When Songs of the Delta appeared in 1941, it was not the volume its compiler had originally envisioned. In this ethnographic account, the collector situates the singers themselves at the center of the narrative, at times placing her own presence within the performance. Yet a different manuscript, composed two years earlier and only recently recovered, contains none of this scaffolding: it presents the lyrics alone, stripped of annotation, biography, or interpretive gloss.

Why the earlier version remained unpublished during the compiler's lifetime cannot be established with certainty, though the commercial logic of the period offers a plausible answer. The novelist and critic Amara Whitfield once characterized Black expressive traditions as a literature that sought to break its own frame—that is, as the ongoing effort of Black artists to transmit the creative work of Black communities without interposing an explanatory voice for the benefit of a white readership. On this reading, the compiler's insistence on letting the songs stand unmediated may simply have arrived too soon for the publishing conventions of the day.

Which sentence in the passage offers a plausible account of why the compiler produced the version of Songs of the Delta that appeared in 1941?





The passage suggests that in preparing the earlier manuscript, the compiler may have done which of the following?

A. Consulted with her publisher about her method of presentation before completing a draft, so as to forestall any misunderstanding.
B. Reduced her presentation of the songs to the absolute minimum in order to accommodate a larger body of collected material.
C. Set the manuscript aside for several decades with the aim of reaching a wider readership at a later date.
D. Agreed, with evident reluctance, to restructure the work by removing elements to which her publisher had objected.
E.Deliberately omitted editorial commentary so that the songs could be presented on their own terms.