[Sterling A. Brown] realized that to express the souls of black folk, the artist has to divest himself of preconceived and false notions about black people, and create an art whose foundation is the ethos from which spring black life, history, culture and traditions. (p. 131)

[In an effort to build a self-conscious art upon folk-art, Brown] brought to Afro-American literature a quality that became one of its main currents: the ethos of black folk. (p. 132)

Early in his career as litterateur, he discovered that the representations of black peasants in most books were very different from the black peasants he had known and seen in Washington. Realizing that the images of black people in existing literature were largely false, Brown set out to correct what he saw. (pp. 132-33)

[Early] in his teaching career Brown "read the new realistic poetry in American life"—that of Frost, Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay and Robinson, for example. In their "democratic approach to the people," Brown saw much that reflected his own thoughts about ordinary people. Brown recalls: "when Carl Sandburg said 'yes' to the American people, I wanted to say 'yes' to my people." Brown's "yes" was to give us carefully wrought poems portraying "common" black folk "in a manner constant with them." His "yes" to black people was also to give us a series of critical works which attempted to counter "the proliferating distortions" of black folk life and character. As early as the Twenties, Brown began writing a series of critical studies and reviews on the portrayal of blacks in American literature…. Like other New Negro writers, Brown knew that such portrayals were neither accurate characterizations nor true expressions of the souls of black folk. (p. 133)

[When] Brown taught and traveled in the South, he became an insider to the multifarious traditions and verbal art forms indigenous to black folk, and through his adaptations of their verbal art forms and spirit he, as poet, became an instrument for their myriad voices. Hence Southern Road.

When Southern Road appeared, [reviewers] … were quick to recognize Brown's absorption of the spirit and the verbal art of black folk. Critics realized that Brown had tapped the black folk ethos which later Afro-American poets would draw from; that he had captured the essence of black folk life and culture, without the distortion and sentimentality of earlier American writers. In form and content, most of Brown's poems reflect some aspect of the life and oral traditions of black people. And it is through his folk oriented poems that he makes his most significant contribution to the corpus of Afro-American poetry. (p. 134)

To give voice to the common black man in poetry, Brown drew heavily on forms that grew directly out of the black American experience; he made use of Afro-American folksongs—their techniques, idiom and spirit. Brown knew that the ideas and art of the folksongs were expressive of the people who created them…. What, then, could be more appropriate modes for poetic reinterpretations of black life in America than the worksong, the blues, the spiritual, and the ballad?

In "Southern Road," the title poem of his first collection, Brown draws upon the forms and spirit of the worksong and the blues. To express the tragic voice of despondency of black chain gangs so often seen on Southern roads, Brown fuses adapted techniques of the worksong and the blues. But the aesthetic and ideational result is something more than the blues or the worksong. (p. 135)

"Southern Road" is a lyrical expression of powerlessness and despondency—one picture of "the tragedy of the southern Negro." It is, then, important to remember that the speaker of the poem is a convict, not a Black Everyman; that his despondency is that of his people; but that other poems in Brown's first collection and elsewhere are needed to round out his picture of the tragic condition of Southern black folk. It is important to remember, too, that in the world of Sterling Brown the black man's response to the inhumanities of his white oppressors is not always acceptance. His response, however futile it may prove to be, is sometimes … revolt in the face of inevitable destruction. (p. 138)

[In] spite of the white man's dehumanization of him from the Middle Passage through the twentieth century, the black man has endured; he has never been completely broken, as it were, for "The strong men keep a-comin' on." In fact, "Gittin' stronger…." To develop the idea of black stoicism, Brown juxtaposes his catalogue of inhumanities against black people to passages from spirituals and secular songs. The songs Brown quotes bespeak the black man's hope, strength and endurance—his dogged will to survive—born out of the suffering, profitless labor, racial segregation, etc., described in the poem. For centuries these songs and others have served as a solace and a source of strength for black people. (p. 142)

The dialect of the black folk figures in Brown's poetry is constant with their character. Honed in black folk life, the dialect he employs has none of the "humor and pathos" of the contrived speech used by "black" characters in the literature of the plantation tradition. Neither is the dialect in his poetry a transcription of how blacks supposedly spoke. Although he retains some of the pronunciations common to black speech, Brown does not arbitrarily mutilate the spellings of words to suggest the unlettered character of his folk…. Brown, with a good ear and a sensibility attuned to the folk, selects … varied rhythms, idioms, metaphors and images, and transforms them into conscious art.

Like Euro-American and other Afro-American poets of the twentieth century, Brown has also employed the traditions of the folk ballad in his poetry. Influencing more than fifteen poems in Southern Road, the ballad, along with the blues mode, is the most frequently used form in the collection. At times, he adopts the ballad form; at others, he combines the narrative techniques of the ballad with artistic techniques of other forms. (pp. 147-48)

Brown's literary ballads, while sometimes adhering closely to the folk ballad form, cover numerous subjects from black folk life. Racial injustice, exploits of folk heroes, tragic love affairs, religion, suffering in poverty, freedom, the need for travel—all of these and many others constitute the subjects of Brown's ballads. His poems in the ballad form alone, more than his poems employing other forms of Afro-American music, give us a broad slice of black life in America. (p. 148)

In addition to the ballad tradition, it is the black tradition of storytelling and folk humor that inform these ballads. Implied in them is the black man's ability to see not only the tragic aspects of his life, but those comic elements also—even in the absurdity of white racism.

The poetry of Sterling A. Brown gives a kaleidoscopic picture of black folk character and life in America—a picture that is constant with the folk themselves. In the main, Brown's are a Black South folk, who, through song, dogged will, ironic laughter, wisdom, "strange legacies," and faith, confront and survive a hostile universe, in spite of the dehumanization they encounter perpetually. "Illiterate, and somehow very wise," Brown's black folk are strong men who "keep-a-comin' on / Gittin' stronger…." Although he concentrates on the folk of the rural South, he gives us a brief picture of the black folk of the urban North in Part Three, "Tin Roof Blues," of Southern Road. Like their Southern brothers, they, too, face a hostile universe, but, cut off from their Black South ancestral roots, Brown's Northern black folk act out their illusions of joy and "arrival" in what they thought would be a Promised Land. In his varied portrayals of black folk, Brown makes no apology for them or their life styles. Neither does he present distorted pictures of them. To counter the propagandistic images proliferated in American literature, he, with the integrity of the true artist, represents black folk realistically through forms created by them and a spirit that emanates from their lives. In short, his poems eloquently fulfill James Weldon Johnson's request that the black American Poet turn inward for an aesthetic that bespeaks the souls of black folk. (p. 152)