Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Turner, Darwin T. “Daddy Joel Harris and His Old Time Darkies,” Southern Literary Journal 1 (December 1968): 20-41.

Wolfe, Bernard. “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,” Commentary 8 (July 1949): 31-41.

Note on the Text

This edition follows the text of the first edition, published by D. Appleton and Company in New York. The book was originally released in November 1880, although the title page bears the official publication date of 1881. There were three states, usually thought of as representing three separate printings, to this first edition, since Appleton had not anticipated the large demand for the book. All are usually considered first editions because they all carry the 1881 date, but the actual first edition can be identified by a few minor changes that took place in the second and third printings. In the first printing, the last line of page nine includes the word presumptive and page 233 contains an advertisement for Roberts Bartholow’s A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine. In the second printing, the word presumptive has been changed presumptuous and page 233 again advertises Bartholow’s Treatise. The third printing repeats presumptuous, but Bartholow has been replaced with reprints of favorable reviews of Songs and Sayings.

The original edition was reprinted in 1883, 1884, 1886, 1889, 1890, and 1892. In 1895 Appleton brought out a new and revised edition, containing superior illustrations by A. B. Frost, a talented artist who would become a close friend of Harris’s as well as his favorite illustrator. The revised edition was reprinted virtually every year between 1895 and 1941; the printings of 1908 and 1920 show minor changes.

It is interesting to note that a pirated English edition appeared almost immediately, published by George Routledge and Sons in 1881. The authorized English edition also appeared the same year but omitted both the songs and the twenty-one character sketches entitled “His Sayings.” The Woodruff Library at Emory University, where most of the Harris manuscripts and letters are deposited, owns a first edition of Uncle Remus that Harris himself began to revise, marking it in pencil to make the dialect more accurate. Anxious about the book’s reception, Harris apparently was concerned that linguists would find fault with his transcriptions. Few of his corrections, however, became a part of subsequent editions.

UNCLE REMUS:

HIS SONGS AND HIS

SAYINGS

Introduction.

I am advised by my publishers that this book is to be included in their catalogue of humorous publications, and this friendly warning gives me an opportunity to say that however humorous it may be in effect, its intention is perfectly serious; and, even if it were otherwise, it seems to me that a volume written wholly in dialect must have its solemn, not to say melancholy, features. With respect to the Folk-Lore series, my purpose has been to preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them permanently to the quaint dialect — if, indeed, it can be called a dialect — through the medium of which they have become a part of the domestic history of every Southern family; and I have endeavored to give to the whole a genuine flavor of the old plantation.

Each legend has its variants, but in every instance I have retained that particular version which seemed to me to be the most characteristic, and have given it without embellishment and without exaggeration. The dialect, it will be observed, is wholly different from that of the Hon. Pompey Smash and his literary descendants, and different also from the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage, but it is at least phonetically genuine. Nevertheless, if the language of Uncle Remus fails to give vivid hints of the really poetic imagination of the negro; if it fails to embody the quaint and homely humor which was his most prominent characteristic; if it does not suggest a certain picturesque sensitiveness — a curious exaltation of mind and temperament not to be defined by words — then I have reproduced the form of the dialect merely, and not the essence, and my attempt may be accounted a failure. At any rate, I trust I have been successful in presenting what must be, at least to a large portion of American readers, a new and by no means unattractive phase of negro character — a phase which may be considered a curiously sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe’s wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.

A number of the plantation legends originally appeared in the columns of a daily newspaper — “The Atlanta Constitution” — and in that shape they attracted the attention of various gentlemen who were kind enough to suggest that they would prove to be valuable contributions to myth-literature. It is but fair to say that ethnological considerations formed no part of the undertaking which has resulted in the publication of this volume.