African American Folklorist of the Month: Dr. Paulette Richards
Soul Songs, Story Objects, and the Power of Black Memory
Interviewed and Published by: Lamont Jack Pearley
In our December feature of The African American Folklorist, we highlight the extraordinary work of Dr. Paulette Richards, a pioneering scholar, filmmaker, educator, and one of the most influential voices in African American object performance today. This episode explores how Dr. Richards transforms puppets, folk songs, and low-tech digital tools into powerful vessels for historical remembrance, artistic resistance, and cultural healing.
Dr. Richards’ recent soundtrack EP, Soul Songs: Remembrance, Resilience, Resistance, is drawn from a ten-year trilogy of experimental puppet films, Blacks and Bays, Men and Mules, and Worth Her Salt. Each film reflects on the historical realities of African American labor, trauma, and survival. Through traditional folk songs, once sung to endure enslavement, convict leasing, and the brutal conditions of the American South, she amplifies generations of voices who used music as a pathway toward remembrance and liberation.
In the episode, Dr. Richards shares how singing these songs, sometimes into an iPhone on her closet floor, became an act of ancestral communion. Pieces like “Poor little baby crying Mammy,” “I got a rainbow wrapped around my shoulder,” and “Before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave” take on renewed meaning as she weaves them into narratives that honor both the pain and the resilience embedded in the Black experience.
A central focus of our conversation is Men and Mules, a visually striking reflection on the convict leasing system that powered the industrialization of the New South. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s documentation of the folk song “Mule on the Mount,” Dr. Richards explores how African American convicts were often treated worse than the mules they labored beside. By using puppets rather than live actors, she introduces just enough emotional distance for viewers to confront the disquieting truths of infanticide, industrial accidents, and racialized exploitation—realities often too heavy to process visually in traditional film.
The episode also traces Dr. Richards’ intellectual and artistic journey: from teaching at Georgetown, Tulane, and Georgia Tech, to her Fulbright research in Senegal, to her landmark work co-curating Living Objects: African American Puppetry at the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute. Her more recent traveling exhibit on The Wonderland Puppet Theater highlights interracial friendship and creativity during the civil rights era, showcasing the transformative potential of community-based art.
This blog post, and this episode, honors Dr. Richards as a cultural steward whose work expands what African American folklore can look like when we place ancestral memory at the center of creative expression. Whether through dance, diaspora, puppetry, or pedagogy, she continues to illuminate new pathways for seeing, feeling, and understanding the Black experience.
