452 Furry Lewis (1893/9?-1981) “Kassie Jones” 1928

“seldom has Lewis’s occupation as both sanitation worker and musician informed understandings of his music. Yet, when Lewis recorded ‘Kassie Jones’—perhaps his most legendary performance—he gave personal voice to a collective black masculine experience at the hands of the white economy...Lewis transformed a traditional folk song into a subtle political expression of black laborers’ struggles to maintain their identities as workers and men” (Robert Hawkins, Callaloo, 2008). 

Furry Lewis “Kassie Jones”