Frankie and Johnny were lovers, O lordy how they could love, Swore to be true to each other, true as the stars above;... He was her man but he done her wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Frankie threw back her kimono, she took out her forty-four. Root-a-toot-toot, three times she shot, right through that hardwo...od door.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you think it will only add one sprig to the wreath the country twines to bind the brows of my hero, I will run the risk of bein...g sneered at by those who criticize female productions of all kinds. ...Though a female, I was born a patriot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »