Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork

Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork, compiled by Harry Middleton Hyatt and published by the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation beginning in 1970, is a massive five volume collection of interviews, over sixteen hundred informants across the American South, transcribed largely in phonetic dialect, documenting African American folk magical practice as its own practitioners described it. Hyatt was an Episcopal clergyman and folklorist who spent decades on the fieldwork, and the sheer scale of testimony he gathered has made the collection an indispensable primary source no later study of hoodoo can avoid. Its strength is the raw volume and directness of first person testimony, unmediated by an outside theoretical framework. Its limit, openly debated among folklorists since publication, is the phonetic dialect transcription itself, which some scholars argue exoticizes and others defend as accurately preserving speech patterns, and Hyatt's own editorial choices about which testimony to include, so the collection is best read as primary material requiring interpretation, not a settled account.