Tradition: Tennessee Lives & Legacies is a hardcover, over-sized photography book that accompanies a touring exhibit which opened at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga on September 26, 2010, and went on to other venues before closing in December of 2013.
Robert Cogswell has spent over twenty-five years as the state folklorist of Tennessee. Based at the Tennessee Arts Commission since 1984, Cogswell directs the Folklife Program, one of the longer-running traditional arts programs in the country. He has spent years traversing the state, learning from and championing those who practice and preserve traditional arts.
This book is intended for a general readership. With its abundance of color photographs, printed on heavy stock with full bleeds, the book is a feast for the eyes. The depth-of-field on some of these photos is breathtaking. One quibble is the book’s typographic design; text widths exceed the norm and on some page spreads, make reading a strain.
The book is essentially a sampling of Tennessee’s folklife brought to life by Dean Dixon’s images. Ethnographic depth the book lacks. I was looking forward to reading more of Cogswell’s words, which, when spoken, are notoriously insightful and colorfully steeped in the vernacular. We do get a taste of Cogswell’s voice in the finely written biographical essays, which ground the traditional arts in cultural, historical, occupational, and geographic context. These little life stories give us a glimpse into the lives of people who have mastered and preserved folk traditions all across Tennessee. Some art forms are associated with long-settled Tennesseans, such as white oak, round ribbed, basket making, old time fiddling, Native American beadwork, and African American gospel singing, while others reflect the cultural heritage of relative newcomers to the state, like Mexican needle arts, Salvadoran foodways, and Laotian dance music. What ties these individuals together is their passion for practicing and preserving artistic excellence. As Cogswell tells us in his introduction, “Each of the book’s profiles is a tribute to mastery” (2).
The book comes with a DVD containing beautiful photographs featuring contextual portraits of people at home and at work. As with the photographs in the book, we see instrument makers, quilters, coopers, woodcarvers, buck dancers, farmers, and cooks. One photo resolves into the next against a backdrop of acoustic, finger-picked guitar playing, which though neither traditional nor vernacular, provides a pleasant sound-bed with which to view the images.
The book should be considered in conjunction with an excellent teacher’s guide of the same title, prepared by Folklife Program Assistant Dana Everts-Boehm. Designed in two sections for grades 3-6 and 7-12, the guide is meant to prepare students before visiting the exhibition through learning about a selection of six artists featured in the book and exhibit, although the guide is useful just on its own. Links to informative websites, YouTube examples, and other Internet sources will assist the teacher in illustrating content. Each lesson is tied to Tennessee state curriculum standards, and a family heritage project is outlined.
Tradition: Tennessee Lives & Legacies is a loving tribute to twenty-five tradition bearers of Tennessee who have shared their knowledge and artistry with one of the South’s finest public folklorists of his generation. Rather than a timely contribution to folklore scholarship, this book is a visual testament to the trust gained, and the valuable relationships formed, between a public folklorist and his “folk.”
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[Review length: 558 words • Review posted on December 17, 2013]