Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage – Bessie Jones

$59.95

Drawn from the rich African-American heritage, these ring dances, singing plays, chants and riddles emphasize cooperation and sharing as they show children how to have fun with nothing more than their hands and feet, voices, and imaginations.

 

Growing up in the rural South, Bessie Jones sang her way through long hours of field work and child tending, entertaining her young companions with chants and riddles or joining them for a rousing evening of ring dances and singing plays. These songs and games, recorded in Step It Down by folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes, capture the shape and colour of the crowded, impoverished, life-demanding, and life-loving days of the black family of sixty years ago, revealing the strength and vitality of African and slave traditions in black American life.

Step It Down weaves together the lyrics, music, and description of traditional Afro-American children’s songs as well as Jones’s comments on their meaning and “feel.” Whether reciting “Tom, Tom, Greedy Gut” or demonstrating the more complex steps of “Ranky Tank” and “Buzzard’s Lope,” Bessie Jones always viewed the amusements of the young as preparation for adult roles and relationships, and as a teacher, she developed her own philosophy of how a black child is socialized into the larger community. Grounded in the values of black society, her songs taught children about cooperative interaction and mutual concern, not about competition and individual achievement, showing them how to create fun out of nothing more than their hands, feet, voices, and imaginations.

Weight0.525 kg

6 in stock

SKU: 3-101 Category: