Soul Songs, Story Objects, and the Power of Black Memory

Dr. Paulette Richards, our African American Folklorist of the Month for December 2025, brings a powerful blend of scholarship, artistry, and cultural memory to her work in African American puppetry and object performance. In this episode, we explore her trilogy of puppet films—Blacks and Bays, Men and Mules, and Worth Her Salt—and the accompanying EP Soul Songs: Remembrance, Resilience, Resistance, which reimagines ancestral folk songs as acts of remembrance and resistance. Through puppetry, Dr. Richards confronts the harsh histories of enslavement, convict leasing, and the ongoing afterlife of mass incarceration, creating enough emotional distance for audiences to engage deeply with traumatic truths. Her practice, shaped by diasporic study in Senegal, dance training, francophone sensibilities, and decades of teaching, challenges dominant visual narratives and restores agency to Black representation. This episode honors Dr. Richards as a visionary whose work transforms low-tech materials into high-impact storytelling, illuminating the resilience, creativity, and unbroken spirit of the Blues People.