Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America, by Stacy I. Morgan, is a critical work on African American folklore and its contribution to the folk culture tradition of America. The book, 255 pages in all, is made up of six chapters, with an epilogue, notes, and index sections. Specifically, the author explores the various creative forms a popular ballad assumes in the minds and hands of artists, as they use this ballad to reflect on, for instance, race relations, gender, African American society, and history. This ballad, “Frankie and Johnny,” was a popular song during the early twentieth century, and it originated from a murder that occurred in St. Louis in October 1899, when Frankie Baker, the aggrieved lover, killed in cold blood her pimp boyfriend, Allen Britt, because of his infidelity with another woman, Alice Pryor. A decade after or thereabout, a ballad, “Frankie and Allen,” or “Frankie and Albert,” was composed and became popular on the airwaves. Different versions were released by a number of composers, and Hugh Canon’s version, “He Done Me Wrong” (1904), is generally agreed to be the first version of the song to have copyright status.
Morgan gives a detailed description of the malleability of folklore and of popular culture, with specific reference to the flexibility of the Frankie and Johnny ballad. It reads like this: ballet + folk song + mural + play + motion picture + poem = the Frankie and Johnny ballad. More importantly, the author of this book uses analysis of the ballad to give a historical narrative of the efforts, academic and commercial, to document America’s folklife and folksongs (7-11). Equally important is the author’s quest to satisfy the curiosity of the reader as to why this particular song became a creative and folkloric tool used by artists to reinscribe or challenge ideas about race and gender in American society. The author identifies particular historical factors that enriched African American folk culture, thereby making the popular ballad, “Frankie and Johnny,” a rich source of creative material. These factors were the New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the resurgent nationalism of the twentieth century.
A strong point of the book is the author’s deliberate and sustained effort to mainstream race and gender in his discussion of the folk culture of African Americans. Chapter 1 discusses the transformation of the ballad into a ballet, performed by Ruth Page as Frankie and Bentley Stone as Johnny, on June 19 1938 at the Chicago’s Great Northern Theatre. Moving away from the criticism that greeted the production’s dramatic enactment of prostitution and suggestive dance steps, the chapter then gives an in-depth explanation of the folk-culture environment of America starting in the 1910s. Many creative artists including folklorists were involved in documenting folksongs at the academic and commercial levels, leading to an intense and sustained interest in African American folk culture. Folk music studies back then revolved around the blues, spirituals, jazz, dance music, folk music, and work songs that were mainly produced by African Americans. However, the flourishing of the interest in African American folk culture was undermined by “pervasive assumptions of Negro backwardness” (10). At the commercial level, the high interest in African Americans saw many African Americans record their songs, with the songs gaining much popularity. But these songs and this music were labelled “race records” (13), impairing a cross-cultural growth. But “Frankie and Johnny” could not be classified in this category because it crossed racial lines which led to its being adopted into different creative forms.
Chapter 2 discusses the person and works of the African American, Huddie Ledbetter, an ex-convict who performed blues and folksongs. In his performance of the Frankie and Johnny ballad, he interspersed parts of the song with narratives dictating aspects of the story, and then continued the song thereafter. In the early 1930s, the white folklorists John and Alan Lomax befriended him and took him on tour to many places to perform. They documented his spoken narratives in their book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, and toured with him to perform before mainly white audiences, who were drawn to the allure of the exotic, which Ledbetter, his violent past, and his songs represented. However, Morgan, regards the relationship between the Lomaxes and Ledbetter as being tainted with “racial paternalism” (71), because of the top-down approach adopted by them towards their black beneficiary. In chapter 3, the author directs his attention to the artist, Thomas Hart Benton and his comical painting of the Frankie and Johnny ballad, part of the Missouri government-sponsored creative project, A Social History of the State of Missouri, from 1935 to 1936.
The Frankie and Johnny ballad assumes another form in chapter 4, a play written and directed in 1929 by the white dramatist, John Hurston. The characters in the play are white and Frankie is presented as a woman of unstable emotions. The enigmatic presence of Mae West dominates the pages of chapter 5 in the analysis of the Frankie and Johnny ballad as adapted into a film, She Done Him Wrong, in 1933. The film challenges Victorian morality, racial prejudice, and gender stereotypes, though in a subtle manner. This chapter exhaustively analyzes gender and feminism in the character of Lady Lou (Mae West) as she renounces and knocks down gender myths about women and men. Chapter 6 presents an anti-lynching poem, “Frankie and Johnny” (1932), by Sterling Brown. The poem denounces the Jim Crow brutality against African Americans and the general fear and violence that pervaded the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries America.
The epilogue looks at the different adaptations of the Frankie and Johnny ballad during the 1930s. This period witnessed a confluence of artistic efforts at documenting, adapting, recreating, and composing folk materials, which reflected ideologies, views, fears and philosophies on race, politics, class, gender, art, and culture. Of particular interest to the author, however, is the near absence of women artists in the prevailing creative environment. Apart from the presence and activities of Ethel Waters and the protagonist of the Frankie and Johnny ballad, Frankie Baker in the original story, women are conspicuously absent. This is due to the imposition of the value of respectability; hence, involving oneself, particularly for a woman, in ballads that have prostitution, sex, and murder as their themes, was frowned upon by both white and black people.
In conclusion, Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America discusses the history, social milieu, artistic temper, politics, race, and gender of 1930s America using a popular ballad, “Frankie and Johnny,” as a critiquing tool to explore the complexities that make up the social environment of that era. Equally important is the worrying fact of the erasure of female creative artists from the folk culture heritage, their absence as creators in the prevailing maze of vernacular interpretations of the Frankie and Johnny ballad of that era due to a cultural convention that imposed on them a gendered cloak of respectability.
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[Review length: 1186 words • Review posted on September 13, 2019]