Rainbow Round My Shoulder

A new edition of the first volume in Howard Odum's famous tale of Black Ulysses

"First Published in 2002, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company."

Howard W. Odum (1884-1954), the pioneering social scientist and founder of the University of North Carolina's department of sociology, played a leading and well-documented role in the modernization of the South. This is the first book-length study of Odum's contributions to southern folklore, which had important but largely unappreciated consequences for his legacy of social justice. Lynn Moss Sanders shows how Odum, as a collector of African American blues and work songs, anticipated some important precepts of modern folklore. Notably, Odum perceived the benefits of a collaborative and nonhierarchical approach to folk studies. Influenced by a racially tolerant former student and by one of his black folk informants, Odum changed his previous paternal, segregationist attitudes about race. Comparing Odum's two song collections, The Negro and His Songs (1925) and Negro Workaday Songs (1926), Sanders links the growing influence of Odum's coauthor and former student, Guy Johnson, to a decrease in instances of racial condescension between the first and second book. The three "folk" novels in Odum's Black Ulysses trilogy (completed in 1931) also reveal a progressive refinement of Odum's racial views. The change, Sanders believes, came with Odum's growing ability to see John Wesley "Left-Wing" Gordon, the black, working-class model for the trilogy's hero, as a friend rather than simply as a representative of "the Negro." From his authorship of Social and Mental Traits of the Negro (1910), now a relic of scientific racism, to his final publication, Agenda for Integration, Odum exemplifies how the study of folklore changed the folklorist--a change felt by a whole generation of southern liberals whose work Odum encouraged and shaped.

These memoirs are a history of pioneering siblings orphaned by a murder/suicide who settled virgin prairie to build an international cattle empire only to lose it in the Great Depression. It is also a story of courage, faith, determination and family values as one family struggles to keep their home and the land they tamed. It is not heroic, it is every day life. It is about a family struggling with the realities of life while dreaming of a better future. Rich only in the blessings of life in America, solid values and devoted family they had all the things that money couldn't buy and through it all, one man who was "so damn grateful". Written from the perspective of an Iowa farmer who was born and lived on the same land for 92 years, this is a history tempered by 368 change of seasons, World Wars, a Great Depression and technology advances that have rocked the very foundations of our world. But most of all, 92 years of working with and sometimes battling Mother Nature tempered by family, friends and God. That makes this not so much a history of a family as a way of life.

Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival is the first biography of the folk singer and song collector Paul Clayton (1931-1967). Preeminently a scholar-balladeer, Clayton is credited with the Top-Ten hit "Gotta Travel On" and single-handedly brought hundreds of obscure folksongs to light for the mid-century radio and recording market. He influenced listeners and friends from Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan, who considered Clayton a mentor, "mindguard," and well of folksong.