William Still: Black Ethnographer of the Underground
By Lamont Jack Pearley
“More than a conductor on the Underground Railroad or the secretary of an historically Black organization, William Still was an early Black ethnographer—archiving memory, testimony, and survival from within the movement itself.”
When we speak the names of our ancestors who laid the groundwork for what we now call Black folklore and fieldwork, it’s crucial that we include William Still.
Many recognize Still as the “Father of the Underground Railroad,” the free Black man in Philadelphia who helped hundreds of freedom seekers escape bondage. That legacy is powerful, and it’s true. However, what often goes unspoken is that Still, through his 1872 book The Underground Railroad, wasn’t just a freedom fighter; he was a fieldworker, a documentarian, and a cultural preservationist. Essentially, Still, like Charlotte Forten Grimkè (whom Still comes out of her family’s camp) was an ethnographer, utilizing folkloristic methods. He was doing the work we now identify as ethnography and Black folkloristics long before those terms were formalized or acknowledged within the academy. Even before Childs, Newells, Brinton, and Boas thought to utilize a Euro lens at what they called “advocating for the respect and understanding of diverse human cultures and traditions..”
Still’s work represents one of the earliest examples of community-rooted field documentation, carried out not from a distance, but from within the very movement it preserved. He created a collection of what is referred to as primary source material.
A Fieldworker in the Fight
Still didn’t interview his subjects years later in comfort. He sat with them immediately upon arrival, sometimes the same day they escaped slavery. He took down their names, places of origin, escape routes, kinfolk left behind, and in many cases, their own personal philosophies. These weren’t secondhand reports or reimagined tales; this was real-time testimony, captured from within the movement itself.
That makes William Still a participant observer, an embedded witness, not just to the facts of escape, but to the internal, spiritual, and familial world of the people in motion. He was practicing what we today call field ethnography, gathering firsthand accounts, contextual details, vernacular language, and deeply cultural expressions from those who lived through it as he led them to their destinations.
He wasn’t collecting data for the sake of scholarship. He was preserving Black memory, so it couldn’t be erased, distorted, or forgotten. He had purpose!
The Archive as Resistance
What distinguishes Still’s work from many other abolitionist documents of the time is that he prioritized Black voice and agency. He didn’t translate their stories into respectable terms for white audiences. He didn’t flatten or edit their words to fit a political script. He let the people speak. He recorded their truths on their own terms. A methodology championed by ethnomusicologists and folklorists currently, as most have come to realize the initial aesthetics and practices of the field and discipline have been racist, sexist, and replete with class warfare.
That’s not just abolitionist work, it’s counter-archival work. Counterintuitively, it is archiving through the lens of what is significant to Black Americans and Afro-Indigenous framing—not archiving and collecting based on outside understanding of what would constitute communal black memory to move the tribes and peoples forward. Still built a repository of Black narrative ownership, one that resisted erasure and claimed the right to document life, pain, joy, and freedom in our own voices. Still gave us the blueprint of black documentation, repository, and archiving for the field ethnographic interviews conducted by insiders. Insiders, in the sense of Black voices documenting Black voices.
Still’s archive includes spiritual beliefs, coded songs, family stories, resistance strategies, and moral convictions. It mirrors today’s folkloristic methods, centered on lived experience, oral tradition, and community truth-telling. Not only did he work as a public folklorist, but he also applied early methods of ethnomusicology, as Still documented the engagement of the folks he interviewed with their music and sonic expression.
A Method Rooted in Culture
From a folklorist’s standpoint, Still’s book is filled with the elements we seek when we enter the field: kinship structures, regional knowledge, spiritual worldview, vernacular storytelling, and historical context embedded in everyday life. He didn’t just collect who went where; he preserved how they thought, what they believed, and why they moved the way they did.
This kind of documentation is what I call Black cultural fieldwork, not just recording for the sake of records, but preserving for continuity, justice, and cultural memory. Essentially, this is the precursor to the Blues Narrative. Still’s methodology was informed not by theory, but by responsibility. A responsibility that lives in ethics! Still didn’t have to develop ethics to conduct his work; his work was born out of the sensitivity and treatment of his people. Out of a cotastraphe, out of war, natural disaster, ultimately, out of prisoners of war named slaves. He understood the weight of the moment and responded with care.
His work is a model of Blues People Preservation: rooted in the community, accountable to the community, and crafted to safeguard the legacy of Black life as told by those who lived it.
What This Means for Us
As a practicing folklorist, traditional Bluesman, and cultural preservationist, I often turn back to Still, not just for his content, but for his approach. He reminds us that fieldwork is not neutral. It’s a choice. And when done right, it’s an act of love and resistance.
In a time when Black stories are still commodified or misrepresented, Still’s work teaches us that to document our people means to honor them, to believe them, and to trust their voice over interpretation. There is no talk of ethics or this idea of objectivity. Still approaches as an applied ethnomusicologist and applied Folklorist,
Still’s legacy lives in every oral history I collect, every field recording I make, every sacred story I preserve. His pen was a tool of liberation. His book is a cultural lifeline.
We Are Still Building
At The African American Folklorist, our mission aligns with Still’s foundational work. We uplift and amplify Black voices, not as subjects but as narrators, theorists, and keepers of knowledge. We build our archives not only to preserve the past, but to affirm the present and shape the future.
William Still wasn’t just recording history. He was practicing a distinctly Black ethnographic methodology grounded in survival, storytelling, and freedom. It’s time we place him alongside our greatest cultural scholars, not just for what he did, but for how he did it.
And so, we carry the torch, not just of freedom, but of Black fieldwork that listens, documents, and preserves with purpose.
Lamont Jack Pearley is a traditional Blues artist, public folklorist, and founder of the Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation and The African American Folklorist Magazine. His work centers the voice, memory, and lived experience of the Black Blues People through research, music, oral history, and cultural fieldwork.
