African American Toasts Folklore Oral Tradition Poetry Philadelphia Ghetto 1970

  
Deep Down in the Jungle. Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia.

Very good hardcover, in good dustjacket. Tight binding, solid spine, clean unmarked text, chips and tears to dj, repairs with archival tape, now in archival mylar wrapper. Folklore, toasts, African American, Philadelphia, oral tradition. The first book to write about Toasts (Afro-American oral folk poetry). It is the foundation from which you should start in researching Toasts.

The white folklorist Roger Abrahms spent some time in the late 1950s living in the Philadelphia ghetto. He befriends a number of the locals who are fascinated with his tape recorder (this was when they were new) and proceeded to record their folktales, songs, rhymes, and stories. To his credit, Abrahms does not patronize his black sources.

He writes about them and their lives with respect in the chapters preceding the tales. But what makes this controversial is that the tales he records are the rough, uncensored kind that black comedians like Redd Foxx, Rudy Ray Moore, and Richard Pryor would not publicly record until a few years later. Many (middle class) African-Americans at the time saw this kind of humor as an embarrassing throwback that would hurt their chances of integrating into mainstream America, thus it was heavily criticized at the time. AFRICAN AMERICAN TOASTS FOLKLORE ORAL TRADITION POETRY PHILADELPHIA GHETTO 1970.