Pellagra and the blues song ‘Cornbread, meat and black molasses’

摘要

In his book Blues fell this morning,1 Paul Oliver, the celebrated historian and biographer of the blues, describes a conversation with Sonny Terry, the blind virtuoso blues harmonica player. Cornbread, meat and black molasses was a ‘field holler’ – a song sung by prison farm inmates on hard labour field detail.