SOURCE: Wright, John S. “The New Negro Poet and the Nachal Man: Sterling Brown's Folk Odyssey.” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 1 (spring 1989): 95-105.

In the following essay, Wright explores the impact of African American folklore on Brown's career and finds him uniquely qualified to provide an understanding of the work of Walter “Leadbelly” Boyd, the infamous African American Depression-era blues singer.

In 1936, the year Sterling Brown and John Lomax joined forces supervising the collection of oral slave narratives for the Federal Writers' Project (see Mangione 257-63), Lomax and his son Alan published the first extended study of an American folksinger. That singer, one Walter Boyd, alias Hudie Ledbetter, alias “Leadbelly,” had been the self-proclaimed “King of the Twelve String Guitar Players of the World,” as well as the number one man in the number one gang on the number one convict farm in Texas. He had fought his...