Negro Folk Rhymes

It was only after World War I that Fisk professor Thomas Washington Talley developed an interest in folklore and began to collect rural black traditional songs. Relying on a little research and many interviews with Tennesseans, he was able to collect hundreds of songs which were published in a volume called Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise. Some of the 349 secular folksongs contained in the volume have musical notations. This collection is significant in that it is the first collection of folksongs from Tennessee to be treated seriously and published and the first to be gathered by a black scholar. It is also the first known collection of black secular folksongs to be published.