Negro Folksongs in Michigan from the Repertoire of J.D. Suggs

Abstract

In Calvin township, a Negro community in southwestern Michigan, I met James Douglas Suggs and recorded 170 of his tales in 1952 and 1953. These have been published in my Negro Folktales In Michigan (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) and Negro Tales from Pine Bluff. Arkansas and Calvin, Michigan (Bloomington, Ind., 1958). Suggs was then sixty five, a Mississippi-born wanderer who had lived in thirty-nine states.