Zora Neale Hurston, known these days for Their Eyes Were Watching God, died broke, having worked as a maid for a number of years, and was buried in a potter's field. Her work was revived by Alice Walker, who has taken the trouble in recent yeras to examine her own Cherokee connections. It's very interesting. Hurston was trained as an ethnographer, and worked with Franz Boas and others. She grew up in Florida in a remarkable black community, that is characterized in the novel (Eatonville).
The black critics (Richard Wright, in particular, but there were others) ripped her to shreds for what they thought was the demeaning of blacks of the day (in a world focusing on "uplift") by writing the dialog with all of the accents and idomatic usage one actually encountered there. It takes a little getting used to when reading it if you're not accustomed to the accents, but if you find a good performance of the book, you'll be astonished at how marvelous it sounds. (I'm not talking about the Hallie Berry performance recently. She looked like Janey, but that was all). Time has proved Hurston's choices correct in writing the way she did. The Ebonics of her day, as it were. (For a full discussion of this, see "Zora Neale Hurston's Work: The Black Woman's Search for Identity" by Mary Helen Washington, Black World, Aug. 1972, p. 68-75. I had to get it on microfiche, but by now someone may have scanned it and put it in a serial collection.)
Hurston did a lot of research in the South and in the Caribbean. I'd be interested to see what she had on this subject. She published a number of the stories she collected. (Dust Tracks on a Road, Every Tongue Got to Confess, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, Mules and Men, etc.)
The trick with using ethnographic materials is to look at the work all of the words are doing. Because we understand what someone means doesn't mean we got the entire message. If I tell you to dial the operator for assistance, you know I want you to make a phone call. You may not even notice that I said to "dial" the phone. I've read accounts of close readings of ethnographic materials that look for the word choices, and even before that, look to see the level of competency of the translator if translation was called for, to detect the "purity" of a story.
You're never going to find the Ur Tar Baby or Brer Rabbit stories. They are too mixed together--that's the syncretic process. And I didn't want to imply that Q couldn't think of this by himself. Another answer about those stories simply seemed to be overlooked. But in a world where African Americans were second class citizens and had few rights and less voice, American Indians were quite simply invisible. Unless of course they were museum pieces to be photographed by EurAmericans on vacation. Indians scholars today are convinced that Harris knew what he was doing, though others probably aren't. But that is because Indians could see themselves on the fringes and could see their stories being retold and claimed by someone who had a voice (and a publisher).
My father collected a lot of books of stories from the South, and I think they contain a lot of clues to the songs he liked to collect. in that same intersection of African and Indian stories were the Old World European stories, encapsulated in those rural mountains. It's a tangle, it's all important, and it's all interesting.