The Language You Cry In

Description

Spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, this program recounts the remarkable saga of how a nursery rhyme sung by the Gullah people of present-day Georgia was confirmed to be of African origin. When 18th-century slavers sent human cargo from Sierra Leone to America's coastal South, they also sent a trove of cultural information that had been passed from Mende mothers to their daughters for generations-including a particular song that had been carefully preserved because it was used in funeral rites. With the help of anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, linguists, and the singers themselves, the "nonsense lyrics" of the song found in Georgia were identified as those of the Mende dirge.

Runtime

52 min

Subjects

Genre

Date of Publication

[2012], c1998

Database

Films on Demand

Direct Link

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