Sharecropper’s Troubadour

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction: Music, Memory, and History

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 1-10

3. “Freedom After ‘While’ ”: Life and Labor in the Jim Crow South

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 11-29

4. Raggedy, Raggedy Are We: Sharecropping and Survival

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 31-46

5. The Planter and the Sharecropper: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 47-70

6. There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land: Terror in Arkansas

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 71-93

7. Roll the Union On: Interracial Organizing in Missouri

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 95-117

8. Getting Gone to the Promised Land: California

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 119-140

9. “I’m So Glad to Be Here Again”: The Return of John Handcox

   • Michael K. Honey

   Pages 141-156

10. Back Matter

    Pages 157-210

    PDF

Folk singer and labor organizer John Handcox was born to illiterate sharecroppers, but went on to become one of the most beloved folk singers of the prewar labor movement. This beautifully told oral history gives us Handcox in his own words, recounting a journey that began in the Deep South and went on to shape the labor music tradition.

• Africa
• African
• America
• freedom
• happening
• history
• history of literature
• liberty
• literature
• memory
• music
• tradition

“In Sharecropper’s Troubadour, Michael Honey has deftly recovered the remarkable story of John Handcox. Honey provides a powerful and compelling account that takes Handcox’s personal and family story and intertwines it with the STFU’s fight against the racism and economic exploitation of southern sharecropping. … By using oral history, Honey allows the rich and deep nuances of the personal perspective that makes history so compelling to rise to the fore. … Sharecropper’s Troubadour is an outstanding work.” (Scott Holzer, Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 110 (4), July, 2016)

'John's story will not be forgotten, now that Michael Honey has got it down on paper. As long as human beings like to sing...I believe his songs will live on. In that sense, John will never die.' - Pete Seeger, from the Foreword

"A deeply moving account of the life and struggles of John Handcox who became known as 'the sharecropper's troubadour' for the songs he wrote and sang at union meetings in Arkansas, Mississippi, and throughout the nation. Honey's book is essential reading to understand the history of labor and black music in the rural south." - William Ferris, author of The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists

"John L. Handcox, the unsung radical guitar-strumming storyteller, has finally found the person to tell his story. Michael Honey not only paints a lyrical portrait of Handcox but delivers a powerful history of a people, a movement, and a culture that birthed the Freedom Songs of the modern era." - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"An arresting account of the exemplary life of an American genius. Honey's and Handcox's voices mix in a unique combination of oral history and scholarly research that reminds us of the centrality of music, and of poetry, to US freedom movements." - David Roediger, co-author of The Production of Difference

Michael Honey is the Fred T. and Dorothy G. Haley Endowed Professor of the Humanities at The University of Washington, USA, and was a 2011 Guggenheim fellow. He is author of numerous award-winning books on labor, race relations, and Southern history, including Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (Norton, 2007). His interviews and writing regularly appear in national media such as The Atlantic, NPR/Fresh Air, The Nation, History News Network, ColorLines, and many other print and digital publications.

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