Writer and collector Robert Emmett Kennedy (1877–1941) built a career reproducing the black music and storytelling traditions he encountered in his hometown of Gretna, Louisiana, for white audiences. A first-generation Irish American pianist and vocalist, Kennedy’s 1924 Black Cameos was his first compilation of African American material. Published the following year, Mellows contains both spirituals and secular pieces that Kennedy collected at black community events across the New Orleans area. Kennedy later performed “Negro recitals” in both Louisiana and New York. These salon performances interspersed repertoire from Mellows with dialect monologues and art music. When performing in Louisiana, Kennedy often conscripted African American residents of communities near his hometown for performances that drew on the racist tropes of amateur ethnography and minstrelsy to dramatize the power dynamics of the South’s slaveholding legacies.

—Erin Fulton