New Books In Folklore

On its back cover, Patrick B. Mullen’s Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music(University of Illinois Press, 2018) is aptly described as “part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir”. Mullen is professor emeritus of English and folklore at the Ohio State University and across the eight chapters that make up this book, he enthusiastically and engagingly describes his many encounters with a wide range of vernacular musics throughout the north American continent and details his experiences with the musical genres, performers, events, and songs that have shaped the soundscape of his life. As his fellow music scholar, E. Cecilia Conway puts it: this “book lets us ride shotgun with Mullen on his journey from Beaumont, Texas boy to Ohio professor to dancing to 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'The Twist' amidst the diversity of American Music. Read Pat Mullen at his expansive best."Rachel Hopkin is a UK-born, US-based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State Univers

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although bluegrass music is typically associated with the bluegrass state of Kentucky and Appalachia, the genre is actually played in many pockets all around the world.  In Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Lee Bidgood explores the popularity of bluegrass in the Czech Republic.  Bidgood is an associate professor of bluegrass, old-time, and country music studies in the Department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University and an accomplished musician himself.  He begins his study with a description of the development of the cultural landscape within this central European nation and explains how a confluence of factors within that landscape – not least a fascination with American pop culture and the appeal of the rural – led to the popularity of bluegrass music within certain circles, and also discusses how the genre was able to survive under Communism.  In addition, Bidgood’s investigation includes his exploration of some of the identity

Kate Parker Horigan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University, and a co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore. In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative (University of Mississippi Press, 2018), she explores some of the numerous narratives generated by Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects on residents of New Orleans in 2005. Her investigation includes personal narratives of those directly affected by the hurricane and which were recorded as part of the “Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston” project (SKRH).  In SKRH – which was set up by folklorists Carl Lindahl and Pat Jasper – survivors were given the training and other resources to interview one another about their experience of the events (see this site for more information).  Horigan notes that many of the narratives collected by SKRH counter widespread and pernicious claims which circulated via the media and through other channels during and after the disaster, i

Bill Ivey’s Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America (Indiana University Press, 2018) advances the idea that we are entering a post-enlightenment world increasingly characterized by alternative facts, fake news, and doubts over the “objective” truths of science. Faced with the failure of data-driven social sciences to explain these phenomena, and to anticipate the behaviors of the American voter in 2016 or the middle-class-teenager-turned-ISIS-fighter, Rebuilding advances folklore as a potential alternative to preserve the Enlightenment’s progress and potentially make good on its promise. Drawing on the work of seminal figures of American folkore’s recent past, including Richard Dorson, Americo Paredes, Archie Green, Ralph Rinzler, and Henry Glassie, rebuilding examines the a range of phenomena including the 2016 presidential election, Black Panther, the rise of fake news, and Story Corps for a way to recognize and value alternative knowledge systems. The path forward is anything but clear, but p

Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 (University of Wisconsin Press) first appeared in 2015 when it comprised of a hardback book, five CDs, and one DVD. It went on to win the “Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music” award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Notes,” received universally superlative reviews, and sold out within a year.  The project has now been re-issued as a paperback, albeit without any accompanying discs; instead the related tracks and film footage are now available for online access care of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library. It’s not hard to fathom why this monumental work received so much acclaim. A groundbreaking multimedia endeavor, Folksongs of Another America is the product of decades of work by the distinguished folklorist, James P. Leary.  Leary is, amongst other things, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies and Cofounder of the Center for the S

In Quilts and Health (Indiana University Press, 2017), Marsha MacDowell and her colleagues examine the phenomenon of health-related quilts, of which there are millions around the world. In fact, and as this book documents, almost any illness, disease, or condition is likely to be associated in some way with quiltmaking. Quilts are made to support health education and patient advocacy, to raise funds, to memorialize those passed, to promote personal well-being, and to comfort others in distress. Some quilts even document medical history; for example, Ohio-based quilter Helen Murrell created a piece that serves as a statement of outrage for the unjust treatment of 600 African-American men who, without their knowledge or consent, were subjected to a forty-year medical experiment of the United States government.  During the experiment, 399 men were deliberately infected with syphilis and were allowed to go untreated, even after a cure was developed. Quilts and Health explores the myriad connections that are forge

People have long been captivated by stories of dragons. Myths related to dragon slaying can be found across many civilizations around the world, even among the most ancient cultures including ancient Israel. In his book The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations, Robert Miller chronicles the trajectories and transformations of this myth, and brings out the major role of dragon slaying in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Join us as we talk with Robert Miller about an age-old, fascinating topic: dragons! Robert D. Miller II earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Michigan, and is Associate Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate with University of Pretoria, South Africa. His other books include Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC (2005), Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (2011), and Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (2012). Robert teaches c

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century (University of Kentucky Press, 2013) is the result of multiple research methodologies including extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival investigation, and rhetorical analysis. The book’s introduction includes a history of tobacco production in the United States along with a summary of changes in attitudes towards the product over time – the most significant shift coming in the wake of the 1964 Surgeon General’s report confirming its detrimental health effects.  Thereafter, the book is divided into three parts. Part One offers a detailed description of the work involved in raising the eponymous crop as well as how that process has changed over time. Part Two, titled “The Shifting Meanings of Tobacco,” is based upon Ferrell’s study of the representation of tobacco – or its n

In Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations, and Contestations (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), edited by Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, gathers authors from a variety of disciplines to examine the growing emphasis on heritage in contemporary China. Since China began its heritage turn in the 1990s, and especially since 2004 when it became the sixth nation to ratify the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Chinese state’s enthusiastic promotion of safeguarding traditions, objects, and sites has empowered communities to carefully engage with the cultural practices. Using an approach that draws from the young discipline of critical heritage studies and featuring chapters examining festivals, museums, architecture and more, this volume shows how attention to the dynamic engagements between local stakeholders, government representatives, and cultural specialists can provide important perspectives on cultural forms in China and beyond. These quest

The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote on paper. And so the Han continue to have writing today. The Tibetan man wrote on an animal hide, and so the Tibetans now have writing as well. The Lòlop’ò man, being poor, wrote on buckwheat pancakes. He ate the pancakes on the way home, and the Lòlop’ò now keep their texts orally among a group of ritual specialists. In Erik Mueggler’s Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Lòlop’ò oral literature and Han Chinese writing feature prominently in local “work on the dead.” For the Lòlop’ò, one’s familial ancestors, and non-familial ancestors are present in the world, and people maintain complex intimate relations with them that are not constrained by death. These relations find expression in rituals in which souls are given material body and then dispersed

Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York.  He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian American and in this episode of the New Books in Folklore podcast, he talks about his latest book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) which “offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics” (xiv). A transdisciplinary work, albeit firmly grounded in folklore scholarship and based on ethnographic research conducted over 35 years, this book is a comprehensive study of the myriad ways in which a people express their personal religious faith in tangible, dynamic, and often public forms.  The resulting yard shrines, sidewalk altars, elaborate presepi (Nativity scenes), and other manifestations – which

In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bernuth’s book joins together a historical analysis of early modern and modern German and Yiddish literature to give us a compelling and insightful account of the history of these stories. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.auLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez, is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place-based creative constructions when she was an undergraduate in Wisconsin. In her introduction to Singular Spaces, she recounts how this particular book began: she and her husband were in the process of renovating an old farmhouse they’d purchased in Catalonia. They took a short road-trip to explore the area around their new home and chanced upon “the enormous roadside construction of Josep Pujiula I Vila, at that time one of the largest and most idiosyncratic art environments found worldwide” (16). Short

Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) is an anthology of essays from Dorothy Noyes, professor of English and Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and president of the American Folklore Society. The collection of essays takes aim at some of the critical questions that the discipline of folklore faces in the twenty-first century. From seminal keyword essays (monsters, she calls them) on group, tradition, and aesthetics that set out the state of the field, to studies of the historical uses of tradition at different moments across Europe, to critiques of present-day slogan-concepts like Intangible Cultural Heritage and resilience, Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) sets out to see how the discipline of folklore, with its emphases on vernacular theorization—as opposed to grand or high theories—provides unique insights into society more broadly. Ultimately, it seems, the strength and weaknesses

When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers’ Club, a folk music venue that Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl founded in the early 1960s and to which Freedman returned many times during her London sojourn. After Freedman returned to the States, the pair kept in touch for a while but their contact became increasingly sporadic. However, it began again in earnest when the folklorist emailed Seeger to check some facts for a writing assignment. During their subsequent exchange, Seeger asked if Freedman might know of anyone who would be interested in writing her biography. Immediately, Freedman volunteered herself. Eight years, many interviews, and much text-based research later, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2017) is the result. As the book’s subtitle sug

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of musical traditions from cultures around the world. The book deliberately places endangered musical practices alongside vibrant traditions like western opera and Hindustani music, each assessed along five domains: systems of learning music, musicians and communities, contexts and constructs, regulations and infrastructure, and media and the music industry. Doing so allows for both “vertical reading” (reading chapters in sequential order) and “horizontal reading” (in which one examines one or a handful of domains and focuses on these across different chapters). Beyond the book, information from the project is also available on the website soundfutures.org. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and moderni

Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her extended family in her home state of Wisconsin either were or are prison workers and it is their work-related humor that inspired this book. If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) is based on multiple interviews which Schmidt conducted during a decade or more, and also on her memories of hearing relatives talk about their working lives to great comedic effect at family gatherings over the years. Schmidt’s analysis provides many different examples of the ways in which humor can be deployed by prison workers. For example, it can be a means of acclimatizing recent recruits to their new roles as prison officers; it can alleviate the long stretches of tedium that characterize prison work, as well as offer a way to cope with the periods of extremely high stress wh

How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cashman seeks to answer in his new book Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). Focusing on the singular character of Packy Jim McGrath and the narratives that feature in his repertoire—from personal experience narratives to stories about the supernatural—we are taken into a lifeworld in which Packy Jim struggles with and develops his own answer to questions of authority, power, sacrifice, place, belief, and more, in a world of limited good. As many people told Cashman during his fieldwork (though they mean something slightly different), “If you want real folklore, Packy Jim is your man.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gretchen Dykstra‘s career to date has been both impressive and wide-ranging. She was the founding President of the Times Square Alliance, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs, and the founding President of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation. She is also a writer, and in this New Books in Folklore episode, she is interviewed about her biography of her grandfather, Franz Rickaby, which features in Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) Franz Rickaby was a young folk music collector and fiddler and between 1919 and 1923, he travelled extensively around the Upper Midwest, seeking out the songs and stories of logging industry workers. Even as he embarked on his venture, the region’s lumber business was in stark decline. Most of the original pine forests that had covered the area had been clear cut by that time, but although the environment had been depleted, a rich cache of folkloric material remained. Rickaby set about pre