Folklore collector, teacher, writer. Though he was known for years in Nashville as a
distinguished chemistry professor at Fisk University, Talley was also a pioneering
gatherer of African American tales and songs. A native of middle Tennessee’s rural
Black culture, Talley was not only himself a product of the traditions he documented, but
he was one of the first Black folklorists to do substantial fieldwork and publication. As a
youth, he sang with a group from Fisk, the New Jubilee Singers, and by the early 1890s
he was collecting songs and tales as he moved through various college teaching jobs in
the South.
The year 1905 found him back at Fisk as a professor, and he soon came under the
influence of colleague John Work II, who in 1915 had published Folk Songs of the
American Negro. Challenged by Work’s assertion that “Negro folk music is wholly
religious,” Talley compiled a collection of secular songs that he published in 1922, Negro
Folk Rhymes (Wise or Otherivise). Predating more famous collections by Dorothy
Scarborough and by Howard W.Odum and Guy Benton Johnson, Talley’s book featured
songs from the preblues rural Tennessee Black community and showed that this musical
tradition was more complex and far-ranging than had been previously thought. In a long
appendix, “A Study in Negro Folk Rhymes,” Talley offered a richly detailed account of
some of his collecting and described in great detail some elements of rural Black music.
(In 1991 an expanded edition of the book was issued, incorporating newly found music
notations that were not in the original.)
Negro Folk Rhymeswas widely reviewed and well received, and Talley at once set
about compiling a companion volume of middle Tennessee tales. This manuscript, The
Negro Traditions, was finished in 1923 or 1924, but for some reason it could not find a
publisher. By this time, Talley’s work at Fisk was becoming more demanding, and he
gradually put his folklore interests aside; upon his retirement in 1942, he did write a long
article about his tales in the journal Phylon and made further attempts to get his work
published. It was not until 1993, however, that Talley’s large collection of tales was
finally published.
Charles K.Wolfe
References
Talley, Thomas W. 1993. The Negro Traditions, ed. with Introduction by Charles Wolfe and Laura
C.Jarmon. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
——. 1942–1943. The Origin of Negro Traditions.” Phylon. 1:371–77; pp. 30–38.
Wolfe, Charles K. 1991. Thomas W.Talley’s Negro Folk Rhymes: A New, Expanded Edition, with
Music. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.