Hester, James Robert

James Robert Hester retired in 2005 from the Department of Energy Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina, where he started his career as an engineer in 1972. Hester has spent his retirement as a student, first enrolled at Augusta State University, where he earned a bachelor of arts in music in 2010, and currently at Georgia Regents University majoring in history specializing in antebellum black music studies. Hester became interested in William Allen's writings in 2010 while writing a thesis on slave songs of Augusta, which were included in the 1867 anthology Slave Songs of the United