Thomas W. Talley (collector)

Thomas Washington Talley (1870–1952) was an American chemist who taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Alongside his scientific work he gathered the songs and rhymes of Black Americans, many of them remembered from the years of slavery.

His collection Negro Folk Rhymes, Wise and Otherwise, with a Study (New York: Macmillan, 1922) sets down dance, play, courtship, nursery and proverb rhymes in the dialect in which they were spoken and sung, adding a short section of rhymes sent from Africa, the Caribbean, Venezuela and the Philippines. The rhymes are credited to the folk who made them; Talley is their collector rather than their author.

The book opens with an introduction by Walter Clyde Curry of Vanderbilt University and closes with Talley's prose study of the rhymes and their origins. Only the rhymes themselves are given here.