Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition, Includes CD [Paperback]

Bruce Jackson (Editor)

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Product Details

Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (Mar 18 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415969972
ISBN-13: 978-0415969970
Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 18.3 x 1.5 cm
Shipping Weight: 454 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,586,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

Get your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is a seminal work in both the collection and analysis of African American oral culture, indispensable to all students of American popular culture..
–Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

A stone cold classic! All you Hip Hop heads need to know this book if you want to know your roots.
–Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is a pioneering work that is as fresh today as when it was first published. As this collection, and Jackson's astute analyses make clear, black oral poetry and folklore are great literature. Funny as all get out, full of biting wit and dazzling wordplay, this book drops more science than Einstein while proving the genius of black folk who created meaning and defended their lives through signifying words. I hope the hip-hop generation takes a look at this book that documents where it all got started!

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–Michael Eric Dyson, author of Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye.

Product Description

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is considered one of the great, classic collections of African-American literature and folklore. Originally published by in 1974 in hardcover only, it quickly gained the reputation as a classic collection of Black folk poetry known as "toasts." Toasts are probably the only living form of oral narrative poetry in the U.S.; they represent a vital genre of black folklore. They come from various sources: from streetcorners to jails, from barrooms to academic halls.
The toasts celebrate mythological figures from African-American culture, including the famed "bad man" Stackolee who is said to have murdered a man over a Stetson hat; the famous exploits of the "Signifying Monkey," who outsmarts his stronger opponents in the forest by using his native wits; and stories of the loss of the Titanic, famed in black folklore because of its symbolic significance as a failure of the era's powerful white establishment-and the (perhaps apocryphal) story that the ship's owner had refused to sell tickets to famed blacks including prize figher Jack Johnson. Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me will delight students of African-American culture and folklore, and anyone who enjoys the double entendres and hidden meanings found in the oral tradition, from its African roots to contemporary rap.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
Toasts can be told anywhere-at parties, lounging around bars and streetcorners, on a troopship crossing the boring ocean-but they seem to be told in county jails more than anywhere else. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index