SOURCE: Hirsch, Edward. “Reverberations of a Work Song.” The American Poetry Review 28, no. 2 (March-April 1999): 43-7.

In the following essay, Hirsch asserts that Brown “turned to folk forms like the blues, spirituals, and work songs to create an accurate, unsentimentalized, and dignified portrait of southern black life in the twentieth century.”

In 1980 I was energized by the publication of Sterling Brown's Collected Poems, which brought together three important books of poems: Southern Road (1932), one of the key books of American and perhaps the key book of African American poetry in the 1930s; The Last Ride of Wild Bill (1975), a uniquely narrative book of eight idiomatic literary ballads rewritten in African American terms out of the central tall tale tradition of American literature; and No Hiding Place, a group of poems mainly completed in the late 1930s but which found no publisher ready to hand and consequently had to wait...