Where Hyatt Recorded: A Map of the Old Hoodoo Informants

Between 1936 and 1940 Harry Middleton Hyatt drove the South and the Atlantic coast with a recording machine, paying people to tell him what they knew about hoodoo, conjure, witchcraft and rootwork. This is where he set up.

Every dot is a town from his citations. Its size is the number of different informants he cites from that town. Click a dot, or find the town in the table, to reach the Hyatt Files entries that quote its people.

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Town by town

Grouped by state, roughly in the order you would meet them coming down the coast and across to the river. The middle column is how many informants Hyatt cites from that town; the last lists the Hyatt Files entries that quote them, most quoted first.

How Hyatt worked

He collected his first belief for these volumes in New York City on 12 March 1936, then went south, town by town, over the next four years.

In each town a local contact man found the people and brought them in. Hyatt did the interviewing in hotel rooms and rented rooms, and paid for what he was told.

He recorded on Ediphone cylinders at first and Telediphone cylinders after, which is why so much of the text keeps the speaker’s own words, dialect and all.

Every item ends with a citation in square brackets: the town, the informant’s number in brackets, then the cylinder. When we quote someone in the Library, those are the numbers you see.

About the counts

The numbers are ours. We counted the different informant numbers Hyatt gives for each town across the scanned text of all five volumes.

Read them as close, not exact. Some people were interviewed in more than one sitting, and the scans misread a number here and there. Hyatt also recorded in a few places with only a handful of informants, which we have left off the map.

Learn the work

Towns, informant numbers and dates from Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo – Conjuration – Witchcraft – Rootwork, 5 vols., 1970-1978. Map drawn by Hoodoo Witch.