When it comes to culture, American states obviously pose artificial boundaries, drawn for historical, political and administrative purposes, boundaries which do not necessarily correspond to cultural factors at all. Yet state boundaries have presented obvious means for organizing culture, including folk culture. There are state folklore societies, and numerous books present the folklore of X or Y American state. This has clear advantages. State boundaries may be a convenience for those of us who seek to approach cultural realities, or state governments may provide support for work involving the culture of a state, or the people of a state may take pride in their political entity and provide an audience for cultural knowledge of that entity. In some cases states actually take on cultural identities. Of course those who study a state’s culture may simply recognize that they are part of a larger region, like the West or the South, and that the culture of their state, however rich, is a variation on something larger.
Though their collection concentrates on a state and its subsections, the editors of A Sampler of Songs and Stories from the Northeast Archive of Folklore and Oral History (the cover also calls the book Maine Song and Story Sampler) recognize how difficult it is to “separate Maine from the rest of the Northeast” (viii), and they include a section of material from a neighboring state (New Hampshire) and Canadian provinces (New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) (a region they conceive as the Northeast; the term here does not refer to the larger portion of the United States which the term often covers). These non-Maine sections they call the Borderlands. That is a Maine-centric perspective but it does acknowledge that folklore sprawls across political boundaries and that cultural and political boundaries are not the same. The folklore of a state exists as part of a larger matrix, though for convenience one may look at the folk culture or cultures of a state. Because the Northeast Archive of Folklore and Oral History, founded by noted folklorist Edward “Sandy” Ives, is located at the University of Maine and has been supported by this state institution, it of course contains a lot of Maine material, and the editors clearly see this book as a collection of Maine lore. As a state, Maine has yielded much folklore over the years, in part because Ives, a very active collector, was there, but because even earlier collectors like Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Phillips Barry recognized Maine as a place where folklore flourished.
This Sampler is in many ways similar to earlier regional collections, though it does cross genre boundaries by including both songs and oral narratives. The “narratives” are not necessarily stories, however. For example, “Acadian Food” is an account of “typical” ethnic foodways, and “Pumpkin Seed Tea” and “Learning Family Healing Traditions” deal with, loosely speaking, the use of folk medicine. So the book is really a bit of a sampler on Maine folklife. Other narratives of course are more in line with what we would expect of folk stories. For example “‘Blueberries’ & ‘Leathery Ice,’” tales from the same narrator and given together, are sorts of tall tales (which the notes indicate were also part of the repertoire of Jones Tracey, who was recorded in the 1960s by C. Richard K. Lunt).
This Sampler presents texts with notes (though unfortunately there is no index or table of contents which would allow the reader to easily find particular selections; the table of contents is organized, as is the book, according to regions), and folklorists will perhaps be most interested in the songs collected in this volume, given earlier collections of Maine song. The collection of songs presented here is varied, ranging from Child ballads to quite local songs and to Native American songs and songs in Swedish and French. As with all the selections in A Sampler, the song notes are excellent, giving Child, Roud, and Laws numbers, sources where versions of the song published earlier can be located, and commentary on the song, placing a song in social context and in the context of song history. For example “Canaday-I-O” is traced back to “Canada-I-O,” “Caledonia,” and “The Buffalo Skinners,” while a “preacher” in this version is explained to be an agent hiring men for woods work, this slang term being traced back to an explanation given by Eckstorm. “The Teamster in Jack MacDonald’s Crew,” collected by Sandy Ives in 1965, is carefully traced to local events, the facts sung about being “remarkably accurate” (69) (in terms of the actual events). And despite its title, “The Irish Patriot” is noted as a song that has been collected only in Maine (though one wonders about the influence of the ballad “The Paisley Officer,” Laws N2, at least for part of a line, which goes unnoted). Some of the information given will already be familiar to folklore scholars, and the notes seem partly aimed at a wider audience (and, indeed, the book is part of a larger effort aimed at the Internet and meant to call attention to the great archive at the University of Maine and stimulate its use, something I myself have done), an idea reinforced by the conception of this collection as a sampler.
Though Maine is part of New England and though the editors of A Sampler were well aware that their state’s culture overlaps that of other political units, Texas tends to see itself as an entity unto itself, even if it is also part of the West (or is it the South? certainly many aspects of Texas culture, particularly that of East Texas, and including racial perspectives and the existence of a plantation culture, have been much influenced by our southern states—from which many Texans migrated). Perhaps this sense of Texas identity has resulted from the fact that Texas was for a time a separate republic, or from the fact that the state does, indeed, fall across American regions. Surely in the popular imagination Texas is seen as the epitome of something, be it cattle culture or oil wealth or the western frontier. Thus the Texas Folklore Society has had its own cultural whole to investigate and promote.
Folklore scholars have never known quite what to do with the long-lived Texas Folklore Society. As a state society it has been around for a long time and was founded under the influence of Stith Thompson, one of America’s great folklore scholars and the founder of one of our great folklore graduate study programs, that at Indiana University. Some of the materials published by the Society have been of considerable interest to scholars (in his preface to volume 68 editor Kenneth L. Untiedt opines that the Texas Society has “contributed more to folklore scholarship in general than any state folklore organization” [ix]). Yet, perhaps because of the influence of J. Frank Dobie, who was suspicious of academic approaches to folklore study, the Society, despite the involvement of academics, has shied away from scholarly approaches and has promoted popular approaches to folklore, often publishing material which folklore scholars have seen as dubious at best. Alone among state societies, the Texas Folklore Society has published not a journal but an annual hard-bound book, often with articles centered around a topic (the Northeast Folklore Society, which published A Sampler, has also published what amounts to not a journal but a monograph series, though not hard-bound volumes). Perhaps all of these factors, as well as the tendency of the Society to allow for a sort of “Texas nationalism,” have led to the on-going vitality of the Texas Folklore Society, which has attracted many people to membership and meetings and which has continued to exist for many years. (In the interest of, as they say, “full disclosure,” I should say that my folklore scholar wife, born in Fort Worth, has been a member of the Society for many years and that together or singly we have attended meetings of the Society.)
The two volumes under review are typical of Texas Folklore Society publications. Though each, as a book, has a title, each presents something of a miscellany of articles, not the somewhat unified collection of essays that Society books have sometimes presented. Thus each is a bit more like a journal than a unified collection; in this each is like many of the Society’s past volumes, whose titles suggest the varied nature of the articles within. Each is divided into sections, with the articles in each section bearing some thematic relation to each other.
The title of volume 68, First Timers and Old Timers: The Texas Folklore Society Fire Burns On, suggests that the Society may be most interested in the people who support it and its on-going existence. The first section of the book consists of reminiscences, and other contributions in other sections rely upon reminiscence as well. Some would wonder what relation such pieces (such as Linda Wolff’s article on how people once were more involved in “making do,” as she remembers her own earlier days) bear to folklore at all. Some of the articles in section 3, Legends in Their Time–and Ours Still, take a non-folkloric use of legend (as applying to famous or noted people) and then talk about the founders of a local store or a minor-league baseball team and its leading personality. Writers of articles in this volume, even when their subjects might be of interest to folklore scholars, seem inured to using documentation. For example, Francis Edward Abernethy, for years the editor of the Society’s publications and one of the Society’s most sophisticated members, writes on “Songs of the Depression” and presents a number of texts without a word about his sources or the possible authors of his songs. It is as though he just threw in the songs he remembered without checking any sources or thinking that readers might like to refer to more material on the songs.
In volume 69, Cowboys, Cops, Killers, and Ghosts: Legends and Lore in Texas, Abernethy has an article about the ghost towns in the Big Thicket region. It’s interesting but is local history and travel writing, not writing about folklore. Ghost legends are folklore, ghost towns are not (though the oral history about them may be). In the same volume Jerry Young writes about a person as “a legend” and Marissa Gardner, in writing about a supposed serial killer briefly mentions legend but essentially gives the reader an article about some murders and what she sees as popular misunderstandings of them. That is, contributors to Texas Folklore Society publications often seem confused about what folklore is, seeming to confuse it with misconceptions and local color and local history. It’s no wonder that folklore scholars sometimes see the materials put out by the Texas Society as amateurish or as not dealing with folklore at all.
On the other hand, both Texas volumes do contain articles which should be of interest to folklore scholars. Manuel F. Medrano’s article on Américo Paredes (partly drawn from Medrano’s book) is a cogent treatment of Paredes’s fieldwork and quotes interestingly from its subject’s letters. And Len Ainsworth’s article on day-work cowboys in the 1930s alerts us to and informs us about an aspect of occupational folklife we might not otherwise be aware of. For that matter, many of the reminiscences, though they may have little to do with folklore as such, provide clues that folklore scholars may find helpful. And where else would they appear if not here? Who else is interested in preserving in print the aspects of culture that the Society devotes its attention to?
These volumes relating to Maine and to Texas represent different approaches to looking at the folklore of a state. The Maine volume is much more in the spirit of conventional folklore scholarship, presenting texts and background information about those texts. The Texas Folklore Society volumes (really more like journals) continue that Society’s practice of looking more broadly at Texas culture, though mostly its more “everyday” aspects, and present much material that many trained folklorists might not consider as being within their range of interest at all, though the Society is to be commended for trying to call attention to things that might otherwise be ignored.
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[Review length: 2045 words • Review posted on October 15, 2014]