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Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales that Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folk Songs

whose lives were upended by the Great Depression and how many of them found hope and security in Roosevelt’s New Deal. Moving chronologically from Hoover’s delayed and voluntary response initiatives through the Depression and into early 1940, Greene shows how clergy and laity responded to the unfolding economic disaster. Organized into four major parts, No Depression in Heaven demonstrates the fundamental ways in which the Depression and the New Deal transformed Protestant denominations in the Delta. The first two parts of the book, “Crisis” and “Depression Religion,” focus on the human misery often glossed over amidst sweeping generalities about the Great Depression. Greene, instead, dives into archives and brings out such stories as parents who left beloved children at orphanages because they did not want to see their sons and daughters starve. Such heartrending accounts demonstrate the desperation with which so many people turned to the churches in the Delta. The problem was those churches were full of desperate people who all needed help. Thus, many clergy were unable to help their parishioners in significant ways. Such a crisis naturally leads into part 3: “The New Deal.” For many southerners living in the Delta, it “was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt” (2). This idea, the almost salvific power of Roosevelt, runs through many of the individuals that Greene documents. Local clergy and political leaders also took note of the shift in power structures. For those attempting to remain in power, it meant that they tried (often successfully) to control federal aid. Local control became a way to keep the poor and African Americans beholden to Jim Crow power brokers. This tension between the far-off provider Roosevelt and local enforcement of institutional racism leads seamlessly into the final part of the book. “Religion Reinvented” moves the reader into criticisms of the New Deal. Although many of these criticisms are woven throughout the book (in fact, some of the most interesting sources that Greene uses are letters written to Roosevelt in response to a questionnaire he sent to clergy around the country), the final chapters of the book examine the realignments that developed in response to the New Deal. In a post–2016 election world, it is hard not to see powerful resonances in current events. In the late 1930s and into 1940, religious leaders developed theological criticisms of governmental intervention, and a national myth started that turned the winners and losers of New Deal legislation on their heads. In her epilogue, Greene brings the reader quickly through the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, where the myth of the redemptive Depression reached new heights. In this recounting of the Great Depression, “people who wanted assistance could always turn to their families or their churches, until Roosevelt swept in to replace voluntary assistance with state aid that rendered its recipients hopelessly dependent” (200). Readers of this book will be struck with just how inaccurate and counterfactual this myth truly is, yet how pervasive it is today. There is much to like in No Depression in Heaven: clear evidence, strong prose, and wonderful use of sources. This reviewer only had the smallest quibbles. Although Greene gives a wonderful overarching view of the transformation of Protestantism in the Delta, occasionally this reviewer would have liked a more in-depth examination of a particular denomination or tradition. As should be clear, Greene’s work is a beautifully written, wonderfully researched portrait of life and belief in the Delta during the Great Depression. Undergraduates will find it accessible through the powerful use of sources, and graduate students and scholars will surely compare it to Patricia Sullivan’s classic Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 1996) as a profound recounting of how high-level policy interacts with the lives of individuals.