("With his two sledgehammers pulverizing boulders, John He...)
"With his two sledgehammers pulverizing boulders, John Henry races a steam drill tunneling through a mountain. It's a deadly contest of man-vs-machine written with such power that this African-American folk hero " from Good Reads
The Green Pastures: A Fable Suggested by Roark Bradford's Southern Sketches, "Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun" (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Green Pastures: A Fable Suggested by Roa...)
Excerpt from The Green Pastures: A Fable Suggested by Roark Bradford's Southern Sketches, "Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun"
Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that The Green Pastures, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. The British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada. And all other countries of the Copyright Union, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion pictures. Recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. In its present form this play is dedicated to the reading public only. All inquiries regarding this play should be addressed to the author in care of the publishers.
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The Story Of John Henry...A Musical Narrative With Ballads & Blues & Other Songs (1955)
(12" narrative..A The Story Of John Henry (First Part)
B ...)
12" narrative..A The Story Of John Henry (First Part)
B The Story Of John Henry (Conclusion)
C1 Black Girl
C2 Free And Equal Blues
C3 Live The Life
C4 Sam Hall
D1 Where Were You, Baby?
D2 Delia's Gone
D3 Run, Mona Run
D4 You Don't Know My Mind
EKL123 LP
(A wonderful retelling of and new insight ino the familiar...)
A wonderful retelling of and new insight ino the familiar biblical tales in wonderfully rich and telling language (a delight in itself) , written by the nineteenth-century American author Roark Bradford. For a while devalued due to its supposedly demeaning and patronising use of 'blackie' speech, it is now recognised as a serious contribution to American literature. As later adapted by Marc Connelly it forms the original text for the successful ( but in some views less robust) play Green Pastures.
Roark Whitney Wickliffe Bradford was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He is famous for his novels which portrayed black characters in a humorous and stereotypical manner.
Background
Roark Whitney Wickliffe Bradford was born on August 21, 1896 in Lauderdale County, Tennessee. He was born on his family's cotton plantation near the Mississippi River in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, the eighth of the eleven children of Richard Clarence and Patricia Adelaide (Tillman) Bradford, both of whom were descended from families prominent in colonial and southern history. A well-to-do lawyer-planter, Richard Bradford not only supervised his plantation of six hundred acres, which was worked by about twenty Negro families, but was in the lumber business and was justice of the peace in his community.
Like all boys of his time and social status, Roark spent a gregarious childhood, mingling as freely with black children as with his brothers and sisters. In fact, he seems to have spent most of his boyhood with black companions, three in particular, Algie, Ed, and Sweet. With a hound dog named Rattler, the four boys wandered in the fields where the hands were picking cotton and visited in the Negro quarters.
If young Roark showed any unusual intellectual curiosity, it was about the local African-American church and its minister, Uncle Wes Henning. Here, in addition to the songs and stories common in the fields and homes of the plantation blacks, he heard Uncle Wes's versions of biblical stories.
Education
Bradford's informal education in the world of the southern plantation, which was to become the basis of his literary career, was supplemented by instruction in a one-room local school, and later by a more substantial formal schooling in Halls, Tennessee.
Career
When the United States entered World War I, Bradford volunteered for service and, upon completing the officers' training program, was commissioned a first lieutenant in the United States Army Artillery Reserve and was assigned to Balboa, Canal Zone.
He was ordered to France in October 1918, but the armistice was declared before he sailed. His further military service included duty as an instructor in military science and tactics at Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College. He was honorably discharged in 1920.
Bradford spent the years 1920-1926 as a journalist, working successively as a reporter on the Atlanta Georgian, the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, and the Lafayette (Louisiana) Daily Advertiser, and moved up in 1924, to night city editor on the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Although he was soon promoted to the editorship of the Picayune's Sunday edition, Bradford decided in 1926 to attempt a new career as a free-lance writer.
While he was in Lafayette, Louisiana, Bradford again came into contact with an environment in which folk storytellers were prominent, in this case the Cajun raconteurs. In New Orleans he found himself back in touch with a Negro community--one more varied and richer in musicians, singers, preachers, and storytellers than he had known before--the world of Rampart Street and the Mississippi River front. One day he discovered an old Negro fishing with a line equipped with a spring alarm clock that sounded when a fish yanked on the line. He wrote a story based on the incident and sold it to the New York World.
Encouraged by this success, he wrote a more ambitious story about Negro life, "Child of God, " which was accepted by Harper's magazine and was awarded first prize in the O. Henry Memorial competition for 1927. Soon Bradford had written enough stories in a similar vein--tales that were essentially adaptations of biblical stories by uneducated Negroes--to make up the book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun (1928).
A dramatic version of this work by Marc Connelly, entitled Green Pastures (1930), was a theatrical triumph, and Bradford and Connelly were jointly awarded a Pulitzer Prize that year. From that time, Bradford became a widely popular writer. Except for one novel, The Three-Headed Angel (1937), about the first settlers in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, he made Negro life the focus of his work.
Kingdom Coming (1933), a novel about the struggles of the freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, attempted to show the American Negro in historical perspective, as did an earlier novel, This Side of Jordan (1929), a portrayal of the invasion of the plantation world by the machine age. The larger part of Bradford's fictional representation of the Negro, however, fell within the realm of sentimental comedy.
This was true of two further collections of short stories, Ol' King David and the Philistine Boys (1930) and Let the Band Play Dixie (1934), as well as of the many uncollected stories (most of which appeared in Collier's) about life on Little Bee Bend Plantation and the life of the river roustabouts. Bradford's one play, How Come Christmas (1930), was filled with comic pathos. Only John Henry (1930), a collection of stories about a legendary Negro roustabout that are more folklore than fiction, escaped the sentimental.
Bradford interrupted his writing career in 1942-1946 to serve as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve with an assignment to the Bureau of Aeronautics Training, Navy Department, and, in 1946, he accepted a position as visiting lecturer in the English department of Tulane University, which he held until 1948.
In the fall of that year he died at his home in New Orleans--of an amoebic infection contracted while he was serving in the navy off the coast of Africa--and, after cremation, as he had requested, his ashes were scattered on the waters of the Mississippi River.
At the time it seemed that his stories interpreting the life of the Mississippi River valley, notably of its black people, would be as permanent as those of Mark Twain. Not only did they enjoy a large popular audience, but they had won favorable critical commendation.
On November 13, 1948, Bradford died of amebic dysentery, believed to have been contracted while he was stationed in French West Africa in 1943. His cremated remains were spread over the waters of the Mississippi River.
Bradford used to find the substance for his career in the people around him. When he began work as a reporter in 1920, he met the colourful characters of various Southern cities, including the musicians, preachers, and storytellers on the riverfront of New Orleans.
Connections
He was married to Lydia Sehorn of Columbia, Mississippi. After her death several years later he married Mary Rose (Sciarra) Himler of Indianapolis, Indiana. A son, Richard Roark, was born of this second marriage.