Ida
Goodson: North Florida Blues Woman, an Ethnography
“Many a
night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shake, Glitter like a swarm
of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. “ Alfred
Tennyson in Locksley Hill.
Introduction
The Seven Sisters lit up my childhood sky
in Detroit and when our beloved baby sitter, Lois Carotta took my brother
Skipper and me on walks, she would point up near Orion and tell us the story of
the Pleiades, seven dots of light in the summer sky. I was amazed to find out
that the stars had stories. This story of the Pleiades, she told us, was about
the seven daughters of Atlas the Titan and Pleione an Oceanid who was the protector
of sailing. The Pleiades were Maia, Electra, Alcyone, Taygete, Asterope,
Celaeno and Merope. They hadn’t always been in the sky, she said. Once they
were mortals and when one day the hunter Orion met them in Boetia, he feel
madly in love and pursued them using his dog Sirius. Jupiter took pity and he
turned them into pigeons and they flew away. Later they became stars in the
night sky. (Herzberg, p. 132).
This story of seven girls who were sisters
was the beginning of my lifelong interest in Greek and Roman mythology. I
devoured the ancient myths and came to see them as explanations for the
archetypal individuals I saw over and over in my adult psychotherapy practice.
Working with people took on a special secret meaning for me. I thought that
these stories were about the repeating patterns of family history, of
personalities that had always been around. I thought perhaps these stories were
invented when ancient people looked around them and described their fellow
human beings. Truthfully, I still believe this about human beings.
I knew a family with seven daughters would
be a special one. But I hadn’t known a seventh daughter until I came across Ida
Goodson and her music one hot late spring day in White Springs, Florida. I was
still relatively new to Florida. I was a graduated student in the Social Work
program, and at the time I first laid eyes on Ida, (really just the top of her
head over the piano; she was a short woman) she was pounding out a ragtime song
whose name I do not remember on the stage at the Florida Folk Festival. It was
1983. I didn’t yet understand nor have a connection to the musical community in
Florida. I had spent most of my time tending to my son who was ten weeks old
when I first came to graduate school, and in the library. I was newly divorced.
I was on my own trying to achieve a PhD, a lifelong ambition. But I had heard
about the festival and off I went one Saturday to take in the music and have a
respite from graduate school drudgery. My son was in a pram and I didn‘t know
anyone at the Festival.
Music was my avocation and I had spent
five years on the faculty at The University of Arkansas teaching undergraduate
social work prior to coming to Florida. But the truth was, I landed in that job
only because I wanted to live in Arkansas and immerse myself in mountain music.
Which I did for five glorious years. My professorship was always a sideline, it
seemed. And more truth here. It was boring teaching social work to
undergraduate students. Finding truth here, (for that is what I have decided is
the focus of my scholarship about Ida Goodson), making music and discovering
music had always been for me, the most interesting thing about my life’s
pursuits.
At the time I first heard her music, Ida didn’t hold mythological importance to
me. I didn’t know she was a seventh daughter. I just knew she played vigorous
ragtime piano. I didn’t know she was still subject to racial stereotyping and discrimination
in the 1980’s on that stage and amongst the principals of the Festival. I just
knew she loved making music. A musician knows this about another musician. It’s
a message that is carried in the rhythms, the cadences, and the tempos of one’s
music. I could hear she loved music. I appreciated her but I was not a piano
player and I was unschooled about piano styles. I couldn’t yet tell you what
ragtime piano was, academically or musically. I knew I liked it, though. And
that was that, for twenty years. Until 2007, when I took my second course and hopefully, not my last course in graduate
English from Dr.Jerrilyn McGregory.
In the process, I also learned much more
about Florida history, and the history of African American women musicians in
America which I had begun to study in earnest with Dr. McGregory‘s
guidance, as I researched both Veronika
Jackson and Elizabeth Cotten and completed my first attempts at becoming an
ethnographer and folklorist. And I applied my early interest in feminism to a
study of Black feminist theory, an area of feminist theory I was totally unaware of despite my own personal history as a feminist
in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan in the 1970’s, until my first course
with Dr. McGregory.
Once I began this study, I discovered that
I still knew very little about the process of ethnographic research. But after all, learning what I don’t already
know is what being a student once again, is about. As of today, I haven’t yet
read all the research that I know exists about Ida Goodson and her sisters. For
instance, I have yet to speak directly with Bruce Boyd Rraeburn, keeper of The Jazz Archives at Tulane, where I know
exists several transcribed oral interviews with Sadie and Ida. I have not
gotten my hands on the one other recording
reportedly published by CSA, which Ida completed, and which I believe is
at the Archives. I have not yet listened
to the more numerous recordings of her sister Billie Pierce and her husband
DeDe Pierce. I have not yet had conversations with individuals who may have
known her but about whom I am unaware.
What follows is my ethnographic
study thus far, of Ida Alberta Goodson
born November 23, 1909 and her life, times, and music. I have included this
introduction because when I discovered she was a seventh daughter, for me she
took on mythological significance. I had found my modern connection to this
story of my childhood. This was thus why
this woman was someone I had to know more about.
I didn’t meet Royce Goodson Johnson the
day I first went to Pensacola. She was reportedly at work when I met and
interviewed Harold T. Andrews and Norman
Vickers in November. When I first made
telephone contact with Royce, who was Ida’s “sweet baby girl” (Goodson,
1981)and her third child, she was in the
middle of moving house and she didn’t have time to talk at length. She asked if
I had read the record jacket notes by Doris Dyen. I had. But once I journeyed to Pensacola and met
Harold and Norm, I felt as though I was beginning to make some progress in
piecing together the facts about Ida
Goodson in the three and a half months of my study of her. It is a process I
have taken to with great enthusiasm and joy I think, because as a psychotherapist of thirty five
years experience, I am still fascinated and inspired to know individual human
beings thoroughly, every day.
As “persons in situation” I have been taught to understand what human
beings are about. Herein is my study
thus far, of this seventh daughter of Wiregrass country origins studied in the
context of what it was like to be a Black woman musician in the early twentieth
century of northwest Florida from a family of seven daughters.
Early History
The L & N railroad line expanded into
Florida in the late nineteenth century. In 1883, the L&N completed a
170-mile rail link from Pensacola to Chattahoochee, Florida.
There was great stores of
cotton, mahogany, tobacco, pine lumber, and turpentine to haul out of the
Florida panhandle as America grew and its need for natural resources
mushroomed. Until that time the principle means of transportation in the
panhandle was riverboats, horse and buggy or mule teams, and walking. Wiregrass
country was an untapped wilderness of natural resources. Great pine forests
stretched for miles. The bays and estuaries teemed with fish. Cotton was still
king but the Civil War was over,
plantations were broken up and Black slaves were free from manumission to
fashion lives more in keeping with the universal forces of the human spirit, to make families, to stay
together and to seek a better life using their talents.
Religious and spiritual beliefs and
practices had soothed human suffering for eons prior to this point in history.
Only the metaphor for deliverance changed. In the music in this country, you could see it become a “train to glory“
(Solomon, 1991) as tracks were carved out of swampy wilderness and railroads
began to crisscross the land. Why the
train became such a powerful symbol of deliverance in spiritual music remains a
mystery. Riverboats never achieved this feat. Neither did the horse and buggy.
Hymns such as “When The Train Rolls up” (see appendix) described the means for
reaching heaven at the end of earthly journey.
I may be blind
en I can not see,
But I’ll meet you at the station
When the train rolls up”
In reality, the railroads brought industry
and jobs to the panhandle. In this context we can begin to imagine Ida
Goodson’s early life. Her father Hamilton Madison Goodson secured a job with
the L&N Railroad somewhere near River Junction in Gadsden county around the
turn of the century. Gadsden county was
a big producer of tobacco so many people in the county worked on tobacco farms
or plantations before they began to break up. He was reportedly a porter and
his run was from River Junction to Pensacola (Dyen, 1981). He and his family
lived next in Marianna. Although I do
not yet know many facts about his early life, I can imagine that he was an
intelligent man who understood how to take advantage of the opportunities
afforded him. He found a woman with education who was reportedly a school
teacher and who played piano, as did he. How they learned to play I still do
not know, but they both must have had musical gifts. Why had they been living
in Gadsden county? Were their own parents slaves? They could have been since
the timing is about right. How did they come to be in River Junction? How did
they meet? These questions came to me one by one. Many are as yet, unanswered.
Madison
had married (whether formally or informally I do not know) a woman named
Sara Jenkins (as per Doris Dyen’s
interview with Ida in 1981) and they began having daughters. However, in another source I uncovered some
conflicting information about her parents. In Florida’s Panhandle Life an
article by Lester Riley names her mother as Sara White Goodson. He notes that
her mother died in 1921 and her father died in 1927. He says at twenty one Ida
had a day job at the Burgoyne Lumber & Hardware Co. in Pensacola. Such
discrepancies in my data collection sources make me realize how much room for
error exists in the process of collecting information from various sources.
At any rate, Madison decided to move his
family to Pensacola by 1909 when his last daughter was born. All the other
daughters were born in Gadsden County.
In 1927, The L&N passenger depot was at Alcanez and Wright Streets
on what was once the original wharf of Pensacola. The L&N roundhouse was at
10th and Wright Street. I visited the original passenger depot with
Norm Vickers. It is fully restored now and houses a hotel and many historic
photographs. The family lived according to Ida, in the four hundred block of
Terragona Street, within walking distance of the station and in what was
reportedly a largely African American neighborhood. Ida mentions the Tanyard, in her discussion
with Dyen in 1981 and notes that they did not live in this neighborhood, which
was renowned for its Creole population. It was southwest of her neighborhood
and nearer to the original Pensacola wharf.
The family home has since been razed to make way for I110 north. A
business and parking lot now sits at the site which is almost under the
expressway. Royce said a family home was in the fourteen hundred block of
Terragona.
Pensacola in 1909 was booming. The lumber
and turpentine industry, the movement of cotton and other raw materials and the
natural harbor of Pensacola had made the city a major port town. In the year
Ida was born, the docks were lined with three masted schooners which were the
principle means of moving natural resources from the L&N railroad to other
parts of Florida and the Gulf Coast. There were some Ford automobiles on the
dirt streets and the trolley cars had been running since 1906 in the downtown.
They ran until 1932. The churches of
Pensacola were numerous and Madison is reported to have become a deacon at
Mount Olive Baptist church a few blocks from his family home. They were a
solidly middle class Black family for that period of time. This can only mean
that both Madison and Sara were intelligent, hardworking, and intent on raising
religiously trained young ladies. The girls may have attended one of the
segregated schools for Black children at that time but I am not yet sure exactly
where they attended school. This home had a piano, Ida says in her interview
for the Florida Folklife record and it was a focal point for the Goodson
sisters.
The most widely circulated story about the
girls and their piano playing at home which I read in several spots and which
Royce also related to me was that they would play religious music when their parents were home to listen and then when they went, out the girls would play
ragtime, and other secular styles and post a lookout to watch for when a parent
would come down the street. At that point they would launch back into something
acceptable such as “What a friend we had in Jesus.“ I remembered Elizabeth
Cotten telling a similar story about her own music and laughed to think that
girls had to hide their forays into the wider world, even then. Who among us
baby boomers didn’t have parents who disliked our buddy Holly, Elvis, and Bob
Dylan records?
My imagination about Ida’s mother’s early
history was fired by a comment made by Charles Chamberlain in his musical
presentation of the life and music of the Goodson sisters. He says Ida’s
paternal grandfather lived in River Junction and was reportedly a Cherokee with
a long dark braid who owned a parrot. This parrot would yell ”Get outta my garden,
get outta my garden” when someone would approach the yard. Chamberlain also
said the parrot would say, “Go get a cord a wood”, and sometimes visitors would then bring a
cord of wood to their grandfathers home, in confusion.
Chamberlain
also says that according to Sadie and Ida, Sara was from Marianna. He further states in his 2002 presentation that the
Sadie said her mother had Spanish relatives. In apparent contradiction to
this, Ida says in her interview for her
Folklife record jacket that her mother had come originally from Georgia. The family was of tri-racial origins it would
seem, from this information. I filed this fact away in my mind and resolved to
think more about its meaning later.
Then in my reading of Wiregrass Country I
came across a term I had never before encountered, “Domineckers.“ McGregory
said the white community in Wiregrass country called triracial individuals this
term, in derision. I began to research this term. The term “Dominicker” a
pejorative racist term for mixed race individuals, nevertheless has informed me
about racial issues of the time. A dominicker is a type of chicken with several
colors but in this context it referred to American Indian, African American and
White mixed race individuals who lived in a small community in what is now
southern Holmes county and originated before the Civil War ( Hood, 2006 )
. These individuals experienced a great
deal of racism and their children attended segregated schools in the Ponce
DeLeon community in which they were most numerous because Florida’s Jim Crow
laws prevented integrated schooling of mixed race individuals .
The Dominicker settlement was primarily in
the southwest corner of Holmes County near the Choctawhatchee River. It is also
written that before the Civil War in about 1857 several of these families went
west and populated parishes in Louisiana coming to be known as “Redbones” whose
origins were kept secret. (Hood, 2006). I researched the Dominickers because I
had not heard the term prior to reading Wiregrass Country. But extant
descriptions of the Goodson family lineage do not make reference to this group
of individuals, and the Dominicker’s Indian ancestors were most likely of The
Creek confederation, such as Yuchis or some other tribe.
After the original bands of native
Americans were wiped out by diseases contracted by the first white explorers,
the Wiregrass area was gradually repopulated with tribes whose names were
sometimes identified with the Alabama-West Florida-South Georgia area such as
the Chatots, Yuchis (Euchees, Uchees), Okchais, Tawasas, Pawoktis,
Apalachees, Yamasees (Emussees), Apalachicolas, Amacanos, Muklasas,
Muskogees, Hitchitis, Sawoklis (Sabacolas), Chiahas (Chehaws), Eufalas,
Koasatis (Coosadas, Choushattas, Shatis), Pensacolas, Mobiles, Pakanas,
Tukabachees, and Seminoles.
Apalachees, Yamasees (Emussees), Apalachicolas, Amacanos, Muklasas,
Muskogees, Hitchitis, Sawoklis (Sabacolas), Chiahas (Chehaws), Eufalas,
Koasatis (Coosadas, Choushattas, Shatis), Pensacolas, Mobiles, Pakanas,
Tukabachees, and Seminoles.
Nevertheless, if Ida’s grandfather was
reportedly Cherokee and he married a Black woman. Madison himself must have experienced a
particular kind of racism reserved for mixed race individuals. Was his father actually Cherokee? Why wasn’t
he more likely to be of the Creek nation, which encompassed the dominant Indian
peoples in this area. Cherokees had been a North Georgia nation and most of them
were driven west on the Trail of Tears. If he was Cherokee, how did he find his
way to North Florida? I recalled an old woman I met many years ago in my own
ramblings, in a junk store near Marianna whose name was Mabel McCoy. She was
weaving a yellow pine basket and when I asked her about it she said she was
Cherokee and had learned it from her mother. She then taught me the basics of
basket weaving with yellow pine needles
and embroidery thread. So I had met at least one Cherokee still alive in the
area in which it is reported that Ida’s Cherokee grandfather resided.
I also wondered as I do with most of the
people I meet with American Indian ancestors (including my own son) what
personality characteristics might be attributed to this part of their heritage.
Mitochondrial DNA studies by Brian Sykes suggest that most American Indian
peoples were of Asian descent having crossed the land bridge of what is now the
Bering Strait about twelve thousand years ago. Ida herself is quite light
skinned, as were several of her sisters. Indeed, Chamberlain notes that when
Sadie tired of playing music in New Orleans, she migrated to New York to
achieve a nursing certificate and worked for a time in a Jewish hospital,
passing as a Jewish woman and even learning Yiddish.
So, I thought, if Ida’s grandfather was Cherokee, Ida and her
descendants would have a DNA lineage of Asian and African combination. If she
also had white ancestors, as many “children of strangers” did from plantation
slave history, she would have been of this “tri-racial” mixture. If her white
ancestors were Spanish, her white lineage might have gone back to the original
explorations. I think of personality as a combination of nature and nurture.
And I think of personality blossoming from the vast experiences of our ancestors.
What makes one person musical? What makes another good at growing things? What
makes still another explore in restless seeking? What makes one love to dance?
We give our ancestors credit for many of our own traits. Is this our
unconscious understanding of nature in the shaping of our personalities? What
inherited traits informed Ida’s life? We will never know for sure but these
questions always swirl in my mind about each new individual I meet. Ida is no
exception. I believe that diversity strengthens us as a human family despite
the hardships associated with facing society as mixed race individuals. But
maybe such private ideas don’t belong in someone’s ethnography.
The seven daughters were, in order of their births were Maggie (or
Mazie), Mabel, Dalla (or Della), Sadie, Edna, Wilhelmina (Billie) and Ida. Ida
has said she learned to play watching and listening to her three next oldest
sisters, who all had musical careers of one sort or another. She even demonstrates
on her Folklife Project album how she learned one and two finger blues playing
when she was very young. The musical lives of her sisters is also varied and
extensive.
I think Ida’s future course was most
likely defined first by the death of her mother in 1921 when she was about
twelve. We all don’t know when “old death” will call us home but the universal
knowledge about how other’s deaths change us irrevocably is at the heart of our
shared humanity. Ida became a motherless child at that tender age. Her father
was still alive but he was frequently away on the railroad. One by one her
sisters had died or left home. According to Dyen, she and her sisters worked
for and were cared for by a white landlady named Dora Talley who had a boarding home (Dyen, liner notes,
1982).
By 1926 or 1927, her father had died along
with her two eldest sisters (Dyen, liner notes). Who was left to support this family? The
answer is no one. Then one by one, Sadie, Edna, Wilhelmina and Ida left the
boarding house to make grownup lives. Sadie was the first, then Edna,
Wilhelmina and lastly Ida.
When her father passed away, Ida
was only sixteen years old at this point in time. It was the height of
the roaring twenties and she was an orphan. But she could play piano, she was
known as “one of the Goodson sisters” who were already known to the musical
world of Pensacola as skilled piano
players and musicians of all sorts had been troubadours in each century for
eons. In this century they traveled the
Gulf Coast Highway with medicine shows, minstrel and vaudeville shows,
circuses, and played the turpentine camp
jooks, the clubs, hotels, and halls that sprung up in boom towns like
Pensacola. The sisters were readily called upon to play piano for many traveling
musical groups and both Sadie and Billie were said to have played for Bessie
Smith before Ida did as well.
In a pinch, it became known that a
Goodson sister could play piano for a traveling show. And who was there to stop
the girls from taking this direction with their music? Their beloved religious and proper parents were dead. Ida
went to work first for The Mighty Wiggle Carnival. She was all of eighteen and
during that year she also had her first child.
Ida had four children in all, Theodora b.
1927, Danny b. 1936, Royce b. 1946 and Sammy, b.1951. She says at the time of her interview with
Dyen that Theodora had been up north for about forty years and had seven
children of her own and Danny was living
in Pittsburgh. Danny graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, where
Harold Andrews was a music and biology teacher. Sammy had his own band in
Atlanta called “Arson” in 1981 and he was proficient on drums, sax, trumpet,
and trombone. Royce was her sweet baby girl and she grew up to have five
children of her own. She was living in California at the time of this interview
and Ida recalled receiving a gift basket from her which she cherished. She also
sounded as though she felt most cherished by Royce and indeed, Royce paid for
her gravestone, which I learned from the Escambia County Vital Statistics
Office and the Holy Cross Cemetery. Royce is now in Pensacola and when I spoke
briefly to her for the first time she made a reference to her grandchildren as
well.
Children will often curtail your wandering
ways if you are a traveling musician and it appears as though Ida sought work
in and around Pensacola for the rest of her life at least in part, to raise her
children and to provide them with a stable upbringing, at which she evidently
succeeded.
Early Venues
Their was a great deal of diversity in the venues for music in this era
as humans sought novelty, entertainment,
and respite from back-breaking work The
Circus was one of those diversions. The Mighty Wiggle Carnival was a circus.
According to Paul
Oliver in Songsters and
Saints,
“Traveling minstrel, carnival and circus
shows enabled people even in the smallest townships and remoter rural areas to
hear the current songs of the day as well as older favorites of the minstrel
tradition and from the ragtime era.” p 81.
Edna had first played for this circus as
had Wilhelmina and both were reported to have toured Florida with it. Ida inherited the job when her sisters went
on to other venues, out of town. This is how Ida must have first been exposed
to the wider world of music, beyond what her talented sisters brought into
their home before the family dispersed. But she has said she never toured far
from Pensacola until late in her life. So she only played for this circus when
it was in or near her town. Another one
of her early venues was The Belmont Street which was at 119 East Belmont
Street. This area of the city was the Black merchants area and it thrived with
prosperous Black owned businesses in the 20’s and 30’s.
White women had only won the vote in 1923
and Black women would be many years behind them in winning these important
symbols of freedom. They were domestics, they taught in black schools if they
were teachers, they were midwives or nurses and not much else was open to any women
as a means of support, let alone Black women. A skill like music opened doors
and created better opportunities to make a living for Black women and many were
already at it. But Ida was by then also a mother. My need to speak with Royce is still quite urgent,
I thought at this point. But how could I
ask such delicate questions as the ones I had in mind regarding Ida‘s love life
and marital history? I felt this part of her history was crucial in
understanding forces which directed her choice as a musician to stay in and
around Pensacola for most of her life. Her other sisters hadn’t done this. They
scattered to the four winds as musicians. Ida was so gifted, without reading
music she could hear a piece once and reproduce it on the piano. She could change
the tempo, or metre and change the sound of a spiritual song. Because she
stayed in Pensacola her entire life, her musical audience was limited and her
talent was never nationally or internationally recognized.
The Importance
of Dance and Dance Music
Throughout Ida’s interview she has
emphasized that she played for dancers in the clubs, halls, and jooks that were
her early venues. She played many
waltzes for her white audiences all through her career. But she was a child of
the roaring twenties and dancing was a highly valued pastime and a developed
art form. Ida mentions the Charleston. Other dances associated with the African
American tradition included “cutting the pigeon wing”, “buck dancing” and
“knocking the back step”. There were also jubas, shuffles, and jigs. (Winans,
1990). Cakewalks were popular. I also discovered that while Ida referred to
this dancing style in passing, it had its origins in the African American slave
community as a parody of white slave owners (retrieved Dec.9, 2007,htttp://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/cakewalks.php.
Music to dance the Cakewalk by was syncopated. Syncopation figured largely in
Ida’s early ragtime style and she adapted it to her spiritual music as well
when she played spiritual music with an up tempo. (expand)
Harold Andrews
In the process of inquiry, I was told by a
lady who answered phones for the Mount Olive Baptist Church that Harold Andrews
was still alive and she gave me his phone number. I knew that Harold had played
on Ida’s only recording but I was not aware of how influential he was in the
Pensacola community, both in terms of his music and with regard to his many
accomplishments. I decided he deserved a section of his own in this paper.
When I decided to contact the Jazz Society
of Pensacola to see if I could get some informant information, a jazz
enthusiast, player and past president Norm Vickers contacted me. He was very
helpful and when I told him I intended to come over to Pensacola and visit the
gravesite, he offered to meet me and to help me out. To this point I had spent
hours in the State Archives and in the State Library but I was eager to
interview live informants. What followed was a full day of activities with Dr.
Vickers.
I met with Dr. Vickers at the Holy Cross
Cemetery. With some help from the cemetery attendant, we located the
gravestone. Dr. Vickers also showed my GG Grice’s gravestone. Grice was a noted
Pensacola jazz musician. We then went on to the nursing home which he said
Harold was staying in because he had become infirm and his wife could no longer
care for him at home. They told us Harold was at Baptist Hospital. Harold was
asleep during our first trip to the hospital. We decided to visit him later
that day when he might be more alert.
We then went to lunch at a downtown café
which supports local jazz musicians. He also introduced me to the general
manager of the Seville Quarter, Jack Williams. The JSOP was having a monthly
Jazz Gumbo there Monday night and he suggested I attend. We talked extensively
about my research and Dr. Vickers own involvement in jazz music and historical
research. Dr. Vickers plays jazz harmonica and visits Harold on a regular basis
at the nursing home. His wife is President of the Pensacola Historical Society
and he is a retired physician with an interest in historical research. He is a
very energetic man and he took me all over town to see various landmarks he
thought I might be interested in. We visited the original L&N train depot.
This depot has been enlarged and gentrified. We looked at historical Pensacola
photographs in the depot. He took me by the corner on street where Ida’s home
was. The home is now gone and a business backs ups to the I110 expressway which
cut through this neighborhood and signaled the demise of Ida’s family home. We
then went to the offices of the JSOP and viewed portions of the video completed
in 2002 which was a retrospective of Ida Goodson which Charles Chamberlain and
Bruce Boyd Braeburn had produced. He
arranged to have it digitized and sent to me in support of my research. I also
visited the Pensacola Public Library.
We then returned to the hospital and Harold
was awake. He was being visited by two of his grandchildren who allowed me to
converse with Harold. He is ninety one years old and is quite frail but he was
alert and delighted to have visitors. I did not take notes during this
conversation as I wanted to be unobtrusive and not tire Harold out.
He told me he had taught at Booker T.
Washington High School for thirty five years. He taught biology, was director
of the Marching Band and taught music as well. Booker T. Washington High school was first
opened in 1916 as a segregated black school and remained that way until 1970.
He was divorced from his first wife who didn’t like his music and found a woman
whom he has been married to for over sixty years. His granddaughter said she
was an energetic woman who did yoga and could put her legs over her head!
His
grandson also said Harold had a very extensive jazz library in his house which
was legendary among jazz musicians. I also learned from an article in the State
Archives file about Harold and Wally Mercer that he was in a band at Tuskegee
Institute called The Royal Syncopators. He began piano and violin lessons when
he was six years old but his favorite is the bass fiddle. He said in this
article it was like holding someone close to you when you played it and he
liked that. He is said to have played nine years in a band with Ida. Surely,
the gigs he arranged helped to anchor Ida’s musical life in Pensacola, along
with her need to raise her children.
Harold was a member and leader in a club
called The Royal Entertainers in Pensacola.
This was a group of about
fifteen male musicians which grew to 30 and Ida was inducted as a member when
the club began to open up to women. They met to drink and socialize at 3221
North Alcaniz St. This club was also instrumental in coordinating the first
Black voter registration drive in Pensacola in 1948. The also supported sickle
cell anemia research, and did food baskets in the community and were considered a social and a civic
club. He said of music, “People who don’t like music of some sort are lost!”
(Pensacola News Journal, 1981)
Harold thought he knew me and I suggested
that it might be a spiritual connection since I had not met him previously. His
granddaughter nodded and we all smiled. His grandson was in attendance. He is a
handsome young man with a rolling DJ business. He said he had inherited
Harold’s interest in DJ work. In the early 1930’s Harold hosted a radio program
on WNYC in New York and attended the New York School of Music (liner notes,
Dyen, 1981). His granddaughter said she
had inherited Harold’s artistic skills and told me Harold had been a sign
painter. Some of his signs were still on various buildings around Pensacola.
Harold also told me he designed the plans for his church and helped to build
it. It is an Episcopal church called St. Cyprian at 500 N. Reus Street. Later
that evening I was driving around the historical Black business district which
is bounded by La Rua on the east side
and ran right into the church. Although it was night, I took some
photographs and I have included them in my research.
Telephone
Conversation with Royce Goodson Johnson 12-10-07
I had some initial difficulty connecting
with Royce Goodson Johnson. She was moving her home and her life was in a
temporary upheaval. Then she returned my call from her new telephone. Royce was
born in 1946. She confirmed that her grandfather’s name was Hamilton Madison
Goodson and that he had a Cherokee father. Sara, his wife had Native American,
white and African American relatives. Danny was born in 1936, Royce was born in
1946, and her youngest brother was born in 1951. Ida had birthed children
beginning in 1927 and ended her birthing years in 1951!
Royce said that her mother had Alzheimer’s
disease in her last years and that she had lived with Royce who was her caregiver
for her last five years and that Ida had died in her home. I remembered that Norm Vickers had told me
that once near the end of her life he had picked Ida up for a performance and
when he returned her to her home she didn’t have her key. Ida told him she
could get one from the neighbor who it turned out, had been deceased for
several years. She couldn’t get back into her home and Norm had left her with a
neighbor. Royce also said that Theodora was estranged from the rest of the
siblings and that it had something to do with difficulties with Ida near the
end of her life. She wasn’t sure where Theodora was.
Royce also told me that Theodora’s father
and Ida did not stay together and that Ida was raising Theodora by herself. She
told me that her own father’s name was Roy L. Thomas and confirmed that the
headstone I had seen next to Ida‘s with his name on it was indeed her father. I
believe he is also Danny’s father but I am not sure about whether he was
Sammy’s father. Royce’s father was not a
musician but was an aircraft mechanic who had worked at the Pensacola Navy base
nearby.
Royce also told me she had gone to Booker
T. Washington High School and that she had had Harold Andrews as a music
teacher. She played clarinet at that time. She has also played organ but wasn’t
playing anything currently. She sang in some church choirs as a younger woman.
She said her mother loved to have her singing with her and encouraged it. Royce
gave me the impression that Ida took great pleasure in her as a girl generally
I thought she was very proud of Sammy, Danny and Royce from the ways she spoke
about them in the Dyen interviews. Danny went to the University of Pennsylvania
and he lives in Pittsburgh. He had also just had some surgery and was
convalescing. Sammy went to FAMU.
She said Ida had gone through fourth or fifth
grade but she couldn’t recall the name of her school. Since the Jim Crow laws
were in effect at that time, I said she must have gone to one of the private
African American schools for younger children. I had seen some photographs of
children in several of the better known schools and made a mental note to
return to the State Library to review them.
She said that she had arranged for the
burial of several of her relatives around Ida in the Holy Cross Cemetery but
that she couldn’t afford to buy everyone a headstone as yet so several were
unmarked graves. She said her stepmother was buried there so apparently her
father had remarried. She told me she had an aunt by the name of Lucille
Wineglass and that she also had several other aunts. Edna, an aunt, and her
stepmother were evidently buried at Holy Cross Cemetery. Royce seems to have
been the daughter who was not only caregiver to her mother in her last years
but the family member most interested in arranging for the various family
members to be buried near one another. She was listed as having bought and paid
for Ida’s burial and headstone according to the cemetery records. Both her
grandparents were buried in Pensacola cemeteries but she wasn’t sure where they
were and would try to find out for me. She thought they were old city
cemeteries.
Royce herself had a brain aneurysm
several years ago and had had brain surgery.
She had no sense of taste,
she said, and she had some trouble remembering things and my questions were
challenging her to remember things she had some trouble calling forth from her
memory but offered to have Danny fax some of the family information to my
office. Royce turned away from the Baptist church and became a Catholic saying,
“Sometimes you resist the church you are brought up in.”
I asked her if she was still working and she said yes, that she substituted in the
Santa Rosa schools and also
did other jobs for the school system when called upon such as cafeteria work or
whatever they had for her. She told me she had won several beauty contests as a
young girl and that she was crowned in one contest associated with the Martin
Luther King ceremonies associated with naming the Boulevard. I said I had seen
an article about one contest.
When I checked again in the Archives the
newspaper article I had read was in fact, about Royce’s own daughter, who had
won a Miss Teenage Pensacola contest and judging by her photographs Angela
Yvette Johnson is a real beauty. Royce has five children in all. One daughter
lives in Jacksonville and is a nurse practitioner. She has two sons and another
daughter in Pensacola and her other daughter lives nearby in Pace. All of her
children were born at home and she was attended by a midwife she referred to as
Sister Fannie Mae Leggamy. She
described herself as the family “peacekeepr” and that her mother Ida was also
like that. She has been divorced for twenty years and felt that she would not
ever remarry.
After this conversation I returned to the
State Archives to reread the materials in the Ida Goodson file associated with
the Folklife Archives. I reread everything I had read early in the beginning of
my research and I found that it made much more sense because I was able to
integrate the material in the transcribed interviews into my growing knowledge
of Ida and her life. I reread the material piecing together in my mind more of
Ida’s history.
Ida never drove an automobile so Royce
often drove her to gigs. She drove her to the Florida Folk Festival and also
said that she loved to play in the alley at the Seville Quarter. The alley is a
beautiful hallway with several restaurant and bar venues and it opens up on a courtyard in downtown
Pensacola.
Ida said in her Dyen interview that
everyone but she had left home by the time she was sixteen in the year her
father died. She stayed with a neighbor’s mother. This may have been Dora
Talley. She was eleven going on twelve when her mother died. She said her
father remarried and died five years later so since he died in 1926 or 1927 he
must have remarried shortly after Sara
died, 1921. It began to sound as though Ida
had not lived with him after that. I remembered the story of Zora Neale Hurston’s
difficulties with her stepmother and I wondered whether a similar problem had
cropped up with Hamilton Madison Goodson’s second wife and Ida. Ida also said
that her sisters left home one by one after her mother died and that “a father
is not like a mother and didn’t worry about it.“ Since he was remarried, I
wondered if that new wife had trouble trying to become a stepmother to five
headstrong and talented young women! The first two sisters Maggie (Maizie) and
Della had died and I asked Royce if they had died in one of the influenza
epidemics but she did not know.
Ida said she married in 1927. Two dates
are given in the extant literature for Theodora’s birth, 1926 and 1927. Ida
said this marriage didn’t last and they
didn’t stay together. I do not know if they were legally married. She said her
guardian thought they were too young. She says she “slipped off” to get
married! Ida thought of herself as a city girl throughout her life and once
mistook cotton for okra.
She began playing Medicine shows and
Vaudeville shows in 1927 and she must have had to support herself and Theodora.
She played one medicine show at a Mardi Gras festival in Pensacola and she says
the doc sold “snake oil liniment” which was used for rheumatism. The medicine shows were like side shows at
carnivals she said. Although snake oil is known as an ancient Chinese remedy
for joint pain, the term had a derogatory meaning when it was associated with
medicine shows in the 20’s. Ida did not seem to hold this opinion however. She
said, “it was pretty good.“
When she began to play in earnest in the
decade of the twenties, dancing was very popular and she remembered the
Charleston, the one step, the two, the slow drag, boogie and beebop. She
remembered a man who worked for the Empire Laundry who was an excellent dancer.
Ida always loved to get happy when she was playing and she took her energy from
the crowds. She also said that when her choirs were energized and singing with
joy, her music would also reflect this quality.
Popular Music of
the Time
In her first years playing as I mentioned
previously, she is said to have played with the Mighty Wiggle Carnival, a
circus that toured all around Florida in the 20’s. Sadie and Edna were reported
to have played with this carnival and done some traveling around the state.
Charles Chamberlain said this carnival played cities such as Micanopy, Quincy,
and further south. Ida doesn’t mention it by name in anything I have seen yet
and I believe she didn’t go very far out of town in the 20’s.
I wondered where she first heard the music
she began playing in the early 1920’s, away from home. Like Elizabeth Cotton,
her older sisters must have brought home many of the tunes from shows,
carnivals, and touring troubadours and Ida picked them up
There were several vaudeville shows
mentioned in documents in the Goodson folder at the Archives. Florida Blossoms
Minstrels were touring between 1908 and 1911. Bill Robinson was likely with
this show and he was known for his “buck and wing” dancing but the material I
read identifies him as Jessie Robinson. His wife, Mrs. Minnie is said to have
sung “Oceana Roll”. This vaudeville show
as well as others such as Huntington Minstrel Shows played at the Belmont
Theatre which is listed in the RL Polk directory in 1909. The Florida Dark Town
Swells played the Hot Springs Majestic Theatre in Arkansas. (I knew the family
who managed it in the 70’s and I visited the theatre and hotel were the family
had an apartment in the hotel and theatre complex.)
The Alabama Chocolate Drops were touring
in 1910 and they played the Belmont Theatre as well. Thus, the early popular
music which the Goodson sister’s were exposed to was likely from minstrel shows
and vaudeville shows and might have been considered quite racist since much of
it was coonjine or “coon shouting” performed by Whites in blackface. Some
minstrel and vaudeville shows featured Black performers, however, and banjo was
a prominent instrument. Winans tells us
that the primary musical instruments referred to in ex-slave narratives in
Florida were the banjo and the fiddle…
“widespread black piano playing also seems to have been a post-war
development. This is interesting because of the relatively short time after the
war that ragtime piano came into being as powerful new black musical form” p
45.
. Chamberlain also notes
that according to Sadie, “while their mother sang and performed spirituals at
home, she also played old time records of popular songs such as “Home Sweet
Home.” Chamberlain, p9.
Shouting, however was as Niles
indicates, a well established vocal
style of two types, sacred and blues. The Ruby Pickens Tart collection has many
jubilee shouts including “The Israelites Shoutin’ in Heaven” with this chorus:
Wouldn‘t shoutin in the heaven
Wouldn‘t bow
Isrealites shoutin‘ in the heaven
Going home Isrealites shoutin in heaven
Going home Israelites shoutin in heaven (Pickens-Tartt, p124):
Ida also remembered that Prince Morris who
had a band and a funeral home in Pensacola used to play on streetcars about
1919or 1920. She also heard music on a record player in her parents home which
she called a “grassaphone“ but was most likely a gramaphone.
On The Road as a
Young Woman
I also wondered what it was like to be a
young beautiful woman playing in carnivals and out of town in rough halls. Ida
said many of the halls she played in in the twenties were eight or ten miles
out of town and largely owned and operated by Blacks. Some of these were
probably jooks associated with the turpentine and lumber camps around the
outskirts of Pensacola and I wondered if she had played in the Century area
during this time. Royce wasn’t sure. She did say that they had racial trouble
in Milton at one point because Mack and The Merrymakers were more popular than
the White bands playing and they needed a police escort to cross the bridge
there. She remembered that there were guns and that one of the band’s drivers
had been in some trouble and had to make a quick getaway. This may have been in
the early fifties. She remembered Mack Thomas, George Leech, Rufus, Oscar
Barbarino who had a diamond in his front tooth,
and a man they called Teddy Bear from this group. She also remembered
that they stayed at a lady’s home and were fed but she noticed that the lady’s
children were not fed and so even though Teddy Bear filled his stomach good,
she didn’t eat much. (Dyen, 1981)
Many of the halls were in Pensacola such as Johnson Hall on the corner of Blount
and Alcaniz, and Pelican Hall on Call
Street. She also recalled playing Tom’s Tavern and The Maker Bar which was
reportedly a White establishment. She said that often one of the band members
would say she was his wife and that her band mates protected her. If someone
wanted to chat her up , one of them would say, “ don’t bother my wife” and if
she wanted to talk to him, she would say,
”Oh he‘s just saying that.” When
she first began playing she was often referred to as “someone’s sister” in the
band because she was underage. She recalled that women would get jealous of her
and one time a jealous wife “threw a brick at me.” Another time she was at
someone’s sister’s home and the woman thought her boyfriend was paying too much
attention to Ida and threw a bottle at him.
Between 1931 and 1933 Ida began to tour in
bands such as “Mack and The Merrymakers.” She also played vaudeville shows at
The Belmont and that was a six night a week gig for about twelve dollars. She
is said to have begun working at the Burgoyne Lumber Company in 1933 and in
1936 Danny was born. She was by then twenty seven years old. So she had two
children to support and I am not sure if there was a man in her life to “hold
down the fort.” This was also the
Depression and one can see from these facts that she had to work hard to
survive during this period. Around 1935 they were playing clubs such as The
Macon Club, The Rumbed Club, The Esquire Club, and The Southland Club. The
bands would get on the back of a flatbed truck and play to advertise their gig
that night. She recalled playing The Dreamland in 1937.
There is a gap in my knowledge about her
venues in the late thirties and early forties but she said she played all
along. Royce was born in 1946, so she
then had two younger children to take
care of and Theodora was about twenty years old by then. She was with Royce’s
father, Ray Thomas some of that time I believe although this line of
questioning seemed too intrusive to really pursue with Royce on our first
conversation so I am not sure. But she was likely to be homemaking and
schooling the children as well as working at the lumber company during the day
and playing gigs at night. She also
mentioned that she worked briefly in the home of the lumber company owners, in
a Pensacola News Journal article I read.
The Fifties and
Sixties
Ida has said that the music scene seemed
to change more in the fifties and she thought it might have been due to tension
over the question of integration as well as a change of taste. She said many
Black and White clubs closed. She doesn‘t seem to have said much publicly about
racial discrimination although she did say she was one of the first people to
drink out of a drinking fountain which was a new invention when she was young
and she didn’t realize they were to be segregated. She says this rather
ruefully but with no other commentary about racism. Her seeming silence about
racism reflects what I have read about Black women of this era. They grew up
with segregation in the schools, neighborhoods, and churches and it was a way
of life, as deplorable as it may have been.
She also remembered the shooting death of
a school teacher named Joe Jesse who was a music teacher who was killed by a
music student. She did not say this was a racially motivated killing but mentioned
it in this general context of the fifties so perhaps it was.
Sammy was born in 1951, so
Ida continued to have to raise her children during this decade and since they
were schooled at Washington High School and Sammy went on to college at FAMU,
she must have provided them with a stable life by working at the lumber company
and gigging at night for money as well.
By this time also, Harold Andrews was back
from living in New York and was very active musically in Pensacola. She played
often with him and Wally Mercer and he seems to have provided a steady stream
of gigs for Ida at this point in time. She remembers playing with Wally Mercer
for $2.50 a night. She also went to New Orleans more than once to visit her
sister Billie and sat in with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. She recalls she
dressed up and when she saw everyone was casually dressed she went back the
next time, “barefoot and in overalls.” She recalls that Billie gave her money
during those years but gave Sadie “her old pots.” I have gotten the impression
from my research that she was very close to and fond of Billie and that Sadie
was harder for both of them to deal with and she got along less well with
her.
She often played the Naval Air Station
near Pensacola and that may have been where she met Ray Thomas. The bases paid
pretty well. She recalled playing a party in Mobile for which she was well paid
but the traveling meant she could charge more for her performance. Music was an
important source of income for Ida throughout her life and she refers to this
fact in several places in her extant interviews. It was often hard work and she
felt she should be paid for the work. Having gigged myself a lot in my younger
years, I know how hard it is to pack equipment, travel, unpack equipment, tune
instruments, play and then pack up and get home. Even now, musicians are not
well paid unless they are doing huge tours and even today restaurants and bars
often expect to get musicians to work for tips and meals but no wages.
Ida has also said that she turned to church
playing at the end of the fifties in part because she “had to sacrifice the
devil and give myself to God.“ She began to play for several churches in
Pensacola such as the Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Mt. Olive Baptist
Church where her parents worshipped when they were alive and some other
Christian churches. In 1981 she had been accompanying the Morning Star
Missionary Baptist Church for at least ten years, as well. Many of the stories
about her suggest she turned completely away from secular music in a strong
conversion but I could see this wasn’t true and Royce confirmed it for me. This
kind of myth seems to reflect to me some need by the dominant male research
community to see women and maybe especially Black women as having changed their
sinful ways through religious conversion. This is often said of Black female
musicians and while it is true that many of them took to playing music for the
church, it seems to have been a matter of coming off the road to raise children
and still having a need to express themselves and to make a living with their
craft when the venues for them changed or they got too old to travel easily and
be considered ingénues. Musicians like Billie Goodson Pierce who played with
her husband DeDe her entire adult life, had total careers in music, largely it
seems because being married made you respectable and not a temptress.
It was at this point she began playing
spiritual music much more often but said about these songs she accompanied the
choir with, “Singing should have life in it, anything dead ought to be buried.“
She loved to play these songs with a lively beat and could easily syncopate a
church tune to give it extra life. These
were steady jobs and she would alternated churches on different Sundays. She
was very popular as an accompanist for church choirs. She said that the choir
members did not often read music and the
songs would be brought to the choirs by various members and they would learn
them. Ida didn’t read music at all and since she said her ability was a “gift
from God“ she played by ear exclusively. She was baptized by full dunking in
the winter of 1960 and remembers that the water was cold. She also said that “
When you are born again, you’ve got to love one another, because all religions
will mix in Heaven.“ She felt herself to be not very racially discriminating
and made reference to her ability to accept everyone as they were.
70’s through
80’s
I have a gap in my knowledge about her
activities in the 70’s but I know she spent much of that time playing for the
churches and probably also with Harold in the Pensacola Jazz Community but by
the early eighties she was well known to the folk community in north Florida
and was swept up in the folk revival by the Florida Folk Festival community.
She had played four times at the Festival by 1983 and said that the 10,000
people she played for on the Amphitheatre was the largest crowd she had ever
played for. She received the Florida
Heritage Award in 1987.
I was told by someone who shall remain
anonymous that she was subjected to some
racist treatment at her
first festival by the then grand dame of the festival Thelma Boltin.
Nevertheless, she was a great crowd pleaser and the State photographic archives
have many photographs of her festival performances, especially taken by Larry
Coltharp whom I know and whom I expect to talk with soon about Ida’s
performances.
She frequently accompanied Diamond Teeth
Mary McLain at the Festivals. Mary McLain was also an older woman by that time
and she had spent many years as a blues “shouter.“ She was from the Tampa Bay
area. So Ida was in her seventies at
this point and wider recognition occurred for her as it did for Elizabeth
Cotten as a result of the growing awareness of the rich musical heritage that
Black women musicians could share with the wider world. Ida was finally
receiving wider recognition from the folk revivalists for a lifetime of
musical performances and her great gifts as a musician and entertainer.
But, for my money she had already proved herself as an
incredibly gifted and fearless Black
woman who overcame the early loss of her parents and fashioned a successful
career as a musician for more than seventy years on the gulf Coast of Florida.
Her star still shines brightly today along with her sisters in the night sky
all over this world. For me, the Pleiades will always now represent the Goodson
sisters and their inspiring musical legacy.
The Songs
What
follows is a partial list of songs and tunes
mentioned by Ida Goodson in the extant literature and the full text of
Ida’s Blues
Diskography
Ida Goodson Sings and Plays Church Music and Songs
From The South (CSA-CLPS1015 1973 Danish enthusiast Lars Endegran recorded this
while she was visiting Billie in New Orleans, (Dyen, 1981, liner notes)
Ida Goodson Pensacola Piano Florida Gulf Coast Blues,
Jazz and Gospel Florida Folklife Program , 1983
St. Louis Blues
Darktown Strutters Ball
Danny Boy
Carolina Blues
I love you truly
Baby Won’t You Please Come Home
Star Dust
Blue Moon
Body & Soul
By The light of the Silvery Moon
Alleluia
I’ll Fly Away
Oh Mary Don’t You Weep
Dinah
Ida’s Blues
One Finger Blues
A good Man is Hard To Find
Nobody’s Darlin But Mine
Shake It and Break It
Precious Lord
I Know I’ve Been Changed
Search Me Lord
I Can’t feel at Home
You’ve Got To Move
Closer Walk With Me
Oh Lordy won’t you come by here
Nearer My God To Thee
Bucket’s Got a Hole in It
Careless Love
Ida’s Blues
I love you baby,
I’m afraid to call your name
Yes, I love you baby but I’m afraid to call your name
If I call your name sweet daddy, I know I will be to blame
When you see me coming baby, raise your window high
When you see me coming baby, raise your window high
Cuz you know I ain’t no stranger, I’ve been there
before
I’m low and squatty baby but I shake like a cannon
ball
I’m low and squatty daddy but I’m shaped like a cannon
ball
Every time I shimmy I’m bound to make some poor man
fall
When you see me coming baby raise your window high
When you see me coming baby raise your window high
You know I ain’t no stranger I’ve been there before
Didn’t the moon look lonesome shining through the
trees
Didn’t the moon look lonesome shining through the
trees
Didn’t my baby look lonesome when I packed up to leave
It’s awful hard to love someone that really don’t love
you
It’s awful hard baby to love someone that really don’t
love you
You can’t get them when you want to
You got to catch them just when you can.
Bibliography
and References
Ida
Goodson: North Florida Blueswoman, An Ethnography
Bragaw, Donald H., Loss of Identity on Pensacola’s
Past: A Creole Footnote Florida Historical Society: The Florida Historical
Quarterly Vol. 50, No.4 Pp. 414-419.
Carby, Hazel V. In Body and Spirit: Representing Black
Women Musicians, Black Music Journal, Vol 11, No 2 (Autumn, 1991), pp.
177-192.
Chamberlain, Charles, "The Goodson Sisters: The
Essential Role of Female Pianists in New Orleans Jazz,” Louisiana Cultural
Vistas, Fall 2002 “
Chamberlain, Charles, "The Goodson Sisters: Women
Pianists and the Function of Gender in the Jazz Age,” The Jazz Archivist.
vol. 15 (2001)
Colburn, David R. & Landers, Jane L. The
African American Heritage of Florida, 1995. University Press of Florida:
Gainesville.
Davis, Angela Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism, 1998. New York, Random House, Inc. Vintage
Books. Pp.6-7, p. 126.
Egerton, John A Mind To Stay Here, 1970, The
MacMillan Company, London, England. Pp.
161-173 (Billie and De De Pierce).
Ehle, John, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of
the Cherokee Nation, 1988. Anchor Books: New York.
Florida Folklife FFF Recording CD-T-80-87 Ida Goodson Playing Gospel and Blues on the
Piano. Recorded by Doris Dyen and Merri Balland. Pensacola, Escambia County
8-21-1980. Side 1
Florida State Archives S1627 Box 3 transcription of Interview with Ida Goodson
by Doris Dyen and Betsy Peterson , 1981.
Gordon, Julius J., A History of Blacks in Florida
Gen 929.3 Florida G663
Goodson Sisters: Pensacola’s Gift To New Orleans ,
Charles Chamberlain and Bruce Boyd Raeburn, May 2002. DVD of Performance
Haskins, James & Biondi, Joanne, The Historic
Black South: Historical Sites, Cultural Centers, and Musical Happenings of the
African-American South. 1993.
Hippocrene Books, New York.
Heritage Museum of Northwest Florida, Boggy Bayou
Around Niceville and Valpairiso, 2005, Arcadia Publishing
Housewright, Wiley J. ed., 1999. An Anthology of Music in Early
Florida. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Housewright, Wiley J., A History of Music and Dance
in Florida 1991, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama pp.
240-278.
McCarthy, Kevin M.,
African American Sites in Florida, 2007. Pineapple Press, Inc. Sarasota, Florida
McGregory, Jerrilyn, Wiregrass Country. 1997.
University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, Ms.
Nile, John J., Shout, Coon, Shout! The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4
(Oct., 1930), pp. 516-530. .
Oliver, Paul, Songsters and Saints: Vocal
Traditions on Race Records. 1984. New York: Cambridge University Press
Riley, Lester Florida’s
Panhandle Life, Vol. 2, No.1 p 8-10.
Solomon, Olivia and Jack, “Honey in The Rock“ The
Ruby Pickens Tart Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County,
Alabama, 1991. Mercer University Press, Macon Georgia.
Spencer, Donald D., Historic Plantations of
Northeast Florida: A Pictorial Encyclopedia, 2003. Camelot Publishing
Company, Ormond Beach, Florida.
Stanley, J. Randall History of Jackson County,
1950. Jackson County Historical Society, Marianna, Florida.
Titon, Jeff Todd Review: From
the Record Review Editor: African American Traditions The Journal of
American Folklore, Vol. 98, No. 390 (Oct. - Dec., 1985), pp. 495-501
Wild Women Don't Have The Blues, dir. Christine Dall,
Calliope Film Resources, 1989, videocassette
Wills, Ora, Images in Black: A Pictorial History of
Black Pensacola. African American Heritage Center, Pensacola, Florida UWF
Press.
Willoughby, Lynn, Flowing Through Time: A History
of the Lower Chattahootchee River,1999. University of Alabama Press,
Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Winans, Robert B., Black Instrumental Music Traditions
in the Ex-Slave Narratives, Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1
(Spring, 1990), pp. 43-53.
Internet Sites of Interest
