John W. Work, III, was a noted African American educator, composer, choral director, scholar, and folklorist whose 39-year career at Fisk University in Nashville (1927-1966) was filled with accolades. Work held degrees from Fisk, Columbia and Yale and was well versed in the music favored by academia, but what set him apart from his contemporaries was the value he placed on African American folk, blues, and gospel music. Although the full extent of his work in the blues was not appreciated until long after his death, he left a valuable legacy of field recordings that includes the first Library of Congress sides by Muddy Waters, conducted in conjunction with a team that included Alan Lomax, in addition to many other recordings from Mississippi, Nashville, and Fort Valley, Georgia. Work’s historic descriptions of the 1941-42 Library of Congress project in Mississippi, complete with musical transcriptions, were published in the acclaimed book Lost Delta Found in 2005. Work was born in Tullahoma, Tennessee, on June 15, 1901, and carried on his family’s church choir tradition when he became director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. He died on May 17, 1967, not long after his retirement from Fisk.
