Lorenzo Dow Turner’s field recordings from Louisiana, 1935

This article presents the field recordings made by pioneering linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner in Louisiana in 1935. Until now, these materials have remained unanalyzed, undescribed, and almost unknown. They constitute the earliest audio recordings of spoken Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French and are of considerable importance for the documentation of these now-endangered varieties. They also record the oral histories, singing, and cultural knowledge of Black speakers of Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole in New Orleans, Lafayette, and Opelousas. Almost no written documentation accompanies Turner’s recordings. Based on archival research, this article uncovers the story of Turner’s fieldwork: his motivations and field methods, the social networks through which he worked, the locations in which recording took place, and his collaboration with his first wife Geneva Calcier Townes Turner. It also undertakes to reconstruct the identity of each person recorded, with details included in the article’s Appendix. Only through this exercise in meta-documentation is it possible to present the first preliminary linguistic analysis of Turner’s recordings. It will be argued that such contextual reconstruction is not supplementary to linguistic analysis of legacy materials, but a prerequisite for it.