Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies.

Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004. 184 pp. $29.95.

The eminent sociologist Howard W. Odum (1884-1954) was well known as a Southern regionalist and as a scholar who contributed significantly to the modernization of the South. In a distinguished 34-year career, he founded the Department of Sociology and a school of public welfare at the University of North Carolina in 1920; launched the journal Social Forces in 1922; and established the Institute for Research in Social Sciences (now named for him) at UNC in 1924. He became an advisor on public policy in the South in matters of regional development and race relations. He remained active as a professor, administrator, and scholar until his death. Odum was a significant figure in the intellectual life of the South throughout his career. Moreover, as a member of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation (1919-1944) and later the Southern Regional Council (1944-1946), he was influential in attempting to change public perceptions of Blacks and their treatment through empirical research about Black life and the dissemination of the findings to the public.

Lynn Moss Sanders's Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies examines a specific aspect of Odum's career, that of collector of African American folklore, and its influence on his vision as a sociologist. The thesis of Sanders's study is that the visible change in Odum's position on race relations and his attitude toward Blacks that had come about since his first publications on race (1909-1911), had occurred for two major reasons: the influence of his younger colleagues and graduate students, Guy B. Johnson in particular; and Odum's own work as a collector of African American folk songs and folklore, which had entailed close personal contact with his African American informants and a growing respect for them as individuals.

Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey consists of six chapters: an overview of Odum's life, his career, and his agenda at the University of North Carolina; a study of his folk song collections; a review of his use of folklore in his Black Ulysses trilogy; an examination of his relationship with John Wesley "Left Wing" Gordon; a discussion of the impact of folklore studies on race matters; and finally an appreciation of Odum's mentorship of and collaboration with younger colleagues and Institute research assistants.

For Sanders, Odum's role as a collector of African American folklore had been central to his intellectual concerns for the greater part of his life, beginning when, as a young teacher in Mississippi, he started to write down the religious and secular songs of Black residents of the area. He published studies of the songs he collected as "Religious Folk-Songs of the Southern Negroes" in 1909; "Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes" in two numbers of the Journal of American Folklore in 1911; and The Negro and His Songs (1925) and Negro Workaday Songs (1926), co-written with Guy B. Johnson. Even Odum's study of the psychology of southern Blacks, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, his 1910 sociology dissertation, used folk songs intermittently to illustrate his observations. The songs, along with personal narratives, also were the basis of his Black Odysseus trilogy, three semi-fictional works based in part on the life and personal narratives of Gordon. The folk-song as art, however, was not his primary concern in the early collections. As a sociologist and psychologist, Odum believed that folk songs were a true expression of the feelings and mental imagery of the race and thus constituted a tool for the study of racial psychology, morals, and capabilities. The knowledge gained from their analysis would be used to bring about change in the lives and status of black people in the South.

Odum's purposes had changed, however, by the time of the mid-1920's song studies. The two sets of folk song studies suggest two intellectual "generations." Written some 15 years apart, not only do the first and second pairs of folk song studies reveal a growing concern with folklore as art, but they reveal a change in Odum's perceptions of black people. He passed from adherence to the ideas of inherent inferiority and the necessity of segregation to a conviction that theories of white superiority had no basis in scientific fact and that the living conditions of Southern blacks were appalling and unjust. And by the end of the 1940s, Odum had become a champion of racial integration. Moreover, Sanders asserts that the folklore trilogy--three novels based on folklore and folk song--also shows a progression in the liberalization of Odum's racial views. While the two song collections of the 20s portrayed Gordon as a Black Everyman, the folklore trilogy of the late 20s and early 30s progressively individualized him.

For Sanders, one key to the change in Odum's ideas of race was his relationship with his graduate student Guy B. Johnson. While exposure to anthropology in Franz Boas's classes had surely influenced this progression in Odum's thought, Sanders asserts that Johnson was instrumental in introducing later changes in the field of sociology to Odum. Johnson, a doctoral student in sociology and a fellow of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences, had come to UNC with a recent MA from the University of Chicago, noted for its cutting edge social science research. His exposure to more recent trends in sociology at Chicago, including a more liberal view of blacks and a construction of race that rejected essentialism, updated and altered Odum's own views. Moreover, Sanders asserts that as Odum's collaborator on the two folk song studies of the 1920s, Johnson made editorial changes that softened some of the racist statements Odum had carried forward from his 1911 publications to the 1925 text. Even more extensive changes due to Johnson's influence were evident in Negro Workaday Songs, published in 1926: the method by which the songs had been collected was clarified; many denigrating remarks and sociological generalizations present in the earlier studies were edited out; and melodies to some of the songs were provided by Johnson, an accomplished musician who realized the value of adding notation. Together, Sanders maintains, Odum and Johnson brought a new critical approach to the study of Black folk songs, focusing on the function, context, style, and other aesthetic features of the songs rather than on the origins or value of the texts.

Sanders contends that another change yielding a significantly more liberal view was precisely Odum's collecting activity. She argues that as he interviewed Left Wing Gordon, an African American itinerant laborer, a relationship developed between the two men that permitted Odum to see Gordon as an individual with a complex personal history and thus to stop viewing Black culture as a monolith. Sanders attests as well a growing respect for Gordon on Odum's part, such that his interpretations of Gordon's stories and songs ceased to be the etic interpretation of the outside observer and moved closer to a collaborative style of interpretation that ethnographers would not begin to adopt until decades later.

Sanders's study of Odum's life and career fills a gap in later 20th-century evaluations of Odum. He was a very well known regional sociologist, and works assessing his ideas and contributions to sociology and to the study of the South as a region are abundant. His conceptions of folk society and state society have been well documented and widely discussed. His contribution as a folklorist, however, is somewhat less known. Sanders's tracing of his changing, more humanized vision of Blacks to his study of their folklore and music, then, adds a piece to the puzzle of this prolific and creative scholar, professor, and mentor.

For all that, Odum's somewhat idiosyncratic definitions of the "folk," folkways, and folk society, admittedly difficult to grasp from Odum's own writings, were extremely important components of his intellectual edifice; thus, more attention might have been given to a strong working definition. By quoting from Odum's work Sanders provides a useful summary of Odum's meanings of those terms, but a more precise, explanatory definition would have been more useful yet to her readers.

In Chapter 3, Sanders examines the question of whether Odum's creative writings were truly based on African American folklore or were instead the product of his own imagination. She uses several different approaches to settle this question, such as the comparison of motifs found in Odum's tales with those of traditional folklore and a confirmation of the tales' existence in Black culture by citing them in the works of other collectors. Through a study of the language and the rhetorical devices used, Sanders seeks to bolster the case that folklore from African American informants indeed underlies the works. This is the least satisfactory part of the discussion. She argues that Odum's way of writing dialect does closely reproduce the phonology of Black Vernacular English (Sanders's term) and names specific rhetorical devices of speakers of BVE, such as signifying (which Gordon called "joreein'"), boasting, and rhyme, which are abundant in Odum's texts. Though I agree with her conclusions that the language and the rhetorical features remain in African American speech even today, and that an analysis of language is one valid way to explore this question, still, her carefully researched discussion reads like the work of one who has little experiential knowledge of the speech habits of African Americans or the mutual influence of black and white speakers in the South. For example, Gordon's speech as represented by Odum has some striking aspects that, like the regular omission of definite and indefinite articles, can only be attributed to an unusual idiolect. Sanders also suggests that Odum might have learned some of the speech he recorded from local color writers rather than directly from African American informants. However, she seems not to have considered the possibility that, as a southerner, Odum had ample opportunity to hear the speech of African Americans for himself. Sanders comments as well that Odum's interjection of putative standard English in introductions to the various chapters of Rainbow Round My Shoulder, his first folk novel, is disruptive in its contrast with the speech of the black protagonist. However, I was struck by certain similarities in the speech patterns of the intrusive narrator and the persona speaking in the text: sentence fragments, the frequent omission of definite and indefinite articles, and a poetic prose style. Is it possible that Odum's style was influenced by his informant's idiolect?

These objections to Sanders's study are minor, however. She reads Odum's fictional works with insight and sensitivity, especially Wings on My Feet, Gordon's memories of his war experiences and the second book of the folklore trilogy. Moreover, she astutely points out Odum's subversion of many strongly held stereotypes of Blacks that predominated In the South, some of which he himself had once embraced. Sanders's study is comprehensive, clearly written, and accessible to the non-specialist reader. Her treatment of the complex sociologist who lived on the cusp of a major paradigm change in the nation s view of race relations is sympathetic and yet quite balanced. The book makes a useful contribution to the study of African American folklore, introducing to readers resources for its study that have been little known. I recommend it to research collections in both folklore and sociology as well as to public libraries, particularly those that house the Black Ulysses trilogy as a part of their collections.

Sharon Masingale Bell

Kent State University