Stars In De Elements

Individual articles from this issue of Black Sacred Music are available for purchase at read.dukeupress.edu/black-sacred-music.

This work is exactly fifty years old, yet it has never been seen by the public. The publishers whom Willis Laurence James contacted after he had completed the manuscript in 1945 missed a grand opportunity to bring out a work of African American folklore as invaluable as the works of Zora Neale Hurston.

That it appears now makes it all the more important as a source of insight into a folk culture of the Deep South that no longer exists as James knew it.