This chapter turns to the sorrow songs, beginning with the famous passage from Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies. It focuses on the ethnography of African American song traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of professionalisation of folklore studies in the American academy. White folklorists claimed the songs were irrational, primitive, childlike, unmediated expressions of feeling; other qualities were discovered by African American ethnographers, including Zora Neale Hurston. The songs were also forms of exploitative labour. The chapter includes a reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘A Corn Song’. Dunbar’s shifts between African American vernacular and ‘standard’ English illuminate the tendency of white folklorists to call attention to the failure of the printed and disembodied textual transcription to transmit the real power of the performed lyric. The chapter considers the attempt to secure an ‘authentic’ Black sound through recordings in prisons and labour camps. It also challenges the notion of authenticity through a reading of Olio by Tyehimba Jess, a work that seeks to recover – through a form of poetic ventriloquy – the thoughts and feelings of the artists whose work was appropriated by white critics, scholars and producers in this period.

Chapter Three focuses on Euripides’ Ion, wherein we find important depictions of both male and female solo dancing. I begin this chapter with a discussion of male dancing in late Archaic and Classical Greek thought, exploring how male choral leadership, especially as embodied by the god Apollo and the hero Theseus, offers a positive model for the male dancer as an authoritative but collaborative figure within his community. I then observe how Ion’s opening monody vacillates between images of male choral leadership and less lofty images of solo work song/dance, calling attention to the ambivalence of the titular character’s social status. I further demonstrate that a similar ambivalence surrounds Ion’s mother Creusa, who performs a monody of her own that draws upon the imagery of female chorality and choral leadership. Yet while Ion’s monody prefigures his transformation from Delphic servant to Athenian royalty, Creusa’s song reframes the assault that resulted in Ion’s birth as a more normative form of maidenly transition. In both cases, I suggest, Euripides uses dance to situate Ion and Creusa within their final roles while also highlighting the contradictions and conflicts that swirl around them.