Retail $29.95, paperback

Music/Southern Studies

ISBN 978-0-86554-827-5

MUP/P231

edited by Olivia Solomon and Jack Solomon

When, in 1936, Ruby Pickens Tartt, newly appointed supervisor of the Federal Writers' Project for Sumter County, Alabama, mailed her first collection of spirituals to John Lomax at the Library of Congress in Washington, he replied, "May I come at once to see you with my recorder? Your area must be rich in folk music."

Rich indeed! Sumter County proved to possess and incredibly rich body of African-American folk music, . . . and over the years dozens of folk song scholars and collectors, from John and Alan Lomax to Carl Sandburg, Ben Botkin, John Jacob Niles, Carl Carmer, and Harold Courlander were attracted to the Tartt home in Sumter County in search of this West Alabama county's cultural treasures. No county in the country is more represented in the . . . Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

For nearly fifty years, Ruby Pickens Tartt . . . dedicated her life to seeking out and celebrating the unique and sturdy cultural riches of her home country . . ."Honey in the Rock" -- with its thoughtful and enlightened introduction and comprehensive bibliographic essays -- is an important contribution to African-American folk-song scholarship and an enduring record of West Alabama's significant role in the cultural history of the United States.

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