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Born in 1902, Bessie Jones learned songs from her grandfather Jet Samson (who died in 1941 at age 105) and others from the Georgia Sea Islands. Many of the songs she had learned dated back to slavery days; Jet Samson himself made the voyage. Along with five other members of his family, he had been brought to the United States as a slave and worked on plantations in Virginia and Georgia. As Mary Jo Barron writes in her notes, 'In every… MORE