This post was written by Dianne Choie, Educational Programs Specialist at the Library of Congress.
Zora Neale Hurston was a writer, playwright, and anthropologist who was born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891. Her work, much of which is held at the Library of Congress, adds important information about Black culture in the American South and the Caribbean. This year, as we celebrate what would have been her 114th birthday, the Informal Learning Office would like to share some history and facts about this remarkable writer and researcher.
Zora Neale Hurston was the first to attend college in her family, leaving Alabama to study different languages at Howard University here in Washington, D.C. She then studied anthropology (the scientific study of human behavior, biology, culture, and language) at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City. During her time in New York, Hurston wrote and published stories about Black culture and became a prominent leader in the Harlem Renaissance. Among many other plays and essays, she wrote the play “Mule Bone” with Langston Hughes in 1930.
Beginning in the 1920s, Hurston traveled to the southern United States and the Caribbean many times over the years as a folklorist, or a person who studies and records traditional ways that people share traditions such as music, crafts, cooking, and storytelling. She even collected folk music with Alan Lomax, director of the Archive of American Folk Song (now part of the American Folklife Center) at the Library of Congress. In the 1930s, she returned to her home state of Florida as an employee of the Works Progress Administration, a federal program employing thousands of workers who lost their jobs during the Great Depression. While other arts workers found jobs in areas like writing or photography, Hurston’s role was with the Federal Writers’ Project studying and recording Black folklore in Florida.
Songs that Hurston collected from Black populations in Florida are available on the Library of Congress website. Below is a recording of her performing “Crow Dance” in 1939, a song from the Bahama islands that is said to have originated from West Africa. It’s pretty amazing to hear a recording of Hurston’s actual voice, of which we have many at the Library of Congress.
As Hurston explains at the beginning of the recording, the crow—what we call a buzzard in the United States— is considered sacred in some cultures of West Africa, and what she shares is part of a game where people imitate the way the buzzard flies. She also makes the bird’s sound at the end of the recording. As you listen with your children, ask them what they notice. Can they hear Hurston clapping along with her singing? What do the young people in your life think the dance might have looked like?
You can hear another dance song that Hurston performed in 1939 called “Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come.” She learned it from a woman in Florida who was part of the Gullah Geechee (also known as Gullah or Geechee) community of African Americans who settled on the eastern islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Because these descendants of enslaved people worked on coastal plantations, they were isolated from other cultural groups and able to preserve their African traditions. The man Hurston speaks to at the end of the recording is Herbert Halpert, an anthropologist and folklorist who studied folk songs and stories.
While Hurston performed for recordings of some of the folk songs she learned about (as we heard above), she also recorded other people’s performances. Below is a recording of the blues song “John Henry” by Gabriel Brown, who played guitar and sang in 1935. Hurston’s recording has not only allowed us to hear the song nearly a century later, but it will continue to be available for researchers in the future at the Library of Congress.
Sound recordings aren’t the only collections at the Library created by, collected by, or otherwise connected to Zora Neale Hurston. She also wrote throughout her entire life, publishing her most well-known novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in 1937. She wrote many other books, essays, and plays ,and she contributed to publications including the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Saturday Evening Post that are archived here at the Library.
An interesting fact about Hurston’s plays is that several of them were lost to history until a U.S. Copyright Office volunteer at the Library of Congress stumbled upon them 27 years after Hurston’s death in 1997. Hurston had deposited ten play scripts for copyright registration decades before, and they are now available in their entirety on the Library of Congress website. Some of the plays incorporate songs that she learned in Florida as a child and later as a folklore researcher. The Library of Congress hosted informal readings from her plays, eventually staging two public concert readings in 2000 as part of the Library’s bicentennial.
This brief look at work by Zora Neale Hurston is just a small peek into the many accomplishments she made over the course of her life in recording, creating, and sharing stories of Black life in the United States. We are so grateful for her talent and efforts, and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating her birthday this year.
