Ruby Pickens Tartt - Lord, Won’t You Come by Here

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
Ruby Pickens Tartt collected a version of "Lord, Won’t You Come by Here" in Sumter County, Alabama, in 1936 or 1937. [1] She was a participant collector like the members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. Her mother’s family was one of the first settlers in the county and Tartt maintained that pioneer social position in Livingston, Alabama, even after she applied for relief from the WPA when her husband couldn’t work in the Depression.

Her mother’s immigrant ancestor, Walter Chiles, moved to Jamestown around 1636 [2] with his adult son, also named Walter. The son was listed as a "cloth worker" in Bristol. [3] Their descendants stayed in Virginia until Tartt’s great-grandfather, Hiram Chiles, moved to Alabama when the Choctaw were removed. [4]

Sumter County’s social structure may have been fluid in the early years, when settlers were growing general crops to feed themselves. However, it probably had stratified by 1840 when cotton was the primary commercial crop and settlers who’d claimed the best land for that crop were likely to be the wealthiest.

The census that year indicated Hiram Chiles owned eight male and three female slaves. This was at the time when the county had 22,000 Blacks and 8,000 whites, or 2.75 Blacks for every white. [5] Sumter then was one of the wealthiest and most densely populated counties in the state. Chiles also was not listed as one of the county’s major slave owners in 1860. [6]

His daughter, Mary Champ Chiles, married Jordan Short before the Civil War. He died in 1861, and she opened a private school. Later she taught at the Livingston Female Academy. Her daughter, Fannie West Short, and her husband moved in with her in 1874. [7] William King Pickens apparently rented his land, rather than selling it or supervising sharecroppers. [8]

Tartt was born in 1880 and developed a "terrible temper" that was more than her mother could handle. She spent time with her grandmother who taught her to draw and paint. After attendeding the local girls’ school, [9] she went to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. [10] Then, in 1901, Tartt moved to New York to study art with William Merritt Chase. [11]

She returned to Livingston where she married William Pratt Tartt. [12] His father, Thomas Morrison Tartt, had worked for his uncle’s commission house in Mobile. After the Civil War, he moved to Livingston where he became a merchant. [13] His namesake son, Ruby’s brother-in-law, was president of the local bank, McMillan and Company. [14] No one has been specific about her husband’s education or employment. [15]

During the 1920s, the Tartts were sufficiently well off to send their daughter Fannie to the University of Alabama where she pledged Kappa Delta. [16] She was responsible for Carl Carmer staying with her parents when a college drama group was visiting Livingston in 1926. [17]

The English instructor had earned a masters degree from Harvard in 1915, [18] where George Kittredge had taken over the folklore work of Francis James Child. [19] According to Howell Raines, Carmer used his students as guides, who took him to events like fiddlers’ contests and sacred harp sings. [20] At the time he met Tartt, he said he was collecting notes for an article, but she recommended he write a book. [21]

He left Tuscaloosa amidst a romantic scandal involving a student in 1927. During the Depression he lost his job as an editor in New York, and began work on his Alabama book. He returned to Livingston to stay with Tartt and her husband. [22]

By then, the Tartts’ situation had deteriorated. Her father had died in 1923. [23] No one has commented on the condition of his estate or how it was divided, but Ruby had an older brother. In 1931, her mother was living with them in Tuscaloosa when she died. [24] The family house was sold and the Tartts rented a bungalow when they returned to Livingston. [25] It was there Carmer stayed.

Stars Fell on Alabama was published in 1934. [26] Anyone interested in the state’s folklore might have recognized one of his central characters, Mary Louise, was based on Ruby. [27] One who did was Julia Peterkin, who wrote about the Gullah culture in South Carolina. [28]

The Tartts were in straitened circumstances when she was assigned to a sewing project by the WPA in 1935. [29] She was the only white, and thus, the defacto leader. She suggested she and her coworkers sing while they worked. [30]

The project quickly found something more suitable for a lady of the community. She was appointed chair of the Federal Writer’s Project for the county, and told to submit eight spirituals within a week. [31] John Lomax was advising the Writer’s Project on folklore at the time. [32] He was so impressed with her collection, he and his wife stopped to visit her in 1937. [33] His subsequent visits reinforced her appreciation of African-American music and spurred her to locate singers for him.

Her work for the Federal Writers Project became part of its collection of slave narratives. Historians have been wary about using the narratives as primary sources, [34] because people who were at least ten-years-old when war was declared were at least 77 when the collection project began. They had potential problems of both being too young to remember and so old their memories were unreliable.

The ones who survived were often house slaves who had better treatment when they were children. They also were more likely to be the ones who maintained contact with whites. Since the collectors were white, and usually from the local community, all the nuances of race relations in the South affected what Blacks were willing to reveal.

Tartt’s narratives were considered superior to most, not only because of "her respect for the actual words spoken, but also to the candor of the interviewees–a measure of the mutual trust enjoyed between herself and these subjects." [35]

After the Writers’ Project ended in 1938, the Tartts had to rent rooms in their house. [36] Their situation improved in 1940 when Tart was hired as a librarian by Sumter County. [37] She joined the county’s board of registrars in 1952. In 1961, Justice Department attorneys concluded she uniformly helped whites to register to vote, but was selective in which Blacks she assisted. [38]

The juxtaposition of reviews of her work for the Writers’ Project and the elections board underscores the complexity of race relations in a state where Carmer watched a lynching while he was visiting the Tartts. [39] Her rapport with singers and her appreciation of their music was inherited from her father in the Jim Crow South. She remembered:

"In the horse and buggy days, I spent many Sunday afternoons with him sitting out near one of their country churches and listening to them sing. When he particularly liked a song he would make a generous contribution to the preacher and it was repeated as many times as he liked. I’ve kept this up through the years." [40]

His encouragement of older music occurred at a time when a radical form of Holiness and new types of music were spreading among poor whites and Blacks. After the Panic of 1893, they became entwined with Populist political movements. I wonder if the same suspicion of African-American churches that underlay the treatment of Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822 [41] wasn’t behind Pickens’ monitoring music in the local churches.

Tartt retired from the county library in 1964, [42] and her husband died in July of that year. [43] She was living in a nursing home when she passed away in 1974. [44]

End Notes
1. Tartt was working for the WPA collecting slave narratives. Tina Naremore Jones provided her start date in "Ruby Pickens Tartt," Encyclopedia of Alabama website, March 21, 2007, last updated September 16, 2010. Olivia and Jack Solomon determined her end date. ("Preface," "Honey in the Rock," Macon: Mercer University Press, 1991, ix).

2. Josh Varnado, Heath Vogel, and Mari Burk. "Walter Chiles (1572 - abt. 1651)." Wikitree website. 3 July 2011. Last updated 15 December 2015. He was the son of John Childe.

3. Mary Elizabeth Stewart, Jennifer Perez, and Mari Burk. "Walter Chiles I (abt. 1608 - 1653)." Wikitree website. 9 February 2911. Last updated 11 November 2015. Son of Walter.

4. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 3.

5. Joseph F. Stegall. Extract from " 1840 Federal Census Sumter County, Alabama." Edited and formatted by Maggie Stewart. US Gen Archives website. 2 June 2001.

6. Tom Blake. "Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." Ancestry website. October 2001.

7. Brown and Owens. 5. The Livingston Female Academy became The University of West Alabama.

8. Brown and Owens. 9.
9. Brown and Owens. 5.
10. Brown and Owens. 7.
11. Brown and Owens. 9.
12. Brown and Owens. 9.

13. T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith. "Thomas Morrison Tartt." In From Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical. Birmingham: Smith and Deland, 1888. 233. Mary Hoit Abbe brought this to my attention. "Thomas Morrison Tartt Biography." AI Gen Web website.

14. Thomas William Herringshaw. "Thomas Morrison Tartt." In Herringshaw’s American Blue-book of Biography: Prominent Americans of 1912. Chicago: American Publishers Association, 1913. 585.

15. Stephen Wade though Tartt had lost his job as postmaster. (The Beautiful Music All Around Us. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 165.) Alan Brown said he worked at the family bank. (Alan Brown. Sumter County. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2015. 63.) Brown and Owens only quoted her statement: "I discovered overnight that not only had we no jobs and no money, but we were in debt." (Brown and Owens. 12.)

16. Obituary for Fannie Pickens Tartt Inglis. The Florida-Times Union [Jacksonville, Florida]. 3 May 1999. Comments made at the Greek Rank website on Kappa Delta at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, KD traditionally was seen as "top tier" at the school.

17. Brown and Owens. 11.
18. "Carl Carmer." Alabama Literary Map website.

19. Wikipedia. "George Lyman Kittredge." I didn’t find anyone who discussed Carmer’s time at Harvard.

20. Howell Raines. "Introduction: The "Strange Country." xi-xxii in Stars Fell on Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000 edition. xiv-xv.

21. Brown and Owens. 11.
22. Raines. xv.
23. "William King Pickens - 1846-1923." Find a Grave website. 29 April 2008.

24. "Prominent Livingston Woman Dies at 82." Included on "Fannie Short Pickens." Find a Grave. 29 April 2008. 1931 Obituary of Pickens uploaded by John Smolarek.

25. Brown and Owens. 12.
26. Carl Carmer. Stars Fell on Alabama. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.
27. Brown and Owens. 11. Tartt agreed she was the source for the character. (Raines. xix).
28. Brown and Owens. 12.
29. Wade. 165-166.
30. Brown and Owens. 13.
31. Tartt’s reaction to this demand was described in the post for 21 August 2017.
32. Brown and Owens. 16.
33. John Lomax is discussed in the post for 27 January 2019.

34. Alan Brown and David Taylor. Gabr’l Blow Sof’. Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997. The introduction included comments on the reservations of historians, i-v. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips rejected them out-of-hand. Eugene Genovese revolutionize the historiography of slavery when he used them in his Roll, Jordan Roll. New York: Pantheon Press, 1974.

35. Wade. 166.

36. Brown and Owens. 24. She described them as "disagreeable renters, with their life-saving, soul-destroying checks" in a letter to Lomax. (page 25).

37. Brown and Owens. 53.

38. J. Harold Flannery and Carl Gabel. Memorandum. "R. P. Tartt and Registration Statistics." 20 July 1962. Cited by Brian K. Landsberg. "Sumter County, Alabama and the Origins of the Voting Rights Act." Alabama Law Review 54:877-958:2003. 909.

39. Raines. xv.
40. Wade. 165.

41. Vesey was mentioned in the post for 20 January 2019. William Seymour and the rise of pentecostalism was discussed in the post for 7 December 2017.

42. Brown and Owens. 53.
43. Fran. "William Pratt Tartt." Find a Grave website. 21 July 2009.
44. Brown and Owens. 55.