Vera Hall
Vera Hall
The Life That We Live
This chapter describes the recordings of Vera Hall (1902–1964). On October 31, 1940, at the Livingston, Alabama, home of author, painter, and folksong collector Ruby Pickens Tartt, Vera sang “Another Man Done Gone” twice into Lomax's machine. During the first take, the partially filled recording blank ran out of space, abruptly ending the song. The second time, however, Lomax used a fresh side, allowing Vera to include all her verses. Just as she finished, but before he lifted the cutting arm and turned off the microphone, he remarked, “That's perfect.” Lomax's summation saluted more than an unmarred recording. “Another Man Done Gone” became Vera Hall's most celebrated performance. Carl Sandburg recalled listening to it more than a dozen consecutive times during a January 1944 visit to Lomax's Dallas home, later including it in his second folksong anthology and learning it himself. The poet termed it “one of the strikingly original creations of Negro singing art.”
Keywords: Vera Hall, housemaids, Library of Congress recordings, Another Man Done Gone, Ruby Pickens Tartt
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
