Forgotten 1935 Recordings Preserve Earliest Known Spoken Louisiana Creole

Earliest Known Spoken Louisiana Creole Sat Unexamined for 90 Years

Thirteen aluminum discs recorded in 1935 hold the earliest known audio of spoken Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French, two languages now spoken natively by a dwindling number of elderly people. For 90 years, the identities of many speakers remained a mystery, because the original archival labels were sparse, misspelled, and sometimes flat-out wrong.

Oliver Mayeux, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, cracked the case by playing genealogical detective. He listened for stray personal details in the recordings, then matched them against census records and genealogy websites. That work identified speakers including Emma Benoit, a Lafayette woman born around 1868, and George Doyle, a former New Orleans police officer who served before the department was segregated.

Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, known as the “Father of Gullah Studies,” made the recordings during a research trip to New Orleans, Lafayette, and Opelousas. Mayeux’s paper, published in Language Documentation and Description, describes a record of Black Louisianans singing, joking, and switching languages depending on who was in the room.

Funding Rejections May Have Left Turner’s Louisiana Creole Recordings Unstudied

By 1935, Turner had become the first African American member of the Linguistic Society of America and begun his Gullah fieldwork. He later wrote “Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect,” a 1949 book that countered the assumption that African language and culture had vanished in the Americas. Far less known is his Louisiana trip. In a July 1935 letter, Turner wrote that from July 9 to 20 he would “give all my time to collecting specimens of Creole.”

Turner meant the recordings as one piece of a larger project comparing African influences on Creole languages across the Americas. That project never came together. His applications for money to study African language sounds in London were rejected, including by the Guggenheim Foundation, which awarded a fellowship to Zora Neale Hurston, Turner’s former student. Mayeux calls it plausible that the Louisiana recordings were simply set aside.

Census Records and Genealogy Sites Identified Who Spoke on the Discs

Turner’s original discs are held at Northwestern University, while Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music preserves digitized versions. The labels did little to explain who was speaking. One disc, labeled in a way that suggested a duet, turned out to be solo piano by Jessie Covington Dent, a pianist and civil rights activist. She became the first person Mayeux could reliably identify.

For the other speakers, Mayeux listened for personal details, then checked them against public records on sites like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. One disc listed a woman under a misspelled last name. On the recording, she says she is 69, the mother of twelve, and had raised four orphans, and that her husband died twenty years earlier. Those details matched Emma Benoit in the 1910 census and her husband’s 1915 death record.

Mayeux contacted Benoit’s great-granddaughter, Valencia Pradier-Linton. She shared a magazine clipping in which Benoit’s son said his mother “didn’t know how to talk English at all.” That fits an era when English was quickly taking over.

Jim Crow Segregation Limited Where Turner Could Make His Recordings

Louisiana in 1935 was strictly segregated, and Turner, a Black scholar, leaned on a network of Black physicians, educators, and musicians to find speakers and safe places to record. His recording machine probably weighed about 100 pounds and needed electricity, and the offices of Black doctors in Lafayette and Opelousas offered relatively protected spaces. Seven of the thirteen discs were made there.

Those offices were social places, full of laughing, chatting, and interrupting. Many speakers opened in formal French, as Benoit did. Then the mood loosened, and they shifted to Creole, often after another voice in the room urged “speak Creole!” Turner was hunting for that language.

A second woman’s voice, asking questions in French and Creole, is likely Turner’s first wife, Geneva Calcier Townes Turner, who had studied French and assisted on his Gullah research. Mayeux could not confirm it.

Louisiana Creole Recordings Show More Variety Than Early Written Records

Written accounts of Louisiana Creole from the 1800s present a fairly uniform language, and it is unclear how much their authors edited what they heard. Turner’s audio is messier. Two New Orleans speakers, Doyle and Odelia Edmond, were both born in the 1860s. They used old-fashioned grammar known mostly from those texts, including an old form of the verb “have” that earlier spoken collections had apparently missed. Yet the same recordings contain sounds linked to later French influence. Mayeux says it remains unknown whether the gap between recordings and print reflects language change, editing by early writers, or both.

Almost no other audio of New Orleans Creole exists beyond a few songs and fragments. English took over in cities earlier than in the countryside, so few, if any, speakers of that variety likely remain.

Old recordings are only as useful as what is known about the people on them. Census records and patient listening turned poorly labeled audio into some of the only spoken evidence of how Black Louisianans talked and told their life stories. Both languages are now close to vanishing.

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