Kimoh, Dar You are‪!‬

A "nonsense" song which was recorded during the Works Progress Administration "Writer's Project" interviews (1) in the nineteen-thirties was, we argue, a creolized version of Wolof phonetically transcribed as English. Specifically, the song which is the subject of this essay was collected during a field interview carried out during "the Hampton interviews," which were part of the larger Federal Writers' Project. In November, 1936, "an all-Negro unit" of the Virginia Writers' Project under the direction of Roscoe E. Lewis began interviewing ex-slaves in Virginia and during the next year interviewed more than 300 elderly Negroes as part of this project. (2) The Writers' Project interviews in Virginia, carried out during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, were part of a study that was preceded by more modest efforts in the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, and Indiana. (3) The analysis of this song from the 1930s reveals expressions of Senegambian cultural knowledge that generally have not been associated with North American black communities of that era. This era represents the last generation of African Americans who would remember a neighbor or relative who was born in Africa or who (possibly) grew up with people immersed in clearly identifiable African referents. Our work therefore builds on arguments that Lawrence W. Levine made years ago (1971) (4) regarding the importance of song in understanding cultural continuity, resistance, and invention in the African American context. Here we review the case of Fannie Berry, and present elements of her narrative as a way of reclaiming and re-ordering ways of knowing that have been "submerged, hidden or driven underground." (5) Following a short discussion of the "discovery" of this text, we provide a summary review of the conditions which produced the particular interview. The article moves on to a discussion of conceptual issues which are embedded in the way the interviews were conceived and implemented. We look at a complex of issues against the issues of class, historicity and the historical record, before analyzing the song itself and key aspects such as ethnographic work, "authenticity" and authorship in black diaspora studies.