author
Guy Benton Johnson
1901–1991
A pioneering sociologist and social anthropologist, he devoted much of his work to documenting Black life and music in the rural South while speaking out for racial equality. His research joined careful fieldwork with a strong sense that scholarship should matter in public life.
1 Audiobook
Negro workaday songs
by Howard Washington Odum, Guy Benton Johnson
About the author
Born in Caddo Mills, Texas, in 1901, he studied sociology at Baylor University, earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and completed his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 1927. He then joined the UNC faculty, where he spent most of his career teaching sociology and anthropology.
He became known for close study of Black culture in the American South, especially on St. Helena Island in South Carolina, and for his early, serious documentation of African American folk music and everyday life. The Library of Congress has highlighted his cylinder recordings of African American music from the 1920s as an important historical collection.
Johnson was also remembered as an advocate of racial equality at a time when that stance carried real weight in the South. He died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1991, leaving behind work that is still valued for both its scholarship and its human sympathy.