individualistic soloing manifests in the swaying instrumental motif of "You Done Told Everybody", echoing his "Going Down the River" and "You're Gonna Be Sorry". Traces of Robert Johnson's percussive attack animate "61 Highway Blues", first recorded by Memphis bluesman Will Batts in 1933. McDowell styled his "Worried Mind" after Big Maceo Merriwether's 1941 recording, "Worried Life Blues". A loping rendition of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" is McDowell's minting of the 1937 Sonny Boy Williamson hallmark, but with none of the latter's urban blues bravado. An infectious, seductive "What's the Matter Now" recalls Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Black Snake Moan"; peppered with the spontaneous finger-popping interjections of McDowell's assembled friends and neighbors, conjuring up all the smoky fatback savor of a late-night Mississippi Delta juke joint, in the most arresting track of a consistently warm and engaging album.

The notes put McDowell and his music in cultural and historical context, sympathetically blending life history, lyrics, song notes, a comparative discograpy, field anecdotes and striking photos by Lomax and English folklorist Shirley Collins. The album showcases the secular and sacred music McDowell and his associates were making well before his 1964 Newport Folk Festival debut, an ensuing U.S. and European touring and recording career, and shortly before his death in 1972, the Rolling Stones' testimonial cover (on Sticky Fingers) of McDowell's memorable "You Got to Move". Recorded in 1959 on four sultry September evenings outside McDowell's Como, Mississippi, sharecropper's cabin, this aural portrait is a spirited introduction to a blues legacy. Just as significantly, the recording confirms the vital resilience of rural Mississippi African American lifeways and folksong style, precisely as the Civil Rights movement was poised to transform the racial formation of the south -- and the nation -- forever.

Overall, the collections assayed here tend to the secular, although the sacred is equally audible in the Lomax legacy. Alabama includes four sacred songs, all by Vera Ward Hall and Dock Reed. On "Moaning (I'll Soon Be Gone)" the antiphonal trade-off between Hall's haunting lead and response of brothers Dock and Henry Reed projects the resilience of the amen corner, the dynamic congregational response to the preacher's sermonic call. Buoyed on Hall's understated harmonic complement, the brothers step forward on the profoundly existential "What Is the Soul of Man?" Dock Reed leads on "Job, Job" and "Didn't That Hammer Ring (I Can't Hold Out No Longer)", reproducing the powerful dialogic character of the African American sermon tradition in concert with Hall's evocative seconding rejoinder.

Also in the sacred vein, Fred McDowell and his wife Annie Mae craft an articulate vocal-guitar interplay on a resolute "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" (also hear the suggestive solo instrumental sketch of the tune). A gently rocking "I Want Jesus to Walk with Me" has McDowell slither freely from the guitar's treble to bass range under James Shorty's vocals. (Another stellar McDowell-Shorty blues lament, "My Mother Died and Left Me", is heard on Southern Journey, Volume 6: Sheep, Sheep Don'tcha Know the Road.) McDowell recorded several versions of "Wished I Was in Heaven Sitting Down"; his solo rendition here unfolds at a relaxed tempo, using the popular country blues device of replacing the lyrics at line's end with sliding guitar notes. (Compare his approach to the same tune as he accompanies singers Mattie and Denise Gardner, on Southern Journey, Volume 6.) McDowell also offers a chiming solo testament in the previously unreleased "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Jesus". Afro-American Folk Music includes a pair of sacred numbers, an a cappella solo rendition of the classic "This Little Light of Mine", and a fine congregation-rocking, bass-drum-accompanied interpretation of "He's Calling Me" (composed in 1954 by Alabama's incomparable Dorothy Love Coates, singing with The Original Gospel Harmonettes).

Sheep, Sheep Don'tcha Know the Road and Mississippi: Saints and Sinners both project the tension between flesh and spirit in African American music. The former includes Bessie Jones and the Sea Island Singers on the title track, and the silky male vocal harmonies of the Bright Light Quartet. The latter album presents 16 secular and nine sacred tracks, most prominently the shouts and spirituals of Rev. C. H. Savage and the Mt. Ararat Missionary Baptist Church choir. 61 Highway Blues includes three spare Fred McDowell spirituals, and backed by the resonant Independence Church choir, Viola James's moaning, unforgettable "Tryin' to Make Heaven My Home" and Anderson Burton's rocking "God's Unchanging Hand".

Likewise, drawing from the most profound sacred music the Lomaxes recorded during the 1934-1942 period in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Virginia, Negro Religious Songs and Services is an essential addition to the African American sacred oeuvre. Listen to Bozie Sturdivant's spine-chilling vocal lead on "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down", with the Clarksdale, Mississippi Silent Grove Baptist Church congregation in the amen corner; prison chaplain Sin-Killer Griffin's "The Man of Cavalry", a levitating, half-sung sermon punctuated by the prisoners' firmament-moving antiphony; or the Arkansas State Farm prisoners' harmonizing vocal quintet on "Holy Babe", with its countdown on the twelve apostles. (Years later, Peter, Paul and Mary covered the tune as "Children, How Shall I Send Thee".) Any one of these songs alone warrants the purchase price.

By way of counterpoint, in The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois remarked upon the resolute transcendent essence of the African American spiritual legacy, the sorrow songs:

"Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song -- the rhythmic cry of the slave -- stands today not simply as the sole American music, but the most beautiful statement of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people".

Seeking the roots of that heritage, the Lomaxes devoted considerable effort to recording in the south's notorious prisons and work camps. A bizarre romanticism led them to reason that the penitentiary's deliberate reproduction of the brutal relations of chattel slavery might yield up the oldest of African American song forms. Instead they found an articulate, wholly contemporary folk corpus sustained in the face of the lethal politics of North American racial terror, in many white minds sanctified by God and reason alike. As Du Bois ironically observed in The Souls of Black Folk, "the characteristic of our age is the contact of European Civilization with the world's underdeveloped peoples . . . War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery-this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law".

Emancipation did not eliminate the need for cheap labor in southern cotton production, levee building, railroad construction and other industries. Indeed, a cold-blooded denial of African American humanity fed a continuing climate of racial terror and eased the ethical calculus that justified the leasing of black convict labor, a practice common throughout the south from the 1870s into the 1920s. Nor did abolition prevent legal authorities from summarily sweeping up able-bodied black male "idlers," "vagrants" and other innocents judged disrespectful of whites, as agents for a prison-run labor system that supplied both private and public concerns. In "Prettiest Train" (Prison Songs, Volume 1) the singers warn, "You go to Memphis, don't you hang around . . . police'll catch you and you're workhouse bound". Another popular inmate song, "Rosie," sardonically relates, "Ain't but one thing I done wrong/ Stayed in Mississippi just a day too long". Prisoners also tapped the sacred vein, of course, as with the poignant call-and-response of "I'm Goin' Home", which turns the release date into a sanctified metaphor of deliverance (on 61 Highway Blues).

The infamous Parchman Farm, in the Mississippi Delta country south of Memphis, was typical of segregated southern penal colonies. Founded in 1904 under the personal supervision of the Mississippi governor himself, Parchman boasted 15 work camps spread over 46 square miles of state land. The governor proposed to instill work-discipline and respect for white authority among young black male inmates while making Parchman economically self-supporting -- a racist prescription today's "tough-love" prison reformers merely reframe in different language.

By 1915 Parchman was turning a profit for the state of Mississippi. Driven six days a week from dawn to dusk, the inmates toiled for chain-gang contractors or in the state's own shops, timber tracts, turpentine groves, mines and plantations. The system worked men to death by degrees, physically and psychologically. Dobie Red, first recorded by John Lomax in 1936, remarked to Alan Lomax in 1947, "I had a good voice at the time. But now, I don't know. I just can't-I can't control my voice . . . I just can't sing like I used to sing . . . I can't do nothin' like I used to do. I can't even work like I used to do". Red offered a plaintive holler of peremptory family separation: "Ain't but one time I felt like dyin', Lord, I left my poor mother in the courthouse cryin'". The severity of the Parchman regime suffuses the inmates' voices, but the singers never surrendered their acerbic, pointed perspective. In "Early in the Mornin'", the "peckerwood" (woodpecker) slyly denotes the "yahoo" or white cracker, and skewers his sexual prowess: "Peckerwood a-peckin' on the schoolhouse door . . . pecks so hard until his pecker got sore".

Lomax traded upon his own privileged identity as a white southerner to gain the uneasy confidence of prison authorities, and agonized over acquiescing to the "Boss-man" role ascribed to him under the white-supremacist regime. A difficult faux jocularity runs through Lomax's conversations with prisoners, pursued in earshot of the white lower-class gun-toting guards, who regarded this southern gentleman's peculiar interest in (what they called) "nigger music" as quite possibly suspect. Lomax understood that the inmates' shucking and jiving (heard on numerous cuts) was a front. However, with this seemingly sympathetic but unknown and potentially dangerous white man, they invariably declined to reveal their true feelings, even in fleeting private moments.

Here Lomax confronted an statement of the double-consciousness of African Americans, what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "peculiar sensation . . . this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity". In "The Sorrow Songs", the closing chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, he observed, "Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations with one another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences".

It would be easy to fault Lomax's romantic, fatalistic view of the singers as tortured artists and tragic victims. As Lomax wrote, "This vein of African-American creativity flourished in the state pens, because it was essential to the spiritual as well as the physical survival of the black prisoners. . . . The songs, quite literally, kept the men alive and normal . . . coming out of the filthy darkness of the pen, touched with exquisite musicality, [they] are a testimony to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait".

Such universalistic idealism, sympathetic though it may be-at least in the abstract-remains symptomatic of generations of schooling in a "western culture-and-civilization" mode whose quixotic, depoliticized epistemology still confounds scholarly and popular understanding. Compare Lomax's reading with that of Frederick Douglass (from his Narrative written in 1845):

"I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an statement of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,-and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because 'there is no flesh in his obdurate heart'''.

Postmodern readings insist that every text intimates multiple positions, and it should be clear that debates over "tradition" and history are always about ideology and politics in the here-and-now. The man who currently occupies (there is no better word) the Big House chose to locate his presidential ranch a stone's throw from the Brazos River, the sluggish, scouring waterway whose bottomlands yielded Texas cotton wealth, rendered with black and Mexican blood, sweat and tears. The wise-cracker from Crawford -- who campaigned proudly on the most murderous, racially skewed death-penalty record in the nation (since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, one-third of all executions in the United States have been carried out in Texas), cynically promising, "I will serve my sentence in Washington" -- probably has never heard the voices on the 1933-34 Lomax Texas prison recordings. But as those serving the real sentence cry out on "Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos", "You ought to come on the river in nineteen-four/ You could find a dead man on ever' turn row. . . . You ought to come on the river in nineteen-ten/ They was rollin' the women like they drive the men". As Lomax relates in the notes to Big Brazos,

"The turn rows-the roads forming the agricultural cuts in the rich bottomlands-were where the men who collapsed or died were thrown in the days when the prison farms and private plantations leased convicts from the state as slave labor. The bodies were left there until someone found time to carry them away. The men still working in the fields could look at the bodies and know they'd better not run or collapse. . . . They knew, too, that there was no help, hence the irony of a stanza . . . common in the songs: 'Wake up, dead man, help me carry my row'".

As for "rollin' the women", whites well understood and routinely used the privileged private sanction and terror of rape, and the public spectacle of lynching, as defining social rituals and everyday means of Jim Crow political administration. Harriet Jacobs, who fled a predatory master after long and violent abuse, speaks back to the regime in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), recalling the ordeal of her fifteenth year:

". . . there is no shadow of law to protect [the slave girl] from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men. . . .

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. . . . If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. . . . My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. . . .

I longed for some one to confide in. I would have given the world to have laid my head on my grandmother's faithful bosom, and told her all my troubles. But Dr. Flint swore he would kill me, if I was not as silent as the grave".

The perpetrator is long gone, forgotten for all but a terrible inhumanity, but Jacobs and the music still testify in defiance of death itself (listen again to Bozie Sturdivant's stunning "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down"). Against the cultural deformations of his own time, Alan Lomax had the acuity to seek out and chronicle this keenly critical folk legacy, a cipher for the otherwise unutterable brutality encoded in black expressive culture. And these voices, they who would not be silenced, eloquently rebuke the new American order: systemic social-service cuts, lifetime welfare bans, the undeclared war on black males, inordinate African American incarceration and capital punishment rates, knee-jerk prison-construction bonds, "efficient" inmate "management," and the economically flawed, politically bankrupt, ethically culpable public subsidy of privatized incarceration-for-profit.

The Lomax oeuvre highlights the structural inequities of the American social contract, but in 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois was already interrogating the wrathful vintage of inequity that made "the Negro . . . a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world". The Souls of Black Folk posed a question to which America -- in all its protestations of innocence and (imperial) goodness before the world community -- has never yet seen fit to respond:

"Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity of those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours; a gift of story and song-soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to . . . lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. . . . Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation . . . and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse".

Sounded a century ago -- a flash of the spirit in the smoking global mirror of September 11 -- Du Bois's eminently contemporary plea resounds prophetically. Against that curse stands an enduring music. It belongs in the air, in the schools, in every serious public collection, on people's lips and in their souls. Resonant before today's kinder, more gently cynical forms of institutionalized depravity and violence, at home and abroad, these voices warrant wider-than-ever audition and critical reflection. Sustaining an insouciant sense of humor, irony, outrage, sorrow, tragedy and transcendence, forged under the arduous conditions of African American social history, and now the world's, this is thoroughly modern music.

Referenced Recordings

Various Artists
Prison Songs: Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm, 1947-48. Volume One: Murderous Home (Alan Lomax Collection)
Rounder CD 1714
U.S. Release August 5, 1997

Various Artists
Prison Songs: Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm, 1947-48. Volume Two: Don'tcha Hear Poor Mother Calling (Alan Lomax Collection)
Rounder CD 1715
U.S. Release August 5, 1997

Various Artists
Deep River of Song: Big Brazos: Texas Prison Recordings, 1933 and 1934 (Alan Lomax Collection)
Rounder CD 1826
U.S. Release June 13, 2000

Various Artists
Negro Religious Songs and Services (Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture)
Rounder CD 1514
U.S. Release July 27, 1999

Various Artists
Southern Journey, Volume 6: Sheep, Sheep Don'tcha Know the Road: Southern Music, Sacred and Sinful
Rounder CD 1706
U.S. Release April 22, 1997

Various Artists
Deep River of Song: Mississippi: Saints and Sinners from before the Blues and Gospel (Alan Lomax Collection)
Rounder CD 1824
U.S. Release August 17, 1999

Various Artists
Deep River of Song: Mississippi: The Blues Lineage: Musical Geniuses of the Fields, Levees and Jukes (Alan Lomax Collection)
Rounder CD 1825
U.S. Release August 17, 1999

Various Artists
Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi (Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture)
Rounder CD 1515
U.S. Release October 17, 2000

Various Artists
Deep River of Song: Alabama: from Lullabies to Blues (Alan Lomax Collection)
Rounder CD 1829
U.S. Release May 15, 2001

Various Artists
Southern Journey, Volume 3: 61 Highway Mississippi: Delta Country Blues, Spirituals, Work Songs and Dance Music
Rounder CD 1703
U.S. Release April 22, 1997

Fred McDowell
Fred McDowell: The First Recordings (Alan Lomax Collection, Portraits Series)
Rounder CD 1718
U.S. Release September 9, 1997

Various Artists
The Rough Guide to Delta Blues
Rough Guide-World Music Network RGNET 1087 CD
U.S. Release June 4, 2002

Rough Guides -- World Music Network

Related Links and Sources

Douglass, Frederick (1845) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office. Source: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. Source: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.

Jacobs, Harriet A. (1861) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Ed. L. Maria Child. Boston: Published for the author.

American Civil Liberties Union, "Race and the Death Penalty".

Witness to an Execution, stories and photographs of the men and women involved in the execution of death-row inmates at the (Texas Department of Criminal Justice) Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas.