Another response from Bruce Conforth:

Hi Joe,
Dick (Weissman) is aware of my new work, as he was my MA thesis which is where Dick got a lot of his information on Gellert for his book (an excellent book I must say. I was a youngster in Greenwich Village for the folk revival and I must say that no one has caught the scene the way Dick has), and therefore much of it was based upon misinformation I had been led to believe was true.

As per the Time article: it's a perfect example of Gellert reinventing himself. The lynching scenario never happened. He never saw a corpse "two days dead" in Asheville and perhaps no where else either. In none of his interviews does he ever mention seeing such a sight anywhere at any time. And of course, the article makes it sound like he discovered some new "hidden" genre that white people never heard. That's exactly what the Left wanted people to believe, but of course accounts of the songs that he collected go back to the 1840s and Odum and Johnson, Talley, Krehbiel, Allen, Scarborough, Newman Ivey White, John Lomax, and many, many more found the same songs before Gellert set foot in the South. They, of course, all called the songs "self-pity" songs, "sorrow" songs, or "complainin'"songs... None of them recognized the element of protest that the songs might possibly exhibit. Now as I said, the idea of protest is an interesting one and not to be accepted without some strong consideration. The Left wanted these songs to be protest songs because that would make them the voice of a revolutionary proletariat. Songs that just expressed sentiments of dissatisfaction were not good enough for them. They needed to maintain that these truly were "protest" songs. It's interesting that despite all the field work that had already been done, collecting virtually (and in many cases - exactly) the same songs no one at that time (the 30s when Gellert started publishing his stuff) pointed that out. There are almost no songs in Gellert's collection that I haven't found earlier references for. His blues collection is a bit different and there are some unique things there. But basically Gellert didn't discover anything new and revolutionary, it was just the way his material was packaged and sold to the public. Now that does NOT negate the import of his collection. It still stands as one of the largest and earliest collections of its kind... those other collections I mention were not recorded collections, but songs just written down.

BUT... then also comes the question of whether Gellert invented any of his songs in order to make his collection seem more important. That was one of the major charges against his collection at the time, and even after - that he invented some of his more definitively "protest" songs and that they were not truly part of African American culture. You'll have to wait for my book for the answer to THAT question, but I have definite proof one way or the other. ;)

You may post this also if you wish.

Best, Bruce