John Wesley Work III (July 15, 1901 – May 17, 1967) was an American composer, educator, choral director, musicologist and scholar of African-American folklore and music.
His uncle, Frederick Jerome Work, also collected and arranged folksongs, and his brother, Julian, became a professional musician and composer.
His best known articles were "Plantation Meistersingers" in The Musical Quarterly (Jan. 1940), and "Changing Patterns in Negro Folksongs" in the Journal of American Folklore (Oct. 1940).
The goal of the partnership was to carry out an intensive field study documenting the folk culture of a specific community of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta region.
Some of the correspondence included in this collection between Work and Alan Lomax, then head of the Archive of American Folk Song, touches on both the Fort Valley and the emerging Fisk University recording projects.
Arrangements for S. A. T. B. of several collected Christian folk songs of the 1860s, first appearing in print in the early 1900s, and published in 1948 by Work through 'Galaxy Music Corp', NY.