G0277_Audio_1 |
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Object Description
Interview no. | G-0277 |
Restrictions | No restrictions. Open to research. |
Project | G.3. Southern Women: Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South |
Project description | Interviews, conducted between 1979 and 1981 by Emily Herring Wilson, for her book Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South. Overall, Wilson interviewed more than forty older black women in North Carolina and selected twenty-seven for inclusion in the publication. The interviewees include gospel singers, midwives, teachers, ministers, college professors, civil rights organizers, artists, and musicians. |
Date | 1 October 1979 |
Interviewee | Smith, Mattie Shannon, 1916-1991. |
Interviewee occupation | Domestic workers |
Interviewee DOB | 1916 |
Interviewee ethnicity | African Americans |
Interviewer | Wilson, Emily Herring. |
Abstract | Mattie Shannon Smith is a well-known singer who grew up singing in her grandmother’s home and her grandfather’s tenant farm. She discusses her upbringing, tenant farming, and attending school as a child. She also discusses doing stemming work in the RJR tobacco factory and going on to work in private homes of other families. In discussing her singing, she describes her belief that she was born with a talent for singing and the emotion behind her music and her involvement in her church. This interview was conducted in part for the book "Hope and Dignity: Older Black women of the South" with text by Emily Herring Wilson, photographs by Susan Mullally, and foreword by Maya Angelou, published in 1983 by Temple University Press. |
Citation | Interview with Mattie Shannon Smith by Emily Herring Wilson, 1 October 1979 G-0277 in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Description
Interview no. | G0277_Audio_1 |