Sidney Stripling was an African American folk musician from Kathleen, Georgia. He is believed to have been born in the 19th Century, and died some time between 1941 and 1945.

At the request of Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...

, in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, John Wesley Work III

John Wesley Work III

John Wesley Work III was a composer, educator, choral director, musicologist and scholar of African American folklore and music.-Biography:...

 of Fisk University

Fisk University

Fisk University is an historically black university founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. The world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers started as a group of students who performed to earn enough money to save the school at a critical time of financial shortages. They toured to raise funds to...

 recorded ten of Stripling's songs at the Fort Valley State College Folk Festival in Fort Valley, Georgia

Fort Valley, Georgia

Fort Valley is a city in and the county seat of Peach County, Georgia, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 9,815.Fort Valley is the corporate headquarters of the Blue Bird Corporation, a large manufacturer of buses...

 in March 1941. These are the only known recordings of the artist, and include ballads, spirituals, blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

, dance tunes and children's songs. Stripling sings and plays what may be a four-string banjo in a style typical of the period around 1900.

Available recordings

The recordings of Stripling found in The Archive of Folk Culture are:

AFS 5149

• B1. "Standin' on the Corner Smokin' a Cheap Cigar"

AFS 5154

• A2. "Hammering in My Soul"
• B2. "Whoa, Mule Whoa"

AFS 5155

• A1. "Alabama Red"
• A2. "Coon Gi'nt"

AFS 5161

• A1. "Breakaway"
• A2. "Sevassafool"
• B1. "Where You Been So Long" (with Gus Gibson, guitar)
• B2. "Lookin' For the Bully in This Town"
• B3. "Sally Walker"

The following songs have been published on the CD Deep River of Song: Georgia (Rounder Records 2001), a selection of songs from the Allan Lomax Collection:

• "Sally Walker" (Children's song)
• "Coon Gi'nt" ("Coonjine")
• "Breakaway"
• "Sevassafool" ("Sebastopol")

The song "Breakaway" is featured on the soundtrack of the Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...

 movie Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is a 2002 historical film set in the mid-19th century in the Five Points district of New York City. It was directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan. The film was inspired by Herbert Asbury's 1928 nonfiction book, The Gangs of New...

(2002).

External links

The Allan Lomax Collection