When this book was first published in 1958, Melville Herskovits, with his wife and collaborator, Frances, had spent over twenty years studying the social networks, religion, music, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the major site of their Africa work, is in the country now known as the Republic of Benin.

This volume, published now as a companion piece to Northwestern University Press's best-selling West African Folktales, has two goals: to provide basic texts of material collected in the field; and to show how they were collected, analyzed, and theorized in the anthropological and folklore disciplinary traditions of Herskovits's day. The result is a wide-ranging collection, culled from an entire narrative tradition, that remains unique among anthropological publications.