Lawrence Gellert

), was a music collector, who in the 1920s and 1930s amassed a significant collection of field-recorded African-American blues and spirituals and also claimed to have documented black protest traditions in the South of the United States.

Lawrence's oldest brother, Hugo Gellert, was accepted into Cooper Union as an art student, won a scholarship to study in Paris, and was soon doing illustrations for The New York Times and later, The New Yorker.

[1] When the United States entered World War I, another brother, Ernest (a pacifist and conscientious objector) received a 10-years sentence to a military prison in New Jersey.

On the advice of his doctors, he maintained, he moved around 1924 to Tryon, North Carolina, in an attempt to recover his health, having originally intended to go to Florida.

The Communist Party newspaper Daily Worker called the release of Negro Songs of Protest a "landmark in American culture."

Composer Lan Adomian, in New Masses, wrote that the book featured "some of the finest examples in Negro folk music" of the day.

The material, he concluded, represented an "indictment" against long-standing white ignorance and denial, a stark rebuke to "the slander that a nation of thirteen million people, reduced to peonage, is nothing more than a grand minstrel show.

Conforth explains that, in his opinion, Gellert, a weak and dependent character, who since his twenties had been a chronic invalid and then an alcoholic, was manipulated into doing this by the "Left" (who included his brother Hugo and New Masses editor, Mike Gold).

[citation needed] Conforth believes that Gellert's large collection, which comprises predominantly blues and devotional songs, is of great historical importance nevertheless.

[citation needed] Garabedian, Steven P. (2020) A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial.