New at PennSound: James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson

Thanks to the archival and digital work of Chris Mustazza, who is the editor of this new material, we at PennSound are now able to announce a new page of recordings of James Weldon Johnson. Most readers who might otherwise know Johnson's work well have never heard the man's voice. The recordings Chris located, researched and digitized were made on December 24, 1935, at Columbia University, recorded by Barnard professors George W. Hibbitt and W. Cabell Greet, lexicologists and scholars of American dialects. PennSound wishes to thank the staff at Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, especially Thai Jones, Jennifer Lee, Devon Maeve Nevola, Jane Siegel, and Karla Nielsen, for helping us to make these recordings available.We acknowledge permission from Jill Rosenberg Jones and the James Weldon Johnson estate to present these recordings for free to anyone.

“The recordings here were originally made on aluminum platters,” writes Chris in his editorial note. “They were subsequently dubbed to reel-to-reel tapes by the Library of Congress in the 1970s. These digitizations are made from the reels, which are stored at Columbia University. I made the decision to present the recordings in the order in which Columbia numbered the aluminum platters, which may or may not be the same sequence used by Johnson and Hibbitt, except for where I reordered them to keep parts of the same poem together. Sequence numbers, as well as record numbers, are available in the file names.”

PennSound’s James Weldon Johnson page offers recordings of fifteen poems and links to the text of those poems. There are also several recorded brief comments about some of the poems made by Johnson.