The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 14: Folklife

The NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA of SOUTHERN CULTURE

VOLUME 14 : FOLKLIFE

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Volumes to appear in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture are: Agriculture and Industry Art and Architecture

Law and Politics Literature

Education

Media

Environment

Music

Ethnicity

Myth, Manners, and Memory

Folk Art

Race

Folklife Foodways Gender Geography History Language

Recreation Religion Science and Medicine Social Class Urbanization Violence

The NEW

ENCYCLOPEDIA of SOUTHERN CULTURE CHARLES REAGAN WILSON General Editor JAMES G. THOMAS JR. Managing Editor ANN J. ABADIE Associate Editor

VOLUME 14

Folklife GLENN HIN S O N & WIL L IA M FE RRI S Volume Editors

Sponsored by

T H E C EN TE R FOR T H E ST U DY OF SOU T HERN CU LTU RE at the University of Mississippi

THE UN IVERSIT Y OF NORTH CAROL I NA PRES S Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2009 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Minion types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Folklife / Glenn Hinson and William Ferris, volume editors. p. 24 cm. — (The new encyclopedia of Southern culture ; v. 14) “Published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.” “Sponsored by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8078-3346-9 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8078-5989-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Folklore—Southern States—Encyclopedias. 2. Folk music— Southern States—Encyclopedias. 3. Folk art—Southern States— Encyclopedias. 4. Folk dancing—Southern States—Encyclopedias. 5. Popular culture—Southern States—Encyclopedias. 6. Southern States—Social life and customs—Encyclopedias. I. Hinson, Glenn. II. Ferris, William. III. University of Mississippi. Center for the Study of Southern Culture. IV. Series. F209 .N47 2006 vol. 14 [GR108] 975.003 s—dc22 2009655070 The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1989. cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1 paper 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

W I L L IA M FAUL K N E R Absalom, Absalom!

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CONTENTS General Introduction xi Introduction xvii

FOLKLIFE 1 Aesthetics, African American 27 Aesthetics, Historically White 30 Basketmaking 35 Bluegrass 38 Blues 43 Cajun Music 49 Car Culture 54 Cemeteries 58 Children’s Folklore 64 Country Music 68 Deathlore 74 Family Folklore 77 Family Reunions 81 Fishing, Coastal 84 Folk Arts and Crafts 89 Folk Medicine 92 Foodways 97 Funerals 102 Gardening 105 Gospel Music, African American 110 Gospel Music, White 115 Grave Markers 121 Hip-Hop 127 Houses and Barns 132 Hunting 137 Hunting Dogs 142 Legends 148 Mardi Gras Celebrations 152 Musical Instruments 157

Música Tejana 163 Needlework 169 Occupational Folklife 174 Old-Time String Band Music 179 Opries 183 Picking Sessions 187 Pottery 193 Powwows 196 Public Folklife Programs 200 Quilting, African American 203 Quilting, Historically White 209 Religious Folklife 215 Rootwork (Hoodoo/Conjure) 221 Stepping 227 Stories of Personal Experience 232 Storytelling 236 Voodoo 241 Wood Carving 244 Zydeco 247 Bar and Bat Mitzvahs 253 Barbecue 254 Basketmaking, Lowcountry 256 Basketmaking, Native American 259 Bluegrass Festivals 264 Buckdancing, Flatfooting, and Clogging 265 Church Dramas 268 Cockfighting 270 Coon Hounds 273 Dancing, American Indian Traditions 275 Decoration Day 278 Decoy Carving 281

Dinner on the Grounds 283 Dogtrot House 285 Easter Rock 288 Face Jugs 290 Fiddle Contests 291 First Monday Trades Days 293 Ghost Stories 296 Ginseng Hunting 298 Gourd Martin Houses 300 Gumbo 302 House Parties 304 Jack Tales 307 John the Conqueror Root 309 Juke Joints 311 Line Dancing 313 Los Matachines 315 Lowriders 318 Marching Bands, HBCU 320 Marching Bands, New Orleans 323 Mardi Gras Indians 325 Moonshining 328 Mules 331 Outbuildings 334 Porch Sitting 336

Pottery, Alabama 338 Pottery, American Indian 340 Pottery, Georgia 343 Pottery, North Carolina 345 Proverbs 348 Quartets, African American 351 Quinceañeras 353 Religious Road Signs 356 Ring Shouts 356 Roadside Memorials 358 Rolley Hole Marbles 360 Shotgun House 362 Shout Bands 364 Smokehouse 366 Southern Soul Music 367 Square Dancing 369 Talking Out Fire 370 Traders 372 Two-Stepping 374 Walking Sticks 376 Womanless Weddings 379 Index of Contributors 383 Index 385

GENERAL INTRODUCTION In 1989 years of planning and hard work came to fruition when the University of North Carolina Press joined the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi to publish the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. While all those involved in writing, reviewing, editing, and producing the volume believed it would be received as a vital contribution to our understanding of the American South, no one could have anticipated fully the widespread acclaim it would receive from reviewers and other commentators. But the Encyclopedia was indeed celebrated, not only by scholars but also by popular audiences with a deep, abiding interest in the region. At a time when some people talked of the “vanishing South,” the book helped remind a national audience that the region was alive and well, and it has continued to shape national perceptions of the South through the work of its many users—journalists, scholars, teachers, students, and general readers. As the introduction to the Encyclopedia noted, its conceptualization and organization reflected a cultural approach to the South. It highlighted such issues as the core zones and margins of southern culture, the boundaries where “the South” overlapped with other cultures, the role of history in contemporary culture, and the centrality of regional consciousness, symbolism, and mythology. By 1989 scholars had moved beyond the idea of cultures as real, tangible entities, viewing them instead as abstractions. The Encyclopedia’s editors and contributors thus included a full range of social indicators, trait groupings, literary concepts, and historical evidence typically used in regional studies, carefully working to address the distinctive and characteristic traits that made the American South a particular place. The introduction to the Encyclopedia concluded that the fundamental uniqueness of southern culture was reflected in the volume’s composite portrait of the South. We asked contributors to consider aspects that were unique to the region but also those that suggested its internal diversity. The volume was not a reference book of southern history, which explained something of the design of entries. There were fewer essays on colonial and antebellum history than on the postbellum and modern periods, befitting our conception of the volume as one trying not only to chart the cultural landscape of the South but also to illuminate the contemporary era. When C. Vann Woodward reviewed the Encyclopedia in the New York Review of Books, he concluded his review by noting “the continued liveliness of xi

interest in the South and its seeming inexhaustibility as a field of study.” Research on the South, he wrote, furnishes “proof of the value of the Encyclopedia as a scholarly undertaking as well as suggesting future needs for revision or supplement to keep up with ongoing scholarship.” The two decades since the publication of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have certainly suggested that Woodward was correct. The American South has undergone significant changes that make for a different context for the study of the region. The South has undergone social, economic, political, intellectual, and literary transformations, creating the need for a new edition of the Encyclopedia that will remain relevant to a changing region. Globalization has become a major issue, seen in the South through the appearance of Japanese automobile factories, Hispanic workers who have immigrated from Latin America or Cuba, and a new prominence for Asian and Middle Eastern religions that were hardly present in the 1980s South. The African American return migration to the South, which started in the 1970s, dramatically increased in the 1990s, as countless books simultaneously appeared asserting powerfully the claims of African Americans as formative influences on southern culture. Politically, southerners from both parties have played crucial leadership roles in national politics, and the Republican Party has dominated a near-solid South in national elections. Meanwhile, new forms of music, like hip-hop, have emerged with distinct southern expressions, and the term “dirty South” has taken on new musical meanings not thought of in 1989. New genres of writing by creative southerners, such as gay and lesbian literature and “white trash” writing, extend the southern literary tradition. Meanwhile, as Woodward foresaw, scholars have continued their engagement with the history and culture of the South since the publication of the Encyclopedia, raising new scholarly issues and opening new areas of study. Historians have moved beyond their earlier preoccupation with social history to write new cultural history as well. They have used the categories of race, social class, and gender to illuminate the diversity of the South, rather than a unified “mind of the South.” Previously underexplored areas within the field of southern historical studies, such as the colonial era, are now seen as formative periods of the region’s character, with the South’s positioning within a larger Atlantic world a productive new area of study. Cultural memory has become a major topic in the exploration of how the social construction of “the South” benefited some social groups and exploited others. Scholars in many disciplines have made the southern identity a major topic, and they have used a variety of methodologies to suggest what that identity has meant to different social groups. Literary critics have adapted cultural theories to the South and have xii

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raised the issue of postsouthern literature to a major category of concern as well as exploring the links between the literature of the American South and that of the Caribbean. Anthropologists have used different theoretical formulations from literary critics, providing models for their fieldwork in southern communities. In the past 30 years anthropologists have set increasing numbers of their ethnographic studies in the South, with many of them now exploring topics specifically linked to southern cultural issues. Scholars now place the Native American story, from prehistory to the contemporary era, as a central part of southern history. Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the South have encouraged scholars to look at such issues as the borders and boundaries of the South, specific places and spaces with distinct identities within the American South, and the global and transnational Souths, linking the American South with many formerly colonial societies around the world. The first edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture anticipated many of these approaches and indeed stimulated the growth of Southern Studies as a distinct interdisciplinary field. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture has worked for more than a quarter century to encourage research and teaching about the American South. Its academic programs have produced graduates who have gone on to write interdisciplinary studies of the South, while others have staffed the cultural institutions of the region and in turn encouraged those institutions to document and present the South’s culture to broad public audiences. The center’s conferences and publications have continued its long tradition of promoting understanding of the history, literature, and music of the South, with new initiatives focused on southern foodways, the future of the South, and the global Souths, expressing the center’s mission to bring the best current scholarship to broad public audiences. Its documentary studies projects build oral and visual archives, and the New Directions in Southern Studies book series, published by the University of North Carolina Press, offers an important venue for innovative scholarship. Since the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture appeared, the field of Southern Studies has dramatically developed, with an extensive network now of academic and research institutions whose projects focus specifically on the interdisciplinary study of the South. The Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led by Director Harry Watson and Associate Director and Encyclopedia coeditor William Ferris, publishes the lively journal Southern Cultures and is now at the organizational center of many other Southern Studies projects. The Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, the Southern Intellectual History Circle, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, the Southern Studies Forum of the EuroGENERAL INTRODUCTION

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pean American Studies Association, Emory University’s SouthernSpaces.org, and the South Atlantic Humanities Center (at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) express the recent expansion of interest in regional study. Observers of the American South have had much to absorb, given the rapid pace of recent change. The institutional framework for studying the South is broader and deeper than ever, yet the relationship between the older verities of regional study and new realities remains unclear. Given the extent of changes in the American South and in Southern Studies since the publication of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the need for a new edition of that work is clear. Therefore, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture has once again joined the University of North Carolina Press to produce The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. As readers of the original edition will quickly see, The New Encyclopedia follows many of the scholarly principles and editorial conventions established in the original, but with one key difference; rather than being published in a single hardback volume, The New Encyclopedia is presented in a series of shorter individual volumes that build on the 24 original subject categories used in the Encyclopedia and adapt them to new scholarly developments. Some earlier Encyclopedia categories have been reconceptualized in light of new academic interests. For example, the subject section originally titled “Women’s Life” is reconceived as a new volume, Gender, and the original “Black Life” section is more broadly interpreted as a volume on race. These changes reflect new analytical concerns that place the study of women and blacks in broader cultural systems, reflecting the emergence of, among other topics, the study of male culture and of whiteness. Both volumes draw as well from the rich recent scholarship on women’s life and black life. In addition, topics with some thematic coherence are combined in a volume, such as Law and Politics and Agriculture and Industry. One new topic, Foodways, is the basis of a separate volume, reflecting its new prominence in the interdisciplinary study of southern culture. Numerous individual topical volumes together make up The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and extend the reach of the reference work to wider audiences. This approach should enhance the use of the Encyclopedia in academic courses and is intended to be convenient for readers with more focused interests within the larger context of southern culture. Readers will have handy access to one-volume, authoritative, and comprehensive scholarly treatments of the major areas of southern culture. We have been fortunate that, in nearly all cases, subject consultants who offered crucial direction in shaping the topical sections for the original edition xiv

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

have agreed to join us in this new endeavor as volume editors. When new volume editors have been added, we have again looked for respected figures who can provide not only their own expertise but also strong networks of scholars to help develop relevant lists of topics and to serve as contributors in their areas. The reputations of all our volume editors as leading scholars in their areas encouraged the contributions of other scholars and added to The New Encyclopedia’s authority as a reference work. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture builds on the strengths of articles in the original edition in several ways. For many existing articles, original authors agreed to update their contributions with new interpretations and theoretical perspectives, current statistics, new bibliographies, or simple factual developments that needed to be included. If the original contributor was unable to update an article, the editorial staff added new material or sent it to another scholar for assessment. In some cases, the general editor and volume editors selected a new contributor if an article seemed particularly dated and new work indicated the need for a fresh perspective. And importantly, where new developments have warranted treatment of topics not addressed in the original edition, volume editors have commissioned entirely new essays and articles that are published here for the first time. The American South embodies a powerful historical and mythical presence, both a complex environmental and geographic landscape and a place of the imagination. Changes in the region’s contemporary socioeconomic realities and new developments in scholarship have been incorporated in the conceptualization and approach of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has spoken of culture as context, and this encyclopedia looks at the American South as a complex place that has served as the context for cultural expression. This volume provides information and perspective on the diversity of cultures in a geographic and imaginative place with a long history and distinctive character. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was produced through major grants from the Program for Research Tools and Reference Works of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Atlantic-Richfield Foundation, and the Mary Doyle Trust. We are grateful as well to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi for support and to the individual donors to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture who have directly or indirectly supported work on The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. We thank the volume editors for their ideas in reimagining their subjects and the contributors of articles for their work in extending the usefulness of the book in new ways. We acknowledge the support and contributions of the faculty and GENERAL INTRODUCTION

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staff at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Finally, we want especially to honor the work of William Ferris and Mary Hart on the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Bill, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, was coeditor, and his good work recruiting authors, editing text, selecting images, and publicizing the volume among a wide network of people was, of course, invaluable. Despite the many changes in the new encyclopedia, Bill’s influence remains. Mary “Sue” Hart was also an invaluable member of the original encyclopedia team, bringing the careful and precise eye of the librarian, and an iconoclastic spirit, to our work.

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INTRODUCTION Few topics summon images of southern life as easily as folklife. The American South’s long rural history and the traditionalism that seemed to dominate the region encouraged Americans to see it as an unchanging repository of folkways in a nation characterized by sometimes-frenetic change. Tourism agencies today use images of banjo players on rural porches and bluesmen at the crossroads to market the region’s heritage. This volume offers factual and analytical detail on such iconic regional images as old-time string bands, quilting, barbecue, coon dogs, and dinner on the grounds. The South is a dynamic region as well, and the editors show a changing South of internal diversity and complex interactions between tradition and innovation. Folklorists were among the earliest professional scholars to document the South’s oral and material lore, resulting in a rich body of interpretive and primary-source scholarship. William Ferris has long been one of the most acclaimed American folklorists, and as coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture he designed an extensive and thorough section on folklife that gave a structured introduction to the field. Glenn Hinson, longtime director of the Curriculum-in-Folklore program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, worked with Ferris in creating the design for this new view of southern folklife, one that conveys the energy and vitality of contemporary scholars studying a rapidly changing region. The overview essay suggests a refocusing of the study of southern folklife toward issues of cultural intent and meaning. At the heart of folklife is the community, and this volume documents specific ways that southern social groups have nurtured the bonds of community. Readers will come to understand how southerners have performed regional identities through ritual performances and the enactment of everyday customs, celebrating the places of shared meanings. The volume explores as well the beliefs that give meaning to the people of the region. It moves away from an overreliance on unchanging tradition as the defining element of folklife, showing that customs are always emergent and never a given. The perpetuation of custom is the result of people in communities deciding to retain inherited ways, but usually with innovations that make them of continuing relevance. The essays in this volume comprise a good argument for the continuing centrality of folklife to southern culture in general. Contemporary scholarship engages issues of cultural diversity, and this volume shows the complex configuxvii

rations of folklife among different groups and in different parts of the South. The region’s historically defining groups—Native Americans, whites, and African Americans—receive considerable attention for their roles in creating a creole culture that has helped give character to the South. Latinos have long been a significant part of the culture of some southern states, but the recent arrival of large numbers of immigrants from south of the U.S. border has injected new ways into the South, and this volume gives due attention to their contributions. Folklife emerges not only from specific groups but also out of specific places in the South. The broad cultures of the Upland South and the Lowland South grew out of differing environmental, geographical, and social factors, all of which provided particular contexts for the expression of folklife. Basketmakers in the Appalachian Mountains and Lowland South Carolina and potters in Alabama and North Carolina use different materials and have differing styles, but all express the significance of material culture forms in southern folklife. The creativity of the Deep South, the hill country, south Louisiana, and other southern regions is apparent in the volume’s extensive entries on cultural expression. This volume contains more than 60 new topics not included in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and many of the earlier articles have been rewritten by new authors. Bibliographies and statistical information have been updated. The South is justly famous for its musical contributions, and this volume has a generous helping of entries from the folklife perspective on such genres as blues, bluegrass, Cajun music, country music, gospel music, hip-hop, and zydeco. A particular strength herein is the attention to dancing, whether country line dancing, mountain buckdancing, African American stepping, or Native American powwow dancing. Traditions of body movement perform folk culture for engaged communities who celebrate their dance cultures. Oral lore, material culture, ritual, and belief all emerge in these pages as signifiers of southern identity, not just as conceived intellectually by writers but as enacted by a wide range of southerners in their everyday lives and on special occasions.

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The NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA of SOUTHERN CULTURE

VOLUME 14 : FOLKLIFE

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FOLKLIFE The spirit is high when Sister Lena Mae Perry strides to the front of the huge, gleaming church. Worshipers at the Western Assemblies Headquarters Building in rural Newton Grove, N.C., had already been offering praises for more than three hours. They had sung with the choirs, echoed the emcee’s exhortations, clapped to the quartets’ driving tempos, and shouted when the spirit led them to shout. Elegantly gowned grandmothers had leapt from the pews in the ecstatic steps of the holy dance; youthful fathers had rocked children to sleep to the sounds of passionate praise; and more than a few young boys—all dressed in sharp-looking suits, with silk ties slightly askew—had ably manned the drums while their parents sang at the church-front microphones. Now, as the electric guitar and bass played an understated riff, the churchgoers are ready to praise anew. It is Sister Perry’s turn to light the fires of exaltation. Stately and commanding in her shimmering gold gown, the sixtysomething singer gazes over the congregation. These are her people, believers who know and share the ways of faith, worshipers who see themselves as part of the vast community of African American Christians who self-identify as “saints.” In the pews before her are teachers, computer programmers, restaurant owners, bricklayers, social workers, bulldozer operators, doctors, service workers, chefs, college students, and more. But occupation and life’s standing—as Sister Perry is quick to tell you—matter not in the community of faith. All are here to lift God’s praises, and that’s all that counts. Cued by a glance from Sister Perry, the piano player gently steers the melody to the opening chords of the old hymn “Remember Me.” Sister Perry sings the opening words with a power that shakes the church, her low voice caressing each slowly voiced syllable. This is one of those “way back” hymns, a piece that Sister Perry remembers as being one of the first songs she ever heard. These memories seem to whisper across her face as she sings with eyes closed, fervently asking the Lord to remember her as she moves though life’s daily trials. “When you sing a song slow like that, people will sit and listen,” she later says. “The thoughts get to rolling over and over in their mind, as they remember what the Lord has brought them through. Those old hymns will stir up a congregation.” And stir it does. Gentle cries of “Thank you, Jesus” and “Praise God” are

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soon floating through the church, buoyed by a chorus of quiet singing, hushed sobs, and soundlessly waved hands. This is clearly a song that means, a piece that draws its hearers together in a communion of feeling, spirit, and shared memory. Churchgoers speak of this experience as being “in one accord,” when the self finds sustenance in the sharing of the whole. Though Sister Perry certainly leads the moment, its many meanings find fullness not in her words, but in the spirits of those seated in the pews. As the song ends, Sister Perry pauses to offer a few words of quiet testimony. Her voice quickens, however, as she introduces her second piece, the faster-paced “If You Can’t Help Me.” Instantly, churchgoers are clapping with the rhythm, enthusiastically pushing the tempo as they sing the song’s victorious refrain. If they knew the opening hymn from church, they know this piece from the radio; it was a gospel “hit” for the Philadelphia-based Angelic Gospel Singers in the 1980s and still gets frequent airplay on the area’s AM gospel stations. The song’s source, however, matters little to these believers. What is important is its message, a message of affirmation and persistence that clearly resonates with their lives. They too are “running by faith,” dodging earthbound obstacles to reach that heavenly “finishing line.” “That song just relates to me,” asserts Sister Perry, reflecting on why she added this piece to her repertoire. “I’ve had those experiences, of people talking about me and blocking my way. And so have others. But where I sing it for one purpose, for someone else it might mean something different. But it still serves a purpose, whatever their situation. That’s why people like that song so much.” This “liking” is everywhere evident in the church. The exuberant singing echoes off the building’s vaulted ceilings, while the rhapsodic clapping encourages the musicians to play with even more fervor. Once again, the congregation is on one accord. And Sister Perry—who clearly feels the shared spirit—smiles and sings on. What does all this have to do with “folklife”? Why open an encyclopedia volume with a story about singing in church? And why open with this story, one that doesn’t particularly speak to popular understandings about the “folk”? The described scene, after all, is not exactly steeped in the old-time and traditional. And these certainly are the qualities that leap to mind when encountering the term “folklife.” Perhaps if the church were smaller and more intimate, with wood-framed walls and a humble sanctuary. Perhaps if the instruments were acoustic instead of electric. Perhaps if the congregation were a bit more working class, a bit more evidently “folky.” Perhaps if Sister Perry were wearing something plainer, something less sparkly. Perhaps if both of the songs were old, hearkening from an era that predated the taint of commercial production. 2

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The passion of gospel singing, echoed by the congregation’s enthusiastic hand claps and calls of encouragement, in many ways exemplifies the communion of spirit, meaning, and community that lies at the heart of folklife. Southern churchgoers often speak of this communion as “coming to accord,” suggesting the particular moment when a singer’s intent and the audience’s appreciative understanding come together as one. North Carolina gospel singer Lena Mae Perry— like countless other singers in churches across the South—leads congregations toward this place of experienced unity virtually every weekend, reminding us that folklife is a vibrant, thriving, and fundamental feature of southern culture. (Photograph by Roland L. Freeman)

And perhaps if Sister Perry had learned the second piece from other singers, rather than from the radio. Then this scene might more readily qualify as the common understanding of the term “folk.” Of course, some aspects of the described scene do fit popular definitions of folkness. Perhaps foremost among these is the simple fact that these churchgoers clearly share a set of beliefs, a sense of style and taste, and a set of worship practices (from their clapped accompaniments and voiced praises to their silently waved hands). In this sharing, they constitute a community set apart from others who don’t occupy this same circle of aesthetics and faith. Is this enough to merit the mantle of folklife? Further, these features of set-apartness were likely learned through nonformal means; that is, they were probably conveyed through observation and conversation rather than through formal teaching. This too seems to be a favorite criteria of the popular definition. Taken together, do these qualities offer enough of a counterbalance to slide this performance under the rubric of “folklife”? The best response to this question offers not a balancing tally as much as a refocusing of the query, a refocusing that leads away from issues of form and process and toward those of intent and meaning. We might well begin this process by listening again to Sister Perry’s descriptions of her songs. In both cases, she speaks of how the songs make her and her listeners feel. She foregrounds the emotions that the songs invoke, first pointing to passion and intensity and FOLKLIFE

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then grounding these experiences in deeper currents of felt significance. The passion is not an end in itself; Sister Perry says that she doesn’t sing merely to make people feel good. Instead, as she explains, the passion is a pathway to deeper meanings, an invitation to reflect, to remember, to connect. Sister Perry sings with the knowledge that songs have this power. Her fellow churchgoers, in turn, share this understanding. Singing thus becomes an act of connection, a meeting of the singer’s intent and the listeners’ expectations. It is this coming together that yields the “one accord” of which churchgoers so often speak—an accord grounded in trust and mutual understanding, an accord that sizzles with significance. Those who experience this significance needn’t feel it as earthshakingly strong. The sizzle might be slight, felt only as the subtle comfort of familiarity or the passing flicker of cherished memory. Alternately, it might be intense, felt as a deep stirring of the spirit. (Such was clearly the case for the worshipers moved to tears during Sister Perry’s singing.) Whatever the experience—whether slight or strong—the sizzle of meaning is always profound, for it speaks to a connectedness that grounds the individual in the welcome embrace of community. We might well describe “folklife” in terms of this accord, pointing to the countless ways of being and doing that craft the bonds of community. These ways need not be performed, as they were in Sister Perry’s case; they need not bear the stamp of artistry that one would expect when speaking about “folk songs,” “folk dances,” or “folktales.” More often than not, they are simply enacted, pursued as part of everyday life, engaged during work, worship, leisure, and play. Hence the focus on life in the term “folklife.” To speak of folklife is to speak of the ways that communities create, sustain, and celebrate their identities. And at the heart of this creating and sustaining—as is always the case when talk turns to matters of identity—is meaning. This brings us full circle to the questions that opened this discussion, questions that challenged the suitability of Sister Perry’s story to open a volume on southern folklife. Those questions focused on the particularities of tradition and transmission, asking how Sister Perry learned the songs, why the setting was so patently modern, why the “community” encompassed so many social classes, even why the instruments were electric (and thus not sufficiently oldfashioned to warrant the designation “folk”). Notice that none of these questions speaks to measures of meaning foregrounded by the community in question. The churchgoers who sang and clapped and wept didn’t seem bothered by the newness of the building or the source of the songs; the communion they experienced did not seem to hinge on the nature of the instruments or the social status of the congregant sitting on the other end of the pew. The meanings that 4

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the churchgoers experienced transcended these matters, tacitly declaring their relative unimportance. What was truly important (as these churchgoers are quick to testify) was the feeling of shared community and the recognition that this sharing is grounded in a host of overlapping sharings, from beliefs, musical tastes, and ways of dressing to joint memories, forms of talking, familiar gestures, hairstyles, and so much more. Therein lie the meanings. And therein lies the best reason for including this moment under the rubric of “folklife.” Of course, if you asked the congregation members about this designation, you would probably earn only blank stares. The term “folklife” is not a word in widespread use; indeed, other than those instances where it precedes the word “festival,” you will rarely hear it in everyday conversation. It is a word that lives largely in the rarefied world of academic study and in the productions and discussions of folklorists. This does not mean, however, that the term has little value beyond these narrow circles. As a broadly encompassing abstraction, “folklife” offers a way to recognize patterns of meaningful connectedness and similarity across widely divergent practices, performances, beliefs, and communities. The term “folklife” invites us to step back while stepping in, to discern broad patterns while exploring the particularities of expression in any given community. That community might be made up of the congregation of a sanctified church or the members of a synagogue; line workers in a textile mill or office workers in a high-tech pharmaceutical firm; friends who foxhunt together or knitters who gather for weekly meetings; an online chat group or the kids on a neighborhood playground; hip-hop emcees in freestyle competitions or participants in bluegrass picking sessions; Civil War reenactors or powwow drummers or matachines dancers; union members or masons; midwives or debutantes; even friends who get together in country stores, coffee shops, or fast-food joints to gossip, boast, tell stories, or simply pass the time. What matters is not the formality or informality of the ties that bind these folks together as groups, but rather the fact that they see themselves as group members. They recognize and enact their groupness. In so doing, they create and celebrate places of sharing and of shared meaning. While these meanings rest with the group members, they are often opaque to those who are not members of these communities. This opaqueness, in turn, can all too easily invite misreading and misunderstandings on the part of outsiders. This process is an altogether familiar one. Not privy to the insider meanings, outsiders tend to read the external markers of a group’s identity—markers that often make themselves apparent in ways of dressing, talking, worshipping, playing, or eating—and then try to make sense of these differences. This sense making, in turn, typically entails coming up with “explanations” of these difFOLKLIFE

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ferences that fit within the outsiders’ way of understanding the world. Note that these “explanations” come not from group insiders but from the outsiders, who are the ones trying to understand the differences. This process might best be likened to fitting square pegs into round holes; sometimes the only way to make the pegs fit is to mangle them enough to force them into the unyielding circles. This mangling engenders the misunderstandings that so often characterize contact between communities of difference, misunderstandings that readily give rise to stereotypes. When contact between groups involves differences in power (as is frequently the case in the South), these misunderstandings all too often lead to mistreatment and exploitation. The study of folklife has the potential to short-circuit this process of misunderstanding. It does so by drawing us into conversation with members of these disparate communities, inviting them to explain the meanings that are so often obscure to outsiders. Their words, their passions, their understandings thus become part of the dialogue. At the same time, folklife study offers us insights into shared patterns of creating identity, patterns that make themselves evident in realms as diverse as the layout of local cemeteries and the foods served at family gatherings. Such patterns often transcend community boundaries; understanding them allows us to “read” unfamiliar situations with greater sensitivity and to ask questions of community members that we might not have otherwise thought to ask. The goal, in the end, is to foster fuller understanding across what can initially seem like chasms of difference and become aware of the role that each of us plays in keeping these misunderstandings alive. This volume pursues this goal of building understanding by exploring the diversity and differences that constitute life in the South and offering readers openings for conversation and further inquiry. The volume’s focus on folklife promises coverage of an impossibly broad range of practices, beliefs, and ways of being. Indeed, one could argue that folklife encompasses virtually every important dimension of what it means to be southern, for folklife speaks to all of those places where people in communities craft meaning. Though these places are clearly too plentiful to catalog in a single volume, we nonetheless offer a starting place, providing a selective set of glimpses that will hopefully invite readers to probe further and ask new kinds of questions when they encounter practices different from their own. The “Life” in Folklife. Where does meaning happen? At first glance, the question seems too abstract, too vague, to even consider. Yet if we narrow the context and ask where meaning happens in communities, then it suddenly makes a bit more sense. When community becomes both the frame for and the agent 6

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of meaning making, we start to step into the realm of folklife. And as we so step, some of these places of meaning quickly offer themselves for consideration. This is certainly true for the South’s many performance traditions, which self-consciously meld significance and passion in the fires of artistry. These are traditions that speak both inward to the community that creates them and outward to the communities that encounter them; as such, they often serve as clear markers of group identity. One need only look to gospel, bluegrass, southern hip-hop, Cajun, country, alt-country, old-time string band, norteño, southern soul, or any of the South’s many other vibrant musics to recognize the power that performance traditions can hold. By the same token, one could look at dancing and its many exuberant analogues for telling examples of performed intensity. The intricacies of buckdancing, the drama of collegiate stepping, and the deep subtleties of dancing at the Cherokee Green Corn Ceremony, for instance, certainly testify to the range and performative power of dance in the South, while the strutting of second liners in New Orleans street processions, the acrobatics of high school cheerleaders, and the high-stepping glories of African American collegiate marching bands just as powerfully speak to the rich worlds of dance-related movement. Folklife also encompasses performances of the crafted word, whether voiced as tales, testimonies, stories of personal experience, sermons, poetry, or even the perfectly phrased pickup line. In addition to standing alone, these familiar performance realms—music, dance, movement, and artful talk—often come together in community-based dramas, which range from drive-through nativity spectacles to Halloween-time “Hell House” productions and womanless weddings. Performances, of course, need not offer themselves with the public immediacy of a chitlin-circuit dancer or a tale-spinning raconteur. Many are far more subtle, imparting meaning not in the intensity of a sparkling moment but in the quietude of time’s passage. This is particularly true for those performances that yield crafted objects—artful things that hold and communicate the passion invested in them by their creators. Though perhaps quieter than their sung or danced counterparts, such objects are no less affecting. Some regularly inhabit popular images of the rural South; regional “folkness” has long been defined by baskets, quilts, turned and coiled pots, rag rugs, wood carvings, forged ironwork, and other handcrafted objects. Other creations less frequently earn the designation of “craft” but are products of the same process, emerging as impassioned embodiments of community aesthetics. Here we might include the exuberantly detailed, street-hugging lowriders; the gloriously hand-painted signs of many southern churches; the explosively colorful costumes of the Mardi Gras Indians; and the simple, plastic-egg-laden Easter egg trees that dot the FOLKLIFE

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southern landscape in the spring. All testify to the auspicious union of creativity and community taste. Such taste, of course, expresses itself in ways that stretch well beyond the relatively small scale of an elegant basket or a roadside sign. Local aesthetics find a much larger canvas on the landscape, where houses and barns, fences and stone walls, gardens and landscaped yards, and even the layout of fields all testify to the shaping hand of human intention. These sites and structures not only reveal their crafted nature but also invite habitation. Here, too, rests evidence of creative decision making, in realms as diverse as the arrangement of a home’s rooms and the decorations therein. The peopling of such places also draws us to the activities that unfold there, from birthday parties and wakes to family games, front-porch talking, and the abundant mastery in the cook’s kitchen. Each domain—however taken for granted—garners unto itself subtle significances, holding in its quiet familiarity shadings of familial, cultural, and regional identity. Stepping into the realm of communal activity further broadens the scope of folklife’s embrace, adding ceremony, celebration, and festival to our list. All represent moments of meaningful engagement, when communities gather to affirm their essential accord and, frequently, to guide members into new stages of individual and social personhood. Hence the calming rapture of a river baptism or the proud gaiety of a quinceañera, both of which exist alongside the rowdy exuberance of bluegrass festivals and the countrified bawdiness of southern drag shows. The events themselves proclaim the publicness of communion and the sharing of purpose. Social connectedness, of course, need not rely on such explicitly heightened occasions. Far more common are the everyday practices that inject meaning into life’s unyielding dailiness, practices that lend comfort in their familiarity and sharedness. Some are simple, time-honored customs, such as harvesting vegetables by the signs of the moon or eating black-eyed peas and collards on New Year’s. Others are workplace traditions, such as welcome-to-the-job pranks played on new workers, skillfully ritualized resistances to the boss’s demands, or worker-claimed contests of occupational skill (in welding, oyster shucking, table bussing, etc.). Still others are leisure-time pursuits that shatter the mundane with moments of shared grace. Ask any coon hunter, for instance, about the joys of hearing hounds bay when they catch a scent and the connections between aesthetics, sociability, and shared meaning will become eminently clear. To speak of these connections brings us full circle to the place at which we began, with Sister Perry’s impassioned singing before the assembled congregation. Here we encounter another important realm of folklife, not as much in the 8 FOLKLIFE

performances themselves as in the beliefs that fill them with meaning. The enacted worlds of faith—the myriad beliefs and practices that feed the spirit and sustain the soul—provide a metaphysical grounding for many of the alreadymentioned traditions. They extend the web of emotional connectedness that links people to communities, places, animals, things, and the encompassing environment by including the supernatural and the divine. In so doing, they further open the circle of accord. The realm of faith embraces both the institutional and the individual, both the formally organized and the informally understood, both the logically reasoned and the simply known. The rituals of midnight mass and Rosh Hashanah and Eid ul-Fitr thus all fall within this domain, as do believers’ trust in the curative power of a weeping statue, their certainty of a luck charm’s efficacy, and their assurance that the ecstatic voicings of tongue speaking are indeed words of divine revelation. Belief also informs the many worlds of healing, lending a socially shared foundation of trust and knowledge to practices as diverse as talking out fire and using baking soda to cure acne. This section began by suggesting that folklife encompasses every important dimension of what it means to be southern. Southernness, after all, is a claim to imagined connectedness, a declaration of identity that grounds itself in shared practice and shared understandings. Although this grounding frequently invokes the past (witness the region’s ongoing infatuation with “heritage”), this invocation itself is an act that unfolds in the present; like so many other shared practices, the foregrounding of memory is a choice and not some innate feature of the southern mind. As such, it is not unlike the South’s heralded preference for sweet tea or its insistence on good manners, all the products of shared decisions whose goal is to articulate and embody deeply held values. These too join the catalog of song, music, and dance; tales, preachings, and artful talk; drama, ceremony, celebration, and festival; crafted objects, spirited constructions, and meaning-filled places; foods, drinks, and the ways of the kitchen; games, hunting practices, and leisure activities; sayings and customs; occupational skills, workplace creativity and the lore of labor; healing beliefs and traditions; belief systems and the ways of worship; and many other ways of enacting local meaning. No part of this whole is merely a thing or an action. Instead, each represents a process—a coming together of intent, value, spirit, and sociability—that fills the everyday with meaning and presses to achieve the accord of shared community. The “Folk” in Folklife. If folklife is about all the ways that communities make and share meaning, then where do the “folk” come into the picture? Don’t they FOLKLIFE

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somehow limit the notion of community, making it less inclusive by targeting particular southern “folk” groups? And we all presumably know who these groups are—mountain folk from the Appalachians and Ozarks; Cajuns; coal miners; rural, working-class African Americans, whites, and Latinos (particularly those connected with farming); Pentecostals (especially those who handle snakes in their services); Gullah people from the Carolina and Georgia coasts; American Indians (seemingly wherever they live); and perhaps factory workers. Such is the all-too-familiar portrayal. In this rather stereotyped reading of “folkness,” the folk are the classic “others,” groups that are somehow distant from those doing the defining. The criteria of this folk “otherness”—the measures that chart the distance from a presumably shared norm—seem to be as diverse as the groups themselves. For some, the distance is measured by race and/or cultural heritage; for others, the difference rests in social class (the “folk” always seem to be working class); for still others, it is location (“folkness” seems to favor the mountains, though rural isolation locates it elsewhere as well). Religious belief (particularly when associated with “unusual” religious practices) also invites the “folk” designation, as do a select few occupations. What becomes clear in reviewing this list is that no single feature unites all of these groups, other than their shared “otherness” and the presumption that their ways of living are sufficiently different from mainstream norms to merit setting them apart. Or, perhaps (in a familiar extension of this logic), that these ways of living themselves cause the setting apart—that they create social boundaries around each community powerful enough both to isolate members from outsiders and foster a passing down of traditions that remains unaffected by goings-on in the outside world. The exact nature of these boundaries, however, is somewhat vague. Note that all of this defining—whether declaring differences or asserting that the groups in question are setting themselves apart—is being done by outsiders. Somehow, the “folk” are always someone else. They are the people “over there,” the ones that are different. As a rule, they are not “us” (whoever that “us” may be). But if folklife is about process rather than people, if it is about the ways that communities create and sustain meaning, then we all would presumably fall under that rubric. To the extent that we all live within and identify with groups and share places of value and meaning with fellow group members, we all partake of folklife. Perhaps we express this collective partaking through our affinity for barbecue. Perhaps we show it through the accents that caress our words. Perhaps we reveal it through the music we play on our car stereos. Whatever the site of meaningful connectedness, that is a locus of folklife. Our collective folklife. 10

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The folklife discussed in the pages that follow draws on this expansive, more inclusive definition. Although many of the domains typically associated with southern folklife make their appearance (for example, string band music, quilting, blues, coon dogs, storytelling), so too do many arenas that do not often get included in such listings (stepping, opries, powwows, line dancing, HBCU marching bands, etc.). The purpose is to honor the full breadth of creative connectivity in southern communities, recognizing that while many of the region’s time-honored traditions are still passionately vibrant, so too are many newer ones. These newer traditions speak to contemporary experience with the same kind of power that their counterparts did in years past. (Today’s young hiphop emcees, for instance, play much the same role in their communities that youthful blues musicians did three generations earlier; both groups used their mastery of words, rhymes, and rhythms to address the issues that most tellingly affected their lives and those of their peers.) Although attempting to encompass both the old and the new, this volume makes no claim to comprehensive coverage. Instead, this work promises only to offer glimpses of folklife in the South, inviting readers to step into a handful of selected communities and places of meaning. Unfortunately, there’s little time to “set a spell” in each of these places (as southern tradition would demand); the stories that each entry is able to tell are necessarily short. Each such narrative, though, bids the reader to look further and to extrapolate from the story told the many more that remain unspoken. If the volume cannot contain the fullness of southern folklife, at least it can offer a guide to discovering where this fullness might lie and how one might learn to recognize it. The Question of “Tradition.” One of the key features used to “recognize” folklife, of course, has long been the presence of tradition. Popular understandings of all things “folk” invariably invoke tradition as a criterion every bit as important as community; while the latter speaks to the communion that holds meaning, the former speaks to the process of passing this meaning on. This framing inextricably links folkness to antiquity, suggesting that the things and practices designated as “folk” necessarily carry the patina of age. Hence the popular association of southern folkways with hand-stitched quilts, split-oak baskets, home-cooked foods, and banjo picking—all seen as “old-timey” traditions that have passed from one generation to another. The familiar image of “knee learning”—where a youngster sits at the knee of a teaching elder—is an essential part of this picture. A definition of folklife that foregrounds emergence and community values would, at first glance, seem to undermine this widely accepted link between FOLKLIFE

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folklife and traditionality. How, for instance, could one call line dancing “traditional,” given that this practice only gained widespread currency in the 1990s? Yet line dancing certainly fits the folklife frame; it is, after all, an expressive form that countless southern country-music and rhythm-and-blues fans pursue with undeniable passion, in community-based settings that range from family reunions to country-music clubs. What happens to the centrality of tradition in cases such as this, when the form has no long-standing pedigree? The answer again rests in a refocusing of the question. If we view passed-down tradition not as a necessary condition of folklife but instead as an important component thereof, then its importance becomes clear. That is because tradition is a product of decisions—decisions to hold onto, decisions to pass on, decisions to accept the passing, decisions to sustain. Practices like music making or turning pots or cooking gumbo become traditional not because some abstract cultural force dictates that they be passed on; they become traditional because the communities that sustain them invest them with importance and then choose to keep them alive. Consider, for example, Sid Luck, a fifth-generation potter from the Seagrove area of central North Carolina. Luck grew up in a potting family, with both his father and grandfather turning pots, primarily for utilitarian use. By the time Luck took to the wheel, however, the demand for utilitarian wares had largely died; inexpensive glassware and mass-produced ceramics had replaced plates and smaller pottery vessels, while refrigerators and freezers had erased the demand for large pickling and canning containers. Nonetheless, Luck learned to turn, and he spent his teenage summers and spare hours crafting pots for a large local pottery that marketed its colorful pots as household wares with artistic flair. But Luck knew that pottery held no future except long hours and hard work for little pay. So after finishing high school, he joined the Marines, fought in Vietnam, and then went to college, where he earned a degree in science education. Soon thereafter, Luck began teaching high school chemistry and math. But Sid Luck never turned his back on pottery. Wherever he taught, he kept a wheel nearby, keeping his hands in the clay. And when the principal of his hometown high school invited him to return to Seagrove to teach chemistry, Luck moved back into the heart of a long-standing pottery-making community. But Luck was a teacher, and the pottery world had changed. Now most of the sales were to outsiders, to folks who visited Seagrove for a quick taste of the “authentic.” These weren’t Luck’s neighbors anymore. Furthermore, the community now included a host of young potters who were serving this outside

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clientele well with wares both innovatively beautiful and stolidly traditional. Seagrove did not seem to need another potter. Yet Luck couldn’t resist the temptation. “I was just always drawn to pottery,” he recalls. “It was like a passion with me; it had some kind of mysterious attraction. Even though I enjoyed teaching—and was actually pursuing a master’s degree in physics at the time—I kept thinking, ‘This is what I need to be doing.’” So Luck built a shop and began to fire pots, selling them on the weekends and in the summer months when he wasn’t teaching. After three years, he decided to leave school completely and dedicate himself full time to turning pots. “My dad thought that I was completely wacky when I resigned my teaching position,” he remembers. “He said, ‘There you went and got that education—now you’re going to waste it.’ He figured that I was going to starve to death.” That was 18 years ago. Sid Luck is still turning pots full time and is not “starving to death,” as his father had warned. Instead, he has found that the local community actively supports his decision, regularly visiting his shop, purchasing pots, and ordering special pieces for weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. By the same token, the outside community—customers from afar who travel to Seagrove, share Luck’s taste, and clearly appreciate his artistry—also affirms the wisdom of his choice. The tradition continues because both Luck and the communities around him chose to make it so. Though the pots Luck now makes certainly do not fill the same functions as those turned by his grandfather and are now more likely to grace mantelpieces and bookshelves than spring houses and barns, they nonetheless continue to serve as artifacts of passion and vessels of meaning. Sid Luck’s story is instructive not only for what it tells about the power of tradition, but also for what it suggests about the ways tradition is learned. Luck epitomizes the classic narrative of familial learning, now representing the fifth generation in his family who followed pottery as their principal pursuit. The same cannot be said, however, for most of the other potters in the Seagrove area, the scores of clay artists who serve much the same clientele as Luck. Their stories are far more diverse. Some of them grew up in the community and turned to pottery not because of family heritage but because pottery making had surrounded them all their lives and eventually intrigued them enough to draw their hands to the clay. A number of these took part-time jobs in local potteries as teenagers and gradually learned to turn by asking and watching. Many more began turning for other potteries or opened their own shops after taking formal pottery classes at one of the local community colleges. Other

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potters moved to the area from elsewhere, bringing with them studio training as ceramic artists or a back-to-the-land aesthetic that sent them in search of self-sufficiency and tradition. Some local potters learned through formal apprenticeships with established potters, while others took up pottery as a postretirement (or postunemployment) avocation—something to keep them creatively engaged after workplace demands had vanished. And at least one potter dreamed that the Lord had called him to this pursuit and thus began to shape clay. The paths of learning are clearly numerous. Yet all of these artists are contributing to the region’s long-standing tradition of pottery making, and all are sufficiently embraced by the community that they can make their living as potters. Though some might be less classically “traditional” than others, all are contributing players in the region’s folklife. In the case of the Seagrove potters, all of the artists are pursuing a single (if broadly defined) path: transforming wet clay into artful objects. Though their choice of clays, glazes, modes of creation, surface treatments, and manners of firing vary widely, they all are creating pots. This shared pursuit inevitably fosters conversation among them, inviting talk about tastes and preferences, encouraging exchanges of glaze formulas and firing tips. Despite their differences, their places of sharing draw them together as a community. What, though, of artists who have no such community? Or, to carry the question one step further, what of those who don’t even partake of a recognizable tradition, practicing an artistry that is theirs alone, without evident precedent or analogue? Can they too be “traditional”? Do they too fall under the purview of folklife? These questions are not meant to include the many tradition bearers who act alone in their communities but are clearly partaking of a broader regional practice. They wouldn’t, for instance, target a town’s lone walking-stick carver, even if this carver had taught himself to carve and was working in isolation from any other carvers. Some traditions typically blossom in the hands of solo practitioners, who draw upon a visual repertoire and aesthetic stream that they might not be able to identify but that nonetheless guides their creativity. (Such was the case, for instance, with George SerVance of Thomasville, North Carolina, one of whose sticks is pictured in the “Walking Sticks” entry.) Hence, even though this carver’s canes might be completely singular, the very fact of their creation—coupled with the fact that such sticks have a long history in southern communities, where they are embraced as potent markers of personal and cultural identity—draws them into the encompassing cradle of tradition. What, though, of those who create outside of such overarching legacies, whose work is both gloriously idiosyncratic and altogether novel? Such is certainly the case for many of the South’s self-taught artists, whose creations 14

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frequently defy easy categorization and who often find themselves gathered together under the rubrics of “folk,” “self-taught,” or “vernacular” art. Some of these artists work with familiar materials (carved wood, sewed cloth, fired clay, paint on canvas, etc.) but push their creations well beyond the narrow precedents of community tradition. Others employ a far broader array of means (paint on tin, cast-off industrial metals, mud on plywood, bark and branches, etc.) to create works whose denial of precedent can seem positively exuberant. Questions about these artists’ “traditionality,” however, must look beyond the materials they use and the themes they convey to consider the communities of which they are a part and the aesthetic currents that inform their creativity. Works that might seem odd or outlandish to cultural outsiders might well resonate at deep levels with these artists’ fellow community members. Even though the artistry itself might have no overt analogue, its underlying logic can feel eminently familiar, thus lending it a welcome place within local fields of meaning. (Conversations with the neighbors of many such artists reveal that this is frequently the case; even artists whose works and personalities earn them the droll designation of “characters” are often embraced as vital contributors to the community.) Although their connectedness to the most evident forms of tradition might not be readily apparent, these artists are nonetheless often profoundly connected both to deeper, culturally grounded aesthetic streams and to their own home communities, connections that readily draw them into the embrace of both tradition and folklife. Although most southern self-taught artistry would fall within the domain of this volume, little appears on the pages that follow—in part because the sheer breadth of southern folklife draws our attention elsewhere, and in part because such artistry is the focus of a separate Folk Art volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The relationship between innovation and tradition takes us on another detour when we consider the experiential path that leads many southerners to their creativity. Across the full range of folklife practice—from song performance and material creation to garden layout and hands-on healing—southerners have long credited the divine as inspiring and, in many cases, providing the ideas and/or skills that guide their work. This notion of unmediated godly guidance finds ready grounding in Christian biblical teachings, which speak of the many “gifts” that the Holy Spirit imparts to believers. Among southern believers, these gifts can take many forms. Perhaps most common are those that unfold in communities of faith, where generations of believers have testified to “receiving” songs, prayers, testimonies, and sermons directly from the Spirit. Such spiritual guidance, however, far transcends the realms of religious FOLKLIFE

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performance. Many southern healers—from laypersons who “talk out fire” to rootworkers—attribute their knowledge to spiritual revelation; so too do many “folk inventors”—mechanics or backyard tinkerers who frequently credit their (often ingeniously) innovative designs, mechanical repairs, machinery, and creations to God-given dreams. The same is true for many “traditional” material artists—basketmakers, for instance, who dream altogether nontraditional designs, or quilters who “receive” wholly original patterns. This process is perhaps most evident, however, in the realms of self-taught art. Generations of “untrained” artists across the South have told of finding themselves graced with a sudden, newfound, and completely compelling creativity, a creativity that seems to demand expression and one that these artists often liken to a spiritual “calling” (much as preachers tell of being “called” by God to preach). Drawing on divine guidance rather than artistic precedent, these artists often ground their work in visions, spiritual inspirations, and dreams. In cases like these, “tradition” rests not as much in form or performance as in the means of transmission, with the divine granting of “gifts” itself standing as a place of familiarity and community embrace. Questions of transmission draw us to one more dimension of tradition’s play in the South: revival. When communities self-consciously recreate practices from the past—practices that have vanished, or ones left only in trace form, enjoying little of their once-spirited vitality—do these revivals count as “traditional”? Do they also enter the realm of folklife? One could point, for instance, to the recent Cherokee revival of stamp-decorated, coiled pottery, a tradition that had largely disappeared by the close of the 1800s. Pottery making continued to flourish among the Eastern Band of Cherokee, but the forms and techniques that Cherokee potters mastered in the 20th century drew upon other Indian traditions and developed with an explicit eye to the tastes of visiting tourists. The earlier practice—which entailed making larger, utilitarian vessels and decorating their surfaces by pressing carved wooden paddles and other textured objects into the moist clay—vanished, a victim of the simple pragmatics of markets and need. At the turn of the 21st century, however, a group of Cherokee potters—working with archaeologists and museum curators—decided to revive the centuries-old tradition. No living potter remained to teach them the now-lost processes of large-scale construction, stamping, and firing; their only “teachers” were the remaining old pots and their broken pieces. Nonetheless, the patient dance of experimentation and creativity gradually led to a reemergence of the older tradition. Grand vessels of coiled clay once again graced Cherokee workshops. Can we call these new pots “traditional”? Or has the broken chain of trans16 FOLKLIFE

mission and the self-consciousness of their revival somehow annulled this designation? If we were to ask the potters, we would find no hesitation. Potters speak with certainty and pride of the traditional nature of their work and testify to feeling a deep aesthetic connectedness with their artistic forebears when they create these pots. If we were to look at the process of creation, again we would have little doubt. The new pots are far more than rote recreations of older forms; instead, they are innovative extensions, new works that honor the old while bearing witness to the creative mastery of their makers. Finally, if we were to ask the community, the very question of traditionality would seem moot. In their eyes, these pots are vessels of meaning and passion, crafted reminders of the past that speak pointedly to a reclaimed and reasserted Cherokee identity. Though the chain of passage may have been broken, the potters’ impassioned intensity and the community’s enthusiastic embrace have certainly forged the links anew, easily drawing these pots into the domains of both tradition and folklife. Much the same could be said for a host of other revived practices, from the African American practice of “jumping the broom” at weddings to the playing of old-time string band music by musicians whose training and heritage differ dramatically from those who first created this music. The inclusion of these practices as folklife rests not as much in their pedigree as in their ongoing vitality as sites of community meaning. They may well serve different needs now than they did in years past; ultimately, however, this tells us more about the resilience of tradition than it does about the roles these revived practices currently play in community life. Like the newly emergent traditions that are their counterparts (for example, line dancing) and the seemingly singular practices that stand alongside them (such as much self-taught artistry), they join the region’s many time-honored traditions in contributing to the fullness of folklife in the South. Situating Southernness. If the essences of folklife rest in practice, process, and meaning, then how does region play into the equation? This volume, after all, falls within a series on southern culture, foregrounding the southernness of all things contained therein. Region clearly defines the encompassing frame. Does this suggest that the stories that follow—stories that range from bar mitzvahs and cockfights to hoodoo and womanless weddings—are all singularly southern? Yes—and no. Yes, in that each such story unfolds within the broader narrative of southern experience, thus referencing the subtle story lines of southern history and tradition. And no, in that the stories are not necessarily restricted to the South, finding voice nowhere else. Our goal in crafting this volume was FOLKLIFE

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not to address only practices particular to the South, but instead to discuss practices extant in the South. Pedigree and provenance are not as important as meaningful practice. Accordingly, we can freely speak about family reunions— for instance—as features of southern folklife, even though such gatherings happen across the country. The fact that reunions occur elsewhere does not make them any less important for southern families; nor does it somehow diminish their regional singularity. Reunions—like all of the practices addressed in the pages that follow—are grounded in the particular experiences of local communities; as such, they embody characteristics of the local and, necessarily, of the regional. Hence, an African American family reunion in the Mississippi Delta is not just another family reunion; instead, it is a gathering flavored with Delta tradition, spiced with African American style, and seasoned by southernness. Local meanings clearly unfold from the immediacy of social engagement; the particular meanings of the aforementioned reunion, for instance, rest in the retellings of family stories, the replaying of family traditions, and the spirit of family communion. What, though, of the regional meanings? What constitutes the seasoning of southernness? The answer is one that southerners and others have debated for generations, yielding eloquence and explanations aplenty. For our purposes, though, a simpler answer will probably suffice. The folkways of the South owe their deepest debt to the confluence of two cultural streams, flowing from West Africa and Western Europe, both of which coursed into— and in many ways overwhelmed—the regional channels already cut by American Indian cultures. Each of these cultural streams carried the richly variegated sediments of local tradition. Some of these blended together, lending patterned currents to the cascading flow; others retained their singularity and apartness. The blended sediments—evidences of deep cultural sharing—encompassed understandings about the workings of reality; the unspoken logics of beauty, balance, and wonder; the framings of linguistic pattern; the subtle sensibilities of space (and its negotiation); and the quiet shapings of sociability. They lent coherence to each contributing stream, drawing its currents together in a deeply shared consciousness. Other sediments, in turn, held themselves apart, honoring the local firmaments that gave them rise. These represented traditions of a more specific nature, traditions that informed the immediacy of everyday experience, embracing particular ways of faith, dress, eating, birthing, humor, death. A preferred kind of song, a pattern for plaiting hair, a taste for spicy stews, an accepted set of proverbs, a ceremony to mark the passage into adulthood—all were markers of life in specific communities. If the blended sediments manifested cross-community sharing, these were evidences of community-based particularity. 18 FOLKLIFE

Each of these broad cultural streams—laden with the sediments of both shared and singular sensibility—coursed with a sublime richness that sustained when its waters pitched, surged, and ultimately commingled with those of its forced consorts. The circumstances of this coming together—so different for each of the individual streams—channeled and challenged but did not fundamentally change the fullness of the discrete cultural currents. Each of the three—hailing from West Africa, Western Europe, and Native America— retained its fecund richness. And in time, each transformed, blending in moments of subtly intimate communion; sustaining the side-by-side, suspended sediments of particularity; and birthing altogether new streamings of tradition. The subsequent cultural flow—still filled with commingled currents and singular sediments—came to define the American South. Of course, these same cultural streams came together elsewhere in the nation. But nowhere else were their currents so strong or their blendings so tumultuous, in large part because of simple numbers. The African presence in the South, in particular, dwarfed that in other regions. Furthermore, this presence sustained over generations, retaining in many areas a numerical dominance that kept West African worldviews and traditions very much alive, while simultaneously fostering the slow growth of a singularly creolized African American culture. As the southern frontier pushed westward, the Southeast’s mix of white, African American, and American Indian moved with it, carrying and sustaining its unique cultural profile. And as the North—and then Midwest, Southwest, and West—experienced the ongoing inflow of new cultural streams from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the South largely retained its singular blend, its waters significantly stirred only in Texas and parts of Louisiana. The longstanding persistence of this particular mix—stretching across the centuries, with little influx from outside—fostered a deep and fertile commingling. Its currents blended and reblended in ever-new combinations, both drawing the source sediments together in novel ways and mixing these older traditions with the already creolized waters of southern culture. Though cultural tributaries from outside were few, the South’s creative currents never stopped churning. To say that these outside tributaries were few in number, however, is not to diminish their importance, or to deny their impact on select parts of the South. One need only look to the vibrant blend of Mexican and southern cultures in Texas to recognize the rich potential of such comings together. The accordiondriven joys of conjunto, the spectacular sizzle of customized lowriders, the sublime grace of santos carvings, the spicy delights of fajitas (a Tex-Mex “invention”), and the devotional intensity of Los matachines processions all point to the ever-emergent creativity of this cultural commingling. FOLKLIFE

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By the same token, one could point to the arrival of the Acadians—exiled from French Canada in the mid-1750s—in south Louisiana, bringing a potent infusion of Francophone culture into a region populated by French Creoles, Spaniards, Germans, Anglo-based white southerners, African Americans, and American Indians. The Acadian exiles proved both resilient and dynamic, not only vigorously establishing themselves in their new home but also absorbing and transforming the traditions of their neighbors, yielding the singularly southern creole of Cajun culture. Like their counterparts in Texas, the Cajuns created a cultural profile all of their own, marked by the spirited zest of Cajun accordion, fiddle, and triangle playing (not to mention the sweet wail of Cajun electric steel guitar); the costumed revelry of le courrir de Mardi Gras (the house-to-house Mardi Gras run); the piquant savor of crawfish étouffée and jambalaya; the bluesy, honky-tonking grit of swamp pop; and, in more recent times, the locally invented brilliance of crawfish-gathering “boats” that travel both land and water. If we were to identify a third major tributary to the streams of southern culture, we would find ourselves once again in Louisiana, though now in New Orleans. The city itself has long been a site of creolizing ferment, hosting vibrant French, Spanish, and African communities in its early years. This mix was forever transformed in the opening decades of the 19th century, when waves of immigrants fleeing the slave-led revolution in Saint-Domingue (soon to become Haiti) entered the port of New Orleans. In 1809 alone, almost 10,000 Haitian immigrants swept into the city, literally doubling New Orleans’s population. More than a third of these newcomers were enslaved Africans, most of whom shared roots in a single West African region, a circumstance that fostered a vitally alive cultural communion. Another third were “free persons of color,” a community that largely shared these same West African traditions (and whose presence propelled the numbers of free African Americans to almost a third of the urban population). The final group were French-speaking whites. This massive and sudden infusion from the Caribbean transformed the social, aesthetic, and religious worlds of New Orleans, giving rise to a host of vibrant creole traditions, not the least of which are the shotgun house and the Catholic-based faith of voodoo. Perhaps even more influential than these distinct practices, however, were the social structures that this Haitian stream helped build, structures that over time (and with the late 19th century’s renewed regimen of racial segregation in New Orleans) gave birth to the improvisatory genius of jazz. Each of these three cultural tributaries—from Mexico, Acadia, and Haiti— contributed strong currents to the streamings of southern culture. Flow from the first has never stopped, with Latino cultural exchange in Texas—and in20 FOLKLIFE

creasingly across the South—continuing to transform the region’s experiential waters. Flow from the second ceased long ago, but the Cajun currents left behind have become a force of their own, themselves becoming the headwaters of regional creativity. Flow from the third has also vanished, its distinctive currents lost to a surging cascade that swallowed, gave thanks, and then pressed on to other places. Evidences of Haitian contributions are not nearly as pronounced as they are in the other cases; their influence rests more in the role they played in shaping the emergent and ever-influential culture of New Orleans. These same processes of ongoing contribution, reemergence, and cultural absorption have played themselves out countless times across the South, as new cultural communities—ranging from Vietnamese and Ghanaians to Ashkenazi Jews and Waldensian Protestants—have made their homes in the region. Until recently, the influence of these outside streams has been relatively limited. Except in the three instances already discussed, their presence—while patently transforming local experience—has not stirred the deeper waters of southern culture. The days of this long-standing equilibrium, however, have come to an end. As the South increasingly claims its place within the national and global economy, the region has come to host an ever-increasing stream of cultural outsiders. Many of these newcomers arrive here singly, as individuals and families; many more, however, arrive as communities, bringing with them the richness of their own home-based traditions. The once-few contributing streams have thus become many, and as their numbers increase, so too does their influence on the cultural flow. Southern Baptist churches now share the streets with Latino Pentecostal congregations; barbecue joints vie for customers with taco stands and Indian restaurants; fairgrounds that once hosted only agricultural fairs, tractor pulls, bluegrass festivals, and gun shows now also feature Latino rodeos and Hmong New Year celebrations. Not all of these newcomers, of course, hail from faraway lands. Many come from “the North” (still the generic term that southerners tend to use when invoking all other parts of the nation). Some are following the lure of available jobs; others are pursuing retirement; still others are seeking the romantic promise of a simpler life. With them have come all the signs of corporate America, gracing small towns and once-rural roadsides with Wal-Marts, shopping malls, and fast-food restaurants. In many of the South’s urban areas, bagel shops now outnumber cafés that sell fresh biscuits, while coffee shops and New York–style sub shops are giving luncheonettes and fried-chicken joints a run for their money. As many southerners are increasingly apt to say, “The South is getting harder and harder to find.” Perhaps. But southerners have been saying this same thing for generations, FOLKLIFE

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bemoaning the passing of a past memorialized in memory and often located in a highly selective miscellany of practices and institutions. It is always worth remembering that southerners were singing songs like “Give Me That Old-Time Religion” in the late 1800s, already lending a nostalgic concreteness to the concept of “old time.” Each generation since has repeated the call to alarm, typically locating the villainy of change in “outside” intrusions, whether of people or technology or ease of long-distance communication. The advent of radio (and then television) was certain to end the days of neighborly socializing. The record player would keep folks from making their own music and surely stifle creativity. Air-conditioning would pull people off their porches and thus forever rip the fabric of community. Yet throughout these (and many more) changes, the South has managed to hold onto its distinct regional identity. Indeed, if we were to measure the strength of this identity by the vitality of the region’s folklife—by that amorphous but auspicious communion of meaning, values, and community—we would probably conclude that this identity not only is at no risk of disappearing but is in fact alive, well, and absolutely thriving. If anything, the rush of new cultural streams is stirring the waters in ways that only increase the opportunities for novel—yet still singularly southern— commingling and creativity. Perhaps a historical example is in order. Today, across the South, southerners point to bluegrass music as a classically old-time form, an acoustic music whose reliance on unamplified instruments, harmonized vocals, and downhome themes bears witness to an earlier, presumably simpler time. If you ask people about the music’s pedigree, you are likely to hear references to its gradual emergence in mountain hollers, at the hands of rural folk who drew upon their Scots-Irish traditions to create a distinctly southern (and distinctly white) tradition. The accepted public narrative insists that fiddlers and banjo pickers were playing bluegrass since the days of the Civil War, if not before. Yet this romantic claim to tradition—however widely espoused—holds no more truth than the exaggerated yarns of a country-store tale-spinner. In actuality, bluegrass emerged in the 1940s at the hands of mandolin-player Bill Monroe and his bandmates, a group of clever and entrepreneurial commercial musicians who were seeking a snappy, exciting music that would appeal to both radio and stage audiences. Monroe himself hailed not from the Kentucky mountains but from the low, rolling hills far west of there. The music, in turn, drew as much upon commercial country forms as it did upon its old-time string band antecedents; furthermore, it borrowed much of its innovative structure (particularly its improvisatory drive and its sequencing of successive solos) from African American swing-band jazz, as presumably heard on records and the 22 FOLKLIFE

radio. Finally, it foregrounded an instrumental virtuosity far beyond the skills of most back-porch pickers. Bluegrass was anything but grassroots and community based. Instead, it was a self-consciously commercial form created for the stage, an innovative cultural hybrid designed to tap into the nostalgic and old while appealing to the novel and modern. The transformative embrace of community, however, and the subtle workings of southern culture have changed all this. While bluegrass still finds a welcome home on the stage, it is now more often heard in informal picking sessions, where sociability is the rule and simple competence counts as much as technical virtuosity. The playing tends to unfold in home kitchens, music shops, community centers, country stores, and even fast-food joints (testifying anew to the ways that meaning making is no respecter of place). And the onceavant-garde emphasis on improvisation and sequential soloing is now taken for granted, even though this practice had little precedent in grassroots white music making. The public stage, of course, has not disappeared; the music’s popularity across the South has given rise to innumerable bluegrass festivals, where fans and musicians alike gather to hear favorite artists and join in the spontaneous jam sessions that invariably fill the nights with music. These festivals—like the music that gave them rise—are a relatively new phenomenon. Nonetheless, they have become an established part of southern culture, embraced as if they had been around for myriad generations. For the countless thousands that attend them every year, bluegrass festivals’ history is clearly less important than the practice that fills them with meaning. Why tell the story of bluegrass at this point in this essay? Because bluegrass offers a telling example of novelty, change, and cultural adoption. The creators of this music took advantage of the options offered them by commerce, increased exposure to other cultural forms, and technology to create something both boldly innovative and singularly southern. Southern audiences, in turn, took this novelty and tempered it with the spirit of community, transforming it into a new vernacular. This transformation neither dulled the music’s creativity nor stunted its potential for further change. Instead, it provided a new foundation for growth, a new invitation for innovation and meaningful emergence. Such has always been the story of folklife in the South. With each change that the region has experienced—whether the influx of new cultural communities, the rise and then demise of industrial production, the gradual transformation of racial relations, the dramatically fluctuating fortunes of agriculture, or any of a number of other political, economic, social, and cultural shifts— southerners have remade themselves, crafting new tools for defining and enacting their identities. The making of meaning has never stopped. The ways FOLKLIFE

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that communities make it, however, have changed. Some traditions have been left behind; others have moved from places of centrality to the distant periphery; still others have vanished and then reemerged; and many more have risen anew, offering themselves as new vehicles of spirit and community meaning. Although many southerners still experience change as challenge (as suggested by the long-standing laments about the loss of the South’s uniqueness), history shows that they have also found in change sparkling new opportunities for cultural expression.

GLENN HINSON WILLIAM FERRIS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Roger D. Abrahams, Nick Spitzer, John Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson, Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul (2006); Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, <www.arts.state.al.us/actc/index-folkarts-actc.html>; Barry Jean Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Music Makers (1999); Julia S. Ardrey, The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art (1998); Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep, vol. 1, African American Vernacular Art of the South (2000); Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (1998); John A. Burrison, Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture (2007); Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (1984); Crossroads of the Heart: Creativity and Tradition in Mississippi, <www.arts.state.ms.us/ crossroads/main.html>; Barbara R. Duncan, Living Stories of the Cherokee (1998); Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (2005); William R. Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (2009); Florida Folklife Program, <www.flheritage.com/preservation/folklife>; Fred C. Fussell, Blue Ridge Music Trails: Finding a Place in the Circle (2003); Henry Glassie, Material Culture (1999), Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968); Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (1972); Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (2008); Glenn Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Spirit and Transcendence in African American Gospel (2000); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; 2008); Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (1999); James Kirkland, Holly F. Mathews, C. W. Sullivan III, and Karen Baldwin, eds., Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (1992); Louisiana Folklife Program, <www .louisianafolklife.org>; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (2002); North Carolina Folklife Institute, <www.ncfolk.org>; Daniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zug III, eds., Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife (1990); Celeste Ray, ed., Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern 24

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Regionalism (2003); Patricia Sawin, Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories (2004); Texas Folklife, <www.texasfolklife.org/ home.html>; Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (1988); Ruel Tyson, James Peacock, and Daniel Patterson, eds., Diversities of Gifts: Field Studies in Southern Religion (1988); Virginia Folklife Program, ; John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (rev. ed., 1990); Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (2004); David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (1983); Michael Ann Williams, Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern North Carolina (1991); Joe Wilson, A Guide to the Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail (2006); Charles G. Zug III, Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina (1986).

A Note on Terms. Historically, southern talk about the region’s principal cultural communities has reductively referred to these communities with the racial designations “white,” “black,” and “Indian.” Each of these terms glosses over worlds of difference within these groups, minimizing internal cultural diversity by declaring a presumed racial homogeneity. Each designation also has the effect of making the named categories more concrete, affirming their “reality” by virtue of their labels. At the same time, each term has long circulated within the community in question, sometimes adopted as a claim to identity, sometimes used primarily to differentiate self from those seen as “other.” In compiling this volume, we have struggled with these tensions between historical usage and contemporary understandings and between outsider designations and insider claimings. Although recognizing the utility of these terms as cultural signifiers when titling the volume’s entries, we also recognize the dangers of essentializing broad and internally diverse communities. Hence, within the individual entries, we have tried to foreground the particularity of the referenced groups, specifying, for instance, specific tribal communities when addressing “American Indian” traditions, or peoples of particular national heritages when speaking of “white” folklife. In entry titles, in turn, we use the terms “African American,” “American Indian,” and “Historically White.” We have chosen “Historically White” instead of the more ambiguous “White” as a way of acknowledging southern whiteness as a very particular historical construction. “Historically White” designates those southern communities that have historically self-identified as white, communities that largely trace their ancestry to England, Scotland, and Ireland (and, to a lesser degree, to France, Spain, and Germany). The term makes no claims to represent the practices of the far more diverse set of communities that currently self-identify as white. FOLKLIFE

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Aesthetics, African American African American aesthetics is an open-ended tradition that favors extensive experimentation in a search for novelty. This is an aesthetic of freewheeling improvisation and innovation, and the artworks it generates and the cultural contexts in which it operates are marked by a distinctive dynamism that can be regarded as indicative of African American cultural values. This dynamism stems from an ever-present delight in the surprise value of new, not completely anticipated discovery. When commenting about his elaborate ornamental ironwork designs, Philip Simmons, one of the foremost African American blacksmiths of the last century, noted: “It isn’t always a thing gonna be set in your mind and when just half way you can see you ain’t gonna like it. . . . You think you like it to start, [but] it isn’t always you like something that you can visualize. . . . I may not like these scroll[s] when I start, but still I see it that way after putting it in and I see where I can improve it.” These words about composing a piece of wrought iron art give a glimpse of a crucially important aspect of African American culture, for they reveal how its traditional art forms are enacted. What Simmons says about ironwork, other black artists have said about music, dance, and many other expressive forms; namely, that the preferred shape of a specific work will only be known when it is completed. As Simmons indicates, the black folk artist may at midpoint sense that something is amiss in his performance, but rather than starting over completely, he will work with what he has until a satisfying pattern emerges. The artist is then doubly rewarded for his effort, in that both his product and his creative process are enjoyable. In the end, he has a beautiful item and has solved his problem of composition by playing with it. The African American aesthetic encourages the exploration of new possibilities, such as unlikely blendings of motifs, inversions of common patterns, and the layering of embellishments on standard forms. Black quilters can make quilt tops that have much in common with Anglo-American patterns, but when they enact their most distinctive artistic codes, their bed covers can be spectacularly different after only a minor adjustment of a “normal” quilt motif. Consider, for example, the commonplace log cabin quilt square, a block composed of small, concentrically arranged strips that are usually no larger than one foot on a side. Many of these blocks will be set into a grid to form a quilt top. Black quilters employ this particular motif in an ordered and precisely geometric manner, but they can also make the log cabin so big that one block alone will constitute the entire quilt top. They may also skew the center of the block to one side and select high-effect colors that are rarely employed by Anglo-American quilters. AESTHETICS, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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The aesthetic call of improvisation and dynamic movement is certainly embodied in the design of this Lowcountry basket, created in 2004 by African American basketmaker Linda Graddick Huger. The sweeping waves dramatically offset the evenly wrapped, horizontal coils of sweetgrass and pine needles, transforming what could have been a workaday basket into a piece that both arrests and delights the eye. (From the collection of Timothy and Pearl V. Ascue, courtesy of the Museum for African Art, New York; photograph by Karin L. Willis)

Such a quilt—when viewed from the perspective of the Anglo-American aesthetic—would seem strange, flawed, or even so lacking in aesthetic quality that it could only be referred to as “crazy.” Closer consideration, however, reveals that such a quilt, which seems random, misshapen, and demented, does in fact have an order, albeit not an order marked by the same meticulous, geometric precision employed by white quilters. The black quilt, when harshly evaluated, might be read as a distorted white pattern, but when viewed from the perspective of the African American aesthetic, its randomness, its off-balance composition, and its deviance from the “norm” should be read as playfulness, as willingness to test the norm, as a strong desire to find novelty within the familiar. Such quilts manifest the same spirit of innovation and improvisation that is encountered in Philip Simmons’s ironwork. In the midst of composition and performance, the artist gathers new insights about previously unconsidered possibilities. If judged as positive, these possibilities become “improvements,” and they are used to convert the usual quilt or ironwork or song or dance step into something unusual. 28

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Thus, African American works have an emergent quality to complement the open-endedness of their design. Improvisations, testings, or improvements are compiled to produce an additively composed artwork. Because this additive approach is incremental, even piecemeal, the final goal is not often seen from the outset of the creative process. Later, at some critical, even magical point, when an acceptable shape begins to emerge, it may seem that the work almost creates itself. In an instant, seemingly random elements come together and appear as powerful, evocative, or beautiful. It is not surprising, then, that many African American folk artists speak of a visionary episode as the source of their work. The plans for their creativity, they say, come in dreams, mysterious voices, prophecies, or spiritual visitations— that is, from some external force over which they have no control. Clay sculptor and bluesman James “Son” Thomas reports: “The dreams just come to me. If I’m working with clay, you have that on your mind when you lay down. You dream some. Then you get up and try.” Leon Rucker, a carver of fancy walking sticks, explains his ideas in the following manner: “The idea came with the voice of the man. Now who was the man, I don’t know, but I say he must have been a god ’cause man couldn’t do a thing like that just by himself.” Gravestone maker William Edmondson—while lying in bed—received a command from his “Heavenly Daddy” to carve. Soon after that communication, he experienced another extraordinary event: “I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon day light He hung a tombstone out for me to make.” Beneath such diverse statements is the African American aesthetic that encourages its proponents to experiment spontaneously and somewhat randomly until they seize upon an order that suits them. That order will seem marvelously self-generated, even though it is the artists who are actually responsible. Improvisation is sometimes perceived as a symptom of the decline of tradition; it is thought to signal the demise of historically sanctioned standards. When a form changes constantly, it is assumed that its traditional base must be unstable and its aesthetic impact weakening. This is not the case in African American culture, where novelty is expected as the norm, where the rules of artistic composition are loosely rather than rigidly enforced, where the creator is expected to stand out from his community. There is thus a strong sense of individuality in black folk expression. Cultural license exists for black artists to do whatever they do in their own way. Blues singers today often refer to standard numbers by famous traditional celebrities such as Robert Johnson or Charley Patton as “my own” even though the original authorship is well known to all. They are expected to remake the tradition, and in fact they do transform old favorites with the addition of their own new elements. Sonny Matthews AESTHETICS, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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explains: “I will sing their songs, but I will put the words my way. If he have a word do one way, I’ll change it and put it another. That’s the way I do most of my singing.” Philip Simmons in like manner claims: “I like doing my own work.” A strong sense of self, then, enters black folk art and is responsible not for the demise of tradition but for its perpetuation. The aesthetic of improvisation promotes a freedom to explore the limits of one’s imagination, encouraging each would-be artist to examine fully the creative formats of his or her community. Such freedom could lead to chaos and confusion, but it usually does not, for most artists exercise their options for self-expression conservatively and modestly, observing that the past is a valuable and useful resource. They negotiate between their sense of self and their sense of society. Their creativity involves a measure of compromise between what they think is good and what their audience will accept as good. Because the shape of these negotiations is similar to the testings and probings required for the composition and performance of black expressive culture, the African American aesthetic seems to consist not simply of the rules for creativity but also of the rules for living.

JOHN MICHAEL VLACH George Washington University Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1972); William Ferris, ed., Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts (1983), Blues from the Delta (1979); Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963); Linn Shapiro, ed., Black People and Their Culture: Selected Writings from the African Diaspora (1976); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978), Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons (1992).

Aesthetics, Historically White A shared aesthetic dictated much of the look of the South’s built environment. White British settlers brought with them guiding principles of order, balance, and proportion. Their standard for good proportion—apparently intuitive but actually acquired by traditional learning—was the “Golden” or “Greek” oblong. It measured two units on the short side to three on the long side. According to one aesthetic primer, this perfect rectangle “is more beautiful than a very long, narrow oblong, in which the breadth and length vary so greatly that they do not seem to be related.” This folk aesthetic of what constitutes proper order and proportion is represented in the basic southern folk house—the single pen, usually a rectangular unit (with roots in West Britain). Variations on this unit, like the double pen, dogtrot house, and I house, extend the rectangular image. 30

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The aesthetic principles of order, balance, and symmetry are eminently evident in this striking “feathered star” quilt, which was pieced by Frances Mathewes of Ruston, La., and then quilted by Nell Roach of Dubach, La., in 1988. Ms. Mathewes filled each matched star with precisely cut triangles and framed them with uniformly even border strips. She then punctuated each strip’s corner with a small, symmetrical, nine-patch square. Ms. Roach deepened the quilt’s overall symmetry by quilting matching wreaths in the blocks’ centers and four corners and half wreaths at their midpoints. The triple triangles and enclosing ovals add a final touch of bilateral symmetry to each framing strip, completing the quilt’s arresting aesthetic statement. (Photograph by Susan Roach)

Indeed, at the earliest settlement of Jamestown, the most efficient housing would have been large multifamily dwellings, but instead the settlers insisted on small, single-family, rectangular houses. The predominance of the rectangle as a basic constructional concept, in fact, extended also to dining and art, for the table was typically rectangular and so was the frame for paintings. The ideal three units of the oblong’s long side are manifested in a preference AESTHETICS, HISTORICALLY WHITE

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for two identical design elements flanking a different central one. The windows of the typical southern folk house are symmetrically placed around a central door. The southern mountain cabin typically has the fireplace in the center of the far wall, rather than in the corner where the Scandinavians preferred it, or off center and by a door in the interior wall, as the Germans tended to have it in some locations in the Shenandoah Valley. The preference for the bilaterally symmetrical pattern is indeed a contrast to African, Gothic, and Italianate architectural styles. Beyond architecture, the American design of gravestones and dress, and even the arrangement of food (meat, potatoes, vegetables) on the dinner plate, follows the bilaterally symmetrical pattern as well. In the English language, sentences are rectilinear, reflecting symmetry and a design of threes: beginning, middle, and end; subject, object, and verb; past, present, and future. The symmetrical aesthetic stems from a geometric projection of the human body as an ideal form; faces and bodies are designed symmetrically. Psychologically, this bodily basis signals human dominion and a preference for regularity. The regularity expressed helped nurture within southern culture a sense of order, balance, and harmony. Southern-based country music, for example, is marked by its rhythmic regularity and evenness; while improvisational African American blues typically follow an aab structure, the country dance tune, for instance, takes an aabb form. The so-called English barn is another example of the British-rooted geometric aesthetic: it contains two bays around a centrally placed passage. The entrance is on the nongable end to emphasize the ordered rectangular façade; human work often is located in the center, while the bays are used for storage. The rectangle is the key form in the southern aesthetic, reflecting the opposition of two equal pairs. Even the regional flag symbol of the Stars and Bars, unlike the national Stars and Stripes, consists of two crossed rectilinear bars that form a field of solid colored pairs. The double-doored, double-pen house form, a pair of rectangular units, is the limit of folk architectural extension; a triple pen is not found in the British American folk repertoire. The house might be extended by placing a double pen over the first pair, thus forming the so-called I house, or by adding an L or T extension on the back to preserve the binary façade (in using this term, speakers are metaphorically referring to the human “face” of the building, with two eyes or windows above a central opening or mouth). The special case is the addition of a central door and hallway that projects an image of bilateral symmetry. Inside, a rear door is typically paired in line with the front door, and, even in a single pen, a light partition often divides the cabin into two rooms. Although there is variety in the traditional house types found on the southern landscape, the southern house has 32 AESTHETICS, HISTORICALLY WHITE

been portrayed since the 18th century as a Golden Oblong with central front and rear doors and symmetrically placed windows. Again, there is a geometric projection of the human body in the binary aesthetic—paired arms, eyes, and legs. In fact, in language, people use this reference when they say “on the one hand, on the other hand.” Binary thinking goes further, from artifact to worldview. The classic binary oppositions of North and South, upland and lowland, and black and white show the place of aesthetic not as ornament but as central, socially important idea. Indeed, “separate but equal,” the common guiding doctrine of an earlier South, was an aesthetic principle as much as a social and political one. In addition to a concern for shape, the binary aesthetic—reflecting a biblical belief in human dominion over the land—stresses a natural look that represents the importance of the land and its accompanying flora and fauna in the southern imagination. The pronounced image of an agrarian South finds characterization in the country-gentleman ideal borrowed from the English. The folk painters and tale-tellers of the South have shared a long tradition of celebrating its rusticity, which represents a high status given to owning an expanse of land as well as maneuvering through wilderness as a test of mettle. This means more than depicting the adored everyday activities of the country church and farm; it reflects an overarching aesthetic stressing human relation to, and reliance upon, nature. The emphasis may be partly explained by southern white settlers’ need to adapt to a geography and climate most unlike their point of British origin. Natural materials add to the appeal of artistic products. Wood, especially favored for its look and feel, may have been a compensation for the deforested British heritage that white settlers had left behind. Southerners valued wood not only as building product but also as symbol because it was considered precious in British manors. Whittlers refuse to paint their wooden chains to make them more realistic; the natural wood, they will tell you, should be shown. Baskets, houses, and pottery commonly display soft, natural colors. Figures made from corn husks, bedcovers in a honeycomb pattern, and instruments made from skins or gourds are among the mainstays, for instance, of a 1937 survey of southern handicrafts by Allen Eaton. The pride expressed by southerners in the naturalistic appearance of their objects is coupled with an aesthetic preference for objects shaped or controlled by hand that again may be a sign of emphasis placed on the rugged individualism implied in human dominion within the wilderness. The title of a major Mississippi folk-art exhibition showing the value of the products was, in fact, Made by Hand. The persistence of handicrafts such as chair making, whittling, AESTHETICS, HISTORICALLY WHITE

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and quilting—even in the face of mass-produced goods—makes an aesthetic statement in favor of handmade quality. Although some observers associate this predilection with southern cultural conservatism, another more plausible interpretation relates the value seen in handwork to the connections—both to nature and to other people—provided by the aesthetic control and emotional compassion of human touch. Like the symbol of ample “time on your hands” reflected by traditional southern storytelling, handworked items represent for southerners the value of individual control, an image of community connection in a producer economy, and a reference to a founding narrative of taming the wilderness. Although the form and feeling of southern material folk culture are varied, the major British inheritance did find prominent expression. A set of coherent aesthetic principles emerged in the southern experience. They were not identical with, or exclusive to, the British antecedent but drew inspiration from general principles of proper order, balance, and proportion. Yet scholars disagree over how many of those principles were imposed on nonwhite or non-British southerners. Some, like folklorist John Michael Vlach, see a major African presence on the landscape with an aesthetic favoring unevenness and improvisation, whereas others, like folklorist Richard M. Dorson, argue that the European culture in America transformed or eliminated most of the cultural traditions of blacks and Indians. Identifying distinctive, multiple aesthetic systems of ethnic origin, however, does not contradict the existence of a dominant southern aesthetic. Despite different, frequently overlapping identities expressed aesthetically, a predominant influence on southern folk design has been those aesthetic principles based on a combination of a British heritage and the new demands of the American scene.

SIMON J. BRONNER Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg Simon J. Bronner, Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America (1986); John A. Burrison, Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture (2007); Richard M. Dorson, in American Folklore in the New World, ed. Daniel Crowley (1977); Allen H. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937; reprint, 1973); William Ferris, Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art (1982); Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (1975); Terry G. JordanBychkov, The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape (2003); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978); Michael Ann Williams, Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern North Carolina (2004). 34

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Basketmaking Practiced in communities stretching from the Atlantic Coast to the Texas plains, basketmaking is a dynamic craft with ancient roots. More than one southern basketmaker has proclaimed that baskets trace their origin back to Moses in the bulrushes. This claim is certainly well considered, as woven baskets of various fibers are found in practically every civilization from antiquity to the modern day. The craft has retained its position in the constellation of cultural traditions in communities and families across the South, holding on through times both lean and good. Basketmaking is well embedded in the distinct yet related cultural repertoires of southerners of American Indian, European, African, Caribbean, and Asian descent. The three major traditions of southern basketmaking are American Indian, African American, and Anglo-American. Of these, the African American basketmakers in the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry have probably received the most public and scholarly attention; their coiled sweetgrass and bulrush baskets have long been admired for their beauty and quality. Much less attention has been paid to Native American baskets (arguably the most intricate and finely made in the country) and to those in the historically white traditions. Even less notice has been given to Latino and Asian basketmaking traditions in the South. Southern baskets’ many forms, materials, and modes of construction (essentially a process of weaving, plaiting, or coiling) indicate a rich crosscultural exchange that has unfolded over many generations; nonetheless, singular characteristics still distinguish each cultural group. Indian peoples favor split reed, willow, and grasses and often incorporate colorings and special designs in the woven container. African Americans in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry craft coil baskets that clearly echo West African traditions. Basketmakers in other areas of the black South weave forms (typically fashioned from white oak) quite similar to those of their Anglo counterparts; they also, however, create baskets with few analogues among Indians and whites and that likely have West African or Caribbean roots. Anglo-Americans have always favored straight-grained hardwood stock for baskets, chiefly white oak and hickory. Pure function and physical rigidity tend to mark the work of culturally conservative white basketmakers, while playful ornamentation in color and form often highlights the work of Indian and African American builders. (As more southern whites create baskets whose primary purpose is decorative, however, this relative starkness is changing; increasingly, these decorative baskets make fanciful use of color and nontraditional textural materials.) The traditional white-oak baskets of white southerners are similar from the Virginia BASKETMAKING

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Piedmont across the mountains into Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. The work of southern American Indians, in contrast, shows striking variation from the eastern coastal areas to the region’s western edges. The purposes to which baskets are put are as numerous as the chores of daily life. Baskets take whatever shape is necessary for their function. All are artifacts of flexible woven material and are used to gather, hold, measure, transport, store, and sort everything from eggs and seeds to babies and firewood. Many contemporary baskets, of course, are made simply to be seen. Southern basketmakers create baskets from every kind of useful plant and wood: corn shucks, straw, grasses, branches, stalks, cane, bark, vines, pine needles, hickory, ash, willow, and oak. Some of the region’s relative newcomers from southeast Asia even create durable baskets from plastic strapping. Among the characteristic types of southern baskets are cotton baskets made to be used by both African Americans and whites in southern fields; fish traps for streams, ponds, and rivers; Choctaw corn sieves; and Lowcountry coiled flower baskets. Some basket types—such as the Cherokee basket of split dyed cane, the African American coiled seagrass basket, and the white riven and ribbed oak egg basket—require much labor and extreme skill. Other baskets are easily made from gatherings of vines, grasses, or branches. Craft revivals have played an important role in southern basketmaking. In the 1920s and 1930s a range of foundations, craft guilds, and New Deal agencies—all seeking to document, interpret, and reinvigorate southern traditions—focused public attention on (and created new markets for) southern basketry. From the 1960s to the present, basketmaking has been nourished by the folklife studies movement, folk-song revivals, back-to-the-land enthusiasts, cultural tourism, Foxfire-like projects, the “country craft” movement, and the widespread adoption of the craft by retired elders seeking a palpable link to the past. The ongoing interest in “country things” and “primitive” artifacts at rural auctions, antique shops, and art galleries has spurred the growth of outside markets for traditional baskets. Whatever philosophical misgivings some scholars may voice about this phenomenon, it has undoubtedly encouraged the continuation and occasional rebirth of authentic basketry. Adult craft classes and recreational programs also foster basketmaking in the modern South; with roots in the early decades of the 20th century (when many such classes were offered as part of economic revitalization projects), this phenomenon has given rise to whole new basketry traditions. Although many contemporary, art-based basketmaking classes stress innovation over tradition, the baskets nonetheless often incorporate local materials and tend to reflect regional tastes. 36

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Modern machines cannot produce a satisfactory “traditional” basket. Despite 19th-century attempts, the failure of technology to create good, inexpensive baskets in factory settings helped generate demand for the development of other cheaper containers, from paper sacks to plastic bags and glass jars. The domination of cheap sacks, bags, and plastic containers encouraged the 20thcentury decline of southern basketmaking, a craft that had flourished when baskets were genuinely needed in society. Yet this decline by no means signals the imminent demise of basketry in the South. The process of craftsmanship is both fluid and dynamic, and it is marked by constant (if often unnoticed) inspiration, innovation, and alteration as builders encounter inviting technologies, new outlets, and new ideas in aesthetics, design, decoration, and function. If a basket made by a craftsman such as Neil Thomas of Johnston County, N.C., in 2009 holds magazines in a parlor rather than kindling by the hearth, the artifact remains a vivid and stable testament to a rich legacy. And it remains a traditional basket, whatever its present function. While one may mourn the loss of the old-timers, theirs is a craft of life, not death, and baskets will continue to be produced in response to the vicissitudes of cultural expression. Basketmaking is well suited to the workshop or spare room and is a convenient way to supplement income from other jobs. At the same time, however, the difficulty in obtaining suitable wood or fiber or even high-quality tools has inhibited the growth of the craft in some areas. Without a proper market outlet or the patrimony of the museum, there would be little incentive to retain the old skills so laboriously learned and manifested in basketmaking; nor would conservative, unassertive craftspeople come to the attention of researchers, collectors, nontraditional imitators, and businesspeople. Some were like the late Jim Nicholson of Northern Virginia (a descendant of a long line of basketmakers), who continued making white-oak baskets and selling them from the hood of his car on the highway shoulder. Many others, however, simply stopped weaving, recognizing that the price for which they could sell their wares would not even begin to compensate them for the time spent gathering and preparing the materials and making the baskets. Basketmaking has always been central to the life of all economic classes and groups of people in the South. Today’s southerners tend to consider baskets as art or as handsome functional artifacts rather than as containers with utilitarian ends. Some basketmakers continue production in traditional contexts for traditional purposes; many others create for new purposes and new markets and often sell their baskets to community outsiders. As has long been the case, these outside markets frequently facilitate artistic experimentation, inviting even traditional basketmakers to extend the logic of tradition to forms and BASKETMAKING

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dimensions that they might not otherwise have even imagined creating and for which they likely would not have received fair compensation within their home communities. Although there are far fewer “traditional” basketmakers today than there were 50 years ago, the craft certainly continues, ever changing but still a characteristic feature of the southern cultural landscape.

HOWARD W. MARSHALL University of Missouri at Columbia Allen H. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937; reprint, 1973); Sarah H. Hill, Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (1996); Dana Bowker Lee and H. F. Gregory, eds., The Work of Tribal Hands: Southeastern Indian Split Cane Basketry (2006); Dale Rosengarten, Row upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1986, 1994); Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout, eds., Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008); Sue Stephenson, Basketry in the Southern Appalachian Mountains (1977).

Bluegrass Bluegrass music has been a commercial style for more than 60 years, but its continued popularity owes much to the same informal, homegrown settings that helped create it. In hundreds of towns and cities across the South, and in other regions, too, people get together in low-pressure settings to “pick” bluegrass. The location is often someone’s home, and, to the occasional frustration of listeners, tends to wind up in a kitchen or other cramped space. Sometimes the gathering is at a community center, music emporium, or general store hosting a regular night for making music. This distinctive American music style blossomed in the 1940s as a sound crafted for live shows, records, and radio. But the not-for-profit get-togethers that attract all levels of bluegrass pickers reflect more than 100 years of music making and social traditions found in southern families, churches, and communities. The term “bluegrass” has come to represent a broad range of music, from the inventive mix that founder Bill Monroe came up with in the 1940s all the way to Alison Krauss’s blend of singer-songwriter pop, artfully adapted rock tunes, and material with a more traditional sound. At its heart, bluegrass refers to an acoustic music that generally requires high levels of musicianship on acoustic instruments—notably guitar, mandolin, fiddle, five-string banjo, and bass— played in specific styles; features high-pitched solo and group singing with a blues- and gospel-influenced “lonesome” sound; and tends to present songs with strong leanings to a simple, rural, “more authentic” era. 38

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The guiding spirit and assembler of the bluegrass style is generally acknowledged to be William Smith (Bill) Monroe, born in Rosine, Ky., in 1911. Monroe grew up immersed in a landscape, lifestyle, and culture that mirrored the music he came to represent. Born in a remote farming community and orphaned while a teenager, Monroe later recalled a lonely life in Rosine. Working around the farm was only lightened by the occasional ball game, powerful church sermons and singing, and local people who made music, often at home. Consigned to play mandolin because older siblings had already chosen guitar and fiddle, Monroe adapted the out-of-fashion instrument over time into a virtuosic force perfect for fiddle tunes, melodic waltzes, and staggeringly bluesy improvisations. His singing, with its high range and aggressive approach, came to encompass the Celtic-descended traditional music of Kentucky, the country tunes of the day, the blues he learned from an African American guitarist, and the angular harmonies of gospel music. Like most budding musicians of his generation, Monroe learned to play at dances, at parties, and along with family members at home. In the late 1920s, Monroe and older brothers Birch and Charlie moved to Chicago, where they got jobs as refinery workers and square dancers before trying professional careers as traveling radio performers. Bill and Charlie soon split off to become hit performers as the Monroe Brothers, recording for Victor Records starting in 1936 and appearing widely on radio and in person. Their repertoire featured close harmonies and Bill’s hard-hitting mandolin style. Tunes might include a traditional number such as “Darling Corey” or a 19th-century gospel song such as “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?” When Bill Monroe left the Monroe Brothers to pursue his own musical path in 1938, he brought striking new elements to what was then called hillbilly music. Debuting on the Grand Ole Opry in 1939, Monroe and his Blue Grass Band experimented with different combinations of instruments until he gathered the “classic” bluegrass band in 1946 featuring banjo phenomenon Earl Scruggs, singer-guitarist Lester Flatt, fiddler Chubby Wise, and bassist Howard Watts. Especially in contrast to the back-porch sound of much of the string band music that preceded it, the Blue Grass Boys’ music emerged faster, higher, bluesier, more improvisatory, and more exciting than anything else in the country universe. The music did not get widely referred to as “bluegrass” until the 1950s, but Monroe and his hard-charging band almost immediately started winning acolytes. Like the Chicago bluesmen who latched on to Muddy Waters’s electric style or the jazzmen who followed saxophonist Charlie Parker into bebop, top musicians such as Ralph and Carter Stanley, Jimmy Martin, Sonny and Bobby BLUEGRASS

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Osborne, Mac Wiseman, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and others fit their own tradition-based sounds into Monroe’s musical framework. Monroe’s band was to produce his most significant competitors when Flatt and Scruggs left in 1948 to form the Foggy Mountain Boys with Wiseman and others. From the beginning, bluegrass tended to be an insider’s music. Musicians and fans mostly came from concentrated areas in the South, the Washington, D.C., area, and parts of the Midwest. Aside from a few major hit recordings by Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and others, bluegrass was adored by a relatively small base of fans and ignored by the mainstream. In the later 1950s and into the 1960s, the music started making a broader impact, often in the context of the ongoing folk music revival. Beginning at outposts such as New York City’s Greenwich Village and Ohio’s Oberlin College, students and others from different backgrounds tuned into the intoxicating sound of bluegrass, often drawn by the intricate music that Earl Scruggs created on the banjo. Major exposure from mass media helped: the highest profile examples were the appearance of Flatt and Scruggs on the Beverly Hillbillies network television show, the use of Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in the hit movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and the role of Don Reno’s “Dueling Banjos” in the movie Deliverance (1972). By the mid-1960s, musicians from a variety of backgrounds were coming together in bands (Bill Monroe hired nonsouthern musicians such as Richard Greene, Bill Keith, and Peter Rowan) and in informal sessions that helped spread bluegrass “virally,” decades before that term was coined for person-toperson transmission of culture. Bluegrass also was being promoted by recordings on major and independent record labels, by genre publications such as Bluegrass Unlimited, by fan clubs for specific artists, by live performances from Carnegie Hall to local taverns, and by the beginnings of academic study of the music. The same sort of community-based music making that gave birth to bluegrass continued as a key element. Unlike classical music, rock ’n’ roll, or jazz, bluegrass routinely offered settings in which skilled and novice players could play with each other. A generally accepted repertoire and performance framework meant that, for instance, a fiddler from Boston, a guitarist from Japan, a mandolinist from North Carolina, a banjo player from England, and a bassist from Nashville could meet, talk, and tune for a minute, then launch into a credible version of Monroe’s “Uncle Pen” or any of dozens of other standards. The very term “picking” for these sessions or parties pays tribute to the high levels of technical ability that bluegrass demands. Beginning players armed with three or four chords and a willingness to learn came to picking parties, but 40

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they typically started on the outer edges of the picking circle. In the best cases, they soak up more music than they contribute. Ad hoc groupings of musicians, or “shade-tree bands,” often get together on the margins of bluegrass festivals, which are another important way that bluegrass gradually penetrated the South and the nation. A bluegrass festival is a sort of large-scale mixture of fiddle contest, down-home picking session, and all-day gospel sing. In many cases, festivals allow fans the chance to mingle, and even play music, with entertainers who have reached significant levels of success. Chroniclers of bluegrass have offered different dates for the first bluegrass festival, but many point to a September 1965 gathering at Fincastle, Va., as the first true multiday event. Bill Monroe, then in his 40s, headlined the threeday event, which also included major stars such as Jimmy Martin, the Stanley Brothers, and Don Reno, all of whom had either played in Monroe’s band or had close links to him. Thousands of similar events were to follow, with hundreds of festivals taking place every year across the United States and abroad. The events provided venues for performances and record sales by the increasing numbers of bands playing bluegrass and related music. They were also communal meeting places for veteran fans and those new to the music. Bluegrass continued to evolve from the core style that Monroe established along with Flatt, Scruggs, and other early practitioners. The later ’60s and early ’70s saw the rise of the “newgrass” sound in the hands of New Grass Revival and others. This was bluegrass mixed with rock style and blues energy, with a jazzy improvisatory focus that would lead to the contemporary “jam band” affinity for bluegrass. More than most popular music styles, bluegrass has grown dozens of new branches while holding to a near-constant awareness of its origins. Innovators such as Dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas, mandolinist David Grisman, fiddler Stuart Duncan, banjo player Bela Fleck, and guitarist Tony Rice all know their Monroe and Scruggs tunes as well as jazz, world music, and rock styles. That meant that an influential player such as Rice could offer solos influenced by John Coltrane as a member of Grisman’s improvisatory group, while sticking to the basics of ’grass in the all-star Bluegrass Album Band. More recently, Alison Krauss has made high-profile recordings with pop-folk star James Taylor and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant while continuing to admire and appear with hardcore bluegrass artists such as singer-guitarist Larry Sparks. The 1980s saw some artists, notably the Nashville Bluegrass Band and the Johnson Mountain Boys, include strong elements of the roots of bluegrass in their successful sounds. Mandolinist and singer Doyle Lawson won fame and BLUEGRASS

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launched a slew of offshoot acts with the disciplined, melodic sounds of his Quicksilver band. Increasingly, female artists such as Krauss, Laurie Lewis, Rhonda Vincent, and Dale Ann Bradley have brought new energy and fans to bluegrass. The creation of the International Bluegrass Music Association in the 1980s and the rise of Internet sites and marketing in the 1990s helped bluegrass reach new audiences. Bluegrass lost its founder with the death of Bill Monroe in 1996, but its community still enjoys the presence of early masters Wiseman, Scruggs, Jesse McReynolds, and the Osborne Brothers. Ricky Skaggs, who started in bluegrass, became a mainstream country star in the 1980s, only to make a triumphant return to bluegrass in 1997. Mass audiences showed once again that they liked traditional music when exposed to it with the overwhelming success in 2000 of the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the old-timey music and bluegrass featured in its hit soundtrack. Both Krauss and the adventurous young act Nickel Creek scored million-selling CDs, creating new acceptance in the commercial mainstream for bluegrassy sounds. New acts, including the family group Cherryholmes, brought a high-energy show and visual appeal to the forefront in the 2000s. And a new generation of pickers—such as guitar master Bryan Sutton, who developed his craft at Asheville, N.C.–area picking parties—showed that highly talented new players would continue to be drawn to bluegrass. As the first decade of the new century neared an end, two festivals held on the same weekend in October 2008 showed that bluegrass was maintaining its reach both on its home turf and far beyond it. In San Francisco, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival attracted familiar names such as Krauss, Scruggs, and Skaggs, as well as acts from all over a musical spectrum: rocker Elvis Costello, folk veteran Odetta, and ironic singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Back in Kentucky, the Jerusalem Ridge Festival commemorated Monroe with performances by Larry Sparks and others who have stuck closer to Monroe’s lonesome mountain sound. Ralph Stanley (who in 1947, along with brother Carter, was among the first acts to follow Monroe’s musical lead) was on the schedule for both events.

THOMAS GOLDSMITH Journalist and Musician Raleigh, North Carolina Tom Ewing, The Bill Monroe Reader (2000); Thomas Goldsmith, The Bluegrass Reader (2004); Neil Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (2005); Neil Rosenberg and Charles Wolfe, The Music of Bill Monroe (2008). 42

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Blues Blues has meant many different things to many different people, and its history—like the history of any musical genre—is as much the history of those evolving meanings as of evolving musical styles. In the beginning, the word “blues” just meant sorrow or depression, and thousands of songs have continued to use it that way: “I’ve got the blues, I can’t be satisfied,” or “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to cry.” But sometime around the first decade of the 20th century, “blues” also came to be used for a kind of music. We may never know exactly what kind of music was first called blues, but there are two early contenders. One was the slow, sexy dance music that African American horn bands in New Orleans and other black communities around the South would play late at night, after the swirling waltzes and sprightly ragtime rhythms had run their course. Another was a kind of song, slow and sad, that was not only found in New Orleans—Jelly Roll Morton said that he first heard it sung there by a woman named Mamie Desdumes around the turn of the century—but also appeared in rural areas throughout the Mississippi River region and very likely as far west as Texas. Ma Rainey, the first touring star to be famous as a blues specialist, told the folklorist John W. Work that she named the style around 1904, after hearing a young woman in Missouri sing a “strange and poignant” song about being abandoned by a man. Both the song Morton heard and much of Rainey’s core repertoire not only had a particular sound and feeling but also were set to a specific musical structure, which has become known as the 12-bar blues. This typically consists of three musical phrases, each of which is four measures long and consists of a line of lyrics answered by an instrumental passage. The three lines of lyrics usually are in an aab pattern: the first line is repeated twice; then the idea is completed in a rhyming third line. There are also two common variations of this structure, known as 8- and 16-bar blues, and many blues artists create their own variations within the form, adding and removing measures as they see fit. But if a singer tells her band to “just play a blues,” any musician would understand that she meant the basic 12-bar form. The sort of blues that Rainey and Desdumes sang flourished in the traveling tent shows of the Deep South and became a national craze after three songs with the word “blues” in their titles were published almost simultaneously in 1912. One of these, “Memphis Blues,” by the composer and bandleader William Christopher Handy, became a huge hit, in part because a white ballroom dance team, Vernon and Irene Castle (who were working with the black bandleader James Reese Europe), selected it to accompany a new step called the fox-trot. BLUES

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Although Handy always explained that his compositions were based on older songs he had heard during his travels in the South, he gave them a more formal structure. This, along with his influence as a writer and a publisher, led to him being called the “father of the blues.” He followed his first hit with “St. Louis Blues,” which by the mid-1920s had been recorded by everyone from jazz bands to choirs and rural singers, both white and black. (Perhaps to capitalize on the Castles’ success, this piece included a bridge in tango rhythm.) Until 1920 very few African Americans had appeared on records. That year, however, a vaudeville singer named Mamie Smith recorded a song called “Crazy Blues,” which sold so well that within a year it had been followed by dozens of records of blues songs by black women, usually backed by small jazz combos or pianists. At first, most of these singers were northerners, performing a more sedate, arranged version of the style Rainey had pioneered. But after Bessie Smith (no relation to Mamie) broke through with “Downhearted Blues” in 1923, record companies rushed to record the southern vaudeville and tent show stars who were more experienced in the style. By 1924 the field was dominated by big-voiced southern “blues queens” like Bessie Smith, Rainey, Clara Smith (no relation to either Bessie or Mamie), and Ida Cox, many of whom composed their own songs or adapted rural tunes and phrases. These women became so popular that, when the record companies started recording other kinds of black entertainers, almost all of the new artists were asked to play and sing material that could be marketed to the same audience that was buying the blues queens. Horn-driven ensembles like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and street musicians like banjo player Papa Charlie Jackson and guitarist-singer Blind Lemon Jefferson had repertoires that ranged across many styles, but their recordings were overwhelmingly focused on blues. And as the variety of performers associated with this style grew larger, the meaning of the word changed: faster dance rhythms and funny lyrics, which might have been called something else a few years earlier, were now accepted as part of the blues style, and eventually the term would come to be used for almost any kind of southern rural singing that was secular and had obvious African American inflections. This broader meaning of blues encompassed a very diverse range of music. One strain, explored at length by Robert Palmer in his book Deep Blues, is a vocal style that has clear roots in West Africa, the so-called field hollers or moans. These were generally sung without accompaniment, and a lot of the people who sang them did not even consider them songs or music—they were just a way of passing time and expressing one’s feelings during a long day in the fields or around the house. A typical holler might drift between short lyrical 44

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phrases and wordless humming or moaning; rather than sticking to the simplified 12-tone system used in European classical music or the strict rhythms of dance music and work chants, many hollers were very loosely organized both rhythmically and harmonically, using free meter and subtle microtonal shadings. For listeners whose ears are accustomed to the European diatonic major scale (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do), the most striking harmonic divergence in West African singing is its frequent use of tones about a half step below the third and seventh notes of that scale; these eventually came to be known as “blue notes.” Today, if we say a song sounds “bluesy,” what we usually mean is that it uses such notes in a way that harks back to this tradition. If the vocal hollers and moans provide the most ancient (and in many people’s opinion, the most soulful and emotionally compelling) strain of the blues style, they are by no means the only musical tradition that influenced the genre. African American instrumentalists, both amateur and professional, played every sort of music heard in the South, from the most African-sounding banjo and fiddle hoedowns to the most formal European cotillion melodies, and all of these left their mark on blues. Many of the professional blues pioneers worked in minstrel shows, which had been a staple of American entertainment since before the Civil War, mixing all kinds of popular music and songs with comedy acts, theater skits, and sometimes even acrobatics or juggling. Minstrel performers, whether black or white, wore clownish “blackface” makeup, and while that makeup gradually fell out of fashion as African Americans asserted their dignity and took on new roles in American society, much of the music and humor survived in blues (as well as in ragtime, jazz, rock and roll, and now rap). In the mid-1920s the blues mainstream changed again. Lemon Jefferson’s records, on most of which he was accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, became a startling success, not only in the rural South but also in northern cities like Chicago. While the blues queens continued to rule in theaters and variety shows, record companies scoured the South for other black streetcorner guitarists. These artists’ repertories typically included plenty of minstrel comedy and scraps of old pop hits, ragtime melodies, and adaptations of hollers that probably reached back to slavery times, as well as songs that resembled the material favored by Rainey, Cox, and the Smiths. Over time, pretty much all of these guitar-based, rural-sounding recordings have come to be thought of as early varieties of blues. At the time, however, the records being marketed to black consumers were simply labeled “race” music; when some of these singers were interviewed in later years, the songs they called blues were often specifically the ones in the style of the vaudeville and tent-show singers. Many rural BLUES

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players said that the first blues to arrive in their area—be it the Piedmont or the Mississippi Delta—was on records by the blues queens. One of the unanswerable mysteries of blues history is how much blues was being sung in the rural South before Rainey and her peers became stars and how much was an attempt to imitate their style and success. In either case, as the twenties were ending, the music shifted yet again. In 1928 two phenomenally popular records appeared: “It’s Tight Like That,” by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, and “How Long–How Long Blues,” by Leroy Carr. Both featured piano and guitar—Red was the most influential slide guitarist in early blues; Tom was a pianist who had been Ma Rainey’s bandleader; and Carr, also a pianist, recorded with the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell—and a quieter, more intimate vocal style than had been possible for either tent-show or street performers. As in mainstream pop music, recording and microphones had made loud voices unnecessary for professional success, and Carr in particular can be considered the first important blues “crooner,” the genre’s equivalent of Rudy Vallee or Bing Crosby. Carr was the most influential male blues singer of the pre–World War II period. While Tampa Red and Georgia Tom were best known for the upbeat, double-entendre party songs that are now often called “hokum,” Carr had his greatest success with moody ballads like “How Long” and “When the Sun Goes Down.” The combination of his relaxed, soulful vocals and rhythmically solid piano would form a template for everyone from Walter Davis and Peetie Wheatstraw, his immediate followers, to later stars like T-Bone Walker and Ray Charles. Carr’s influence was pervasive: both Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters said that “How Long” was the first song they learned, and his compositions were also performed by people like Count Basie, the Ink Spots, and Sam Cooke. The solid rhythms of the piano-guitar duos had neither the looseness of the street players nor the ragtime-jazz feel of the blues queens’ accompanists, and they were the foundation for most later blues-band styles. In 1929 the stock market crash and subsequent Depression drove many record labels out of business and forced the others to cut way back on recording trips. Rather than going south in search of local talent, blues record producers through the 1930s mostly relied on small cliques of musicians and singers in two key towns: St. Louis and, most importantly, Chicago. These artists accompanied one another, did versions of each other’s songs, and produced a cohesive sound in which piano, guitar, or sometimes bass kept the rhythmic pulse while a lead guitar or a harmonica filled in the spaces. Key artists in this period included Roosevelt Sykes, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Lonnie Johnson, Kokomo Arnold, 46

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Washboard Sam, and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. All were from the South but had settled in midwestern cities; they played music that suited urban jukeboxes and parties in crowded apartment blocks where a horn band would have annoyed the neighbors. At the same time, blues had spread well beyond African American communities and southerners to become a widespread national style. Jimmie Rodgers, the “Yodeling Brakeman” and father of country and western music, originally made his name as a blues singer, as did Gene Autry and later Hank Williams. The Kansas City jazz masters, from the Count Basie Orchestra to Charlie Parker, all played a huge proportion of 12-bar blues, and Billie Holiday first came to national attention as a blues interpreter. Throughout the South— and for the thousands of southern musicians who had traveled north, whether black or white, male or female—blues was a sound that expressed people’s regional roots and deepest feelings. Even Dinah Shore, who is generally remembered as a big-band singer and TV personality, was described in the 1940s as a blues singer because of her choice of material, her heartfelt delivery, and her warm Tennessee accent. World War II mixed together Americans from all regions and backgrounds. It also brought hundreds of thousands of young southerners to cities in the Midwest and on both coasts to fill the relatively high-paying jobs in wartime industries. The nickels these young listeners fed into jukeboxes and the money they were ready to spend in dance halls and cafés created a huge market for singers who both reminded them of home and expressed their new freedom. White honky-tonk and western swing bands and black rhythm-and-blues groups all played a huge proportion of blues, both slow laments and the hot dance rhythm called “boogie-woogie,” which had been pioneered by black pianists in bars and juke joints all across the South. Electric guitars and saxophones, which could cut through a full rhythm section or a noisy bar, became prominent solo instruments. The dominant male singers were crooners like Charles Brown and T-Bone Walker or big-band shouters like Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris; the dominant female voice was Dinah Washington, who added a church-influenced, rasping shout to the older blues inflections. Los Angeles became a particularly prominent center because of its young black population and new record companies that focused on black talent. Though relatively few of the great blues artists of this time remained in the Deep South, almost all had been born there, and even the ones born up North were children of recent immigrants. Their roots were in the old plantation states, and they sang with inflections that owed as much to bayous and cotton fields as to urban streets. In the 1950s the offspring of these electrified, urbanized blues styles became BLUES

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the mainstream of rock and roll. In many cities, though, black audiences also continued to support musicians who were too “down home” to attract the average northern teenager. Chicago had particularly strong ties to the Mississippi Delta—owing to the connecting railroad lines—and a generation of Windy City Mississippians kept a particularly raw, earthy sound alive, while electrifying it and reshaping it to fit the changing times. Singers like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and the young harmonica virtuoso Little Walter forged a specifically Chicago style. Meanwhile, in Memphis, B. B. King was creating a fusion of Mississippi church vocals with the precise orchestration and stinging electric guitar he heard on records from the West Coast; his style would be picked up by a generation of younger players who remain defining figures in modern blues, including Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and Albert King. In the 1960s a new audience discovered all of this music—not just the electric band sound of the urban young Turks, but also long-forgotten rural artists like Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Willie McTell. This audience was largely European American and came to blues either through the more conservative wing of the jazz world, which considered blues a vital source of the New Orleans style, or the folk music world, which considered blues singers to be African American equivalents of the Appalachian ballad singers and western cowboy bards. The folk scene had included blues players since the 1930s, with southern singer-guitarists like Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and Josh White appearing on network radio, in fashionable nightclubs, and even in elite concert halls. Through a startling evolution, these artists were imitated by some young Englishmen, who called their variation “skiffle,” and in the early 1960s kids who had grown up on skiffle and moved on to rock and roll began looking for the roots of the music they loved. Soon the Rolling Stones had invited Howlin’ Wolf to join them on one of the Stones’ first American television appearances and then toured the country with B. B. King. The fusion of blues and rock was nothing new: Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and all the other early white rockers had based much of their style on the work of black blues artists. And the later blues-rock stars continued to mine older traditions, with southern bands like the Allman Brothers and ZZ Top basing their songs on records reaching back to the 1920s, even if the result sounded so different that their fans might not realize the songs were even blues. Meanwhile, many players, both white and black, tried to keep straight-ahead blues styles alive and relevant; this was true for both acoustic players like Alvin Youngblood Hart and electric bar bands inspired by guitar heroes like Stevie Ray Vaughn.

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In southern black communities, although these more traditional blues styles have retained a limited audience among older listeners, they were largely supplanted in the 1960s and 1970s by what was then called soul music. However, while the music changed, the word “blues” continued to have a deep appeal, and in the 1980s many southern soul singers began calling their style blues. Singers like Bobby “Blue” Bland and Little Milton, who had always been identified as blues artists, were joined by soul artists like Clarence Carter, Denise LaSalle, and Millie Jackson, forming a new wave of African American stars whose sound—while owing as much to Otis Redding and Tina Turner as to what had previously been called blues—essentially became the “blues” to its hundreds of thousands of fans. Whatever the name, these artists continue to tour on a circuit little different from the one that people like Rainey and the Smiths worked a century ago, singing about the same concerns for much the same audience.

ELIJAH WALD Independent Scholar and Musician Cambridge, Massachusetts Lawrence Cohn, ed., Nothing but the Blues (1993); David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1987); Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home (1981); Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (1990); Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 2nd ed. (1997); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981); Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (1978); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (1971); Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (2004).

Cajun Music Cajun music blends elements of American Indian, Scots-Irish, Spanish, German, Anglo-American, and Afro-Caribbean music with a rich stock of western French folk traditions. The music traces back to the Acadians, the French colonists who began settling at Port Royal, Acadia, in 1604 and again in 1632. In 1755 local British authorities deported the Acadians from their homeland after years of political and religious tension. Ten years of wandering eventually brought many Acadians to Louisiana, where they were determined to recreate their society. Within a generation, these exiles had so firmly reestablished themselves as a people that they became the dominant culture in south Louisiana, absorbing other ethnic groups around them. Most of the French Creoles (descendants of earlier French settlers), Spanish, Germans, and Anglo-Americans in the region eventually adopted the traditions and language of this new society,

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thus creating the south Louisiana mainstream. The Acadians, in turn, borrowed many traits from these other cultures; this cross-cultural exchange produced a new Louisiana-based community: the Cajuns. The Acadians’ contact with these various cultures contributed to the development of new musical styles and repertoires. From Indians, they learned wailing styles and new dance rhythms; from Afro-Creoles, they learned the blues, percussion techniques, and improvisational singing; and from Anglo-Americans, they learned new fiddle tunes to accompany Virginia reels, square dances, and hoedowns. The Spanish contributed the guitar and even a few tunes. Haitian refugees—both free and enslaved—who arrived from Santo Domingo at the turn of the 19th century brought with them a syncopated Afro-Caribbean beat. Jewish-German immigrants began importing diatonic accordions (invented in Vienna in 1828) toward the end of the 19th century when Acadians and black Creoles began to show an interest in the instruments. Acadians blended these elements to create a new music, just as they were synthesizing the same cultures to create Cajun society. The turn of the 20th century was a formative period in the development of Louisiana French music. Some of its most influential musicians were the black Creoles, who brought a strong, rural-blues element into Cajun music. Simultaneously, African Americans influenced the parallel development of zydeco music, later refined by Clifton Chenier. Although fiddlers such as Dennis McGee and Sady Courville still composed and recorded tunes, the accordion was rapidly becoming the mainstay of traditional dance bands. Limited in the number of notes and keys it could play, it simplified Cajun music; songs that could not be played on the accordion tended to fade from the active repertoire. Meanwhile, fiddlers were often relegated to playing a duet accompaniment or a simple percussive second line below the accordion’s melodic lead. Lyrically, musicians composed new songs that reflected the changing times, such as “Une piastre ici, une piastre là-bas” (“A Dollar Here and a Dollar There”). They also retooled longer ballads and French complaintes, trimming the lyrics so that they would fit into the new formats of both popular dance music and the three-minute record. For example, Dennis McGee turned an old French mal marié song warning about the trials of married life into his “Jeunes gens de la campagne,” which distilled the message into a few stanzas accompanied by a driving fiddle tune. This process transformed the oral poetics of Cajun music, giving rise to a tradition of intense, tightly condensed, and oftenimpressionistic lyrics that suggested a feeling or an idea instead of telling the whole story. By the mid-1930s, Cajuns were reluctantly, though inevitably, becoming 50

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Americanized. Schools throughout south Louisiana banned the French language, as America—caught in the melting-pot ideology—tried to homogenize its diverse ethnic and cultural elements. In south Louisiana, speaking French not only was against the rules but also became increasingly unpopular, as Cajuns attempted to escape the stigma attached to their culture. New highways and improved transportation opened this previously isolated region to the rest of the country, and the Cajuns began to imitate their Anglo-American neighbors in earnest. The social and cultural changes of the 1930s and 1940s were clearly reflected in the music recorded during this period. The relatively slick programming on radio (and later on television) inadvertently forced the comparatively unpolished traditional sounds underground. The accordion faded from the scene, partly because the old-style music had lost popularity and partly because the instruments were unavailable from Germany during the war. As western swing and bluegrass sounds from Texas and Tennessee swept the country, string bands that imitated the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and copied Bill Monroe’s “high lonesome sound” sprouted across south Louisiana. Freed from the limitations imposed by the accordion, string bands readily absorbed a variety of outside influences. Dancers across south Louisiana were shocked in the mid-1930s to hear music that came not only from the bandstand but also from the opposite end of the dance hall through speakers powered by a Model-T behind the building. The electric steel guitar joined the standard instrumental lineup, and drums replaced the triangle as Cajuns continued to experiment with new sounds borrowed from their Anglo-American neighbors. When amplification made it unnecessary for fiddlers to bear down with the bow to be audible, they developed a lighter, airy sound, moving away from the soulful styles of earlier days. By the late 1940s, the music recorded by commercial producers signaled an unmistakable tendency toward Americanization. Yet an undercurrent of traditional music persisted. It resurfaced with the music of Iry Lejeune, who accompanied the Oklahoma Tornadoes in 1948 to record “La Valse du Pont d’Amour” in the turn-of-the-century Louisiana style and in French. The recording was an unexpected success, presaging a revival of the earlier style, and Lejeune became a pivotal figure in a Cajun music revival. Dance halls providing traditional music flourished, and musicians such as Lawrence Walker, Austin Pitre, and Nathan Abshire brought their accordions out of the closet and once again performed old-style Cajun music. Meanwhile, new local record companies such as Khoury, Goldband, Swallow, and La Louisianne began recording them. Cajun music, though bearing the marks of Americanization, was making a CAJUN MUSIC

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dramatic comeback. At this same time, interest in Cajun culture and language was quickening in anticipation of the 1955 bicentennial celebration of the Acadian exile. A subsequent generation of musicians, led by Aldus Roger and his Lafayette Playboys and Belton Richard and his Musical Aces, continued to experiment with modern influences. In addition to incorporating trap drums, electric basses, steel guitars, and even pianos, they also began to showcase tight arrangements and complex orchestrations that featured individual instrument rides and smoother vocals. During this same period, folklorist Alan Lomax—a member of the Newport Folk Festival Foundation who had become interested in Louisiana French folk music during a field trip with his father in the 1930s—began to encourage the documentation and preservation of Cajun music. In the late 1950s, folklorist Harry Oster started recording a spectrum of Cajun music, ranging from unaccompanied ballads to contemporary dance tunes. His collection, which stressed the evolution of the music, attracted the attention of a number of local activists, including Paul Tate and Revon Reed. The Newport Foundation, in turn, grew increasingly intrigued with Oster’s and Lomax’s work and sent fieldworkers Ralph Rinzler and Mike Seeger to south Louisiana. While Cajun dance bands had played at the National Folk Festival as early as 1935, little echo of these performances had reached Louisiana. This would soon change, as Rinzler and Seeger—seeking the unadorned roots of Cajun music— chose Gladius Thibodeaux, Louis “Vinesse” Lejeune, and Dewey Balfa to represent Louisiana at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Their “gutsy,” unamplified folk music made the Louisiana cultural establishment uneasy, for such “unrefined” sounds embarrassed the upwardly mobile Cajuns who considered the music chosen for the Newport festival crude—“nothing but chanky-chank.” The instincts of the Newport festival organizers proved well-founded, as huge crowds gave the old-time music standing ovations. Balfa was so moved by this reception that he returned to Louisiana determined to bring the message home. He began working on a small scale among his friends and family in Mamou, Basile, and Eunice. The Newport Folk Foundation, under the guidance of Lomax, provided money and field-workers to the new Louisiana Folk Foundation “to water the roots.” With financial support and outside approval, local activists became involved in preserving Cajun music, language, and culture. Traditional music contests and concerts began to appear at such events as the Abbeville Dairy Festival, the Opelousas Yambilee, and the Crowley Rice Festival. In 1968 the state of Louisiana officially recognized the Cajun cultural revival, which had been brewing under the joint leadership of the music com52

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munity and political leaders such as Dudley LeBlanc and Roy Theriot. That year, Louisiana created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), under the chairmanship of James Domengeaux. The council immediately began working on the political, psychological, and educational fronts to erase the stigma that Louisianans had long attached to French language and culture. The creation of French classes in elementary schools dramatically reversed the policy that had formerly barred the language from the school grounds. Domengeaux’s efforts were by no means limited to the classroom. Influenced by Rinzler and Balfa, CODOFIL organized a Tribute to Cajun Music festival in 1974, with a concert designed to present a historical overview of Cajun music from its origins to its modern styles. The echo had finally come home. An audience of over 12,000 enthusiastically received Balfa’s message of cultural self-esteem. Because of its success, the festival became an annual celebration of Cajun music and culture; not only did it provide exposure for the musicians, but it also presented them as cultural heroes. Young performers were attracted to the revalidated Cajun music scene, while local French government officials, realizing the impact of the grassroots, began to stress the native Louisiana French culture. Balfa’s dogged pursuit of cultural recognition had carried him farther than he had ever expected. In 1977 Balfa received a Folk Artists in the Schools grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to bring his message into elementary school classrooms. Young Cajuns, modeling themselves after local musicians who didn’t play country or rock, began to perform the music of their heritage. Yet they did not totally reject modern sounds. Performers such as Michael Doucet and BeauSoleil, Wayne Toups and ZydeCajun, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and Balfa Toujours have gradually made their presence known in Cajun music, replacing older musicians on the regular weekend dance-hall circuit and representing traditional Cajun music at local and national festivals. Today, traditional dance halls are giving way to other performance contexts, including festivals, restaurants, and jam sessions. These settings continue to provide Cajuns, as well as everyone else, with opportunities to celebrate Cajun music and folklife and to keep these traditions alive. Meanwhile, young groups such as Feufollet, Bonsoir Catin, the Pineleaf Boys, T-Salé, the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, and the Lost Bayou Ramblers are taking the place of elder musicians who have passed away or retired. Contemporary Cajun music continues to evolve and draw upon other forms of music, especially country, southern rock, and rhythm and blues. This new generation seems to be interested in traCAJUN MUSIC

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dition as a process—not just playing what the old musicians played, but doing what the old musicians did. They are creating in a way that preserves continuity between the traditional sounds of the past and the new styles that they are exploring. And as they do so, they are producing music that is both surprising and reassuring.

BARRY JEAN ANCELET University of Louisiana at Lafayette Barry Jean Ancelet, The Makers of Cajun Music / Musiciens Cadiens et Créoles (1984; revised, 1999); Cajun Music and Zydeco (Rounder 11572) and More Cajun Music and Zydeco (Rounder 11573); Glenn R. Conrad, ed., The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture, 3rd ed. (1983); Philip Gould and Barry Jean Ancelet, Cajun Music and Zydeco (1992); J’étais au bal: Music from French Louisiana (Swallow 6020); Louisiana Cajun French Music: Southwest Prairies, vols. 1–2 (Rounder Records, 6001 and 6002); Louisiana Cajun Music, vols. 1–7 (Old-Timey Records 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 124, and 125); Ann Savoy, Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People (1984).

Car Culture As the 20th century dawned, the excitement of fast cars captured the hearts of southerners, especially males. The region’s love affair with speed and chrome eventually spawned dynamic traditions of oval-track racing, straight-track drag racing, hot rodding, custom car building, and, of course, endless miles of adolescent cruising. Not surprisingly, these all developed amid an ever-changing mix of national automotive trends and media influences. Although the American Automobile Association held organized time trials on the beaches of Florida in 1903, southern racing found its true home at fairgrounds spread across the region. Competing on regional fairground circuits, professional drivers skidded open-wheel “Indy-style” automobiles, called “big cars,” around flat dirt ovals originally built for horse racing. Some larger fairgrounds—such as those in Nashville, Tenn., and Richmond, Va.—featured one-mile tracks, but shorter ovals were far more common. By the 1920s a handful of amateur drivers were competing with the pros. “Stock car” racing, in which local drivers raced against other local drivers in modified everyday cars, played a small but growing role in the oval-track scene through the Depression years. By the time World War II brought a temporary halt to the sport, entrepreneurs were starting to bulldoze southern fields into packed-dirt ovals specifically for auto races. After World War II, auto racing— especially stock car racing—roared back to life. Southern mechanics and aspiring drivers, some with loose ties to moonshining, filled the pits with Ford 54

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The flagman sends a 1932 Ford coupe (right) and a 1931 Model A coupe charging down the Roanoke Drag Strip in Roanoke, Va., in 1958. This particular ’32 coupe featured an Oldsmobile engine built in North Carolina by Lee Petty, father of the legendary stock-car racer Richard Petty. The ’32 Ford coupe was the car of choice for hot-rodders in the 1950s. (Photograph courtesy of the Blue Ridge Institute & Museum, Ferrum College)

flathead V-8s and other models. Small tracks sprang up by the dozens across the South. In the Richmond area in 1954, for example, six tracks offered central Virginia drivers multiple opportunities to race each week. The small-track racing scene thrived with plenty of fender crunching on the dirt, a vibrant social environment among the spectators, and even the occasional fistfight between competitors in the pits. Some mechanics were ingenious in their cheating. When faced with the rule that an engine could have only one carburetor, for instance, L. O. Stanley—an innovative Virginia engine builder who later worked for the North Carolina Holman-Moody racing team—installed two hidden carburetors under the engine’s manifold. As Richard “The King” Petty once said, “I don’t particularly tell my guys to cheat. I just tell them not to get caught.” As the small-track scene flourished, entrepreneurial race enthusiasts established a variety of new competition circuits. Florida-transplant Bill France organized the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) in 1948, and in the ensuing years, NASCAR-sanctioned events turned oval-track racing into a powerful national spectator sport with major venues from coast to coast. Known as much for their personalities as their racing skills, many CAR CULTURE

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southern stars, including Virginia’s Curtis Turner, Florida’s “Fireball” Roberts, South Carolina’s Cale Yarborough, and North Carolina’s Richard Petty, built the NASCAR audience. Nevertheless, short community tracks, local drivers, and self-taught mechanics remained the backbone of southern stock car racing for years. Today, many of the region’s older dirt tracks and even some of the paved venues stand overgrown with weeds, victims of changing tastes in entertainment and automotive technology. For about two decades after World War II, another group of young southerners took their love of speed down a separate road from the stock car racers. Hot-rodders, typically young men in their teens and twenties, modified used cars from the 1930s and 1940s by stripping down and customizing the body, lowering the chassis, installing a high-performance motor, and adding large tires. As Virginia hot rod builder John Rinehart remembers, “The hot rod was something you could buy cheap and fix up and make it go fast.” The hotrodders’ cars stood distinctively apart from those of the oval-track racers in both appearance and performance. Hot rod engineering, primarily the result of self-taught mechanics working in home garages and small shops, produced a loud, low-riding vehicle with little comfort but with neck-jerking acceleration. The 1932 Ford coupe, enhanced with a 1950s’ Cadillac, Oldsmobile, or Ford flathead V-8 engine, became the quintessential hot rod. Born in California, the hot rod craze quickly swept across the nation. Southern hot-rodders participated in the national conversation about mechanical ideas and aesthetic trends through Hot Rod magazine and similar publications. Garages and speed shops in larger cities sold performance equipment, and countless southern car builders made pilgrimages to major regional parts retailers such as Honest Charley’s Speed Shop in Chattanooga, Tenn. Speed-shop catalogs placed equipment in even the remotest mailboxes. As hot-rodding grew, so too did the network of community organizations formed by young men with shared interests in modified cars. Hundreds of hot rod clubs thrived in the southern automotive scene of the 1950s and 1960s, and drivers displayed their affiliations with club jackets, patches, decals, and license plate holders. Unlike oval-track racing, hot-rodding became an icon of youth culture; as such, the rumbling, look-at-me attitude of the hot rod came to carry a host of negative social connotations for much of the public. Starting with Devil on Wheels (1947), a series of Hollywood movies fed the stereotype of hot-rodders as dangerously restless; at the same time, entertainers such as actor James Dean and Virginia’s international rockabilly star Gene Vincent wove hot rod style and stereotypical surliness into their professional images. Responding to this negative stereotype, many southern hot rod clubs encouraged their 56

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members to assist disabled motorists whenever possible in hopes of promoting a positive image for hot-rodders. Unlike stock cars, hot rods were built for pure forward acceleration on flat pavement and not for maneuverability; consequently, hot-rodders embraced their own racing tradition: the drag race. The format of a measured straightahead sprint from a dead stop put the car’s tire-screaming performance on full display. Drivers interested in an informal drag race sometimes cruised through the parking lots of teen hangouts in search of competition; in many southern communities, secluded streets or stretches of highway were (and continue to be) well known for illegal racing. Racing entrepreneurs, car clubs, and civic officials all became involved in the creation of formal off-street drag strips to give drivers a safe place to race. Many of these early organized drag races took place at airport facilities from Texas to Virginia; track building followed soon thereafter. In 1957 a Chester, S.C., competition billed as “The First Annual International Drag Race” drew competitors from 16 states. With the creation of legal strips, some hot-rodders shifted to building “dragsters,” dedicated racing machines such as the “rail” dragster and the “funny car.” (The rail dragster features a long, narrow frame not much wider than the engine; the funny car hides a V-8 engine and modified chassis under a body shell vaguely similar to an assembly-line automobile.) Florida’s Don “Big Daddy” Garlits became the first drag racer known from coast to coast, a bruise to some egos in the California racing scene. Though drag strips were never as common as stock car oval tracks in the South, every state in the region has continued to boast active drag strips since the 1950s. Through the 1960s the hot rod scene in the South declined, as it did elsewhere. The process of turning an old passenger car into a high performance machine lost its allure as Detroit began to produce powerful, sleek, street-legal, race-worthy automobiles, known as “muscle cars,” and to sell them in dealer showrooms right next to the station wagons. Additionally, the men who had fueled regional hot-rodding now had careers and families. Still, the desire to tinker with automobiles is not easily quenched. Many hot rod builders of the 1950s turned their skills into full-time occupations as bodyand-fender men, upholsterers, and mechanics. In middle age they found new outlets for expression, producing a variety of gleaming custom vehicles. The purists have restored to showroom condition everything from Model T Fords to 1960s muscle cars, while the more expressive builders have created rolling pieces of functional art garnished with the comforts of luxury automobiles. Custom cars are meant to be seen, and each weekend owners throughout the South gather for community parking-lot “cruise-ins.” Every southern fair and CAR CULTURE

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festival also seems to include a lineup of custom vehicles. Thousands of auto enthusiasts annually travel to major southern car shows, such as the Grand Rod Run in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. The car culture of the South draws energy from each generation of new drivers. In every form, from the ’50s hot rod to the newest SUV, the automobile provides an intoxicating sense of freedom for teenagers and young adults. After World War II, teens in towns of every size developed informal cruising circuits anchored by parking lots or youth-friendly restaurants. As has always been the case, cruising continues to offer the opportunity to see, be seen, and socialize, even despite some cities’ attempts to control the practice through anticruising laws. Today’s southern car culture continues its evolution. Thanks to corporate sponsorship and television, the character of high-level professional racing— both oval-track and drag competition—has assumed a national rather than a regional feel; nonetheless, many smaller venues still fill the stands with local spectators. The older hot-rodders and custom car owners socialize in lawn chairs beside their automobiles at cruise-ins. Even the young “motorheads” in their modified German and Japanese compacts take part before roaring off into a night of possibilities. A century after Floridians watched Daytona Beach daredevils racing to put their names in the record books, southern car junkies still crave the chrome and the speed.

RODDY MOORE VAUGHAN WEBB Blue Ridge Institute & Museum, Ferrum College Curtis Crider, The Road to Daytona (1987); Brian Katen, Roddy Moore, and Vaughan Webb, Car Crazy: Racing and Rodding in Southwest Virginia (2004); Morris Stephenson, From Dust to Glory (1992); Peter Vincent, Hot Rod: The Photography of Peter Vincent (2004); Sylvia Wilkinson, Dirt Road to Glory (1983).

Cemeteries Southern cemeteries are distinctive. It is still possible to think of cemeteries in the region as one of two types: rural or urban. Of the two, urban cemeteries are less regionally distinctive, in that they exhibit a broad degree of cross-cultural exchange. National trends in sepulchral art, cemetery management, and landscape design are more obvious in the burial grounds of Savannah, Charleston, Atlanta, and Charlotte than in the small, more prevalent graveyards of the rural South. The eclecticism of urban burial landscapes defies meaningful typology.

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Prewitt’s Chapel Cemetery in Vernon Parish, La., is a classic example of an Upland South folk cemetery. This 1967 image shows grave shelters, scraped-ground and mounded graves, examples of the art of “making do” (note the use of terra-cotta turpentine cups as balking around plots), symbolic vegetation (magnolia and gardenia), and personalized ornamentation. In 2008 the only reminders of the traditional landscape captured in this photo were three grave shelters—the large white shelter in the right foreground, the small white shelter to the left, and the large grave shelter in the far background. (Photograph by D. Gregory Jeane)

Rural burial landscapes, in contrast, are particularly expressive of the region’s singular attitudes toward the proper disposal and veneration of its dead. Southern rural cemeteries are modest in size, varying from smaller than a half acre to as large as five acres. Until recently, the South had two general graveyard categories: the family burial ground and the larger, more loosely defined community cemetery (often without any church association). Family burial grounds, of course, are not uniquely southern. Yet the perpetuation of dominantly rural culture in the South through World War II and beyond makes rural burial grounds spatially more common in this region than elsewhere. While the plantation as a southern land-use phenomenon fostered the use of private burial plots, plantation burial grounds stylistically have more in common with established urban cemeteries than with the numerous burial grounds of the plain folk who settled around them.

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The most common southern cemetery is associated with the crossroad settlements and hamlets that pepper the region’s landscape. Approximately half of the time, these community cemeteries bear no affiliation with a specific church or denomination. Field data clearly shows that older, more established burial grounds preceded church association by many years. It was common practice in the South that local landowners would donate acreage for burial grounds, and these cemeteries typically carry the benefactor’s name. If a church were built at a later date, the church and cemetery would generally have separate names. Common associative traits characterize both small and large burial grounds. Excluding urban innovations or ethnic peculiarities, a number of definitive characteristics identify the southern folk cemetery. Among these are a specific preference for the cemetery site, preferred species of vegetation, directional grave alignment, innovative decorations, scraped ground, a lack of commercial grave markers, and an established “cult of piety” that governs cemetery maintenance and veneration of the dead. We might call this distinctive regional burial ground the “Upland South folk cemetery.” (Although the term “Upland South” continues to be debated by geographical scholars, in the cultural context of its use as established by geographer Fred Kniffen, the term is entirely appropriate.) Often associated with the structural upland regions of the South, the folk cemetery is widely scattered—with little regard for topography—from central Texas to the Atlantic Piedmont and from the Ohio Valley to the margins of the Gulf Coast. The most studied type of southern cemetery serves historically white communities. Though it shares a number of characteristics with rural black cemeteries, the two are unique in their own right. The southern African American cemetery still awaits systematic study. The preference for location is a hilltop. Whenever feasible, the graveyard is perched on the very summit of a hill or, if this is not possible, on the crest of a ridge or well up the side of a slope. Communities never willingly choose low-lying areas that are subject to periodic flooding or standing water. Though the sacredness of high elevations is of great antiquity, common folk concern is more practical, and good drainage of the burial ground has long been a pragmatic priority. Folk cemeteries, like all burial grounds, are highly symbolic; one must learn to “read” the burial landscape in order to understand it. Specific species of vegetation have long been associated with sacred places. Evergreens, symbolic of immortality since antiquity, are a particularly obvious example. In the South, the dominant “cemetery tree” is the eastern red cedar; other common species include various pines and oaks. A wide variety of shrubs, perennials, and annu60

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als are also common. Although species vary throughout the region, the more common ones include crape myrtle, arbor vitae, rose, gardenia, spiraea, and lilies. Azalea, dogwood, and mimosa are recent newcomers. Most preferred species share a common trait: natural hardiness requiring little routine maintenance. Graves are aligned along an east-west axis—or, more accurately, along what is perceived as an east-west axis—with the head to the west and the feet to the east (more commonly northwestward-southeastward because of latitude). The responsibility for digging a grave traditionally fell to the menfolk in the local community. A team would go out at sunrise on the day of burial, determine the axis from the rising sun’s shadow by using the handle of a shovel, and dig the grave. They would choose this alignment because Jerusalem is in the east, and the dead in Christ will rise to face the risen Savior on Judgment Day. Following burial, the grave would be filled and mounded. Innovations in folk decorations on the actual gravesite cover a broad spectrum. “Making do” (using materials on hand without having to buy anything) is a well-established southern tradition. Mourners cover grave mounds with shells, dishes, personal artifacts (coffee mugs, eyeglasses, medicine bottles), and/or other paraphernalia. Coffee cans or canning jars covered in aluminum foil make suitable flower containers. Family members fashion gallon-size plastic milk jugs or bleach jugs into flower containers by cutting the jug in half crosswise, making a hole in the jug’s bottom half, inverting and inserting the top half, and securing it by screwing the cap on the jug top. The resulting container has a broad enough base to withstand toppling and can hold an abundant array of flowers. Graves of children are more colorful and contain more decoration than those of adults. The decorations often include favorite toys, marbles, animal or religious figurines, and even stuffed animals. There appears to be less difference between the grave decorations of white and black children (except for number of items) than among those of white and black adults. White mourners, for example, seldom break dishes before placing them on a grave; this practice is more evident on African American graves, where it draws upon the African tradition of breaking dishes or gouging a hole in a pan or pot to prevent any use other than by the spirit of the deceased. Other adult grave artifacts symbolize occupation or a tragedy causing the deceased person’s death. For instance, a toy log truck might mark the grave of an adult who was a logger and died in a log-truck accident. Similarly, a toy train engine on an adult grave might indicate a career with the railroad. Shells also commonly appear on southern gravesites. The use of shells was CEMETERIES

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originally associated with ancient fertility rites; as grave decorations, they appear to have entered Judeo-Christian symbolism via the Romans. One seldom encounters this practice outside the South. Most often, the shells are freshwater clams or mussels, though sometimes they are whelks and conchs. Shell placement might be a line along the grave mound axis, random scattering on the mound, or a complete blanketing of the grave. In some cases, a burial site contains a single whelk or conch, placed at the head or foot of the grave. No folk explanation exists for this widespread practice other than its attractiveness. Two additional decorative traits that merit comment are the use of white sand and the practice of building grave shelters. The common practice of scraping the folk cemetery bare is occasionally augmented by covering the entire cemetery with white sand, creating a dramatic visual expression, particularly when the cemetery is surrounded by forest and cropland. This practice requires a local source of white sand or, more commonly, obliges a significant investment of time and expense to haul white sand from coastal areas. The second trait—that of building small houselike structures over an individual grave or a grouping of graves—is unique to the South. (House-form structures on Native American graves, found among Upper Great Lakes and Alaskan tribes, are a 19th-century missionary introduction, not an indigenous Native American culture trait.) The typical grave shelter is rectangular with open sides, picket fencing, and gables at the head and foot of the grave. Grave shelters typically do not appear in black folk cemeteries. Debates over the origins of these shelters variously attribute them to Native American practice, to West African tradition, and to the English lych-gate (the roofed entranceway to a churchyard). None of these explanations, however, has proven satisfactory. Once common, the grave shelter today is rare. Another feature of the southern folk burial complex is a “cult of piety” that expresses a community’s veneration of its dead. Regular maintenance of cemeteries has long been a sign of this veneration. A central element of this practice is the graveyard workday, an annual event where all folks with kin buried in a particular burial ground gather to clean the cemetery (scrape the ground), remound graves, right fallen grave markers, mend fences, and rake and/or sweep the ground. The workday usually is planned in late spring prior to a revival or singing event at church. Just before the event, family members often decorate the graves with flowers, a tradition known across the South as Decoration Day. If the cemetery is particularly large, a second cleaning might be arranged in the late summer, a lay-by time in the annual round of agricultural activities before harvest. Associated with this daylong event is dinner on the grounds (with each family contributing to a common meal eaten at midday), light courting, busi62

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ness dealing, and a general renewal of family bonds and friendships. Traded stories teach youth about family history and the expectation for venerating their deceased kin. Historically, graveyard workdays have served many functions within the folk kin-based community, in much the same way that contemporary southern funerals unfold as impromptu family reunions. One can still find the Upland South folk cemetery, little changed from its historic norm, albeit with some difficulty. The advent of the blacktop road following World War II, in addition to the social changes wrought by soldiers returning from the war but not to the farm, began a gradual transformation of the South. The increased importance of the county seat, the general spread of urbanism, and the slow pull of the South into mainstream American culture has taken its toll on the region’s material culture. The influence of national trends in cemetery design and management has certainly affected the folk cemetery. Attitudes toward proper disposal of the dead and their veneration have also changed. Death has migrated from the home to the hospital. Undertakers now play the role of the family in preparing the dead for burial and digging the grave. Today, family members only have to show up for the last rites. The tradition of marking graves with fieldstones or with cedar stakes has been replaced by the use of commercial grave markers. Park, lawn, and memorial-garden cemeteries continue to contribute to the demise of scraped ground, grave mounding, the use of grave shelters, and the placement of personal artifacts on graves. Today, the artificial floral arrangement is ubiquitous, though even this practice has evolved from the use of plastic flowers to those of silk. A curious blend of folk and urban traditions is still common in southern cemeteries; one can still find individually scraped and mounded graves scattered within a vast expanse of lawn, the occasional use of white sand on a grave, a shell now and then, or a toy on a child’s grave. Graveyard workdays have virtually disappeared, though Decoration Day appears to be a surviving practice. The South has one of the most varied cemetery landscapes in America. Pristine examples of the Upland South folk cemetery certainly survive. At the same time, memorial gardens appear in practically every town of any size and often in nonurban communities as well; national trends in cemetery design and maintenance are as evident in the South as any major urbanized area of the country. Across this expanse of sacred space, one finds symbolic evidence of ancient belief and ritual, burial traits incorporated from areas outside the South, and a strong European influence (mainly English) on the form of the modern funeral and its symbolic ritualism. All of these features yield more unanswered questions than definitive explanations. Southern cemeteries are an important element of the cultural landscape. CEMETERIES

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They remain a barometer of the economic and social viability of a community and serve as a looking glass into the innermost feelings of southerners regarding death and the veneration of ancestry. Change is inevitable; the southern cemetery remains a dynamic cultural landscape.

D. GREGORY JEANE Samford University D. Gregory Jeane, Journal of Popular Culture (Spring 1978), Tributaries, Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association (Spring 2000); Terry Jordan, Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy (1982), Southwestern Historical Quarterly (January 1980); Fred Kniffen, Geographical Review (October 1967); Fred A. Tarpley, Southern Folklore Quarterly (December 1963); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and AfroAmerican Art and Philosophy (1983); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978).

Children’s Folklore Children’s folklore is an age-group folklore consisting of the traditional materials that are circulated among children up to about the age of 12. After that, intertwining physical and social changes not only lead many young people to new folklore, now considered adolescent folklore, but also cause them to turn their backs on previous traditions as “childish” and subsequently forget them. Children’s folklore, like all folklore, comes in three general groups: oral, social or customary, and material. By and large, children’s folklore has not received much attention according to socioeconomic class, ethnicity, region, or nationality, but some attention has been paid to children’s religious folklore and still more to gender-related issues. Scholarly works on the subject range from general anthologies and comprehensive studies to more focused examinations of specific types of folklore. Important works include Henry Bolton’s The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (1888), Mary Ruef Hofer’s Children’s Singing Games Old and New (1891), Carl Withers’s A Rocket in My Pocket: The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans (1948), Iona and Peter Opie’s The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), Simon Bronner’s American Children’s Folklore (1988), and Elizabeth (Libby) Tucker’s Children’s Folklore (2008). Although children’s folklore has not been a major focus of folklore study or folkloristics, over a century of study has established that children have a folk culture of their own that at times overlaps with the folk culture of the adult community and at other times is almost completely separate from that community. In venues where the activities are controlled, in whole or in part, by 64

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adults, children learn the folklore of the groups to which they belong. The first folklore they learn comes from within the context of their families. Among the oral folklore children learn are nursery rhymes, bedtime stories, and family histories; they will also learn the family’s folk speech, the names to call parents or grandparents (for example, “Meemaw” is a common name for a grandmother in the South), and the family’s beliefs about such things as ethnicity and race. The social and customary lore they learn could involve bedtime rituals, the seating arrangements at the dinner table or in the car, the family’s religious folk practices, when presents get opened at Christmas, and the like. As children get older and begin to join groups outside the home—school groups, religious groups, organizations such as Little League or Girl Scouts—they will learn more folklore from their peers, and some of that will be separate from the adult community. As children interact in formal places, such as school, and informal places, such as the neighborhood, they begin to develop and exchange their own folklore. Some of their oral folklore consists of specific words; some years ago in the South, “fish” was used as a derogatory label, as in “those are really fish sneakers” to indicate a discount-store brand as opposed to a name brand like Nike. Certain pranks transcend region; yanking up the back of someone’s underpants, for instance, is called a “wedgie” or a “melvin” throughout the United States. On a more complex level, children ask traditional riddles (“What’s black and white and read [red] all over?”), tell traditional jokes (“There was this kid, Johnny . . .”), hurl traditional insults (“Liar, liar, pants on fire!”), and transmit traditional folktales, including urban legends (“There was this girl babysitting who started getting strange phone calls . . .”). Children’s customary behavior helps them deal with their own world and the adult world. They use traditional counting-out rhymes (“One potato, two potato . . .”) to pick the first person to be “it” in a game; they know the rules by which traditional games such as hide-and-seek are played (although some of the rules may vary from neighborhood to neighborhood); and there are hundreds of jump-rope rhymes, ball-bouncing rhymes, hand-clapping rhymes, and the like to structure similar activities. Children also have folk beliefs about luck; girls in particular have a variety of divinations (twisting apple stems or peeling an apple while reciting the alphabet) to attempt to discover the initials of the boy they will marry, the number of children they will have, the sort of house they will live in, and so forth. There are also secret clubs, some with secret languages, organized by and only for children (sometimes only for boys or girls) with full-blown initiation ceremonies, which exist outside the various group activities organized by adults for children. CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE

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Children’s material culture has received less attention than their oral or customary folklore primarily because their material culture is so transitory. Children jump in leaf piles and make acorn jewelry in the fall, build snow forts and snowmen in the winter, tie rope and tires to tree limbs for swings in the spring, and use ropes to swing out over and drop into pools, rivers, or lakes in the summer. Girls make daisy chains, and boys make poplar-branch whistles. One of the most ubiquitous substances children “construct” with is also the least durable: paper. The most obvious creation is the paper airplane, but children also make boats, drinking cups, fortune-telling devices, “poppers” (which make a loud noise when the teacher is not looking), animals (some derived from origami), footballs (to play with in study hall or the cafeteria), game boards (for “hangman” and “battleships”), puppets and “cootie” catchers, cone-shaped rockets (which, when launched over the hot-air heater, fly up and land in the lights), and rubber-band-fired spit wads—to name but a few. Guns, knives, bows and arrows, slingshots, spears, and the like may be made from wood. “Motors” for tricycles and bicycles can be made from playing cards or from plain cardboard. Friendship bracelets are made from string and may have beads or pieces of metal woven into them. And some children still play string games. But as all of these are temporary and disposable, they are very seldom collected by folklorists. Jay Mechling argues in Children’s Folklore (1986) that “the white male folklorist recognizes that he will never know what it means to be a black woman, but we all think we know what it means to be a child.” But most people have forgotten much of what goes on in childhood. Social and parental pressure to “grow up,” “stop acting like a child,” or “don’t be a baby,” and peer pressure— calling someone a “cry baby,” for example, or making a parody of the Barney and Friends theme song as a way of rejecting what was once a favorite show— cause most of us to leave “all that” (including, and maybe especially, the “dirty jokes”) behind. And so, having forgotten much, we misremember and, perhaps more misleading still, romanticize childhood so that it becomes, for most of us, an innocent and happy time. We do the same with adolescence, telling our children to enjoy high school because “these are the best years of your life.” It is perhaps exactly because we are so far away from childhood, in years and in memory, that Mechling concludes that we should “approach children’s folk cultures as we would any unfamiliar culture.” Some of the folklore that children create gets its inspiration from the adult world. Adults may read or recite the anthologized version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to their children, but the children might also know a different version:

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Mary had a little lamb You’ve heard that one before But did you know she passed her plate And had a little more? There are numerous parodies involving Mary and her lamb, and there are parodies of every other well-known nursery rhyme as well. Some, like the one about what Jack burned when he jumped over the candlestick, are unlikely to be told to adults. Children also parody other materials, from television and radio commercials (“McDonald’s is your kind of place / They throw French fries in your face”) to religious songs (“We three Kings of Orient are / Tried to smoke a rubber cigar”), patriotic songs (“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school”), and anything else that catches their attention. They create these parodies in part because they are bombarded with these materials, materials imposed on them by adults, and they want to define themselves in opposition to those materials. They want their own cultural identity. Even further from the notice of most adults is the rather substantial body of off-color or obscene folklore of children, almost all of it oral. The child who calls another child a “doo-doo head” has begun his or her perhaps lifelong playful or abusive use of off-color language that, by the time the child becomes an adolescent, has become a fully developed vocabulary. In addition, and starting a bit later, as a child becomes aware of sexuality and reproduction, he or she gathers and spreads a great deal of folklore on those topics; and if the jokes they tell are any indication, they move from a very poor understanding, or even misinformation, to full awareness—from cabbage patches and storks, through “train and tunnel” or “car and garage” jokes, to “That isn’t my navel—That’s ok; that isn’t my finger.” Collections of such materials have been published only in the last three decades or so, partly because publishers refused to accept them earlier but also because of the inability of adult folklorists to collect such things from child informants. That children both have obscene oral folklore and keep it from adults attests to their understanding of propriety and to their desire to have something of “their own.” As Bronner suggests in American Children’s Folklore, children circulate their own folklore as an expression of their own identity: “They want to declare their own identity, and lore is their protected expression of cultural connection to one another.” And because it is theirs, they tend to keep it to themselves. One of the interesting things about children’s folklore is its ability to travel from one place to another, so that the folklore of children may well be much

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less diversified according to region than the folklore of adults. As the Opies show in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” from the mid-1950s film, was able to jump from America to England almost immediately and without the Internet or even widespread transatlantic telephone usage; since then, with the advances in communication, children’s lore has been able to travel even faster. And it may be that because children’s folklore flies under adult radar, it remains less affected by region (and maybe other factors) than adult folklore. In any case, and regardless of technological change, there is a vibrant lore out there being passed on from child to child.

C. W. SULLIVAN III East Carolina University Simon Bronner, American Children’s Folklore (1988); Mary Knapp and Herbert Knapp, One Potato, Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children (1976); Jay Mechling, in Folk Groups and Folk Genres: An Introduction, ed. Elliott Oring (1986); Iona Opie and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959); Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, eds., Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1995); Elizabeth Tucker, Children’s Folklore (2008).

Country Music Country music had its origins in the folk culture of the South—a diverse culture that drew upon the interrelating resources of Europe and Africa. It was British at its core but eclectic in its borrowing. Long before the 1920s, when the radio and recording industries made their first exploitations of southern folk talent, fiddlers, banjoists, string bands, balladeers, and gospel singers proliferated throughout the South. They performed most often at house parties and other community functions (such as house-raisings, fish fries, or corn shuckings); many were also able to function on a broader basis, and in a quasiprofessional manner, at fiddle contests or in medicine or vaudeville shows. For the most part, these musicians drew upon their inherited folk resources for songs and performing styles. From a variety of other sources, including African American entertainers and the vast panoply of 19th-century popular music, they also picked up material that they could adapt to their styles and that fit their community aesthetic standards. The establishment of radio stations in the South after 1920 (including WSB in Atlanta, WSM in Nashville, WBAP in Fort Worth) and the recording of rural performers after 1922 encouraged further professionalization, as well as the development of an “industry.” The early entertainers were rural, for the most part, but not exclusively agricultural. Usually part-time musicians, they worked as railroad men, coal miners, 68

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textile workers, carpenters, wagoners, sawmill workers, and cowboys, and even occasionally as country lawyers, doctors, and preachers. Whatever their occupation, their dialects, speech patterns, and performing styles reflected the rural South. Given the social context of the 1920s, when the rural and socially conservative South seemed greatly out of step with a dynamic nation, and when its rural inhabitants seemed given over to strange oddities and eccentricities (such as snake handling, tenantry, and night riding), it is not surprising that a term such as “hillbilly” should be affixed to the region’s rural music. The commercialization of southern rural music had both positive and negative consequences. On one hand, folk styles and folk songs received a wider hearing and, presumably, longer leases on life than they otherwise would have had; on the other hand, folk styles were homogenized and diluted, and traditional songs were gradually replaced with newly composed ones. But too much has been made of this change. Folk styles were never pure. They were drawn from a multitude of sources, and folk musicians were never reluctant to accept or seek some kind of reward for their talents. The string bands of country music’s first decade played hoedown tunes and British dance tunes; they were also receptive to current popular dance tunes and especially to ragtime, which remained a national passion in the World War I period. Songs originally designed for the parlor piano, such as “Chicken Reel,” “Redwing,” and “Over the Waves,” or for marching bands, such as “Under the Double Eagle,” made their way into the repertoires of string band musicians and have become permanently ensconced in the country-music repertoire. A large percentage of the early hillbilly songs came from 19th-century popular music, the “parlor songs” that had originally been written by professional composers and disseminated on lavishly illustrated sheet music among the nation’s urban middle class. Many of these sentimental favorites are still performed regularly by bluegrass and old-time country entertainers. Country entertainers, therefore, were torn between tradition and modernity. They were loyal to their own communities but were eager to build a wider audience. Neither they nor their promoters (radio and recording men, booking agents, advertisers) were quite sure whether the most feasible promotional method would involve a rustic or an urbane approach. Country performers might have preferred conventional suits or even formal attire, but they were encouraged to clothe themselves in rustic or cowboy costumes. The conflict between rusticity and urbanity has been a factor in country music’s development in both sound and image. Although string bands and homespun acts predominated on early hillbilly recordings and on radio shows, the star system soon asserted itself and indiCOUNTRY MUSIC

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vidual talents rose to the top. Texan Vernon Dalhart contributed to the music’s commercial acceptance by recording, in 1924, such nationally popular songs as “The Prisoner’s Song” and “Wreck of the Old 97.” Uncle Dave Macon, a comedian, singer, and five-string banjoist from Tennessee, was one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry and a repository of 19th-century folk and popular songs. Although there were a host of pioneer performers, the most seminal acts— whose impact is still felt in the music today—were Virginia’s Carter Family and Mississippi’s Jimmie Rodgers, both of whom first recorded in early August 1927 in Bristol, Tenn. No group better embodied the mood and style of the family parlor and country church than the Carters; their three-part harmony, Maybelle’s unique guitar style, and their large collection of vintage songs (such as “Wildwood Flower” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”) still influence country singers today. In Rodgers, the former railroad brakeman from Meridian, Miss., the music found its first superstar. Rodgers personified the rambling man, an image in sharp juxtaposition to that projected by the Carter Family. During the Great Depression, country music not only survived but also solidified its position in American popular culture and greatly broadened its market. The 1930s were the heyday of live radio programming, and cowboy singers, duets, string bands, yodelers, and balladeers could be heard everywhere, even in New York City. Radio barn dances—Saturday-night variety shows with a rural or folk flavor—prevailed in many cities, but none was more important than WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago or WSM’s Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The Grand Ole Opry, which first went on the air in 1925, really affirmed its status as a national institution when it gained network affiliation on NBC in 1939. The 50,000-watt, clear-channel stations, such as WSM and KWKH in Shreveport, La., played crucial roles in circulating country music, but no stations had a more profound impact in the national dissemination of country and gospel music than the Mexican-border stations—popularly called X-stations because of their call letters (XERF, XEG, and the like). Their powerful transmission, sometimes surpassing 100,000 watts, blanketed North America with rural music (from the Carter Family to the Stamps Quartet), evangelism, and incessant advertising, which have become part of our national folklore. As the professionalism and commercialization of country music proceeded, the nature of the music also changed. Traditional songs continued to appear with great frequency, but newly composed songs gradually edged the older ones aside, and fledgling performers increasingly sought to find a commercial formula as successful as that of Jimmie Rodgers. Stylistically, the southeastern hoedown-oriented string bands and the “brother duets” (acts that usually featured mandolin and guitar accompaniment, such as the Monroe Brothers) 70

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relied heavily on old-time songs and ballads and remained conservative in performance and material. Some musicians from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma were more innovative, producing dynamic styles that would revolutionize country music. Whether cowboy singer, mandolin-and-guitar duet, or hot string band, they all conveyed a homespun or down-home feeling, and “hillbilly” was the rubric that covered them all. A modern perspective suggests the great differences among them. In 1934 Gene Autry, a radio hillbilly singer from Texas, went to Hollywood, where he became the first great singing cowboy in film. The romance of the cowboy would have been appealing to country singers in any case, but Autry’s Saturday afternoon horse operas, his syndicated Melody Ranch radio show, and his very popular recordings magnified the appeal while providing country musicians with an identity much more respectable than that of the hillbilly. More strongly reflective of evolving southwestern culture than the movie cowboy songs was western swing, the jazz-influenced string band music popularized by Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, the Light Crust Doughboys, and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The western swing bands were eclectic in repertories and receptive to new stylistic ideas, including the use of drums, horns, and electrified instruments. Developing alongside western swing, and drawing its inspiration even more directly from the bars and dance halls of the Southwest, was honky-tonk music. Country music’s entrance into white roadhouses, which were called generically “honky-tonks,” divested the music of much of its pastoral innocence and tone. The result was a realistic musical sound that documented the movement of country people into an urban industrial environment. World War II was both the major catalyst for change in country music and the chief agent in its nationalization. The country music industry itself languished under wartime restraints, such as shellac rationing (which reduced the number of records released), the military drafting of musicians, and the scarcity of gas and tires (which limited personal appearances). At the same time, however, jukeboxes became ubiquitous accoutrements in bars, cafés, and penny arcades, and country records began appearing on them in cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles (in part, a reflection of the movement of southerners to northern and western industrial centers). The Grand Ole Opry gained its reputation as a mecca for country fans during the 1940s, and Tennessean Roy Acuff, who joined the show in 1938, became the unquestioned king of country music during those years, taking his road shows to all parts of the United States and holding down the most important time slots on the Saturday night Opry. Country music’s first great commercial boom came in the years immediately COUNTRY MUSIC

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following the war, continuing to about 1955. Postwar prosperity and the ending of wartime restraints generated an unprecedented demand for amusement. Record labels proliferated; new barn dances (such as the Louisiana Hayride) competed with the Grand Ole Opry; and thousands of jukeboxes reverberated with the songs of such country entertainers as Eddy Arnold, Kitty Wells, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Williams. By the time Williams died on 1 January 1953, pop singers were “covering” his songs, and country music was winning commercial acceptance and respectability that had earlier been scarcely dreamed of. Just a few short years later, country music’s “permanent plateau of prosperity” had been shattered by the revolution wrought by Elvis Presley and the rockabillies. All forms of traditional country music suffered temporarily as promoters and recording companies began their urgent searches for young and vigorous stylists who could re-create what Elvis had done and who could hold that youthful audience that now dominated American music. One consequence of this quest was the creation of a pop style of country music, known generally as “country pop” or the “Nashville Sound.” This form of music was considered to be a compromise that would appeal to both old-time country fans and the newly sought pop audience. By using vocal choruses and a sedate form of instrumentation (vibes, violins, piano, a muted bass), country-pop singers avoided the extremes of both rockabilly and hillbilly. Commercially, country music’s development since the late 1950s has been one of the great success stories of American popular culture. Country music’s spectacular ascent and expansion have been accompanied by self-doubts and contradictions, as well as by anguished debates among performers and fans concerning the music’s alleged dilution or loss of identity. Although the quest for crossover records remains a powerful passion in modern country music, revivals of older country forms have periodically taken place since the rockand-roll era. Honky-tonk music lives in the performances of men like George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Moe Bandy. “New grass” practitioners have preserved the acoustic style of instrumentation and the “high lonesome” style of singing; bluegrass festivals are held somewhere almost every weekend from May until November. One of the most remarkable manifestations of interest in older songs and styles has come through the performances of youthful entertainers or older musicians who have catered to youth. Emmylou Harris’s fresh, uncluttered style of singing and her choice of material are considerably more traditional than most of the women singers who grew up in the country music world. Willie Nelson has probably done most to bridge the gap between the rock-

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oriented youth audience and country music, being receptive to their music and their heroes and by affecting a lifestyle and mode of dress (beard, earring, jogging shoes) that put them at ease. In the process, he has introduced his young fans to the best of older country and gospel songs. Since the 1980s, while country music has moved persistently and inexorably toward a suburban sound that reflects the new demographics of the South and United States (heard in the music of artists like Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and Shania Twain), it has nevertheless experienced periodic infusions by younger performers who have consciously revived and updated its traditional forms. This group includes such performers as Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, Randy Travis, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Iris DeMent, George Strait, Brad Paisley, Tim O’Brien, Patty Loveless, Joe Nichols, the Dixie Chicks, and Alan Jackson. Country music has become a phenomenon with worldwide appeal, but it maintains its southern identification. Nashville remains its financial hub, the center of a multimillion-dollar music business. Country singers still come from southern working-class backgrounds in surprising numbers, and both they and the lyrics of their songs convey the ambivalent impulses that have always lain at the center of country music and southern culture: puritanism and hedonism, a reverence for home and a fascination with rambling, the sense of being uniquely different and at the same time more American than anyone else. In an age of computerized complexity, country music owes its appeal to the yearning for simplicity and rootedness that permeates modern American society.

BILL C. MALONE Tulane University Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music (1997); Bruce Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville (1998); Douglas B. Green, Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music (1976); Paul Kingsbury and Alanna Nash, eds., Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Country Music in America (2006); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-Year History (1968; rev. eds., 1985, 2002), Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (2002); Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1922–1942 (2004); Ivan Tribe, Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (1984); Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (1982), Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (1977).

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Deathlore Deathlore refers to the many beliefs and practices surrounding death, including death omens; funeral rites; and stories designed to instruct, warn, or entertain the living. Death omens—the first of these categories—take the form of signs of nature, signs of the human body, or accidental happenings that portend a death. Funeral rites—the second category—ease the safe passage of the deceased person’s spirit, often with an eye for preventing its return as an evil entity. The final category encompasses the many stories about death, stories that serve a variety of purposes. The serious or “scary” stories, for instance, warn people of the consequences of intruding on sacred ground or not burying a corpse properly. The humorous stories, in turn, often offer comic treatment of unnerving events; in so doing, they provide a kind of balance for their more terrifying counterparts. Taken together, these forms of deathlore reveal people’s religious beliefs, social values, and worldview. The first broad category of southern deathlore—death omens—often reflects the cultural sharing of African Americans and their Scots-Irish neighbors. Until the mid-20th century, many southerners believed that, by learning death omens, people could not only predict when they would die, but they might also be able to avoid death altogether, at least for the immediate future. Death omens in southern folklore have historically taken a variety of forms. Many southerners have long contended that certain animals, birds, or insects can foretell death. Birds fluttering against the window, sitting on the window sill, or actually flying into the house, for instance, are often seen as signs of impending death. When dogs howl at the moon or cows bawl at night, tradition holds that someone is bound to die. Another set of southern death beliefs relates to the human body. Some say, for example, that a constant ringing in the ears or sneezing before or during breakfast on Sunday is an omen of death. Death signs are also associated with the house. Many southern families believe, for instance, that spectral knocking, or a ticking sound coming from inside a wall, portends death. Other omens involve changes in nature. Coffin-shaped clouds, for example, or falling stars are sure signs of death for some southerners. So too are a variety of supernatural phenomena. In Kentucky, for instance, one hears accounts about people who died after the appearance of the Shadow of Death by the bedside of a dying person. Encountering a coffin in the road or alongside the road can also presage death in parts of Kentucky. Even accidents, like a chair falling over backwards, can spell death for a member of the family in some southern communities. Burial rites constitute the second broad category of southern deathlore. They too change very slowly. Funeral protocol followed in many southern towns and 74

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cities dates back to the Victorian era. In most cemeteries, for instance, families bury the dead facing the east. Historically, however, people who committed suicide or some other mortal sin were often buried facing the west, so that when Gabriel blows his trumpet from the east, they will be unable to find their way to heaven. Many people still place objects—including plates, porcelain animals, and toys—on graves. Many other southern funerary traditions, however, faded away in the early 20th century. Cedar trees, whose durable wood and long life made them fitting symbols for eternity, are now found only in older southern cemeteries. False crypts, the two-foot-high brick enclosures placed over graves in cemeteries where the earth was very hard or rocky, have been rendered unnecessary by backhoes. Grave shelters, whose origin can be traced back to the lych-gates in England, are rarely erected over graves in the South anymore. And the tradition of wakes—referred to by many southerners as “sitting with the dead”—began to decline when funeral parlors made an appearance around the turn of the 20th century. This practice—which dictated that the corpse must not be left alone from the time of death until burial—likely originated with the Scots-Irish settlers who settled much of the South in the 18th and 19th centuries. Because most corpses were not embalmed, mourners kept a constant watch on the coffin to ensure that the dear departed was truly departed. During the summer in some of the most rural parts of the American South, watchers sat by the coffin to prevent “critters” from climbing through the open window and dragging the corpse out of the house. By the 1960s, wakes had vanished in most of the South. The third category of deathlore involves stories about death, particularly stories about ghosts. Many such stories dwell on the consequences of not respecting the sanctity of burial rites or graveyards. One of the most common of these tales is “Drunks in the Graveyard.” In this often-told story, two men are walking down a lonely road late one night with a bushel basket loaded with fish (or nuts, in some variants). Suddenly, one of the men sets down his end of the basket and says, “I’m tired, and I know you’re tired. There’s a graveyard down the road a piece. I got a gunny sack in my back pocket. Why don’t we go down there and divide up the fish. It’ll be a whole lot easier getting them back to town.” As the men pass through the graveyard gate, two fish fall out of the basket. “Don’t worry about them,” one of the men says. “We’ll come back later and pick them up.” The two men then walk to the middle of the graveyard and begin dividing up the fish, saying, “One for you, and one for me.” About midnight, a couple of drunks stumbling out of a nearby saloon decide that they will take a shortcut home through the graveyard. Just as they start walking through the gate, a couple of spectral voices coming from inside the cemetery cause DEATHLORE

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them to stop dead in their tracks: “One for you, and one for me. One for you, and one for me. And what about those two at the gate?” Those old boys are so scared that they run all the way back to town, yelling, “Y’all had better get to the graveyard quick, because God and the devil are dividing up the stiffs.” Some graveyard tales are true-life accounts of pranks played upon people who were foolish enough to walk through the graveyard at night; others tell of unexpected encounters with the buried dead. Such is the case, for instance, in the Alabama legend about Captain Charles M. Locklin’s predawn encounter with the ghosts of 12 Yankee soldiers. While Locklin and his wife were riding their buggy past Claiborne’s McConnico Cemetery in 1865, they met the fully outfitted specters of a dozen soldiers riding out of the graveyard. Such stories likely served the same function as graveyard fences and gates: they discouraged people from trespassing on sacred ground. The practice of “sitting with the dead” has also generated a number of humorous tales. A good example is an African American tale from Gainesville, Ala., about the corpse of an elderly woman afflicted with osteoporosis. Her spine was so curved that family members had to tie her body down with ropes so that it lay flat in the coffin. Around midnight, the ropes came loose and the corpse sat up in the coffin, frightening the children still sitting at the wake. Most southerners no longer take seriously many of the regional beliefs associated with death and funerals. They do not care if the grave is left open over Sunday, or if rain falls into an open grave, or if the clock is stopped at the time of death to prevent another death in the family. The urbanization and globalization of the South, the ascendancy of “scientific” explanations for supernatural phenomena, and the broad critique of many beliefs as “superstitions” have certainly contributed to the erosion of many of these traditions. Consequently, most of the beliefs included here were taken from published folklore collections rather than from contemporary tellings. This is not to say, however, that traditional beliefs about death have altogether vanished. This is particularly true for burial rites, which offer an important link between the living and their ancestors. Although undoubtedly less common now than they were a century ago, these traditions continue to play an important role in southern life, with many southerners reluctant to leave them behind.

ALAN BROWN University of West Alabama Alan Brown, The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore (1996); Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (2000); William Lynwood Montell, Ghosts along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills (1992); Ruby 76

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Pickens Tartt, in Dim Roads and Dark Nights, ed. Alan Brown (1992); Kathryn Tucker Windham, Jeffrey’s Latest 13 (1982).

Family Folklore Family folklore grows out of the shared experiences, history, and sense of identity of family members. Families often give these experiences creative expression in such forms as stories, songs, sayings, pastimes, recipes, naming practices, gestures, rituals, customs, keepsakes, photographs, and home videos. Some of these practices are passed down through several generations; others are always being created anew. However long their history, families shape these traditions to meet the demands of the present. Quite often, for instance, a successful party becomes an annual family event, or a mispronounced word or memorable remark becomes a shared family expression. In my South Carolina extended family, for instance, “cocktail hour” has been called “cottontail hour” since the day my five-year-old daughter pronounced it that way; and family members say “Tell Ma the boat floats”—taken from a relative’s farewell remark as he departed on a boat trip—to reassure anxious parents when their children are traveling. Families frequently develop their own calendar of pastimes and celebrations, their own repertoire of stories and expressions, their own recipes for favorite dishes, and their own version of the family’s past. Southerners have long maintained a strong sense of family, a notion that embraces not only the nuclear group but also a broader network that often includes several family branches, distant cousins, and persons who may not even be blood kin. In part, this is because so many southern families have lived in the same area for several generations and have consequently developed strong ties with their relatives and their communities. Nuclear family groups, of course, also have a wealth of family traditions; yet families who have maintained continuity with relatives and community for generations tend to develop especially rich stores of folklore. Sociologists James Bossard and Eleanor Boll, who define family rituals as the “ceremonial use of leisure,” found in their study of American families that the “larger the family the more numerous and rich the rituals.” In part, this can be attributed to the simple fact that the more time family members spend with their relatives, the more experiences they have to draw upon in their folklore; additionally, with more continuity between generations, traditions will more likely survive and flourish over time. In large, extended family groups, traditions often help to define family membership and keep separate the different branches of the family. Which relatives are invited to traditional family events and, of those invited, which ones reguFAMILY FOLKLORE

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larly participate, can be telling indications of who “counts” as a member. In communities with several large, interrelated families, an invitation to an annual picnic may be a more important sign of family membership than the same last name. Family membership and a sense of family identity may thus derive as much from shared traditions as from blood ties. The South has often been called a region of storytellers; not surprisingly, stories are a major genre of southern family folklore. Stories, of course, are part of family lore throughout the United States, with their themes showing remarkable similarities across regions; family stories often focus on major transitions (such as birth, courtship, and migration) and the personalities of family members. In the South, these broad themes clearly reflect the southern experience. This sense of the local is evident, for instance, in the “lost fortune story,” a common American story type that describes how an ancestor lost what would have been a fortune through foolishness or a lack of entrepreneurial spirit. In the South, this theme often appears in stories about family members who buried the family silver to prevent northern troops from finding it and then forgot where the treasure was buried or died without telling relatives the location. Historical events and periods that had a long-lasting effect on southerners—such as the Civil War and the Great Depression—also provide materials for family stories and often keep these events alive in families for generations. Tellers frame many of these tales as survival stories that recount how the family endured and survived economic hardship, sickness, and tragedy. Such stories include contemporary tales of survival and loss during the fierce storms and floods that frequently batter the South, as well as the stories of recent immigrants who risk and often lose their lives leaving their homelands (crossing the Mexican border, for instance, or escaping from Haiti or Cuba to Florida in makeshift boats). African American families also tell stories about their ancestors’ capture into—and sometimes escape from—slavery, the indignities of racism in the South, and relatives who rebelled or outwitted those who tried to deny their freedom and dignity. In Children of Strangers: Stories of a Black Family, for instance, folklorist Kathryn Morgan describes how family stories about her Virginia-born great-grandmother, Caddy—who actively resisted repeated attempts to deny her humanity—served as “buffers” against the pain of racism for her descendants. In their study of American families, Bossard and Boll argue that leisure is the key to family rituals, and that the more time that families devote to leisure, the more rituals they will develop. In a region where leisure has long been upheld as one of the virtues of the southern way of life, family pastimes not only become important in and of themselves but also provide the shared experi78

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ences that give rise to other forms of folklore; additionally, they often provide the settings for sharing these traditions. Stories, for example, are often told—as well as set—at family picnics, parties, reunions, vacations, and other leisure events. Family relationships and the traits and personalities of family members are also dominant topics of southern family folklore. The legends that grow out of long-standing family feuds, for instance, tell of the violence and bitterness that sometimes erupt between, and within, clannish southern families. Other family stories recount years of silence between relatives that arose from a perceived wrong or slight. More often, however, family folklore celebrates and helps forge the ties that bind. In communities with several large interrelated families, the relationships among kin can become quite complex, and family members use their folklore to reaffirm kinship connections that might otherwise be forgotten. Drawing on characteristic traits associated with family names, stories often connect a relative with different branches of the family by showing how he or she exhibits family traits. Such stories frequently begin with a statement such as “you know how stubborn the Hardens are” and then follow with an example of Harden stubbornness. In many southern families, such tales conclude with the expression “she comes by it honestly,” followed by stories of other relatives who have the same trait. The folklore of family traits may be seen as part of a larger southern preoccupation with kinship relationships and with “placing” individuals according to their family background, social class, ethnicity, and geographic origin. Southern family stories and expressions also dwell on the idiosyncrasies of relatives, recounting the traits that distinguish them from other members of the family. The eccentric uncle, the flamboyant aunt, and the relative who is “set in his ways” are central figures in much family folklore, often earning these figures special status as “family characters.” The folklore surrounding these “characters” may be one way in which large, closely knit family groups accept nonconformity among their relatives and thus maintain family harmony. Family keepsakes, like stories and expressions, also help preserve knowledge of family history and memories of significant events, places, and people. Diaries, letters, photographs, audio and video recordings, birth and marriage certificates, and land deeds—as well as examples of family artistry such as quilts—preserve family records, voices, and images. Other keepsakes, such as the favorite hat of a beloved family member, a brick saved from a demolished family home, or a seashell brought back from a memorable vacation, are tangible evidence of things the family holds dear. Displaying such keepsakes in the home gives family members opportunities to recount the stories associated with FAMILY FOLKLORE

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them to younger generations: “This quilt was made by your great-grandmother, Rose, as a gift to my mother on her wedding day. My mother gave it to me on my wedding day, and someday it will belong to you.” In my southern family, for example, the tangled balls of fishing twine found in my great-uncle Joe’s cabin after he died have become family treasures, displayed in the homes and offices of relatives lucky enough to have one. We value them because Joe was such a beloved family character and because they remind us of two of his memorable traits: the way his fishing lines caught on tree limbs and unraveled all the way to his fishing hole; and the way he saved everything, thus ensuring that there would be several balls of twine left by which we could remember him. Southern families also pass on their memories of relatives and family events through foodways, which can range from favorite dishes, special recipes, and holidays foods and menus to events associated with preparing and consuming seasonal foods (including fish fries, barbecues, oyster roasts, and peanut and crawfish boils). Many families create their own versions of favorite southern dishes, adapting recipes to accommodate family food preferences and religious, ethnic, and regional differences. It should come as no surprise that family cookbooks abound in the South; many feature family stories and history along with the recipes, which themselves often bear the name of the family member who created or perfected the dish (“Aunt Hattie’s Cornbread,” “Uncle Jim’s Catfish Stew”). The authors of one such cookbook—Norma Jean and Carole Darden’s Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family—even chose to organize their recipes not by standard food categories but by family members’ names (for instance, “Grandad Sampson” and “Aunt Lillian”) and by the recipes that each liked or was noted for. My own family’s cookbook, Cook Kin, contains a recipe for “Van’s Cooter [Turtle] Pie” submitted by his daughter Ida, who adds the note: “This is Father’s Cooter Pie recipe. Were he here, I’m sure he would tell you some wonderful story about the best way to catch a cooter or maybe about the bi-i-i-ggest cooter he ever caught.” Stories, pastimes, expressions, keepsakes, and foodways are but a few examples of southern family folklore. There are many more. Naming traditions, rituals, songs, customs, gestures, pranks, and material culture offer equally rich avenues for families to express their sense of shared identity and history. The emphasis on leisure time, the strong continuity between generations in many families, the interest in family background and kinship, and a love of storytelling have collectively contributed to a rich body of folklore among southern families.

AMANDA DARGAN New York, New York 80 FAMILY FOLKLORE

Mody C. Boatright, Robert B. Downs, and John T. Flanagan, The Family Saga and Other Phases of American Folklore (1958); James Bossard and Eleanor Boll, Ritual in Family Living: A Contemporary Study (1950); Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (1994); Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (2005); Deirdre LaPin, Hogs in the Bottom: Family Folklore in Arkansas (1982); Kathryn Morgan, Children of Strangers: Stories of a Black Family (1980); Steven J. Zeitlin, Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker, eds., A Celebration of American Family Folklore: Tales and Traditions from the Smithsonian Collection (1982).

Family Reunions From the ancestor worship of some southerners (particularly old-moneyed families with Confederate forefathers) to the emphasis placed on knowing one’s people or kinfolk, southerners of all ethnicities and subcultures have long used family to determine their social interactions and personal identities. Many southern families reinforce and maintain these family connections through the annual or semiannual family reunion. While annual family gatherings are by no means limited to southerners, the prevalence of family reunions in the South and their importance for southern families mark them as unique regional folk celebrations. In this region where family relationships play an essential role in the culture, reunions take on greater significance as multifaceted, multigenre celebrations of group values and identity. These recurring family gatherings celebrate, sustain, and strengthen family ties. Family reunions in the South range from small-scale, informal get-togethers of immediate family members to conventionlike meetings of extended families and kin. They might be arranged by a single family member or planned and organized by an elected family board of directors. Some families boast of gathering for a century or more at a historic family homesite, while others celebrate their family ties annually or biennially aboard a cruise ship or at an amusement park. Many reunion participants trace their ancestry to a single forebear and label their reunion with this ancestor’s surname. Participants in these reunions are direct descendents or spouses of descendents of the founder of this family line. Other reunions recognize the importance of extended kin groups and fictive kinship beyond the group of consanguines and their spouses. These events include family friends, in-laws, relatives of in-laws, and even neighbors. Reunion participants can range in number from a few branches of one family with three to five members in each family unit to extended gatherings that bring together hundreds of family members. The events are as varied as the families who celebrate them. However, all serve to bring family members—often disFAMILY REUNIONS

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persed around the country or the world—together to reconnect and reacquaint themselves with their kin. More often than not, family reunions in the South (or reunions organized by families with strong roots in the South) are held in the summer months, usually in July or August, to correspond with summer, Fourth of July, or Labor Day vacations; this scheduling possibly hearkens to the importance of summer “lay-by time” in southern agricultural communities, a period that hosted many community events, including church revivals and camp meetings. Members of families travel (at times, great distances) to a family homeplace, a hometown, or, in more recent years, a tourist attraction to spend an afternoon, a weekend, or longer with siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and inlaws. Participants renew kinship bonds, introduce new members of the family, reminisce about deceased members, and retell the family’s history. They visit with one another, worship together, perhaps sing folk songs and hymns, play games, catch up on local and family gossip, and enjoy traditional southern cuisine. For many families, the reunion is an expansion of the traditional Sunday afternoon dinner, the once-a-week communal meal usually hosted by a family matriarch. A communal meal (or a series of meals), the preparations that go into that meal, the recipes shared and swapped, and the stories told in the kitchen and around the table often serve as the central events of the family reunion. In most southern family reunions, food and feasting are among the strongest tools used to maintain family bonds. But barbecues, fish fries, covered-dish suppers, catered banquets, and other food events are not the only feature of family reunions. Other common activities include outdoor games (such as horseshoes, football, softball, or baseball), family talent shows, ceremonies to honor departed family members, religious services, speeches by family elders or leaders, family photo sessions, and meetings of organizers to plan the next reunion. Many reunion organizers—often in an effort to attract young adult family members to the reunion—schedule visits to nearby amusement parks or tourist attractions as part of the event’s activities. Others move the reunion from one city to another each year to benefit from the recreation, tourism, and shopping opportunities offered by metropolitan centers. Recognizing the economic potential in attracting reunions to their region, tourism offices in such southern cities as New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, and Charleston have created staff positions to serve as liaisons between city businesses and reunion organizers. These businesses include not only hotels, caterers, and tourist attractions but also social and health organizations (who recognize reunions as opportunities to address members of a particular 82

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ethnic group) and screen printers (who often print family reunion T-shirts, commemorative cups, and other paraphernalia). Family reunion traditions cross ethnic, religious, and cultural lines. From the descendents of the South’s indigenous peoples to the families of successive generations of immigrants to the region, family reunions serve as popular occasions to celebrate family ties. Reunions are particularly popular among southern African Americans, where they play an important role in preserving family and cultural identity and history. African American reunions typically involve two or three family names, usually those of an ancestor and his or her spouse, often from the first generation out of enslavement; the kinship connections among participants at these events are much looser (or even nonexistent) than those of their counterparts in other ethnic communities. The inclusiveness of such reunions reflects the history of African American family structure and a culturally specific definition of family, with a core family consisting not only of parents (or one parent) and children but also of grandparents and aunts and uncles, as well as family friends. While this definition of family can readily be traced to West African traditions of family organization, the modern African American definition emerges from the legacies of slavery and, later, the mass migration of southern African Americans to the North. Although references to reunions of emancipated African Americans appear in the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and some African American family gatherings trace their origins to shortly after the Civil War, most African American family reunions began in the 1970s and 1980s. Their emergence corresponded to the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) and the television miniseries it spawned and to a later initiative by the National Council of Negro Women, who in 1986 launched the Black Family Reunion Celebrations in response to what council leaders saw as negative representations of the black family. Typical African American family reunions are highly organized, multiday celebrations. Most follow a three-day pattern, usually over a holiday weekend, with the first day devoted to arrivals, greetings, and a barbecue or fish fry; the second centered around a banquet or feast and including recreation activities, games and amusements, or day trips; and the third day devoted to an extended worship service, a luncheon, planning for the next reunion, and farewells. These reunions often remind the participants—through family histories that are shared, stories that are told, and memories that are passed on—of the important role that family has played in the survival of African Americans in the South. From the desperate attempts to build, rebuild, and maintain families during slavery to the struggles to hold onto family ties through the Jim Crow era as many family members left the region and headed north in search of FAMILY REUNIONS

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greater economic and social opportunities, the history of the African American family in the South has been one of separation, exploitation, and, at times, desperate negotiation. At the same time, though, it has been a chronicle of tenacity, determination, and creativity. This history is preserved and shared through the family reunion. From the 1980s through the first decade of the 21st century, a number of highly publicized reunion events have brought the complicated history of African American families and their relationship with white southern families to the attention of the general public. Popular southern historic sites such as Monticello, Montpelier, and Jamestown have hosted reunions of the descendents of Africans and African Americans enslaved at these locations. Lesser-known southern plantations—such as Somerset Place and Cherry Hill in North Carolina and Lakeport Plantation in Arkansas—attracted media attention as they hosted reunions of white and African American families with ties to the plantations. Popular books such as Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family and Dorothy Spruill Redford’s Somerset Homecoming, as well as Macky Altson’s documentary film Family Name, explored this history of southern families and the role of family reunions in negating or preserving this complex legacy. For the past three decades, African American family reunions have grown in size and popularity at a time when reunion celebrations among many other groups have begun to decline. This popularity has not escaped the eye of the entertainment industry. African American–focused magazines, such as Ebony, and a number of book publishers have offered reunion planning guides and cookbooks targeted toward African Americans; likewise, film and television show producers have set comedies and family dramas developed largely for African American audiences in the rich setting of the family reunion.

STEPHEN CRISWELL University of South Carolina at Lancaster Macky Alston, Family Name (film, 1997); Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (1998); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (2003); Michael J. Coggeshall, Carolina Piedmont Country (1996); Amy J. Kotkin and Steven J. Zeitlin, in Handbook of American Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson (1983); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979); Dorothy Spruill Redford, Somerset Homecoming (2000).

Fishing, Coastal Generations of commercial fishing men and women have cultivated some of the South’s most iconic regional foodways, material culture, community events, 84

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occupational folklife, traditional beliefs, folk arts, industry, and crafts. Family fishing operations are the foundation of many rural coastal communities; they represent the nation’s long-standing connection to and dependence on the water. The commercial fishing that they pursue supplies the nation’s seafood markets, creates jobs, and provides critical economic strength to culturally rich communities along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Commercial fishing in the South relies on both finfish and shellfish, though shrimp currently constitutes the region’s largest fishery. Finfish caught and sold include mackerel, tuna, drum, red snapper, grouper, tilefish, monkfish, bluefish, sea bass, summer flounder, and croaker. To catch these fish, fishing men and women use gill nets, purse seines, hand nets, hooks and lines, trawls, long lines, and fish traps like fykes and pound nets. Shellfish harvested in the South are clams, surf clams, oysters, blue and golden crabs, shrimp, and spiney lobsters from the Gulf and south Florida. Shellfishing techniques include hand tonging, patent tonging, raking, trawling, dredging, using pots, and fishing with baited trot lines. Eels are caught with gigs or with mesh pots whose designs are based on woven oak basketry trap forms. The South’s commercial fisheries also include bait fish, menhaden, and sponge. Menhaden are a historically significant, omega-3-rich fish harvested in “factory” boats and brought back to a reduction plant for processing into a marketable product like fish meal. Until the early 1960s, crews of African American menhaden fishermen, working in small boats deployed from these larger vessels, would haul the nets by hand; while so doing, they would often sing work songs to coordinate their pulling, lending a distinctive sonic signature to their work. While menhaden are fished in both Atlantic and Gulf waters, the sponge fishery is restricted to Florida, where it developed in Tarpon Springs in the late 1800s and grew to international significance with the success of diving techniques introduced by Greek immigrants in the early 20th century. Commercial fishermen are fiercely independent, inventive, and entrepreneurial in spirit. Constantly faced with the unpredictabilities of weather, markets, and aging or failing equipment, they become masters of many trades, often balancing roles as fishermen, mechanics, and guides. Following seasonal cycles, fishermen may dredge crabs in the winter, trap fin fish with pound nets in the spring, and guide charter fishing tours in the summer. Also following a seasonal schedule, they work on their boats and gear (adjusting even commercially bought equipment) and mend and outfit their nets. Commercial fishing is a dangerous occupation, where critical decisions constantly balance financial success with personal safety. Daily challenges include weather, resource availability, competition, regulations, and equipment malfunctions. Families learn FISHING, COASTAL

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Long-hauling, or haul-net fishing, has been a specialty of fishermen in Core Sound, N.C., for a century. Related to haul-seining, two workboats tow linked nets between them for a few miles to the shallows, where the nets are pulled together into a loop. Fishermen gradually haul the nets into their skiffs to reduce the circumference of the loop, and a run boat from the fish house bails the fish from the net into its hold. Long-hauling has come upon hard times in recent years as high fuel costs, stingy hauls, and fishing restrictions make it difficult to keep a crew. (Photograph copyright Lawrence Earley 2008, Danny’s Crew 007)

to anticipate changes; the most successful fishermen adapt quickly, adjusting their gear and finding new markets if necessary. The earliest documented commercial fishing in the South was Native American trade with colonial settlers. The Caloosa in Florida, for instance, traded salted mullet to the Spaniards in the 18th century. Native American contributions to fishing technology include traditional tools like canoes, fyke nets, fishtrap designs, and preservation techniques of smoking whole fish and stringing shellfish meats. Oysters were a prominent early American colonial food, leading oystering to become the major fishery on the Chesapeake Bay by the second quarter of the 19th century. In 1844 an oyster-canning center developed in Baltimore, Md. Oysters were the first canned product to be widely distributed in the United States, and packing houses became a southern institution that supported whole communities. Many of these houses were owned by African Americans, offering an entrepreneurial opportunity relatively rare in the coastal South. Al86

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though the oyster catch has diminished because of disease, oystering continues today as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. The train systems of the late 1800s fed a nation on oysters and connected southern commercial fishermen to both established markets along the eastern seaboard and emerging markets in the Midwest. Advances in canning helped crab, pickled fish, and other cut fish reach wider markets. Later, ice manufacturing, cold storage, and refrigerated train cars and trucks supplied the nation’s seafood markets with whole fresh fish. Vast quantities of red snapper and mullet were shipped west and north from the southern states. One cannot speak about fisheries, of course, without speaking about boats. Throughout the coastal South, boatbuilding was—and to a lesser degree, still is—an integral part of the occupational profile of fishing towns. Distinctive regional workboat designs include a variety of locally made, shallow draft vessels. In the early 20th century, the first automobiles inspired the independent introduction of motors into boats, an innovation that greatly expanded the efforts and success of fishermen (though regulations limiting dredging and other motorized fishing techniques followed shortly thereafter). The shrimping industry, for instance, was transformed by the advent of motors; this transformation was due, in large part, to the contributions of the Sicilian immigrant Sallecito Salvador, who in the early 1900s developed a technique that involved using a small engine to pull a shrimp seine through deeper waters. The 1912 introduction of the otter trawl (a trap net that catches shrimp while being hauled behind a trawler) further strengthened the emerging southern shrimp fishery, which has remained prominent ever since. Fishing men and women must also deal with cyclic population fluctuations, which can include dramatic species death from pollution, invasive species, and diseases. The rise of aquaculture and fish farming has further transformed commercial fishing in the last 30 years. While aquaculture has helped sustain clams and oysters, the importing of pond-raised shrimp from foreign markets has provided stiff competition for the shrimp industry. In response to these challenges, fishermen have developed new markets and new business strategies, including direct marketing to the public, identifying and developing niche markets, and contributing to regional branding strategies. Navigating the legal issues and various interests affecting commercial fishing is complicated. Fishing resources have been a valued commodity in the South since before Spanish, English, and French colonization. Land under salt water or land affected by the tide is held in trust by the state as a “public commons.” Complicating this commons, however, are riparian rights and a politically charged history of grandfathering privately leased areas that are not “natural” FISHING, COASTAL

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shellfish beds for the purpose of farming shellfish. Adding to these complications is the dramatic increase in private boat ownership and recreational fishing that followed World War II, a development that profoundly intensified competition for resources. Recreational fishing interests have launched marketing campaigns and lobbying initiatives like the Florida net ban, which voters passed in the 1990s. The ban eliminated the use of gill nets and effectively crushed the region’s mullet fishery; in so doing, of course, it forced many fishermen off the water. Commercial fishing interests also criticize environmental research that influences policy, regulation, and public opinion, arguing that it often fails to include social and community concerns. In 1976 Congress passed the Magnuson (later amended as the MagnusonStevens) Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which greatly affected national and international commercial fishing and delineated state and federal jurisdiction. The act initiated federal control of areas between three and 200 nautical miles off the shore, including waters that used to be fished by foreign fleets. States manage fishing to the three-mile mark, but they must coordinate with the federal managers. The act also created regional fishery management councils to encourage local-level participation and facilitate interstate initiatives and commissions. Commercial fishing in the South is overseen by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Councils. Southern coastal communities are dependent on saltwater marshes and lowlands created by the tributaries that feed into the numerous bays along the coast. Commercial fishermen consider themselves stewards of the resources on which they depend, and they consequently maintain a deep respect for the water. Traditional knowledge defines renewable resources that have thrived for centuries on what fishermen call “long” cycles of weather changes, large storms, and population fluctuations. The loss of traditional work landscapes to new development and infrastructure supporting tourism and leisure has adversely affected many commercial fishing communities. Yet despite the ongoing encroachments of regulation and coastal development, many southern fishermen would not trade their way of life for any other. “To be on that ocean and the sounds and all . . . it’s a different world,” muses Jonathan Robinson, a longtime fisherman and fisheries advocate from the coastal town of Atlantic, N.C. You know, when you’re ashore, man has everything in little plots. . . . Towns and cities are made up of blocks, and within the blocks there’s little plots of land, and we all hold claim to some little plot of land. But the lines and 88

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boundaries ain’t that clearly defined on the water. . . . It’s a different dimension. And I think that’s partly the reason there is such a communal spirit among fishermen and fishing culture. Because of that shared fishing ground and that shared environment. I think that carries over into what I call—what I like to think of as—the spirit of the Tidewater community. It comes from the shared waterways, [and] fishing grounds. It’s a unique place, a unique environment, and a unique culture. And I just wish it could live forever.

SHELLY DRUMMOND Drummond Consulting, Plant City, Florida Harold Anderson, Maryland Marine Notes (March–April 1998); Tina Bucuvalas, Peggy A. Bulger, and Stetson Kennedy, South Florida Folklife (1994); David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001); Larry S. Chowning, Harvesting the Chesapeake: Tools and Traditions (1990); N. D. Jarvis, Marine Fisheries Review (Fall 1988); Paula J. Johnson, ed., Working the Water: The Commercial Fisheries of Maryland’s Patuxent River (1988); Robert P. Jones, Florida’s Net Ban—A Study of the Causes and Effects, <www.southeasternfish.org/ Documents/commfish.html>; Tom Lowe, The Sponge Divers of Tarpon Springs (film, 2002); Roger C. Smith, James J. Miller, Sean M. Kelley, and Linda G. Harbin, An Atlas of Maritime Florida (1997); David A. Taylor, Documenting Maritime Folklife: An Introductory Guide (1992).

Folk Arts and Crafts Southerners have produced a wide variety of arts and crafts. Men and women, blacks and whites, Native Americans and ethnic groups have all contributed to the region’s traditions. The Appalachian white, rural African American, Native American, and Moravian ethnic traditions are among the best documented in the region. Ironworking, for instance, has included utilitarian products with aesthetic dimensions. Philip Simmons of Charleston is perhaps the most well known among many examples of black craftsmen who have used iron to make art. Distinctive pottery traditions can be found in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and east Texas. Among the South’s most famous potters were Lanier Meaders of north Georgia and Burlon Craig of North Carolina. Carving stone and wood has also been a frequently practiced craft and includes the documented stone carvings of animals and angels by Tennessean William Edmondson, the sculpted clay skulls of James “Son” Thomas of the Mississippi Delta, and the wooden walking sticks of Victor “Hickory Stick Vic” Bobb in Mississippi. FOLK ARTS AND CRAFTS

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Basketmaking provides a good example of the three ethnic-artistic perspectives that exist in folk arts and crafts in the South: Native American, African American, and Euro-American. Each group used somewhat different materials and designs. The Mississippi Choctaw baskets, the African American Sea Island baskets from South Carolina and Georgia, and the baskets from Appalachian rural areas are well known to collectors and scholars. Other craftsmen in the South have specialized in creating musical instruments; included in this group are guitar-maker Louis Dotson of Mississippi and dulcimer-maker Homer Ledford of Kentucky. Women have produced distinctive and distinguished textiles, including quilts (by Pecolia Warner of Mississippi, for instance, and Harriet Powers of Georgia) and needlework (by Ethel Mohamed of Mississippi). “Sewing” encompasses many specific techniques. The regional arts-and-crafts tradition also includes chair and furniture making, weaving and spinning, Indian beadwork, jewelry in general, rug making, leatherwork, glasswork, toy and doll making, and countless other activities. Like those found in other regions, folk arts and crafts in the South are rooted in the traditional values of communities and families. Embedded within folk objects, which are made with skill and designed for beauty, is a conservative desire to preserve the ways of an honorable past, believed still to have worth in the present. What southerners are saying in a material mode when they fashion quilts or baskets or churns is that the people from whom they learned their craft were good, decent, and intelligent folk worthy of imitation. Thus, contemporary artisans turn their talents to making objects whose designs may be a century old. They repeat again, rather than create anew, so that tradition will survive, so that their sense of group is more pronounced than their sense of self. These patterns, which are seen in all folk societies, are repeated in folk society in the South. From the colonial period until the first decade of the 19th century, most American artifacts were made by traditionally trained artisans. But throughout the 19th century, these same goods came to be made more often in factories by large numbers of workers using machines. Industrialization and the factory system took hold first in New England, however, and did not reach the South in any appreciable manner until after World War I. Hence, in the 21st century the number of folk artisans in the South is significantly larger than in other regions. Consequently, southern folk arts and crafts today enjoy relatively high visibility, and homemade items are often presented as emblematic of the region. What one really sees in coverlets and carvings is a national pattern that has simply survived longer in the South than elsewhere.

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Although the various genres of traditional arts and crafts are found all over the country, southern examples have some distinctive features. Southern stoneware vessels, for example, are sealed with a wood-ash or alkaline glaze not found in other regional pottery-producing areas. Its characteristic runny finish, variously called “Shanghai” or “tobacco spit” and found from North Carolina to Texas but nowhere else, can be used to distinguish a Deep South style of ceramics. Other glazes and glazing techniques have been carried into the South, but the alkaline glaze has remained exclusively in its original territory. In patchwork quilting, many block patterns—such as “log cabin,” “double wedding ring,” “drunkard’s path,” or the ubiquitous “nine patch”—are shared across regional boundaries. However, southern blacks, in addition to using block patterns, have also composed quilt tops with strip units. As a consequence of this ethnic tradition, southern quilting as a whole is quite different from quilting done in other regions; it includes an African American as well as an Anglo-American approach to quilt composition and design. Until the 19th century, the slat-back chair was a piece of sitting furniture common in all parts of the eastern United States. At that point, other chair types became popular in the North while the slat back remained the most typical southern “settin’” chair. Subsequently, it underwent a number of modifications: most notably its rear posts were curved backwards and their front surfaces were shaved flat, producing the so-called mule-ear motif. Southern furniture making thus evolved a distinctive chair type at roughly the same time that its earlier form was nationally distributed. To identify the “southernness” of southern folk arts and crafts, then, one must be aware not only of national patterns but also of very minute and specific attributes of an item’s materials, techniques, and social history. What is uniquely southern about an item may consist of a minor detail, important mainly to the maker of the object. A folk society is often, although not necessarily, a rural society. Because the South has only recently experienced major industrial development, farming remains quite prominent and rural agrarian values are widespread. Life on a farm is, above all, marked by making do with whatever is at hand, and craftsmanship of either the production or repair variety is part of the daily routine as handwork helps supplement the marginal finances of a small, family-owned farm. The economic benefits of traditional know-how mean that craft activities are not archaic, quaint survivals. Rather, they are necessary, useful, and practical ways to live independent of urban control, and they make one proud of inherited skills. The decorative touches that grace rural homes and yards in the South likewise manifest a spirit of independence. Quilts and bottle trees,

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tractor-tire planters and whirligigs, and walls covered with newspaper and magazine cutouts all convey the message that life can be brightened with means that are close to home. Homegrown art, it is asserted, is as good as any other. Visitors to the South in recent years, imagining the place to be peopled with exotic “hillbilly and cracker” personalities, have expected southern folk art to be extraordinarily deviant. Indeed, one can find southern artists without conventional studio credentials who have created highly innovative works. Walter Flax of Yorktown, Va., had his fleet of almost 150 battleships and cruisers; Charlie Field near Lebanon, Va., decorated a whole house, inside and out, with polka dots; and Eddie Owen Martin of Buena Vista, Ga., made a stepped Aztec pyramid in his backyard. But these people, though southern and artists and possibly members of folk communities, are not southern folk artists. Their efforts reflect private visions and fantasies rather than a shared folk heritage. In looking for folk art, one looks not for spectacular expressions but for the regular and commonplace, confirming the ordinary rather than celebrating the novel. A culture is kept vital by the mutual agreement of the members of a group, not by the efforts of a lone individual. In communities and families, folk arts and crafts are perpetuated in the South.

JOHN MICHAEL VLACH George Washington University Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (1950); John A. Burrison, Handed On: Folk Crafts in Southern Life (1993), Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture (2007); William Ferris, Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art (1982); Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978), Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons (1992).

Folk Medicine Like the phrases “folk music” and “folk religion,” “folk medicine” is a slippery term, suggesting shared practices of individuals excluded from fully evolved forms of cultural knowledge and expression. But if we interpret this term to mean any community’s informal set of interrelated patterns of understanding and practice concerning wellness, folk medicine becomes a more universal and potentially sophisticated concept. Whereas formal medical practice derives its authority institutionally in the form of official regulation and credentialing, folk medicine relies on an authority that is typically relational in origin: the familiar practices and beliefs of a group both in the present and extending back through time. This relational authority is especially persuasive when it takes the 92

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form of testimony from trusted individuals in the family or community, who not only administer traditional treatments but also bear witness to their efficacy based on their own experience. Home remedies and many forms of informal treatment persist, supported both by their intrinsic medical value (which may vary) and by their connection with the life events and values of family and community through time. Understood in this sense, most of us are “folk medical practitioners” under some circumstances, whether relying on a spoonful of sugar as a hiccup remedy or settling a cough with a homemade toddy. General attitudes toward southern folk medicine, again like those toward southern music and religion, have tended to both essentialize and marginalize the category, reflecting long-standing tensions between mainstream America and southern culture. To the extent that the term “folk” encodes “ignorant,” “isolated,” and “quaint,” folk medicine has been inextricably bound up with popular stereotypes of the region. Hence practices such as herbalism, planting by the moon, and others common in many parts of the United States are regarded as characteristically southern. Nevertheless, the oft-noted reverence accorded custom and communal/familial relationships in southern culture supports the observation that long-established traditional forms of treatment receive special attention and even privilege. The apparent conservatism of vernacular medicine in the South may be as much a matter of choice as necessity, giving older modalities such as herbal practice an enduring attraction that survives intact in the region, even as their popularity waxes and wanes in other parts of the United States. What, then, are some of the distinctive characteristics of southern folk medicine? Ethnographers have certainly long observed a common preference for socalled natural (that is, herbal or botanical) modalities. The range of plant life of the region is exceptionally diverse, which lent itself to extensive botanical patterns of medical treatment in American Indian practice as well as adaptation by European settlers and enslaved Africans. The precise dynamics of communication of knowledge between these groups have been difficult to document; they differ from region to region and are confused by complex social factors involving race and power. Nonetheless, it is clear that such communication did occur, surviving, for example, in the still-prevalent preparation of sassafras (Sassafras officinalis) as an early spring tonic among southerners of different backgrounds—originally an Indian practice. Plants in common medicinal use among Indian, European, and black southerners have included wild garlic (Allium reticulatum), May apple (Podophyllum peltatum), mullein (Verbascum thapsis), blackberry leaves (Rubus villosus), cotton root bark (Gossypium herbaceum), American senna (Cassia marilandica), wild yam (Dioscurea villosa), and FOLK MEDICINE

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Seneca snakeroot (Polygala senega), among many others. Although the healing properties of herbs are understood by healers of all backgrounds to inhere in the plant itself, there is also a widespread belief that these properties and discernment in their use are both God-given gifts, intertwining natural and spiritual folk medical belief. The conservative preference for older vernacular forms of treatment extends to over-the-counter products such as Syrup of Black Draught and 666 Laxative Tonic—medicines that are not necessarily manufactured in the South but that still enjoy a ready market there. Preference for older forms of administration also remains: pungent petrolatum-based topical ointments, such as Cloverine (1860) and Porter’s Liniment Salve (1871), and analgesics, such as BC Powder (1906), retain their popularity in many small-town southern pharmacies. While not “natural” in the strict sense, these over-the-counter remedies pointedly advertise their botanical content. Their packaging frequently employs typography and graphics that are self-consciously “old-time,” depicting or suggesting transgenerational family use. Just as southern folk medical practice includes commercial products, undermining the stereotype of exclusively home-prepared “dooryard” remedies, longstanding patterns of written transmission subvert popular assumptions concerning southern folk medicine as exclusively oral. From a very early period, an informal written tradition has been maintained: early plantation owners and other householders often kept “commonplace books,” in which illnesses and effective remedies were carefully described. An extension of this practice is evident in the lively tradition of privately published compendia of remedies and herbal advice continued to this day, exemplified by such works as Tillman Waggoner’s Poor Man’s Medicine Bag. Commercially published works also served to support and reinforce botanical treatment. Southern practitioners in even the remotest regions often made use of books and almanacs in making medical choices. Among the most influential of such works was John C. Gunn’s Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend (Knoxville, 1830), a compilation of medical advice that included an extensive section on healing plants that could be discovered or cultivated on the Kentucky-Tennessee frontier. The popularity of this work extended well beyond the mid-South. At one time, it was said that no southern household was complete without a Bible, an almanac, and a copy of Gunn’s work; late editions (the last published in 1920) can still be found in some homes, with careful handwritten marginal notations. More recently, relevant volumes of Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire compilations of folklife and oral history are sometimes used for domestic reference, along with other well-known published herbals. 94 FOLK MEDICINE

In addition to “natural” remedies, attention to astrological phases of the moon has been, and remains, a factor not only in planting and harvesting but also in making a number of human and veterinary health-related decisions, from the timing of tooth extraction to the gelding of livestock. Along with gardening tips, best fishing dates, tide schedules, and weather prognostication, moon-phase information is available in regional and national almanacs, some of which are among the country’s oldest serial publications. Farm-supply businesses as well as funeral homes customarily offer their patrons complimentary wall calendars providing the same data. While not universal, the system of lunar beliefs underlying these publications crosses social, economic, and educational lines to a striking degree. The quasi-scientific basis for calendar-based customs is generally attributed to a kind of lunar magnetism. The concept of health as dependent on an unimpeded flow of magnetic energy cycling through the body represents a related health belief model, resulting in the popularity of homemade and manufactured copper bracelets as a preventive or cure for joint pain. As a supplement to domestic folk medical practice, community-recognized traditional healing specialists represent a distinctive ongoing aspect of southern folk medicine. Individuals who carry on the traditions of “blowing out fire” (healing burns), “stopping blood” (halting hemorrhage), and curing warts or thrush (oropharyngeal candidiasis) generally have had the “gift” passed on to them according to established rules and utilize a combination of magical verbal spells and other techniques to bring about their results. Straddling the categories of “natural” and “magico-religious” custom, the continuity of West African–derived practices in the South has long attracted the attention of scholars, both among southern African Americans and in black urban populations of southern origin. Among the most dramatic of these are spells and practices relating to hoodoo and conjure medicine, often the territory of “root doctors” and other specialists. Although the practice is generally associated with African American tradition, there is no doubt that both white and black southerners have had recourse to such practitioners. Specifically African American health belief systems include concepts of internal balancing of blood factors such as pressure, “sweetness,” and other elements. The lexicon for these beliefs is complex and often a source of confusion in formal medical contexts. Finally, no account of the spiritual aspect of southern folk medical practice would be complete without reference to the importance accorded to the healing power of prayer. This emphasis placed on the possibility of divine intervention in medical settings is evident in private domestic settings and hospitals, as well FOLK MEDICINE

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as in more public settings such as church services, gospel-music programs, and healing revivals. The stereotyping of southern folk medicine is as worthy of attention as the practices themselves. This process of stereotyping has not been static but has been shaped and reshaped over time by shifts in attitude toward the region. The emergence of allopathic medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the institutionally privileged form of treatment coincided with both the conceptual emergence of the South as a discrete regional entity in American consciousness and a general postbellum antagonism toward the former rebels. Fictional and nonfictional accounts of southern folklife of this period include an alarming array of degenerate preacher-healers and demented granny-midwives, practicing far from, or in defiance of, more enlightened forms of treatment. Toward the mid-20th century, more extensive interaction of mainstream culture with the South only ameliorated this demonization to the extent that practitioners became figures of fun. Female domestic healers were especially stigmatized by caricature, resulting in comic-strip figures such as Snuffy Smith’s bumbling wife Loweezy (from the pen of Billy DeBeck) and Li’l Abner’s redoubtable mother Pansy Yokum (from Al Capp). Actress Irene Ryan’s portrayal of Granny Clampett, purveyor of “spring tonic,” on the 1960s television show The Beverly Hillbillies continued the ignominious tradition. By the 1970s, however, widespread social malaise attributed to the overindustrialization and overinstitutionalization of American society in general, and formal medicine in particular, brought about a reevaluation of southern folk medicine in the popular mind. As represented in popular nonfiction works such as Wigginton’s Foxfire series, “matters of plain living” became matters of widespread interest, not least in the area of health. Real-life individuals such as Foxfire’s Aunt Arie Carpenter and the extensively studied North Carolina herbalist Tommy Bass, as well as the African American midwife Onnie Lee Logan, have elicited respect and attention for the contrast their lives and practices offer to current health-care norms: an implicit critique centering on their emphasis on simple, “natural” cures as well as their attention to relational issues. As the classic distinctions between southern culture and the “American way of life” enumerated by historian C. Vann Woodward in 1960 continue to blur, the future of folk medicine as an aspect of southern folklife remains uncertain. New patterns of immigration from South and Central America and Asia, increased urbanization, and changes in economic and social patterns will surely result in adaptation of some traditions and elimination of others. But the careful observer may note that some shifts are more apparent than real: the pungent ointment Tiger Balm—invented by a Burmese herbalist in the 1870s and 96

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currently manufactured in Singapore—now comfortably takes its place on the shelf next to Cloverine and Porter’s Liniment Salve, and acupuncture and other foreign energy-based modalities are readily understood and accepted through their similarity to the accustomed health belief models underlying chiropractic adjustment and the tried-and-true therapeutic copper bracelet.

ERIKA BRADY Western Kentucky University Erika Brady, Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems (2001); Anthony Cavender, Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia (2003); John K. Crellin and Jane Philpott, Herbal Medicine Past and Present: Trying to Give Ease (1997); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2007); John C. Gunn, Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend (1830; 1986); James K. Kirkland, Charles Sullivan III, Holly Mathews, and Karen Baldwin, Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (1992); Kay K. Moss, Southern Folk Medicine, 1750–1820 (1999); Loudell Snow, Walkin’ Over Medicine: Traditional Health Practices in African American Life (1993); Virgil J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine (1970); C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (1960).

Foodways Contemporary scholarship defines foodways as the study of what we eat, as well as how and why and under what circumstances we eat it. As folklorist Jay Anderson argued in a pioneering 1971 essay, foodways encompasses “the whole interrelated system of food conceptualization and evaluation, procurement, preservation, preparation, consumption, and nutrition shared by all the members of a particular society.” This broad definition embraces both history and regional differences while simultaneously pointing to the importance of food events (barbecues, Brunswick stew suppers, oyster roasts), food processes (ham curing, snap-bean canning, fried apple pie making), and even the aesthetic realms that touch upon the world of food (country songs about food, quilts raffled at community fish fries, literary references to eating). Folklore scholarship relating to southern foodways is of long note, with many of the early works largely anecdotal in nature. Lafcadio Hearn’s La Cuisine Creole (1885), for instance, included recipes, food-vendor street cries, and Creole proverbs from New Orleans. George Bagby’s The Old Virginia Gentleman and Other Sketches (1910), in turn, includes the author’s observation that the Old Dominion archetype “gets religion at a camp-meeting, and loses it at a barbecue or fish-fry.” For much of our region’s history, working-class southerners subsisted on FOODWAYS

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the 3M diet: meat (usually pork), meal (corn), and molasses (sorghum in the northern reaches, cane in the southern ones). Of these three, pork and corn were the true bedrock ingredients of southern cookery. Pork earned its place in this pantheon in 1539, when the Spanish introduced pigs to Florida. Unlike pastoral cattle (which were expensive to maintain), pigs foraged for their food and were wonderfully efficient converters of feed to flesh. Pork came to be so pervasive a part of the diet that in 1860 John Wilson Jr.—a Columbus, Ga., physician—observed that “in many parts of this region, so far as meat is concerned, it is fat bacon and pork, fat bacon and pork only, and that continually morning, noon and night for all classes, sexes, ages and conditions; and except the boiled bacon and collards at dinner, the meat is generally fried. . . . [It] is the very oil that moves the machinery of life.” Southerners embraced the hog as a source of calories and a source of inspiration. “Both symbolically and in reality, the hog has become ingrained in the culture of the South,” asserts historian Jonathan Bass. “Much like cotton, the hog developed from a simple economic staple to a broad cultural symbol.” Sociologist John Shelton Reed agrees, pointing out that “barbecue joints are one of the few places in the South where you get all kinds of people: black and white, bikers and lawyers, Christians and cowboys; all appreciate good smoked pork.” Given the divisiveness of the Confederate battle flag, Reed even jokingly suggests that the South consider adopting a flag with “dancing pigs, which you see on barbecue joint signs.” Corn—and particularly corn ground into cornmeal—makes up the second half of the southern food pantheon, with cornbread clearly standing as the region’s staff of life. Known by various names—including spiderbread, pone, suppone, hot-water cornbread, dog bread, cracklin’ cornbread, and hoecake— cornbread is the most elemental of southern foodstuffs. It serves as a totem of identity as well as a marker of class standing. Folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston made the latter case in her 1934 novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, wherein a character complains about returning across the river to a lower-class existence: “Mama, Ah don’t want to go ’way back over dere in dem woods. All you kin hear ’bout over dere is work, push-hard and pone-bread, ole cawn bread wid nothin’ in it but salt and water! Ah laks it over here where dey talks about biscuit-bread some time.” Journalist William Bradford Huie also appreciated the importance of bread as a socioeconomic delineator. “Biscuit for breakfast is a social and economic self-measurement among croppers and hands,” Huie wrote in 1942. People who eat “biscuit for breakfast regard themselves as successful persons of dignity.” They “look down on the unfortunate who have to go back to corn pone during 98

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hard times. . . . [A] Negro or white cropper would relish corn pone for dinner or supper, but to have it for breakfast would have broken his spirit. . . . Corn pone for breakfast among croppers is like a patch on the seat of the britches for a man, or drawers made of flour sacks for a woman.” The repeated references to pone as “poor folks’ food” remind us that although much of the South boasts both an extended growing season and a wealth of game and fish, the region has long suffered economically. The pages of 1863’s Confederate Receipt Book, for instance, testify to the ravages of the Civil War, offering instructions for preserving meat without salt and making ersatz coffee from acorn shells. In the wake of the war, privation was a constant for many. To supplement meat and flour purchased from the city grocer or country store, countless southerners turned to kitchen gardens. When the nutritional deficiency pellagra was rampant during the early years of the 20th century, homegrown green vegetables like collard greens proved to be the underclass’s cure-all tonic. The Great Depression was equally devastating, though in 1931 it did engender a lighthearted debate between the editors of the Atlanta Constitution and Huey Long, U.S. senator-elect of Louisiana, over the proper consumption of two frugal foods: pot likker and cornbread. Long was a dunker of cornbread, while the Constitution advocated crumbling, yielding a debate that raged in the newspaper pages for more than three weeks. The animated back-and-forth gave rise to songs, short films, plays, and poetry. One of these poems—George L. King’s “Ode to a Crumbled Pone”—included the following lines: I’ve eaten many luscious fruits, I’ve tasted many sweets; I’ve been in many hot disputes About the choicest eats, I’ve dined on tongue of nightingale, At manus I’m some picker; But how I wish I were a whale Facing cornpone and potlikker. Many of the dishes that southerners think of as distinctively southern—from hog’s head cheese and collard greens to desserts like chess pie—owe their origins to European recipes and techniques. But the factor that most thoroughly transformed—and ultimately defined—regional foodways was the introduction of enslaved Africans to the South. African Americans reinterpreted both European cookery and Native American ingredients, infusing southern cooking with African-inspired techniques FOODWAYS

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and recipes. In the kitchen, African American cooks slipped in a pepper pod here and an okra pod there. Many of the foodstuffs that we now recognize as elemental to the southern diet owe their presence to the slave trade, including okra, benne (also known as sesame), and watermelon. This same transformation was evident in cooking processes. Southerners of African descent, for instance, brought with them the practice of cooking in deep oil, giving rise to the South’s love of fried foods. They also mastered use of the sweet potato, the available tuber closest in appearance to the fibrous yams of Africa. Historian Eugene D. Genovese characterized this general tendency as an example of “the culinary despotism of the quarters over the big house,” pointing to a tradition as evident today as it was in the historical South. Stretching far beyond the kitchen and dining table, foodways weave through the expressive world of the South. Songs like Uncle Dave Macon’s “Eleven Cent Cotton, Forty Cent Meat,” Dan Penn’s “Memphis Women and Fried Chicken,” Memphis Minnie’s “I’m Selling My Porkchops (But I’m Giving My Gravy Away),” and Travis Matte and the Zydeco Kingpins’ “Barbecue and Drink a Few” all testify to the overarching significance of food in the region. Nicely illustrating this combination of foodways and song is Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith’s much-recorded piece “Chitlin Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County”: When it’s chitlin cookin’ time in Cheatham county I’ll be courtin’ in them Cheatham county hills And I’ll pick a Cheatham county chitlin cooker I’ve a longin’ that the chitlins will fill. Food also figures large in southern literature. In a passage from the 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, for instance, William Faulkner suggests that food provides universal passage into the community of man, asserting that one may read the history of food as the history of humanity: “[M]an didn’t necessarily eat his way through the world but by the act of eating and maybe only by that did he actually enter the world . . . by the physical act of chewing and swallowing the substance of its warp and woof.” In his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison points to the ways that food provides an emotional tether to place, invoking the importance of sweet potatoes for expatriate southerners: “I saw an old man warming his hands against the sides of an odd-looking wagon, from which a stove pipe reeled off a spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me. . . . [W]e’d loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them raw—yams and years ago.” 100 FOODWAYS

Ellison’s elegant layering of past and present leads us to consider contemporary foodways in the South. Modernity—in the guise of improved transportation and a more homogenous food supply—has knitted together the South’s various subregions. The 20th-century movement of southerners from farms to cities and suburbs spurred an increased reliance upon prepackaged foods and a spike in the number and quality of restaurants. Roadside food of the sort peddled by Harland Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken and thousands of independent purveyors became a constant of southern eating. Foods like fried chicken and barbecue, once proudly provincial, found regional and national markets. And as local-option prohibition laws were repealed, white tablecloth restaurants began to proliferate in cities beyond the fine dining mainstays of Charleston and New Orleans. During the latter years of the 20th century, a growing national fascination with regional foods found a foothold in the South, yielding a host of cookbooks that touted southern cooking. The publication of the first Foxfire book in 1972 began a documentary series that featured essays on butter churning, hog killing, vegetable canning, and many other aspects of southern foodways. Following soon thereafter came the neotraditionalist cookbooks The Taste of Country Cooking (1976) by Virginia’s Edna Lewis and Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking (1982) by North Carolina’s Bill Neal. Nathalie Dupree’s New Southern Cooking (1986), a cookbook complete with turnip-green pasta, and John Egerton’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987), the book that comes closest to claiming definitive status on the subject, followed. By the turn of the millennium, the South was rife with restaurants serving new takes on traditional recipes (for example, pecan-crusted catfish or fried green tomatoes topped with crab). As southern chefs rose to prominence cooking such updated dishes as grits soufflés and butter-bean crostini, their work inspired younger southerners to embrace the foods and foodways of their forebears. Farmers, responding to this trend, have begun to plant older varieties of vegetables and fruits that southerners of 100 years ago would readily recognize. Meanwhile, a younger generation are embracing traditional food events like farmers markets, political barbecues, and church fish fries, staging such gatherings with an eye toward knitting back together the frayed tethers of community. Inspired by these complementary developments, two organizations dedicated to studying southern food culture—the Society for the Preservation and Revitalization of Southern Food and the American Southern Food Institute— started and stopped operations in the early to mid-1990s. In 1999 the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern CulFOODWAYS

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ture at the University of Mississippi, gathered the member rolls of the previous organizations and launched an ongoing campaign to document and celebrate southern foodways by staging symposia, collecting oral histories, and making documentary films.

JOHN T. EDGE Southern Foodways Alliance University of Mississippi S. Jonathan Bass, Southern Cultures (Spring 1995); John T. Edge, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 7, Foodways (2007); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (2005); Jessica Harris, The Welcome Table: African American Heritage Cooking (1995); Sam B. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South (1972); Stephen A. Smith, in American Material Culture, ed. Edith Mayo (1985); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (1982); Andrew Warnes, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food (2008); Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006).

Funerals Southern funerals have served sacred and social functions. As far back as the colonial era, a funeral was the occasion for the display of both grief and hospitality. Although the early Puritans in the North held simple funerals, Virginians made their death ceremonies into elaborate events. Southern settlement patterns made for rural isolation, but the funeral was a recognized time to overcome the separation. Mourners shared with the bereaved family the loss of a community member as well as the need ritually to overcome it. The firing of guns, the consumption of liquor, and the funeral feast tradition brought from England were all characteristic of public funerals. In the early 19th century, southern funerals in general did not differ markedly from those in the rest of the country. Plantation funerals, however, were distinctive occasions. Slaves and slave-owning families shared the same burial grounds. When a slave died, the plantation community responded with an immediate burial and, later, an elaborate memorial service, usually on Sunday, the day of rest. When a slave owner died, activity on the plantation stopped and a grand public funeral resulted, complete with both real and feigned grief among the planter’s chattels. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, southern funerals came to differ from those in the rest of the nation. Funerals for public figures like Robert E. 102 FUNERALS

Lee and Jefferson Davis were true ceremonies of the southern identity. Symbols of Dixie were prominently displayed, while eulogies explained the contribution of the deceased to the South as a region. Funerals of the average person reinforced social and cultural characteristics associated with the South. They were among the region’s chief ceremonies. Neighbors and friends played a major role in them, thus strengthening the bonds of community. Funerals also nurtured the sense of family, as an individual’s death typically resulted in a homecoming and a gathering of his or her extended kin. Funerals reflected caste and class arrangements so important in the region. Whites and blacks at times attended funerals together, but they behaved in highly patterned ways reflecting racial segregation. Blacks at white funerals sat or stood in the back of the room, but whites at black funerals sat on the front row and viewed the body before others attending did so. For the southern poor, death was an event to be dealt with in a memorable way. A proper funeral was deemed necessary by people who had so little in life. If he had no other recourse, the poor rural tenant farmer so common in the South might borrow money from the landowner or merchant, driving the tenant deeper into debt. Burial societies became especially prominent in the South as a cooperative way to set aside money for funerals. The funeral industry transformed the way most Americans handled death in the late 1800s, but southerners persisted in old-fashioned ways. The American way of death as it emerged in the Northeast and the Midwest included the embalming process, elaborate caskets, funeral homes, and a secular funeral service. Professional funeral directors set the tone for the funeral, and they tended to discourage emotional expressions. The development of the funeral industry lagged in the South because of the poverty and dispersed rural nature of the population. The conservative religious outlook of southerners at first made them suspicious of embalming bodies that would be judged in the afterlife. Visitors to the region observed that southern funeral attendees often displayed high levels of emotion, expressing their grief in the face of death. Southerners in general have likely been more effusive in their grief than the typical middleclass northerners who readily embraced the funeral industry, with Pentecostal services, black funerals, and the death ceremonies of the southern rural poor the most visibly grief-ridden and emotional. Although customs such as opencasket funerals, touching or kissing the corpse, and taking photos of the dead were not typical of most southerners, they have been widely documented in the region. While the American way of death downplayed such direct bodily confrontation with the realities of death, many southerners typically embraced it. The traditional southern funeral went through a series of stages. It was a FUNERALS

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community affair throughout, with family, neighbors, and friends directing each stage, including laying out the body, constructing a coffin, visiting at the deceased’s home, and shoveling dirt into the grave. A typical regional custom was the “sitting-up” ceremony between the death and the burial. Family and friends stayed with the body, even through the night, in a modified wake. A sad, solemn occasion for the bereaved family, it was a social event as well. Particular regional food and drink were usually in abundance during the wake, and contemporary regional cookbooks still indicate appropriate casseroles and other dishes to bring to grieving families. Through the 19th century, funerals were held in the home, but a church funeral and the presence of a minister became especially important for a proper funeral. The display of flowers at a funeral was a gauge of the community’s honor given the deceased. The most trying part of the funeral was likely the burial itself, as everyone stayed until neighbors, friends, and family had shoveled the last spade of dirt into the grave. Hysterical behavior was not uncommon at this point. The southern funeral was shaped by the evangelical, fundamentalist religious style and outlook predominant in the region. A central focus of the funeral was the evangelical sermon, which used the death to remind mourners of their own mortality and of the need to get right with God. Funeral hymns and prayers portrayed the peace of heaven, but they also kept southerners aware of the inevitability of death. Southern funerals in the contemporary era increasingly reflect the standardization and secularization of death. Funeral directors now arrange the process, resulting in less community and family involvement. Night and weekend funerals are more common than in the past, reflecting the difficulties of getting off work for weekday services; and simple memorial services, rather than traditional funerals, often take place. Funeral-home visitation, with limited hours, often replaces the wake. Regional customs such as the sitting-up ceremony and the open-casket funeral are thus on the decline, although they remain a common enough occurrence. Attitudes toward death and funerals show greater continuity with the past. Religion and the churches continue to be so central to southern life that religious beliefs shape the predominant view of death. Churches continue to be popular locations for funerals, ministers are still regarded by church members as necessary for proper services, and emotionalism is probably more common than elsewhere. Finally, the funeral remains a prime ceremonial occasion for eating southern food, hearing southern music, and nurturing the region’s renowned sense of family and community.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON University of Mississippi 104 FUNERALS

James K. Crissman, Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Attitudes and Practices (1994); Christopher Crocker, in The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subcultural, ed. J. Kenneth Morland (1971); James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (1980); Charles O. Jackson, Passing: The American Vision of Death (1977); Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (2003); William Lynwood Montell, Ghosts along the Cumberlands: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills (1975); James I. Robertson Jr., Georgia Review (Spring 1959); Charles Reagan Wilson, Georgia Historical Quarterly (Spring 1983).

Gardening Ask a random group of southerners to describe a garden. Their descriptions might vary from a half acre in the country planted with vegetables or hybrid roses in a suburban backyard to a housing-project porch lush with the foliage of container plants. It is likely, no matter what kind of garden they describe, that the description will take a detour to include memories of a gardening neighbor or relative or the friend-to-recipe ratio necessary to make it through a bountiful zucchini crop. Although none of this is necessarily unique to the South, southern gardening is often marked by attitudes and traditions particular to the region. Gardens are found in cities and suburbs as well as in rural areas. Some gardeners plant vegetables exclusively, while others concentrate on flowering plants and decorative foliage. Some plant a mixture of the two. Some garden out of necessity, others out of long-established habit. Some seek advice from books, magazines, the Internet, and gardening “experts”; others rely on generations of gardening lore and experience. Many contemporary gardeners do both, drawing on formal networks, clubs, and organizations as well as their green-thumbed neighbors and family. The Internet offers many possibilities, with thousands of websites devoted to various kinds of gardening below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern gardens represent a link with the region’s agrarian past and, on a personal level, with previous generations of gardeners. Increasingly, they reflect a growing tendency among southern gardeners to move freely across lines of class and culture in planning their garden spaces and creating a garden aesthetic. To get a sense of the role gardening plays in southern life, consider the many references to gardens by those who write about the South. Two of the female characters in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), for example, are defined in part by what they grow and how they grow it. Miss Maudie, neighbor and confidante to the Finch children, was an avid gardener who “loved everything that grew in God’s earth,” with the exception of nut grass. A woman for GARDENING

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whom “time spent indoors was time wasted,” Miss Maudie’s habit of working in her flower beds all day in men’s coveralls and appearing on her porch in the evening to “reign over the street in magisterial beauty” reflects the way that southerners use their yards and gardens as an extension of living space. When a fire left burning to protect her houseplants during a cold snap burns the house to the ground, the children are surprised at her reaction: “Always wanted a smaller house . . . Gives me more yard. Just think, I’ll have more room for my azaleas now!” Another character from the novel, Mayella Ewell, is from a very different social class—poor, white, and country (compared to Miss Maudie’s comparatively well-off town world)—yet gardening is important to her, too. By placing some potted plants in the Ewell yard, Lee deftly illustrates Mayella’s small, futile attempts to rise above the squalor of her circumstances: “One corner of the yard, though, bewildered Maycomb. Against the fence, in a line, were six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums, cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson, had Miss Maudie deigned to permit a geranium on her premises. People said they were Mayella Ewell’s.” Eudora Welty’s work abounds with gardening references. In The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), Laurel comes to terms with her past while working in her mother’s garden. Welty, who lived most of her life in her childhood home, grew up working with her mother in a garden that later became her own. In her short story “Kin,” she describes a neighborhood populated by gardeners: “Bloom was everywhere in the streets, wisteria just ending, Confederate jasmine just beginning. And down in the gardens!—they were deep colored as old rugs in the morning and evening shade. Everybody grew some of the best of everybody else’s flowers.” This could easily describe the garden created by Welty’s mother and sustained by the author. Visitors to the Welty House, now a National Historic Landmark, are able to tour the garden. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains the house and garden, relying heavily on the garden journals of both women to ensure that the garden remains true to their aesthetic. This approach to gardening is not only found on the wide, shady streets of comfortable middle-class neighborhoods. In her essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” Georgia-born Alice Walker recognizes the garden as her mother’s art form, one that gave rise to a creative spirit in the midst of poverty: “Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms—sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena . . . and on and on. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with 106 GARDENING

life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia—perfect strangers and imperfect strangers—and ask to stand or walk among my mother’s art.” It is no accident that these southern writers of different races and backgrounds bring similar perspectives to the garden. For generations of southerners, the garden has been a place to maintain tradition and folklore, connect with relatives and like-minded friends, and create a personal space and vision from an impersonal landscape, whether the space in question is a piece of land in the country or a cookie-cutter suburban backyard. In the South, the urge to plant and grow transcends lines of race, class, or rural, suburban, and urban settings, just as it does everywhere. A connection with a family, a philosophy, or a place may take the form of a container garden on an Atlanta balcony, rows of vegetables in a Montgomery backyard, or a rural garden patch that will feed several families through the summer and fill shelves with home canning at season’s end. At first glance, the gardens of the rural working class might seem as far removed from those of more well-to-do gardeners as other aspects of their lives. Although gardening techniques are similar throughout the region, the aesthetics of the garden can be quite different. Traditionally, there are distinctions to be drawn between the gardens in town and those in the country, as well as between the spaces created by black gardeners and their white counterparts. Flower gardens in town are more likely to be formal, for instance, and confined to backyards. These gardeners plant flowers to use in arrangements indoors as well as for enjoyment outdoors. Rural gardens more often have flowering plants in the front yard and vegetables in the back. Rural gardeners are more apt to extend their garden space to the front porch, using a variety of containers, although this is done as well by urban gardeners seeking to make full use of available space. Lines may blur between these stylistic variations, however. Neighborhoods where previous generations of gardeners adhered to traditional designs with clipped shrubbery, bordered beds, and carefully chosen plants are now just as likely to sport bottle trees, tire planters, and decorations made from found objects. In Jackson, Miss., for example, the Fondren section, located just a few blocks from the Eudora Welty House, defines itself in part by its open-minded approach to garden design. Felder Rushing, a gardening writer, “slow-gardening proponent,” and Fondren resident, describes his neighborhood as one “that fell in the cracks when taste passed through. . . . [W]e resist being pegged. We can paint our houses whatever colors we like—even brazenly—and we express ourselves with homemade garden art (Fondren has more bottle trees per capita GARDENING

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than anywhere else in the world); we have composts, vegetable and herb gardens, and wildflowers in our front yards.” The slogan adapted by the Fondren community organization exhorts residents to “Keep Fondren Funky.” This celebration of quirky, freestyle garden design is replicated in many southern urban neighborhoods. Most southern gardens fall somewhere in between the structure of a formal garden and the more eccentric spaces created by gardeners who value use of found objects and items used in unexpected ways. Still, the garden provides avenues for expression, either in the garden itself in the form of arranging plants and flowers or, for many southern gardeners, through gardening organizations and civic gardening projects. The National Garden Clubs, Inc., represents the largest volunteer gardening organization in the world, with 6,218 clubs and 198,595 members in 50 states and the District of Columbia. A sizable number of these clubs are located in the South. In fact, the first such club, the Ladies Garden Club of Athens, was founded in Georgia in 1891. The clubs provide opportunities for members to learn about gardening and floral design. Each club participates in projects that often include gardening education for young people or communityimprovement activities. Southern garden clubs, for example, have taken an active role in projects to restore landscaping in hurricane-affected areas of the Gulf Coast and, working with Habitat for Humanity, to provide container garden plants to Habitat homeowners. The Master Gardener program of the Extension Service is another organization in which southern gardeners are well-represented. The program, which originated in Washington State in 1972, offers training to gardeners who are willing to volunteer their time and expertise to community gardening projects such as conducting garden consumer hotlines; setting up exhibits; writing news articles; educating in community gardens; conducting yard and neighborhood environmental programs; controlling invasive plants; establishing public-demonstration gardens; providing sensory gardens and other gardens and gardening techniques for the handicapped; helping with community plantings; and teaching youth, elder, and at-risk audiences. Each of the southern states has an active network of Master Gardener programs with several thousand participants. For some southerners, the word “garden” does not evoke thoughts of colorful blooms and sweet scents. These gardeners think of getting their seeds in the ground before Good Friday, of whether to plant Kentucky runner beans again this year, of the acrid smell of tomato plants in the July sun. Vegetable gardens are a common sight on the southern landscape, found just about anywhere someone can get a tomato plant to live in a container. For generations, 108 GARDENING

southern families have relied on kitchen gardens to supply their food. Corn, peas, squash, turnip greens, tomatoes, beans, and many of the other staples of southern cooking are grown in rural fields, small backyard plots, and community gardens throughout the region. As southerners moved to urban areas to seek work, they brought their gardens with them, planting vegetables to feed their families—fresh in the summer, canned in the winter. It would be an overstatement to say that every southerner has a vegetable garden, but the tradition of raising one’s own vegetables remains strong in the South. Over time, factors such as the Victory Gardens of World War II, the organic-foods movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the early 21st-century interest in locally grown foods and “slow food” have helped add new gardeners to each generation. Many southern gardeners deviate little from the gardening methods they learned from previous generations. They choose times for turning the ground and planting by observing the size of new oak leaves or consulting the Farmer’s Almanac. Some plant according to the phases of the moon, believing that crops that bear above the ground should be planted in the light of the moon and those that bear below ground in the dark phases. Others plant at similar times because of weather conditions. All of them are doing what they learned from other gardeners and from trial and error. Like their counterparts around the country, southern gardeners have embraced the Internet as a way to learn from and communicate with other gardeners. The blogs and websites dedicated to some aspect of gardening in the South are too numerous to count. The region’s colleges and universities, government agencies, and clubs and organizations sponsor sites with information about gardening, as do nurseries, seed companies, and manufacturers of gardening equipment. Specialty businesses sell forms for bottle trees, wind chimes made from cutlery, and other outdoor decorative pieces online. Nurseries that feature large collections of heirloom plants provide information about the history and uses of these plants. A series of formal and informal networks provide information for gardeners in most southern communities. In addition to organizations like local garden clubs and Master Gardeners, many neighborhoods and community associations have gardening days for neighborhood improvement. Groups of gardeners may come together to swap “passalong plants,” a term for plants that are easily propagated and transplanted from one garden to another. This is a tradition of long standing among gardeners in the South. This willingness to share—whether plants, information, time, or effort—is a major characteristic of southern gardening. Besides the obvious benefits of the haven provided by a garden, the beauty of flowers brought indoors in arrangeGARDENING

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ments, the taste of fresh vegetables prepared traditionally, and the satisfaction of planting and growing, the garden has been a place where southerners from all kinds of backgrounds can meet on common ground.

DEBORAH BOYKIN Alabama Center for Traditional Culture Alabama State Council on the Arts Ben A. Davis, The Southern Garden: From the Potomac to the Rio Grande (1971); William Lanier Hunt, Southern Gardens, Southern Gardening (1982); Felder Rushing, Gardening Southern Style (1987); Richard Westmacott, African American Gardens and Yards in the South (1992).

Gospel Music, African American For generations, the exuberant sounds of praise—the sounds of gospel singing—have graced worship gatherings in African American communities. Whether chorused by congregations or sung by quartet harmonizers, soloed by street-side evangelists or voiced by mass choirs, the message and mode are joyfully the same. These are songs of praise and thanksgiving, songs addressed not merely to mortal ears but to the heavens themselves. Raising their voices in undeniable exaltation, gospel singers fulfill the often-cited charge of the Old Testament psalmist: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise” (Psalm 98:4). Gospel singing does just this, offering both a “joyful noise” and a welcoming message of salvation. To those who join in the praising, gospel is never “just singing.” Instead, it is always a vehicle for communion—with fellow believers, with other listeners, and, most importantly, with the Lord. The word “gospel,” when referring to singing, holds many meanings among African American churchgoers. To some, it refers to a very specific style of religious singing, a way of full-voiced praising that finds fullest expression in the mouths of soloists and choirs and stands in contrast to the singing of quartets and many “contemporary” ensembles. To others, it points to the broad body of explicitly composed (as opposed to anonymous and handed-down) praise songs that emerged in the 1930s with the compositions of the Georgia-born “Father of Gospel,” Thomas A. Dorsey, and have reigned ever since. To still others, “gospel” refers to all songs of passionate praise conveyed with the stylistic signatures of African America, whether hymns from the 18th century or sanctified hip-hop grooves from today. Far from being exclusive, these (and other) definitions coexist in the community of faith, their different meanings invoked more by context of use than by definitional formalities. 110

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Underlying all of these definitions is a shared sense of purpose and a shared set of understandings about how this purpose can best be achieved. For most singers, the purpose of gospel singing is absolutely clear: they say without hesitation that “gospel music is praise.” “That’s why we sing,” declares Alabama quartet singer W. Lawrence Richardson. “To offer God’s praises. To raise high thanksgivings. To light that fire in people’s souls.” The shift in Elder Richardson’s explanation—as he talks first of sending praises heavenward and then of lighting the fire among listeners here on earth—is tellingly indicative, in that it presents praising as a two-way process. “When praises go up,” southern churchgoers have long proclaimed, “blessings come down.” Believers say that sincere singing delights the ear of the divine and brings the ministrations of the Holy Spirit into their midst, carrying with them joy, solace, healing, and hope. Gospel singing is thus never just an act of happy voicing; instead, it is always an act of creating communion. The ways of creating this communion speak to a set of shared stylistic understandings among churchgoers, understandings with deep roots in African American tradition. First among these is the sense that singing is never a solo endeavor. Rather, it is an act that ever invites participation, drawing listeners into the performance as cocreators and calling them to sing along, clap their hands, call out to the singers, and move their bodies. Without engagement, the singing—in the oft-repeated words of gospel artists—is “dry” or “dead.” Only when the congregation joins in, only when they actively join the singers with their voices and bodies, does the performance come alive. If gospel singing is always an act of sharing, it is also always emergent, unfolding in the moment according to the moment’s needs and the singer’s will. As such, gospel never follows a defined script (unlike its white musical counterparts); instead, it is eminently improvisatory, changeable, spontaneous. Churchgoers expect singers to “play” with the songs—bending the notes, stretching out the lyrics, shifting the tonal textures, switching the tempos. Hence, no performance unfolds precisely like any other. This approach is completely in keeping with singers’ assertions that they sing for feeling rather than for formality. Their songs are in-the-moment vehicles for getting to a place of felt passion, a place that changes from moment to moment and from worship service to worship service. This press toward passion lends songs, song sets, and entire song programs a distinct trajectory, typically moving them on a path of increasing emotional intensity. A gospel quartet’s set, for instance, might open with a quiet, sweetly harmonized piece; move to a faster, “harder” number in which gentle harmonies give way to an increasingly strained vocal lead; and then close with a driving GOSPEL MUSIC, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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“shout song” that pulls the background singers into an insistently repeated riff while freeing the lead to stretch out with preachinglike fervor. Gospel singers sometimes describe this pattern as “starting low, rising high, catching on fire, and sitting down,” reminding listeners that their ultimate goal is to “catch on fire”—a phrase that refers not only to the singers’ heightened engagement but also to that always-anticipated moment when the Spirit graces singers and listeners with His holy touch. The journey toward intensity does not only find expression in song; it also makes itself evident in the remarks that link songs together—in the singers’ spoken introductions, testimonies, invitations, and exhortations. Such commentary is as much a part of gospel performance as the singing, always reminding listeners that song is but one aspect of the broader worship experience. The shift from speech to song is often both gradual and seamless, with the speaker’s intensifying words taking on the contours of melody and frequently moving into a rhythmically punctuated staccato (much like the heightened “zooning” of a preacher’s chanted sermon). This blurring of speech/song boundaries is yet another characteristic feature of gospel performance. Just as lyrical talk often leads into songs, so too does it emerge in their midst. Lead singers, for instance, will frequently testify or preach in the middle of a song, riffing on the lyrics’ message while the choir or backup singers hold onto the melody; the leads will then effortlessly slide back into singing to close the song. This layering of talk and tune echoes a long-standing practice in African American sacred singing. In the late 1800s, for example, sanctified songsters would lead congregations in chanted and rhymed Bible stories, with churchgoers punctuating the verses with collectively sung choruses. This pattern of half-sung, half-talked rhyming found its way into the praisings of preachers, guitar-playing evangelists, and quartets in the early decades of the 1900s, when it graced scores of commercially released recordings. In the 1930s and 1940s, it reached its popular apogee in the smoothly swinging harmonizing of jubilee quartets, whose “talked” gospel stories became a national sensation. By the 1950s such syncopated storytelling (often modeled after the mastery of Tidewater Virginia’s Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet) had largely given way to the improvised, in-song testimony and exhortation with which this discussion began. This form of speech/song layering remains popular across a range of gospel styles, from the most traditional to the most contemporary. Meanwhile, the older pattern of rhyming talk has found a vibrantly new incarnation in the artistry of hip-hop gospel. The blurred boundaries in gospel between speech and song find a masterful counterpart in the equally blurred borders between human voices and musical 112

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instruments. To many gospel singers, the voice and the instrument inhabit the same performative space; each is seen as sharing a potential for dramatic range, expressive eloquence, and articulated passion. Hence gospel organists will transform their instruments into crying choruses, while singers will swoop into the wordless moans that, as generations of churchgoers have testified, have for so long defied the devil’s understanding. Musical instruments become voices in performance, joining the broader conversational flow. And voices become instruments, matching the keyboards and guitars tone for tone in their twists and glides. Singers will constrict their voices midsong to shift the texture, swoop from a rumbling growl to a piercing falsetto, and hold notes for seemingly impossible lengths, all to the delight of the congregation. Gospel singers treat the voice not merely as a way to convey the lyrics but rather as a full partner in the passion of performance. All of these features of gospel style—the conversational structures, the dynamic of improvisation, the press toward intensity, the communion of talk and tune, and the harmony of instruments and voices—also mark other realms of African American vernacular performance. The dimension that sets gospel critically apart, however, is that of spiritual experience. As suggested earlier, gospel is never merely singing. Instead, it is singing with the goal of connecting with the divine. As such, it is a music of invitation, with the singers offering praises in hopes that the Holy Spirit will bless the fellowship with His presence, touching singers and congregation members alike. When the Spirit does arrive, His presence is both felt and seen. Some churchgoers raise their hands in eyesclosed praise; others shout rhapsodic litanies of “Thank You, Jesus!”; still others leap into the ecstatic rhythms of the holy dance. Some cry tears of quiet bliss; others feel a fleeting shiver of rapture. And much like preachers when they too are caught “in the Spirit,” singers sometimes find themselves singing words over which they have no conscious control, words of revelation that singers say “flow just like water,” coming from on high. The constant (and altogether expected) concurrence of gospel singing and such moments of spiritual communion sets gospel firmly apart from its secular counterparts, marking this as a music of experienced holiness rather than of simple performance. The singing that invites these experiences unfolds in a wide range of settings in the contemporary South. First and foremost among these are Sunday morning services, gatherings typically marked both by congregational singing and by offerings from one or more choirs. (Even small southern churches often boast three or more choirs, all of which sing songs that are broadly called gospel, with one—typically the “gospel choir”—singing pieces in a more contemporary style.) While gospel singing unfolds as a single component of Sunday morning GOSPEL MUSIC, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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worship, it takes center stage at the many weekend “programs” and “anniversaries” that grace most African American communities. The more generic term “program” refers to a special song service that features an array of gospel soloists, ensembles, and choirs; such services range from modest church-auxiliary events that present local singers to larger “ticket programs” that headline touring professionals. “Anniversaries,” in turn, are once-a-year programs honoring a particular singer or ensemble; these too feature a range of groups, all of whom gather to celebrate the honorees (often in exchange for the honorees doing the same at their own anniversaries). The anniversaries of established gospel groups frequently span two days, can stretch as long as six hours for each of the two services, and can include as many as 40 visiting ensembles. When one figures that most African American churches host three or more choirs, often include a few smaller ensembles in their membership, and typically have members who sing in other nonchurch-specific gospel groups—and that most of these many groups hold singing anniversaries—one gets a sense of the number of such events that regularly dignify community calendars. Although live gospel performances fill many churchgoers’ weekends, recorded performances often grace their workweeks, particularly as broadcasts on radio programs. Virtually every African American community in the South large enough to host a local AM station also hosts gospel radio programming, with many stations dedicated exclusively to this format. In larger markets, a number of FM stations now also feature full-time gospel programming, with most of these stations favoring “contemporary” gospel, influenced by R&B and hip-hop, over the older, “traditional” styles. Many a southern workplace hums to the sounds of gospel, with radios delivering their inspirational messages in fast-food joints and doctors’ offices alike. In keeping with the music’s conversational invitation, the broadcasts frequently elicit foot tapping and singing along, as believers transform the workaday to the worshipful. Reports of working churchgoers listening to gospel on the radio and then feeling the Spirit’s touch, sometimes eliciting shouted praises or even a holy dance, frequently show up in church-house testimonies. As believers are quick to assert, the power rests not in the medium but in the message. The popularity of gospel radio across the African American South points to one final aspect of this devotional realm: the seamless connectedness between the commercial and the vernacular. Although churchgoers may (and often do) criticize the lives led by professional gospel singers, they are nonetheless quick to adopt their songs, transforming them into local versions that almost instantly grace church services and program performances. The demand for improvisatory personalization means that these songs never sound exactly like they did 114 GOSPEL MUSIC, AFRICAN AMERICAN

in their original recordings. Once new versions unfold in performance, they offer additional options to the local public, inviting further reinterpretation. Not infrequently, these new variants also show up on locally produced CDs, thus further extending the songs’ impact. This pattern of vernacular adoption keeps local gospel performances wonderfully vibrant, ensuring a constant infusion of new material while inviting grassroots experimentation and, simultaneously, reinterpretation within traditional frameworks. African American gospel stands as one of the South’s most vibrant and creative realms of vernacular performance. Every weekend, countless thousands of worshipers from a host of denominations gather in churches, social halls, and school auditoriums to join in praise, both leading song and singing along. The resulting worship—shaped by African American style and powered by the passion of faith—both honors the old and welcomes the new, ensuring that gospel will continue to speak to new generations of southern believers, just as it has for the many generations who came before them.

GLENN HINSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (1995); Mellonee V. Burnim, in African American Music: An Introduction, ed. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maulsby (2006); Tom Davenport, A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle, <www.folkstreams.net/film,2> (1986); Glenn Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Spirit and Transcendence in African American Gospel (2000); Jerma A. Jackson, Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (2004); Kip Lornell, “Happy in the Service of the Lord”: African American Sacred Vocal Harmony Quartets in Memphis (1995); Bernice Johnson Reagon, ed., We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (1992); Alan Young, Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Gospel Singers and the Gospel Life (1997).

Gospel Music, White For white southerners, gospel music is among the most significant artistic expressions of Christian values and worldview. Affirming a personal or collective embrace of Protestant beliefs, gospel music permeates white working- and middle-class culture, from religious ceremonialism and personal enrichment to popular entertainments and the commercialism of the recording and broadcast industries. With origins in early 19th-century camp-meeting songs, shape-note singings, and brush arbor revivals, the gospel music industry emerged in the decades after the Civil War. Publishing companies, such as Ruebush-Kieffer in GOSPEL MUSIC, WHITE

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Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, popularized sacred singing by issuing songbooks using the newly developed 7-shape system for representing different notes. The 7-shape system supplanted the 4-shape notation of the earlier Sacred Harp formulation, expanding the musical possibilities of gospel songs. In 1875 northerners Ira D. Sankey and Philip P. Bliss published Gospel Hymns and Sacred Tunes, a songbook that embedded lyrics within arrangements inspired from the popular songs of the day. Aimed at bringing young people into the church, the Sankey and Bliss hymns became the principal template for gospel songs well into the 20th century. The popularity of the new songs spread quickly, as Ruebush-Kieffer and other publishers hired singing teachers to conduct singing schools throughout the rural South. Armed with songbooks published by their employers and proficient in shape-note technique, singing-school teachers lived an itinerant lifestyle, moving from community to community and holding ten-day singing schools for rural residents during the months before autumn harvests. Holding forth in one-room schoolhouses or other available spaces, these teachers taught songs published in their employers’ songbooks, popularizing the songs and generating profits by creating a market for the books. Well into the 20th century, singing schools were an important means by which gospel songs entered into individual and congregational repertoires, from North Carolina’s coastal plain to Arkansas’s rugged Ozark Mountains. Many of these songs—“Precious Memories,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and “Rank Stranger to Me,” among them—remain popular today. In 1902 James D. Vaughan, a former singing-school teacher from Tennessee, founded the Vaughan Publishing Company, which he promoted by means of singing schools, a monthly magazine (Vaughan’s Family Visitor), and professional quartets that toured the South performing his songs. By 1921 Vaughan had added a record company to his publishing enterprise. Two years later he founded his own radio station, WOAN, in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Vaughan’s radio venture followed Atlanta’s WSB (1922), the first radio station to broadcast in the South. These and other stations—including WBAP (1922) in Fort Worth, Tex., and WSM (1925) in Nashville, Tenn.—aired live performances that featured both secular and sacred songs. As more radio stations and record companies opened throughout the region, gospel music became one of the South’s most important expressions of entertainment and faith. Throughout the 20th century, gospel continued to evolve, adapting to changing musical tastes. Today, it is heard in a variety of styles, from bluegrass, honky-tonk, and contemporary country to smooth, piano- and organ-backed Southern Gospel, lushly orchestrated praise music, and heavy-metal Christian 116 GOSPEL MUSIC, WHITE

“What I love in a female singer is power,” says Tammy Sullivan. “The type of church I grew up in all my life is Pentecostal. And the message, when the preacher preaches, is a driving, shouting delivery— fiery. When I go to sing, I think of that and say, ‘Well, I like that delivery that I hear from the pulpit.’ If I can deliver my song like that, that’s the way I want it delivered and projected to the audience—with fire in it.” Here, Tammy sings one of the songs written by her father, Jerry Sullivan, at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Goodway, Ala., in 1993. Accompanied by mandolinist John Paul Cormier, Tammy continues the musical ministry that she and her father began in 1979 and that her cousins, Enoch and Margie Sullivan, pioneered in 1949. (Photograph by Jack Bernhardt)

rock. Especially popular among white churchgoers, Southern Gospel is sometimes known as “quartet music” because of its origins with all-male, tenor/ lead/baritone/bass vocal quartets. Early examples included Smith’s Sacred Singers, the Stamps Quartet, and the Speer Family. Today, Southern Gospel is represented by Gold City, the Calvarymen, the Gaither Vocal Band, and many other ensembles, as well as by such female-featured groups as the Isaacs and the Happy Goodman Family. Still, its core rests in southern folk traditions as an integral part of the lives of individuals, families, and communities throughout the South. Each week, thousands of churches, from tiny backwoods sanctuaries to urban brick-and-glass cathedrals, incorporate gospel songs into their services. Drawing guidance from the book of Psalms—“O come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation”—many churches feature musicians who are members of the congregation and who accompany services with traditional and original songs. These amateur musicians play a variety of instruments, from pianos to fiddles, banjos, guitars, mandolins, tambourines, drums, and electric and upright basses. Many southern congregations rely on songbooks that feature conventional music notation; one familiar favorite is The American Service Hymnal: A Collection of the Great Hymns and Gospel Songs, New and Old, Whose Melodies and Truths Will Meet the Needs of All Churches. Other churches use books that symbolically feature the 7-shape-note system established in the 19th century. GOSPEL MUSIC, WHITE

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For example, Great Gospel Hymns, Number 3 (Shaped Notes Only), compiled by O. C. Thompson of Pineville, La., includes such standards as “The Old Country Church,” “Where the Soul Never Dies,” “Old Time Power,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and the Stamps Quartet’s 1948 composition, “What a Savior.” The cover of this volume, published in 1979, is inscribed with the notation, “If you are in need of a singing school in your church or community, write: O. C. Thompson.” The continuing preference for the classics and shape-note representations connects today’s worshippers with their ancestors and the old-time religion, grounding them in tangible family and community traditions of song and style. Gospel music plays an equally important role outside the church. Its performance at homecomings and fund-raisers, at music festivals and gospel concerts, and on local radio and television broadcasts affirms the spiritual identity of the community and promotes a bond of belief and belonging, or communitas, among the faithful. While written primarily to offer praise or give thanks to God, gospel songs often embody multiple meanings, some of which may resonate with the needs or experiences of the listener and others that may carry broader meanings embedded in community history and tradition. Songs such as Albert Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away” and Jerry Sullivan’s “Born Again Experience” celebrate personal salvation and belief in the heavenly reward. Others have topical themes that address issues of concern to local communities. Early Grand Ole Opry star Uncle Dave Macon, for example, recorded “The Bible’s True” as antievolutionary commentary on the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925: “God made the world and everything that’s in it / He made man perfect and the monkey wasn’t in it.” In 1962 northern Alabama’s Louvin Brothers expressed concern over recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings concerning separation of church and state with “Don’t Let Them Take the Bible out of Our School Rooms.” While of national consequence, these events resonated across the South, with families worried that their children would be exposed to Darwinism or other secularizing ideas in the public schools. More recently, Jerry Sullivan’s “Shadow of the Steeple” (2007) exhorts worshippers to open their eyes and hearts to those who make their homes in cardboard boxes and decaying doorways within view of the stained-glass opulence of Sunday services. Musical ministries remain one of the most popular means for sharing new and old gospel songs with southern audiences. Family-centered gospel groups have a long legacy in the region and include such heralded acts as the Chuck Wagon Gang, the Isaacs, Joel and LaBreeska Hemphill, the Rambos, and the Happy Goodman Family. One such ensemble, south Alabama’s Sullivan Family, has performed bluegrass gospel exclusively for more than five decades. The 118 GOSPEL MUSIC, WHITE

Sullivan Family (the father-daughter team of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan), the Lewis Family, and countless others are inspired by the music of the late Kentuckian Bill Monroe, who made gospel an integral part of the bluegrass music he developed between 1938 and 1945. These musical evangelists, whose numbers may rank in the thousands, take their songs and testimonies to churches, camp meetings, tent revivals, and festivals (both sacred and secular), presenting their music as a religious vocation and as a means for earning a livelihood. In the rural South, many churches are small, consisting of 30 or fewer, generally elderly, members; the children and grandchildren of today’s congregants have often moved to cities that provide opportunities for employment and entertainment unavailable in rural regions. Singing evangelists commonly perform at these churches for “love offerings”—voluntary “pass-the-plate” donations from audience members of limited income that are often supplemented by a stipend offered by the pastor. Both entertaining and faith affirming, these gospel singings also may feature and validate the talents of church members who perform and testify during intermissions. Throughout the South, local and national television broadcasts, as well as AM and FM radio stations (and increasingly, Internet streamings), transmit gospel music into homes, automobiles, and business establishments. Television shows (Bill and Gloria Gaither’s Gaither Gospel Hour on the GAC network, for example) or specials (such as Silent Witness, hosted by Grand Ole Opry star Ricky Skaggs) combine testimonies and music from notable guests whose numbers have included Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton, and Marty Stuart. In addition to broadcasting a wide range of gospel music styles, religious radio stations often broadcast church services and sermons, provide important information on farm and industry news, make public-service announcements, and report on the health and welfare of members of the community. The Radio Book, a broadcast yearbook published by M Street Publications, reports a total of 322 Southern Gospel radio stations in July 2008; it lists an additional 37 stations as “gospel,” 936 as Contemporary Christian, and 1,269 as following a Religion (Teaching/Variety) format. The importance of gospel music to white southerners is further confirmed by the fact that most bluegrass and country artists include religious songs in their repertoires and many have recorded entire albums of gospel songs. Popular bluegrass artists Ralph Stanley, Ricky Skaggs, and Doyle Lawson, for instance, make gospel music a regular feature of their stage shows, and its welcomed performance at festivals and in concert draws loud and sustained applause. Blending Southern Gospel vocals with bluegrass instrumentation, North CaroGOSPEL MUSIC, WHITE

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lina’s Primitive Quartet merges sacred music with patriotism during their annual Singing in Hominy Valley festival, held near Asheville over the Fourth of July weekend. The Primitives describe their music as “the traditional mountain shape-note-style singing accompanied by acoustical instruments including the mandolin, banjo, fiddle, guitars and acoustic bass.” Southerners young and old may also connect with gospel sentiments through recordings and performances by their favorite country artists. Country-music stars Charlie Daniels and Brad Paisley, for example, often include a gospel number or two on their secular albums. Other performers, including Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, and Alan Jackson, have recorded all-gospel albums, reminding fans of their shared cultural connections and proclaiming commitment to evangelical beliefs. Many country music stars also construct songs aimed at the secular market around gospel sentiments; a host of such pieces have become popular hits. Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever Amen,” a musical affirmation of everlasting love, helped launch his career when it was released as the first single from his second LP, Always and Forever, in 1987. Carrie Underwood, who gained national stardom on television’s popular American Idol, enjoyed enormous success in 2006 with her chart-topping prayer song, “Jesus Take the Wheel.” And the following year, Martina McBride scored a top-five hit with “Anyway,” a song praising God’s greatness and invoking the power of prayer. From modest beginnings in shape-note hymnals and brush arbor revivals, white gospel music has evolved in response to changing song styles and technology. Regardless of form or function, it remains grounded in southern folk tradition, drawing upon a common Protestant heritage that is expressed through shared cultural symbols of faith and through songs that celebrate family, salvation, and the infinite goodness of God. For white southerners, gospel music remains one of the most popular expressions of faith and virtue. Its diverse strains continue to be heard in homes and churches, on radio and television, and at sacred and secular gatherings throughout the South.

JACK BERNHARDT Wake Technical Community College Jack Bernhardt, in Country Music Annual 2001, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (2001); Lois Blackwell, The Wings of a Dove: The Story of Gospel Music in America (1985); Howard Dorgan, The Airwaves of Zion: Radio and Religion in Appalachia (1993); James R. Goff, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (2002); George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933); Kenneth M. Johnson, The Johnson Family Singers: We Sang for Our Supper (1997); William Lyn120 GOSPEL MUSIC, WHITE

wood Montell, Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky (1991); Bob Terrell, The Music Men: The Story of Professional Gospel Quartet Singing (1990); Henry Willett, ed., Alabama’s Sacred Music Traditions (1995).

Grave Markers Most grave markers currently made in the South are produced by monument companies that import granite and other stone from a distance, work it with standard industrial tools and techniques such as stencils and sandblasting, and follow evolving national fashions in creating the shape, lettering, and ornamentation of the marker. A family may ask the monument company to add something to the stone that appears distinctive and local—the picture of a railroad engine, a tractor, or a race car to symbolize an occupation or cause of death; a deer or a fishing pole to commemorate a love of hunting or fishing; or a religious motif like hands in prayer—but the execution is usually generic. An identical image may appear on many stones elsewhere in the country. Even as early as 1800, when local hand cutting of stones was still a vigorous traditional occupation, urban tastes in the South were already inclining toward fashionable motifs and typographic models. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, monuments that wealthy patrons imported from outside or commissioned from local craftsmen reached extraordinary heights of elegance and fashion in sites like the Cedar Hill Cemetery of Vicksburg. In New Orleans the influence of Roman Catholicism and Afro-Caribbean culture and the need for above-ground burial gave cemeteries more distinctiveness. Most grave markers peculiar to the South, however, are the output of earlier traditional stonecutters or of later craftsmen who were in one degree or another shielded from American popular and elite fashions by their geographic, economic, or racial and ethnic isolation. Products of these two phases of craft activity are in fact “southern,” chiefly in their localism and diversity. In the earlier period, burial customs of Native Americans in the region did not include the erection of gravestones, and since the sandy Tidewater South provided no supply of stone, 17th- and 18th-century English colonists failed to develop the stonecutting tradition that was then thriving in New England. The earliest monuments by European settlers in the coastal South were either locally made wooden markers (most long since decayed) or gravestones imported from northern colonies. The early cemeteries of a Charleston or a Wilmington are therefore small museums of contemporaneous New England stone carving. The rocky uplands, however, offered Scots-Irish and German immigrants GRAVE MARKERS

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The William and Mary Barnet stone (1785)—attributed to stone carver William Bigham Sr.— at Steele Creek Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, N.C. This is a transitional stone from the Bigham Workshop. The shield format—with the helmet as crest, rudimentary mantling, and a motto banner beneath—points back to the heraldic designs carved on many earlier stones. But the emblems in the shield stand not for the identity of the family but for that of the community. The dove and accompanying scythe suggest that the new nation will enjoy peace and plenty. The crossed arrows and eagle, in turn, are emblems of the just-concluded Revolutionary War. The banner underneath— bearing the words “Vain World Adieu”—sounds a discordant note from evangelical Presbyterianism, presaging the Second Great Awakening that will burst forth 20 years later. (Photograph by Daniel W. Patterson)

in the 18th century a range of workable material: sandstone, limestone, slate, granite, and soapstone. The output of these immigrants is scattered in churchyards and family graveyards that are predominantly near courthouse towns, thus linking them to the three institutions of greatest importance in the lives of the settlers. The churchyard stones have had the better chance of survival into the 21st century. Many 18th-century churchyards show a few examples of crude, local, amateur markers. Any significant output is usually the work of a settler who arrived with prior training as a stonemason. Unlike New England, however, the region had few localities with the density of population or prosperity to support the work of such a craftsman. In such an undeveloped economy, the Old World seven-year craft apprenticeship lapsed into a system for keeping orphaned minors off the public dole. The stonemason, like other master artisans settling in the southern backwoods, aspired to own land and typically became a farmer and jack-of-several-trades. He made grave markers as a sideline, as a service to kinsmen or neighbors, or as a supplement to his cash crop. One major exception was the Scots-Irish workshop of the Bigham family in the North Carolina Piedmont: brothers William Sr. and Samuel Sr., two of William’s sons, a grandson of Samuel, probably some other unidentified family members, and two neighbors trained by them. The senior Bighams arrived in Pennsylvania in the mid-1730s. William clearly had prior training as a stonemason, perhaps near Larne in County Antrim. Inhibitions against gravestones for the middle- and working-class people were probably lower in the colonies than in the Old World, and William Bigham carved 100 slate and red-sandstone grave markers that survive in five counties in central Pennsylvania. In 1760 Samuel came south with his family to Mecklenburg County, N.C., and seems then to have begun carving. William and his family followed him in about 1769. The men settled together near two major transportation arteries, the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to Charleston and the Catawba River, in what was becoming a predominantly Scots-Irish Presbyterian area. Artisans from their workshop tradition carved gravestones until nearly 1830 and probably did other large-scale stonework in their community in the 1770s. Well over 900 of their skillfully carved soapstone markers survive in early Presbyterian churchyards and other sites scattered across 11 counties of North Carolina and South Carolina. They influenced several nearby carvers. Theirs is the earliest artwork by European settlers that is demonstrably the product of this Piedmont region. It was commissioned by many of their associates, exhibited in open-air galleries beside the churches they attended, and studied by all in their neighborhoods. Both the iconography and the inscriptions illustrate the transformation of GRAVE MARKERS

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these ethnic immigrants into Americans. The graphic designs on the earliest stones were soul images (winged faces), like those widely popular in the British Isles and in New England, and Scottish motifs (the thistle) and armorial bearings (most of them fictive), suggesting their social aspirations. During the American Revolution, the carvers transformed the coat of arms into a patriotic design. Falcons became supporters for shields filled with 13 stars or banners and firearms. The crests were now crossed swords or eagles, and the mottoes read, “Arma libertatis.” Later these carvers further revised the coat-of-arms form, filling the shield with symbols from Freemasonry, another new identity some of their patrons were adopting. In the Early National period, they carved many stones with the American spread eagle. Another motif—the dove—began even earlier to emerge from the heraldic designs to take on religious significance, symbolized by an olive sprig in its beak. This dove of promise became the most common of all the motifs in these early Presbyterian burying grounds, especially on stones for children. The inscriptions also show the emergence of the new identities. Following a Scots custom, early stones for wives may give their maiden names: “Agness Beatey, alias Armstrong, who was married to Robert Armstrong.” Within a half century, this practice faded away. In contrast to the gravestones of New England or the Anglican gentry in Charleston, the Scots-Irish markers only rarely include titles that denote gender, age, profession, political office, or status. Names are not prefixed by Mr., Master, Mrs., Miss, or “the Hon.” Even magistrates, military officers, and ministers are often not honored with their titles (Esq., Capt., and “the Rev.”). Like God, people in these communities were not respecters of persons. Personal information, when given, was usually condensed into conventional roles that emphasized ideal moral conduct rather than the individual’s talents or achievements or quirks. Reticence was a dominant trait: The former virtu’s of y e dead to name I do not chuse~ to say his were not few indeed is nothing too profuse~ Stimulated in 1780 by the loss of soldiers who “Died in y e Bed of honor” in battles of the Revolution, families turned the stones from grave markers (“Here lyes the Body”) into memorials (“In Memory of ”) and began to speak their feelings and beliefs. Mainly, they adapted verses they borrowed from religious sources. In the 1790s some of these were stanzas from the Scottish Psalter, which until that decade universally served them as the music of Presbyterian worship. But hymn texts already preceded and far outnumbered the metrical 124

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psalm texts on these stones. The community was already preparing itself for the outbreak of the Second Great Awakening. When it reached this region in 1802, it changed and deeply intensified personal religious experience. The temperate gravestone verse of New England in the same period seems to reflect a society burnt by the First Great Awakening that had recoiled and embraced the refined. The southern Scots-Irish community, fired by the Second Awakening, broke through their reticence and used vivid verses by Isaac Watts to exhort preparation for Judgment and to promise that Corruption, earth and worms Can but refine this flesh Till our triumphant spirits come To put it on afresh. Today, we recognize the long legacy this evangelical transformation left among southerners. Several major German workshops also were active in Lutheran and Evangelical Reform communities in the southern backcountry. Carvers in nearby Davidson County, N.C., between 1800 and the 1840s produced remarkable soapstone markers, many of them cut through to create silhouettes of symbols of resurrection like the swastika or fylfot. In the profiles of their stones and their use of molding, the Davidson County carvers applied their knowledge of woodworking. Another major German workshop was that of Laurence Crone, who left his handiwork in Wythe, Roanoke, and Pulaski Counties, Va., between 1815 and 1836. His large, handsome sandstone markers seem influenced by Taufschein motifs. The stones typically bear on the rear face a carving of a heart rising from an earthen mound and flowering into roses or lilies. Crone worked for Scots-Irish as well as German clients, and his inscriptions and those of the other German carvers registered the fading of their ethnic identity. They gradually shifted from German to English and even to anglicized forms of the family names of both clients and carvers. The early southern monument traditions normally ended abruptly with the death of the carvers (such as Laurence Crone or the Scots-Irish carver Hugh Kelsey, who worked in Chester County, S.C.) or their migration westward (as in the case of several Bighams, who moved to Tennessee). Land wore out in the older states. Clients developed gentrified tastes and turned to more fashionable urban monument makers from Charleston or Columbia. But the family of Hugh Kelsey, psalm-singing Associate Reform Presbyterians, moved to Indiana after his death in 1817, reportedly convinced that the white working man had no future in the South. They hated slavery, feared a slave insurrection, resented GRAVE MARKERS

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the arrogance of slaveholders, and sent sons back to fight them in the Civil War. Upcountry carvers who succeeded this generation of craftsmen aimed their work at the lower end of the market but increasingly incorporated the national popular taste for weeping willows and urns or, later, Bibles and hands pointing up toward heaven. The early carvers produced much of their work for a patron class. Like many of the poorer whites, most of the carvers themselves were buried in unmarked graves. Slaves too were among those excluded from what Armando Petrucci called “a written death.” Some burial sites in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, however, had graves that they and their free descendants decorated with seashells or household objects—a survival of West African traditions. As blacks began to place other markers on their graves, economic limitations and cultural preferences perhaps freed them from the dominant American popular culture. African Americans in building trades, for example, learned to use concrete and started to create grave markers of that material, incising or painting them with designs or decorating them with shells, pebbles, bits of mirrors, or colored glass marbles. An occasional extraordinarily gifted craftsman like William Edmondson of Nashville, Tenn., was impelled by religious inspiration to become a stonecutter for his own community; guided by this inspiration and his African American perspective and sensibility, he developed his own execution of limestone doves, angels, and lambs and eventually also sculpted other works outside the graveyard tradition. In the absence of any strong, persisting vernacular tradition or any compelling economic necessity, only such a religious imperative is likely in the foreseeable future to inspire black or white craftsmen and patrons to ignore commercial products and dignify the resting places of their dead with monuments embodying values of a subculture shaped by the South. We may expect, however, new commemorative forms among populations only now arriving in the South. Many of these, like those of earlier immigrants, will fade into the widely fashionable. But a few may contain the seeds of dynamic new developments. We have seen this more than once in southern vernacular arts.

DANIEL W. PATTERSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Art of William Edmondson, with Essays by Robert Farris Thompson, Bobby L. Lovett, Rusty Freeman, Judith McWillie, Grey Gundaker, and Lowery Stokes Sims (1999); Diana W. Combs, Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina (1986); M. Ruth Little, Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers (1998); Armando Petrucci, Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the 126

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Western Tradition (1998); Bradford L. Rauschenberg, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (November 1977); Klaus Wust, Folk Art in Stone: Southwest Virginia (1970).

Hip-Hop Arguably, cultural elements from the South have been present in the hip-hop subculture since it began in the 1970s. The South that has nurtured hip-hop is a product of the African diaspora and the African American diaspora to the northern states in the early decades of the 20th century. The region has seen the emergence of numerous southern styles of hip-hop. The beginning point is the relationship between the South and New York’s hip-hop. The sound and party ethic of early hip-hop was born with Jamaican DJs who “toasted” their dancers (or themselves) in rhymed couplets over a musical dub. These “toasts,” or the act of “chantin’ pon the mic,” were influenced by African American radio disc jockeys who rhymed over music, a practice that draws upon time-honored, southern African American verbal traditions. American radio disc jockeys like “Jockey Jack” Gibson and Jocko Henderson introduced their style of talking rhythmically over the music to Jamaicans, who listened to the DJs’ broadcasts via shortwave radio. Jamaican émigré Clive “Kool Herc” Campbell introduced these outdoor musical traditions to New York’s South Bronx in 1973. Being a DJ in its simplest form meant playing records of the most danceable tunes to keep the dancers on the floor. Herc noticed that partygoers responded to the most rhythmic sections of the songs (the “breaks”) and began to extend these beats by using dual turntables and two copies of the record so that dancers could dance longer than the few seconds that constituted the original break. Building upon Herc’s style, other young DJs began mixing multiple break beats, applying tricks and sound effects like scratching (cutting the record back and forth against the needle). Grandmaster Flash would become that era’s greatest technician; yet it was Afrika Bambaataa’s brand of music—“electro-funk”—that would inspire the southern hip-hop sound. The earliest efforts of hip-hop MCs (for “master of ceremonies”) consisted largely of party shouts like “Kool Herc is in the house, and he’ll turn it out without a doubt.” More sophisticated, narrative-driven rapping eventually replaced these archetypal expressions. This rapping drew heavily on older southern traditions such as “toasting” and “boasting,” verbal dueling, and the oratory of the black church. Toasts and boasts are evident in several African American song traditions. HIP-HOP

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Toasts are rhymed narratives of [anti]heroic events, celebrating the exploits of tough-guy characters such as the baaadman Stackolee: Say, boys What do you think of that? Stackolee killed his best friend Bout a five-dollar Stetson hat. Oh bad man Stackolee. . . . “I care nothing about your children Care nothin about your wife, You done stole my Stetson hat And I’m gonna take your life.” Oh that bad Stackolee. Southern hip-hop MCs recast such exaggerations of wealth, roughness, and sexual prowess in raps of criminal or ghetto-fabulous badness. Houston’s Scarface, for instance, revives the bad man as a drug-dealing gangsta in his song “Jesse James”: Snuck up behind him, had his hands in his pocket Took my pistol out—unlocked it Pulled the hammer back and cocked it And left his shit all on the carpet I seen a [murder, murder]. I pin-pointed my target I’m making my way up out the building I got the nigga that I came here to get, notify his children That they old man done fell up out the game Because I came to this muthafuck and killed his ass just like Jesse James. The rapper brags about personal attributes and material possessions by way of verbal skill. In hip-hop, MCs personalize these folk narratives and narrate them in the first person. MC battles were the proving ground for rival MCs; they draw their structure, in large part, from the verbal dueling of the dozens (a practice also known as capping, cracking, and snapping). Dating from as early as 1891 in Texas, the dozens are ritual insults typically traded between men. The insults can be either direct or indirect (with the latter often pointed at women who are special to the men involved in the dueling). The objective is to anger one’s competitor to the point that he either loses his cool or exhausts his repertoire and cannot respond with a new insult. The old school MC battles were largely a “hip-hopification” of playing the dozens. In the recording era, these hip-hop battles, or beefs, would 128 HIP-HOP

often be played out on the radio, and fans would have to wait for the targeted rapper to go into the studio to record a response. For example, Atlanta rappers T. I. and Ludacris both claim to be king of the South. Ludacris—in a collaboration with Yung Buck—attacks T. I. (a.k.a., T. I. P.) in his song “Be Easy”: I’m masterin’ this program, hazin’ these undergraduates So, pimpin’ be easy, quit catchin’ feelings Cuz you worth a couple hundred grand, and I’m worth millions Nobody thinkin’ ’bout you, plus your beats ain’t legit So please stay off the T. I. P. of my dick. T. I. responds to the insult and his subsequent Grammy loss to Ludacris with the support of Wyclef Jean: [Wyclef:] Let them know who tha king of the South is! [T. I.:] Women sweating when they see me I’m apparently hot Had the album of the year nigga, Grammy or not Remember all day I used to stand in one spot Two revolvers in my pocket pitchin’ handling rocks See me now? Choppin’, there ain’t a car I ain’t got I’m the #1 customer at my own car lot. The dozens taught youth to sharpen their verbal skills, control their anger, and transfer hostility and potential violence into a humorous gaming tradition. Beefs in hip-hop culture continue this gaming ethic. Understanding the black musical and verbal aesthetic in hip-hop is understanding the South’s participation in hip-hop’s formation, given the foundational traditions that southern migrants brought with them as they moved to the North and West in search of employment. That is why hip-hop artist Snoop Dog, after signing with New Orleans’s No Limits Records in 1998, acknowledged, “Most of us from the West Coast got roots down South anyways.” Consider the southern-inspired accents that imbue hip-hop, the drawls and twangs of West Coast rapper Snoop Dog’s “Calabama” diction, or the “huh-huh, huh, huh” of East Coast rapper Melle Mel (which draws from the preacher’s lineending “Huhs”). Slurs, moans, shouts, melodic ornamentation, and—most importantly—the percussive qualities of text in the delivery of rhymes are all oratorical and musical practices that come directly from the black church. So too does the call-and-response pattern that places MCs in constant dialogue with their partygoers, allowing them to maintain their distinct voices while blending with those of their audience. Southern hip-hop has several epicenters that have shaped southern ways of HIP-HOP

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making hip-hop and in so doing have sent powerful seismic waves that have influenced hip-hop production far beyond the South’s traditional borders. The most dominating epicenters are Miami and Atlanta in the east, and Houston and Memphis in the west. New Orleans feeds off the two regions, while Virginians add their own flavor. Oftentimes, the main selling point within these southern styles is regional pride, though styles and approaches remain distinctively connected, most notably by their deep driving bass. Descriptions of a few southern styles follow. The pioneers of the dirty rap/x-rated rap and Miami bass style—2 Live Crew of Miami, Fla.—performed dirty raps as early as 1986, but the release of their controversial album As Nasty as They Wanna Be in 1989, with songs like “Me So Horny” and “Put Her in the Buck,” gave hip-hop a new regional style to consider. Lyrically, 2 Live Crew drew inspiration from southern comedians like Clarence “Blowfly” Reid and Rudy Ray Moore. Musically, their inspiration came from Afrika Bambaataa’s masterpiece, “Planet Rock,” playing with drum machines, synthesizers, and bass-heavy grooves. 2 Live Crew’s productions, along with DJ Magic Mike’s funky, grittier sound, gave rise to Miami bass, a style that began to spread throughout the South in the late 1980s. While the Afrocentric Native Tongues formed in New York in the early 1990s, a mirror organization called Arrested Development formed in Atlanta, exemplifying the rural message style. Songs like “Mr. Wendal” and “Tennessee” brought socially conscious rap with a southern sensibility to the mainstream, affirming that not all experiences in black America occur in metropolitan centers. They positioned the American South as the intersection between Black America and Africa. Their rhetoric survives in works such as Outkast’s “Rosa Parks” (1998) and in the rural orientation of Louisville’s Nappy Roots. In the era following N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton (1988), countless “gangsta” rappers described the chaotic, rough, and seedy side of inner-city life using graphic language laced with expletives, representing the southern gangsta style. The earliest southern incarnation came out of Houston with the dark tales of the Geto Boys. Their song “Mind of a Lunatic” (1990) describes rape, mutilation, and murder, yet the lyrics also direct our attention to the environmental roots of our senseless tolerance for criminal behavior. In New Orleans, Master P shifts attention away from the West Coast models and establishes the South’s dominance in the gangsta-rap scene. His second release, The Ghetto Is Trying to Kill Me (1994), is filled with references to drug dealing and murder and helped to establish a new, southern gangsta-rap model. Bounce music, another major southern hip-hop style, incorporates New Orleans’s homegrown, parade-strutting, carnival beats in the hip-hop aes130

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thetic. Mainstreamed in large part by New Orleans’s Cash Money Records, the lyrics to these songs often include the word “bounce,” pointing to the energetic feel of the music. By 1993 gangsta lyrics had become incorporated in the style, giving birth to “gangsta bounce.” Representative songs are Juvenile’s “Pimpinabitch” (1999) and David Banner’s “Like a Pimp” (2003), both of which utilize the signature “Triggerman” sample, drum-line progressions, and fluttering hihats and snare trills. The late Houston DJ Screw pioneered—and gave his name to—this hazy, sleepy groove called chopped and screwed in the early 1990s. The slowed-down tempo defined the “screwed” part of the title, while the DJ’s cuts, scratches, pauses, and rewinds defined the “chopped.” Fans likened the music to the dulling effects of their drug of choice: codeine syrup. In 2000, when Three 6 Mafia and UGK released the national hit “Sippin’ on Some Syrup,” chopped and screwed crossed over into the mainstream. Paul Wall’s The Peoples Champ [Chopped and Screwed] (2005) continues the style. Crunk, associated with Memphis and Atlanta, is a high-energy club music that emerged in the late 1990s. The pioneers are primarily Atlanta-based rappers, such as Lil’ Jon and the Ying-Yang Twins. Crunk’s sound relies on repetitive synthesized, bottom-heavy rhythms; looped drum machines; and gritty, hoarse party chants. Mississippi-based MC David Banner describes crunk as party music where “you’re only partying to get away from the pain,” echoing much of the South Bronx’s original intention for the hip-hop subculture. By 2004 crunk had crossed over into the mainstream and Lil’ Jon was producing hits with R & B artists like Usher (“Yeah”) and Ciara (“Goodies”), creating another style referred to as crunk & B. Snap Music is also associated with Atlanta. The Atlanta quartet Dem Franchize Boys had snap hits in 2005 and 2006 with “I Think They Like Me” and “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It,” offering hip-hop fans a mellower crunklike aesthetic by slowing down the tempo and replacing the snare beat with finger snaps. The definitive snap music hit, Atlanta quartet D4L’s “Laffy Taffy,” reached No. 1 in 2006. Cocaine rap is a style that returns our attention to the underworld perils of the cocaine trade. Rapping about the drug trade is, of course, not new; indeed, cocaine rap marks a comeback of sorts, circa 2005, though the name is recent. Cocaine rappers often claim real-life experience dealing coke and boast of their skills as salesmen, not as party people. Rick Ross’s Port of Miami (2006), for instance, celebrates Ross as the biggest dealer in his hood and Miami as a port of entry for South American narcotics. Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy and Virginiabased Clipse helped reinvigorate drug-trading storytelling in the same year. HIP-HOP

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By no means is this list complete. Not only are southern hip-hop artists guiding the hip-hop music market, but they are also doing the same for pop music; this is particularly true for Virginia artists such as Missy Elliot, Timbaland, and the Neptunes. The hip-hop production team the Neptunes built their reputation with huge commercial hits like Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Ass” and Jay-Z’s “I Just Wanna Love You (Give It 2 Me)”; in 2001 they added pop to their repertoire, producing hits for Britney Spears, *NSYNC, and Usher. Hip-hop producer Timbaland followed suit, producing popular “hip-pop” for pop stars Nelly Furtado, Gwen Stefani, and Justin Timberlake in 2006. While some may argue that these styles should not be considered “folk” or “traditional,” they do embody stylistic features and performance practices that are deeply rooted in the African American South. Further, though much of this discussion has focused on their commercial incarnations, all of these styles have emerged from the vernacular, where their practice extends far beyond the recorded record. Deeply grounded in the grassroots experience of southern African Americans, these hip-hop styles have profoundly influenced—and continue to influence—the American musical scene.

FERNANDO OREJUELA Indiana University William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (1999); Jim Fricke, Charlie Ahearn, and the Experience Music Project, Yes, Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade (2002); Cheryl L. Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (2004); Portia K. Maultsby, in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (1990; 2005); Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (2004); Roni Sarig, Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (2007); John F. Szwed, in The Vibe History of Hip Hop (1999); David Toop, Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop (1999).

Houses and Barns As geographers have long noted, a relatively consistent pattern of traditional house and barn types appears across the American South. This consistency belies the diversity of ethnic inheritances that shaped this regional tradition of building. Native American, African, and European (most notably British and Germanic) vernacular architectural traditions weave through the fabric of southern building. The log cabin—among the most iconic of southern folk houses (especially in the Appalachian regions of the South)—exemplifies this diversity of in132 HOUSES AND BARNS

heritances. The Cherokee were among the first to build log homes in southern Appalachia, adopting the construction method by the mid-18th century. Horizontal log construction, however, was not part of native building traditions prior to European contact. Nor was it indigenous to Great Britain or Ireland, although the log cabin is now frequently associated with those of Scots-Irish descent. Like the Cherokee, they learned log building from others (probably those of Germanic backgrounds) and adapted it to patterns of use from their own cultural traditions. Amalgams of cultural traditions, small one- and tworoom log dwellings housed Cherokees, African Americans (both prior to and after emancipation), and European Americans. Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, along with their immediate non-Cherokee neighbors, were also among the last to build traditional log homes, maintaining the tradition well into the early 20th century. The onset of the Great Depression partially revived traditional log construction, and some folks in the South continued to build, or live in, log homes at the same time that a commemoratory and recreational revival of log construction (spurred by the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal agencies) was growing nationally. A hallmark of southern vernacular building has been the conservative nature of the tradition. Traditional patterns of construction, use, and form lingered far longer in the South than in most other parts of the United States. This was due, in part, to the social and economic forces that reinforced cooperative patterns of building in many rural communities. Despite the longevity of building traditions, however, southern traditional buildings were not themselves particularly long-lived. Environmental and economic factors reinforced architectural impermanence in the early English colonies of the South; consequently, unlike in New England, relatively few examples of common houses that predate the 18th century still survive. The cooperative building of dwellings and agricultural structures (a tradition that lingered well into the 20th century in some parts of the South) also made the replacement of buildings relatively achievable by families of modest means. The impermanence of early Anglo-American building in the South was accompanied by a tendency in frame construction to streamline the building process by using lighter, more uniform, and less exacting building components than the heavy-timbered construction farther north. This tendency presaged the “invention” of balloon framing that would revolutionize American building in the mid-19th century. Ironically, the South would be slow to embrace this revolution, owing in part to the region’s economic devastation in the post–Civil War era. Instead, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many southerners adopted an even more expedient and lightweight building system: the single HOUSES AND BARNS

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wall, vertical-plank, “boxed” house. Although variations in this form of construction existed in early New England and elsewhere, it came to be associated in the South with industrialized rural areas (timber and coal camps, mill villages, and the like). Rural farm families also commonly used boxed construction for their houses, which tended to follow traditional plans. In addition to streamlining the building process, southerners developed an indigenous modular system of vernacular housing. An example of this system is perhaps most evident in the evolution of the hall-and-parlor house. The tworoom hall-and-parlor house—widespread in the early years of Anglo-American building—consisted of a larger “hall” that served as a common living room and a smaller “parlor” for more formal interactions; both rooms could be used for sleeping. This arrangement continued a basic system of spatial use found in postmedieval Great Britain. In New England, hall-and-parlor houses tended to have massive internal chimneys and were quite large and solidly built. In the South, average homes tended to be smaller, and exterior end chimneys were far more common. Throughout much of the South, the preference for the hall-and-parlor plan gave way to house plans that featured two equal-sized rooms. Three common variants, built in either frame or log, dotted the southern landscape: two equalsized rooms on either side of a double chimney (the saddlebag plan), two rooms side by side with end chimneys (the double-pen plan), and two rooms flanking an open passage (the dogtrot plan). In some cases, these houses represented an expansion of the single-room (single-pen) house; just as often, however, they were built as a whole. Despite the difference in proportion between these tworoom plans and the hall-and-parlor house, the room use was quite similar: residents used one room for everyday interaction, working, cooking, and eating and the other for formal interaction. Both rooms, as well as the upstairs or loft, could be used for sleeping. The most common addition to these plans was the separate kitchen, which isolated cooking and eating from other interactions in the house. Sometimes, the kitchen stood apart from the house; in other cases, it was not accessible through an interior doorway. The segregation of sleeping from other household activities tended to come later; placing beds in living rooms was a common practice in many smaller southern houses into the 20th century. A larger house plan also existed among the repertoire of southern folk houses. Dwellings following this plan, sometimes called I houses, were two stories high and had two equal-sized rooms on either size of a central passage. Often a symbol of relative upward mobility among rural dwellers, these houses were larger in appearance than in usable space. The central passage would seem 134 HOUSES AND BARNS

to suggest a highly formal space for social interaction; many southern I-house dwellers, however, converted the formal space of the center hallway into living space, despite the inconvenience in size or proportion. Although the centralpassage I house would seem to represent a different architectural system from the modular single-pen and double-pen plans, dogtrot houses sometimes morphed into a version of the I house, a transformation eased by the practice (common in the more northern parts of the southern United States) of enclosing the open center passage. While this distinct modular system of folk houses predominated in much of the South, a separate architectural tradition—the shotgun house—also played a prominent regional role. Derived from West African spatial systems and Caribbean architectural traditions, the earliest versions of the shotgun house emerged in New Orleans and from there extended up the Mississippi and throughout the Lower South. Often, although not exclusively, associated with African American occupants, the shotgun house is long and narrow with a front-facing gable; it appears as often in urban as in rural areas. In the 20th century, this form seems to have merged with another vernacular tradition, the stripped-down, front-gable southern bungalow, which is typically slightly wider than the shotgun house and only two rooms deep. Unlike the shotgun house (which is widespread across the South), other house forms associated with specific cultural traditions appear in smaller subregional pockets. German Americans migrating south from Pennsylvania built distinctly Germanic house plans in the Shenandoah Valley (though this practice petered out as this group moved further south and interacted with other cultural traditions). The vertical log tradition—rather than any distinct house forms—is the chief architectural legacy of this ethnic group. French and Caribbean architectural traditions shaped the vernacular architecture of southern Louisiana and parts of the lower Mississippi. And Caribbean traditions—particularly verandas and porches—show up in the coastal Carolinas and Georgia. Distinct regional traditions also mark the South’s vernacular barns and outbuildings. In the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, farm families tended to group many functions (living, storage, stabling animals, etc.) under a single roof rather than build separate stables and granaries. The massive, multifunctional Pennsylvania bank barn of the 19th century is probably the apotheosis of this tendency. Although some of these larger barns appear in Virginia’s Shenandoah region, most southern farmers of modest means favored smaller, single-use agricultural structures. (The region’s milder climate, of course, made stabling less of a necessity.) Some small barns did serve the dual function of HOUSES AND BARNS

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housing animals and storing grain; most southern outbuildings, however, served a single end. Hence the frequency of corncribs, chicken houses, spring houses, and smokehouses. As in the folk housing tradition, southerners adopted a modular system for barns. Smaller barns and stables often consisted of a single crib or two equalsized cribs on either side of an open aisle. A larger four-crib barn typically featured an aisle extending from nongable side to nongable side, and one stretching from gable end to gable end. By the early 20th century, the region’s most common barn followed a transverse crib plan, with an open aisle extending from the two gable ends. Frequently, farmers with four-crib barns would enclose the aisles on the nongable end, creating more stabling space and rendering them almost identical to the transverse crib plan. All of these plans could be built of either log or frame; as mentioned earlier, builders used logs in rural outbuildings far longer than they did in traditional houses, a practice that extended in some areas well into mid-20th century. Any discussion of broad regional patterns is always complicated by the presence of many subregional traditions and variants. This is as true for barns as it is for houses. One of the most distinctive subregional barn types is the cantilevered barn of east Tennessee, found in relatively high numbers only in a small area on the west side of the Smoky Mountains. Although the barn’s base— typically built of logs—follows a common double-crib or four-crib plan, the frame-built second floor dramatically cantilevers over the first, either on two or four sides of the structure, giving the barn a distinctive, top-heavy appearance. Scholars have speculated about the barn’s ethnic origins or its possible connections with the cantilevered (on one side) bank barns of Pennsylvania, but the limited temporal and geographic scope of this particular barn tradition points to an isolated phenomenon among a small group of related builders (who may or may not have known about other related traditions). More typically, variations of barn types arise from agricultural specialization in the South’s subregions. Different forms of tobacco curing, for instance, gave rise to a variety of specialized barns, from the alternating open slats of the air-dried tobacco barn to the chimney-topped small barns used for flue-cured tobacco and the larger structures used for fire-cured tobacco. When the latter barns were in use, smoke would billow out from under the eaves, often leading outsiders to exclaim, “Hey mister, your barn’s on fire!” The vernacular building of houses and barns is closely tied not only to the ethnic and cultural traditions that shaped the region but also to the distinctive economic and social histories that form its story. Considering the diversity of southern subregions, what is perhaps most surprising is that a regional pattern 136

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emerges at all, despite a wide array of house and barn subtypes. A small log house of similar proportions and construction may have served as home to an enslaved African American in Tidewater Maryland in the mid-19th century, a Cherokee who eluded the Removal of the 1830s and stayed in the North Carolina mountains, or a mountaineer of Scots-Irish descent who continued to farm his land in the early 20th century. Though occupying similar spaces, of course, the actual use of these spaces probably varied considerably among these families, following the intangible precepts of their cultural traditions. Ultimately, it was social class and not cultural makeup that led some southerners to diverge from regional folk traditions and build up-to-date, stylized houses or agricultural structures that were efficiently streamlined for a single type of agricultural product. Still, the vernacular structures of the rural (and, to a lesser degree, urban) South tell a story of people of modest means who clung to traditional methods and cooperative patterns of building despite the blending of tradition and the upheavals of history.

MICHAEL ANN WILLIAMS Western Kentucky University Catherine Bishir, Southern Built: American Architecture, Regional Practice (2006); Charles E. Martin, Hollybush: Folk Building and Social Change in an Appalachian Community (1984); George W. McDaniel, Hearth and Home: Preserving a People’s Culture (1982); John Michael Vlach, in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (1986); Michael Ann Williams, Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern North Carolina (1991).

Hunting During the South’s colonial and antebellum periods, the pursuit of wildlife provided settlers with both a diversion from their ordinary work routines and a supplement to their sometimes meager stocks of food. Settlers also hunted to control the numbers of larger mammals in their vicinity, for their crops were vulnerable to grazing by deer and by flocks of birds, while their free-roaming livestock fell prey to wolves. During this period, some wealthy planters sought to emulate the privileges and refinements of European aristocrats. In some areas, hunting certain wild game became identified with the prerogatives of power and status; as such, it emerged as an important social activity for influential, wealthy individuals. The elite hunting narratives of the antebellum years offer detailed descriptions of the hunt, the chase, and the shoot. Although claiming to be factual, these narHUNTING

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ratives are actually standardized accounts whose recurrent themes provide insights into the ideology of affluent planters and the ways in which they sought to distinguish themselves from other social classes. Many planters believed that hunting enabled them to understand nature and man’s place in the world. Southern hunters loved nature for its supposed order and stability, which their own organized social life (based in a hierarchical arrangement of people and contingent upon the judicial application of force) could only approximate. For these planters, hunting was a socially sanctioned expression of power; they saw its violence as a requirement for participating in the natural world and appreciating its indestructible order. This perspective allowed planters to differentiate their modes of hunting from others on the basis of presumed motive and purpose. If most whites and blacks in the South hunted out of necessity, planters did so for sport and for amusement. While other classes pursued wild animals for meat and tangible trophies, planters saw the process itself as the most important part of the chase. For them, the end was both unimportant and inconsequential. Hunting conventions (sportsmanship) became prerequisites for membership in polite society, and they provided its participants the opportunity to learn the important lessons of self discipline and control. Plantation-style hunting, of course, was not for everyone. Outside the restricted circles of gentility, most men hunted wildlife for food and for profit. The majority of these hunters subsisted on the land and sold skins and game meat whenever they found buyers. After the Civil War, the processes of urbanization and industrialization gradually concentrated many southerners in towns and cities. Leisure and wealth for growing numbers of these urban dwellers made a return to nature and the land increasingly attractive. This “escape” to nature became possible for those who owned or leased large tracts of land; outside of these tracts, however, city hunters came into increasing conflict with rural landowners, market hunters, and game dealers over the declining stocks of wild game. State trespass laws and federal game regulations became a solution to these conflicts; to legislators, they seemed the most democratic way to handle access to wildlife for those aspiring to hunt. By 1910 most southern states had joined the rest of the nation in enacting trespass and game laws and providing cadres of officers to enforce them. With these legal structures in place, market hunting and the sale of wild animals became illegal. State legislatures, in turn, gave wildlife agencies the power to monitor the populations of species now defined by law as “game” and to determine the ways and means by which these species became legal to hunt. Hence, as a direct result of legal processes initiated by city dwellers, states 138 HUNTING

across the South restricted the variety of hunted species and formalized many hunting norms. These statutes and regulations still provide the ground rules and boundaries determining what, where, when, and how species are hunted. Although many southern hunters continue to hunt for food, most hunting in the South is now for sport and recreation. Most of the current initiatives affecting field sports have come not from the South’s rural populations but from organized groups in the cities; these groups include antihunting leagues and hunting and conservation organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the National Turkey Federation, and the National Wildlife Federation. These organizations and their many counterparts publish their own journals, solicit contributions, and maintain lobbies that seek to influence legislation favorable to their causes. From these journals, contemporary hunters glean the latest tips, techniques, and technologies for tracking their game; find out about what to wear while pursuing it; learn about the big ones that escaped; and read about current fads in men’s games. Modernizing developments have influenced some types of hunting more than others. Particular varieties of dogs/hounds are bred, trained, and certified for specific types of hunters. A number of national organizations focus on these particular breeds, keep breeding records, and sponsor annual series of field trials and bench shows to authenticate their products. The trading, purchase, and breeding of hounds and dogs is a big business in many rural areas of the South, particularly in those that host the various field trials. The influences of technology and the changing patterns of land ownership are also apparent in the organization of hunt clubs. Hunt clubs began in colonial days when neighbors joined together for game drives. At that time, their organization was informal and often spontaneous, involving no fees or formal membership. Later, when the large estates were divided or sold, individuals joined together to lease land for game and to alleviate the costs of maintaining hunting dogs throughout the year. Formal hunt clubs began about 1900. These clubs had a paid and limited membership and set specific times for hunting. In the latter decades of the 20th century, agribusiness—with its mechanized operations on large tracts of land—dramatically reduced game habitat on the better lands; most of the marginal lands, which had previously been occupied and tilled by tenants, reverted to pine plantations and scrub. With this secondary growth, deer returned to these marginal lands; so too did hunt clubs, now frequently headquartered in refurbished tenant shacks. Today, precision firearms have largely replaced the muskets of former times (although many purists still prefer to stalk their deer with muzzle loaders or bows and arrows). Four-wheel-drive vehicles have superseded horses and wagHUNTING

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ons, dirt roads have replaced the foot trails, and CB radios and loudspeakers have silenced the hunter’s horn. Yet the informal, intimate rituals between hunting buddies and the traditions of time and place continue to make the hunt club a seasonal feature of southern life. The distinctiveness of southern hunting stems from a peculiar combination of traits found in the region. The myth of the plantation lifestyle continues to inform the traditions of those who can afford to live the image of this lifestyle and to influence others. Its reality persists in the hunting plantations for quail and deer (many of which were purchased and maintained by northern wealth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and in the colorful pageantries of the exclusive hunt clubs located throughout the South. Extensive landownership, wealth, power, and leisure sustain these plantations and clubs, luring some to join and many others to observe their seasonal rituals. Still others read about them or participate in regional or national field trials for fox, quail, and coon— species associated with earlier plantation life. Most hunting in the rural South lacks the pretentiousness of the plantation tradition; nonetheless, it continues to reflect regional traditions of gender, racial, and socioeconomic stratification. Over two-thirds of southern hunters come from small towns or live in rural areas. Most are whites and Indians. Among these groups, youngsters typically learn to hunt from their fathers or close relatives. Guns are often heirlooms passed between generations. African Americans are proportionately underrepresented in the ranks of southern hunters; in contrast to the other cultural groups, they learn to hunt later in life and tend to learn from peers rather than from their fathers. Most southern hunters come from the working classes and are generally under 40 years of age. Although the expressed motivation for hunting varies, most hunters say that they hunt for sport rather than for food; nonetheless, they eat most of the game they take. Hunting is still very much a masculine domain. Historically, most women who hunt have come from the far ends of the economic spectrum; this pattern seems to be shifting, however, as more southern women in the middle economic class take up the sport. Yet, hunting remains an activity dominated by men, and it is to them that the cleaning, cooking, and serving of game meat usually falls. Socialization as a hunter begins at an early age, guided by fathers or an intimate circle of friends. In these close groups, young boys learn lessons about masculinity and their identity within a given community, together with skills useful in their transitions to manhood. A variety of coming-of-age rituals (aptly described by William Faulkner in his story “The Bear”) celebrate their matura140

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tion and accomplishments. Most boys’ initial kills are small game such as squirrels and rabbits, which make relatively easy targets. Youngsters generally pursue a variety of mammals and birds as their time allows, but as they mature, they tend to specialize in one or a few species, depending upon their associations with other men, their jobs, and the costs of maintaining trained dogs. Men who hunt together are also influential in other areas of community social and political life. Increasingly, however, family and work commitments disrupt these male hunting fraternities. Although jobs outside of the local community may temporarily dislodge these networks, many men return home religiously for the fall hunting season. The types of game that southern hunters pursue reflect stratification along socioeconomic and racial lines. Ownership of trained dogs and the availability of extensive tracts of land are prerequisites for game that many count as the most “prestigious,” including quail, deer, fox, and turkey. Access to these species remains difficult for many, although they may be hunted on public lands. Dove shoots, which usually open the fall hunting season, are generally open to most people because the shoot requires guns positioned in as many places as possible around a recently harvested field to keep the birds flying. (In many northern states, doves and quail are classified as songbirds and thus not hunted.) Many African Americans and working-class whites hunt squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and possums, species normally avoided by other, more specialized sportsmen. As a region, the South still retains an edge over other areas in the number of households that include a hunter. In 1959 Gallup Polls revealed that slightly over half of southern white households contained a hunter, compared to onethird for the rest of the nation. Fifty years later, these percentages have dropped dramatically. A cumulative tabulation of survey data from 1972 to 2006, compiled by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Survey, showed that the number of southern households with hunters now barely edges above 25 percent. This still suggests that one out of every four households in the South includes a hunter—a figure that continues to lead most other regions of the country. Every five years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publishes a national survey of wildlife-associated outdoor recreation. Its 2005 surveys in North Carolina estimated that 277,000 hunters spent 4.6 million days afield. That year, these hunters reportedly spent $512 million on their pursuits within the state, a sum that contributed to 8,800 jobs. The majority of these sportsmen (8 out of 10) say that a political candidate’s position on hunting-related environmental issues is an important factor in determining for whom they cast their votes. Sportsmen and sportswomen have powerful voices in legislation through the HUNTING

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Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation and the National Assembly of Sportsmen’s Caucuses.

STUART A. MARKS Independent Scholar Durham, North Carolina Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (1979); William Elliot, Carolina Sports by Land and Water (1859); William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in Go Down, Moses (1942); C. Gondes, ed., Hunting in the Old South (1967); Stuart A. Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History, and Rituals in a Carolina Community (1991); Nicholas W. Proctor, Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (2002); Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy (1957); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (2006).

Hunting Dogs “There’s a rabbit in the log and I ain’t got my dog,” sang Charlie and Bill Monroe in their classic song “Feast Here Tonight.” First recorded in 1938, the song expresses the challenging predicament of a rambling man out in the world without his trusted hunting dog. One need look no further than country music to discover the deep and symbolic place of hunting dogs within southern culture and to encounter the myriad ways in which they were necessary to subsistence traditions and integral to a rural way of life. “Hey, bird dog get away from my quail,” sang the Everly Brothers from Muhlenberg County, Ky., making a hit out of the Boudleaux Bryant–penned love song in 1958. “Hey, bird dog you’re on the wrong trail,” the song continues, using dogs, quail, and the pursuit of the hunt to address the challenge of romance. “Shoulder up your gun and whistle up your dog,” directs the narrator in the traditional song “Ground Hog,” “off to the woods for to catch a groundhog.” Whether in pursuit of rabbits, quail, or the lowly groundhog, the dog has occupied a fundamental place in hunting in the American South. Bird dogs, retrievers, squirrel dogs, scent hounds, and hog dogs all play a central role in both subsistence and sports hunting in the region, securing a bond between hunter and dog and between humans and the chase. These relationships and traditions span diverse habitats, geographies, and hunting practices across the region. In the South’s early years, farmers typically had one dog (and one gun, if lucky) to use for all kinds of hunting. Their hunts centered on whatever game the dog chased, regardless of the hunter’s initial intent. With time, however, dogs became more specialized through both the circumstances of the hunt and 142

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the desire of the hunter. Although most breeds of hunting dogs in the South originated in Europe, they adapted to southern game in the generations following settlement. Bird hunting, a practice often chronicled by elite sportsmen, has long been a favorite of southern hunters. In the days of good quail habitat and abundant birds, dogs such as English pointers and English setters ran birds throughout the South. For many hunters, nothing quite matches walking across the landscape with a bird dog, waiting for that perfect covey rise. James Kilgo—in Deep Enough for Ivorybills (1988), his meditation on hunting, the big woods, and companionship in nature—remembers his first hunt when he was 12 years old and recalls how he felt awaiting his first covey of quail: “The dogs were borrowed and the land belonged to an old woman who lived in the country, but as far as I was concerned we were lords of a vast estate.” The retriever, while also a dog used for hunting birds, stands in a category by itself. Although most southerners now identify the retriever with the contemporary Labrador (a dog seemingly found in every cul-de-sac in the region), this breed descends from the bloodlines of great hunting dogs. Nowadays, most retrievers’ biggest challenge consists of finding their bowl on the back deck; hunters, however, continue to use the dogs to locate and bring back dead or wounded ducks or geese. Waterfowl are hardy birds with thick feathers and powerful muscles. In the past, when hunters shot at fairly long range and used inefficient shotguns that did not always kill cleanly, they relied on their dogs to save a large part of the bag. Indeed, many hunters argued that the best duck gun was a well-seasoned retriever. The large expanses of rough water on the Atlantic Flyway likely led to the evolution of the robust Chesapeake Bay retriever, said by some to be descended from the Newfoundland. Many waterfowlers still use these big, curly-haired dogs, though Labradors are currently much more common. While retrievers work the water, squirrel dogs run the land. As suburbanites know, almost any dog will chase squirrels; not surprisingly, one finds good squirrel dogs among a range of breeds. Traditionally, hunters have relied on terriers, fiests, and black-mouthed, brindle, and mountain curs for hunting squirrels. As in coon hunting, the desire for the quarry has been somewhat superceded by the activity of the chase, and competition squirrel hunting has become quite popular. Many hunters are far more interested in owning a good squirrel dog than in killing squirrels for the table. Few types of dogs are more associated with the South than hounds. Probably descended from European fox and stag hounds, American scent-hound breeds have hunted everything from convicts to possums. Names like black HUNTING DOGS

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Hunters are quick to say that their relationship with their dogs is never merely one of ownership. Instead, the dogs become “part of the family”— trusted, talked to, respected, and treated as full partners in the hunt. Here, hunter Brent Dula of Yadkin Valley, N.C., stands with Mutt, his champion Treeing Walker coonhound. Dula says he started hunting with his father when he was a small child. Mutt’s tight stance in this 2006 image is his “show” pose; in the woods, this Grand Nite Champion would never be so still. (Photograph by Cedric N. Chatterley; courtesy of the North Carolina Folklife Institute)

and tan, bluetick, and redbone are familiar even to those whose only contact with raccoons is through their tires on the highway. Southern hunters have generally used hounds to pursue furred game like deer, bear, coon, and fox and have traditionally followed the progress of the hunt by the dogs’ excited barking. Hunters have long said that they can diagnose the prospects for the chase through the voices of their animals, a practice that Mississippi bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson brought to life in his song “The Hunt,” and which countless other southern musicians have evoked in tunes such as “The Fox Chase.” When the game is rabbit, southerners turn to the trusty beagle, surely the dog that the Monroe Brothers had in mind when they sang about having “a rabbit in a log, but ain’t got my dog.” The beagle is easily the best of all rabbit hounds. Rabbit hunter Robert L. Mason, a native of western Kentucky and author of the comprehensive The Ultimate Beagle: The Natural Born Rabbit Dog (1997), remembers his earliest image of the tight bond between his father and his dogs: “The moment that my father’s hounds caught sight of him in his hunting clothes, they would go into a frenzied, yelping dance. Once he emerged from the house with gun in hand, the dogs would begin behaving riotously. Leaping joyously against the kennel gate, they knew full well that the hunt was at hand.” Such scenes were familiar across the region, as men walked fence rows, railroad right-of-ways, and fields lined with thickets, waiting for their nimble, tenacious beagles to smell their way to a rabbit and start the chase. Of the many breeds of hunting dogs associated with the South, three stand 144

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apart, either because they originated in the region or because they have developed a specific regional identity. The first of these is the Catahoula, a breed that many believe originated in North America and that got its name from a parish in Louisiana. Stockmen originally developed Catahoulas to gather and control free-range cattle and hogs. The dogs themselves are generalists, a bluecollar breed that does well when proven hunting squirrels, deer, coon, bear, and feral hogs. But it is hog hunting that most often draws the Catahoula’s name to hunters’ lips (even though many other hound breeds and mixes also hunt hogs). Feral hog populations are expanding all across the South, where they compete for food and space with native animals. As a result of this expansion, game departments and wildlife biologists have declared feral hogs an invasive species and enthusiastically advocate killing them whenever possible. As there is no closed season for hog hunting with dogs, this is one of the few regional examples where opportunities for sport hunting are increasing. Wildlife biologists often joke that there are only two kinds of open land in the South: that which has hogs and that which will soon have hogs. Since wild swine take readily to heavy cover and become mostly nocturnal if molested, incidental kills by hunters in search of other game have little effect on their numbers. As a result, landowners who might not otherwise grant hunting access to their land are usually more than pleased to host hog hunters and their Catahoulas. The chase itself is reasonable in scope. Unlike deer and fox, hogs come to bay in a time and space that a reasonably fit hunter can cover. The dogs will often catch the bayed hog (pit bulls are frequently used as “catch dogs”) and hold it until the hunter can shoot it, kill it with a knife, or capture it alive. Catahoulas—once little known even in Louisiana—now compete in trials that mimic the demands of hog hunts. The largest such trial is Uncle Earl’s Hog Dog Trials in Winnfield, La., a four-day event named after former Louisiana governor Earl K. Long and heralded by the Washington Post as “the Super Bowl of hog-dog trialing.” The second breed associated with the South—and one that has its origins in western North Carolina—is the Plott hound. This strong and aggressive hunter descended from a line of Hanovarian hounds brought to this country by Johannes George Plott, a 16-year-old German immigrant who settled in North Carolina’s north-central Piedmont in the mid-18th century. Plott’s family bred these hounds over many generations; when neighboring hunter Gola Ferguson crossed Plott’s line with Blevins hounds, the result was the Plott hound, a strain of black-saddled tan hounds that has become a hunting favorite throughout southern Appalachia. The third distinctly southern breed of hunting dog is the Boykin spaniel, HUNTING DOGS

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whose origins trace to Wateree River basin in South Carolina. Named after L. W. “Whit” Boykin, the first Boykin is believed to have been a stray spaniel that appeared to one of Boykin’s friends and hunting partners. Finding the dog to be both very trainable and a great retriever, Boykin bred it with other lines to develop what has been widely called “the ideal dog for hunting ducks and wild turkeys.” The likely ancestors of the contemporary Boykin were the Chesapeake Bay retriever and the springer, cocker, and American water spaniels. The Catahoula, Plott hound, and Boykin spaniel—along with countless other bird dogs, retrievers, squirrel dogs, scent hounds, and hog dogs—have long held a favored place in the hearts of southern hunters. William Faulkner’s depiction of Lion—a dog found by Sam Fathers in Faulkner’s story “The Bear”—eloquently captures this spirit of affection and respect. At first, Fathers believed Lion too wild to tame; eventually, however, he domesticated the dog, and Lion went on to confront the mythic bear, Old Ben. When Lion died from wounds suffered in this battle, Fathers held a funeral for him, which Faulkner describes: “They came up mounted and on foot and in wagons, to enter the yard and look at him and then go on to the front where Lion lay, filling the little yard until there were almost a hundred of them squatting and standing in the warm and drowsing sunlight, talking quietly of hunting, of the game and the dogs which ran it, of hounds and bear and deer and men of yesterday vanished from the earth.” Faulkner goes on to say that General Compson, who delivered Lion’s eulogy, “spoke as he would have spoken over a man.” Southern hunting is changing as fast as the southern landscape, with less and less land available for running dogs and more and more landowners intolerant of dog packs moving through their property. Increasingly, one hears the hunter’s adage “dogs can’t read posted signs,” pointing to the growing pervasiveness of lands posted with “No Hunting” notices. These restrictions have been accompanied by stricter laws on many forms of dog hunting, particularly in regards to hunting deer. Formal English-style fox hunts still occur in some parts of the South, though the horse-mounted riders of these hunts are having an increasingly difficult time finding large expanses of land where hounds can run without having to cross dangerous highways. Similar challenges are faced by the more vernacular fox hunters, whose tradition stands in sharp contrast to the practice of redclad gentry riding to the hounds. Traditionally, this was an informal practice in which hunters would gather at night to listen to their hounds run a fox. As land access has become more restricted, fox hunters have increasingly had to confine their hunting to vast fenced areas known as “fox pens,” which allow both the running of dogs and the fellowship associated with it. Fox hunter Bill Pevey 146

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of Crystal Springs, Miss., remembers a time when “if your dogs ran on your neighbors’ property, they didn’t say anything. They didn’t care. Your neighbors were close friends. Even the ones that lived five or six miles away, you went to church with them.” Those days, however, have changed. “Hunting inside” the pen, while eliminating the happenstance of finding a fox and running new land, at least allows the dogs to run and the hunters to gather for fellowship. These transformations exemplify the many ways that southern dog hunting has had to adapt to reductions in land access and increased development. Nostalgia for hunting days and dogs past is common across the region. Quail plantations have serene cemeteries for well-remembered dogs in south Georgia, and special coon dogs find a resting place at the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard in northwest Alabama. Other sacred burial grounds for favorite dogs undoubtedly exist across the South. Most of the remembrances, however, are carried in less marked and more intangible spaces and ways, like those captured in the traditional song “Old Blue.” Drawing on time-honored ballad motifs, this much-recorded piece aptly captures the bond between a hunter and his favorite dog: When old Blue died he died so hard He shook the ground in my back yard We lowered him down with a golden chain And every link we called his name My old Blue was a good old hound You’d hear him holler miles around When I get to heaven first thing I’ll do Is grab my horn and call for Blue.

WILEY PREWITT Independent Scholar Yocona, Mississippi

TOM RANKIN Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University Luther Wayne Capooth, The Golden Age of Waterfowling (2001); William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in Go Down, Moses (1942); Rupert Isaacson, The Wild Host: The History and Meaning of the Hunt (2001); Stuart A. Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History, and Rituals in a Carolina Community (1991); Wiley Charles Prewitt Jr., Mississippi Folklife (Winter/Spring 1995).

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Legends Legends are traditional stories that explore the boundaries of the possible. These accounts of extraordinary or supernatural events circulate unofficially from neighbor to neighbor and generation to generation. Though they are commonly told as true, their truth is sometimes accepted, and sometimes debated, by teller and audience alike. Some folklorists distinguish between belief legends and historical legends; the former dwell on supernatural beings and occurrences, while the latter focus on persons and events crucial to the local, regional, and national past. Many southern legends are deeply steeped in both the historical and the supernatural. Legends reflect the concerns, tensions, and anxieties of the people who tell them; accordingly, the heroes, villains, and supernatural creatures that populate them will change over time, from place to place, and from group to group. The variety of southern legends told about witches, for example, attests to this changeability and to the region’s historical development and cultural diversity. The colonial obsession with witches, best known through the Salem witch craze of 1692, also found expression in the South, where one of the nation’s last witch trials has been the subject of legend for more than 300 years. The stories tell of Grace Sherwood, Virginia’s “Witch of Pungo,” who—like many other women of her time—was accused of using supernatural powers to ruin her neighbors’ crops and livestock. In Sherwood’s era, belief in witches was not confined to storytellers in small communities but was also entertained by colonial legal and religious institutions. Accused of witchcraft, Sherwood was “ducked” in the Lynnhaven River to test her status as a witch. The authorities declared that if she were guilty, she would float, but if she were innocent, she would sink and likely drown. With thumbs and feet bound together, Sherwood was cast into the water and floated, thus earning the legal status of witch; she was then sent to jail for seven years. Long after witchcraft lost its legal status, stories of Sherwood continued to circulate around Pungo. By the 20th century, Sherwood was no longer considered a demonic witch but was rather seen as a woman unjustly accused; her story, one could argue, transformed from belief legend to historical legend. In the 18th century, Virginia residents’ stories accused her of magically killing cattle; in the 21st century, however, tellers highlight the errors of an era when women were stereotyped as evildoers. Today, Sherwood is commemorated with parades and dramatic reenactments of her trial. In 2006, on the 300th anniversary of her trial, Virginia governor Timothy Kaine officially turned Sherwood’s legend into a history lesson by issuing her a pardon with these words: “With 300 years of hindsight, we

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all . . . can celebrate the fact that a woman’s equality is constitutionally protected today.” In other early southern legends, witches appear in the form of animals or take on the properties of ghosts or poltergeists. One such legend, which dates back to the early 19th century, tells of the Bell Witch of Robertson County, Tenn. In some accounts, the witch first appeared in 1817 to farmer John Bell in the form of a strange creature—part rabbit, part dog—that taunted him in his cornfield. Later, the witch manifested itself in various strange sounds and then in violent attacks on Bell’s daughter Betsy. In some versions, future president Andrew Jackson (who had commanded two of Bell’s sons at the battle of New Orleans) heard about the hauntings and rode to visit the Bells; en route, the witch halted his wagon for a time. Since the late 19th century, the Bell Witch has been the perennial subject of books and articles, and since 2000 several video and film treatments of the legend have been marketed throughout the country and around the world. By incorporating President Andrew Jackson into its narrative, the legend of the Bell Witch, like the legend of the Witch of Pungo, illustrates the close relationship between belief and history that often emerges in legends. Both stories also illustrate how certain legends, originally rooted in one locale, may persist for centuries, become the subjects of media treatments, and attain a popularity that extends far beyond the small communities in which they were first told. Most southern legends, however, do not attract widespread attention; instead, they remain in small communities, where they often function in part to explain strange happenings in a certain locale. Colonial witch legends were influenced by Christian doctrine; rural stories of later times often reflected a tight economy in which the lives of an entire family could depend upon one harvest or the health of a few cows. In “Cooking a Witch’s Shoulder,” for instance, a man’s seemingly healthy sheep drop dead one by one. As told by James Taylor Adams of Wise County, Va., a neighbor “witch doctor” tells the man to skin one of the sheep, cook its shoulder in his oven, and allow no one to borrow anything from the house while the shoulder is cooking. As the man cooks the sheep’s meat, an old neighbor woman repeatedly rushes to his house in great pain and seeks to borrow something, but she is refused. On her last visit, she rips off her clothes to reveal that her shoulder has been baked to the same “crisp golden brown as the mutton shoulder.” When first told, circa 1900, this legend reflected the economic hardships of its tellers. In the 21st century, such stories persist largely to entertain and to illustrate the beliefs and lifestyles of earlier times.

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Currently in the South, ghosts are far more popular than witches as legend subjects. Such fine collections as Ray B. Browne’s “A Night with the Hants” and Other Alabama Folk Experiences (1976) and Lynwood Montell’s Kentuckyfocused Ghosts along the Cumberland (1975) present ghostlore surveys of individual southern states; W. K. McNeil’s Ghost Stories from the American South (1985) covers the entire region. In the first half of the 20th century, the more dramatic ghost stories were sometimes shared by large groups in parlor and front-porch storytelling sessions; most such tellings, however, were not set performance pieces but rather sprang out of everyday conversations. One of the most common themes in ghost legends remains the haunted house. In one widespread tale (known internationally as “The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Is”), a boy accepts a dare to spend the night in such a house. He encounters many strange sights, including skeletons descending down the chimney and coffins floating through the air. Finally he meets a ghost, who tells him that he had been murdered in that house. The ghost then reveals that a bag of money is hidden in the house; he tells the boy to dig it up and give half to the ghost’s survivors and take half for himself. The boy’s bravery is thus rewarded by wealth. In most of the United States, this tale is told as fiction; in Appalachia and other parts of the South, however, tellers tend to present it as a true local event. Historical-legend themes include the dangers of the wilds, encounters between European Americans and Indians, Civil War stories, and exploits of great hunters (for example, how a hunter pursued by a panther threw pieces of meat behind him to delay and finally escape the animal, or how Daniel Boone tricked five Indians by having them reach their hands into the cleft of a log he was splitting and then removing the wedges to trap their hands). It is important to note that although legends may present highly strange or unlikely events, their content is not necessarily false. While it is true that a legend persists because it reflects the emotional and social truths of its tellers, a given legend performance may be factually true as well. One of the events most richly commemorated in southern historical legend is the siege and battle of the Alamo (23 February–6 March 1836). No story told about this conflict is better known than the episode of “the line in the sand.” According to this legend, shortly before the battle, Alamo commander William Barrett Travis—knowing that the defenders faced certain death—offered them the chance to leave and live. Etching a line in the sand with his sword, he challenged his men: those who resolved to stay and fight should step across the line to join him; those who chose to leave should stay where they were. Only one of the 180 soldiers, Louis Moses Rose, stayed behind. We cannot prove that this 150

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scene actually occurred; indeed, historians tend to reject it, in part because the earliest surviving report emerged fully 37 years after the battle (in an account published by William Zuber, who said that he had heard it from his family, who had offered refuge to Rose after he had escaped). Yet the story persists, in large part because it adds a democratic element to the battle. Unlike other stories of famous last stands, which typically focus on the courage of the losing commander, this Alamo legend illustrates the individual courage of every soldier who stepped across the line; it casts each of them not merely as a subordinate victim but as a hero who chose to die for a cause that he believed to be just. Today, the “line in the sand” is used as a proverbial image to rally allies and intimidate opponents; on the eve of the first Gulf War in 1990, for instance, President George Herbert Walker Bush used the phrase to warn Iraq not to advance into Saudi Arabia. A major historical event will often attract legends that reflect the varied perspectives of the different cultures and communities involved. This is certainly the case with the battle of the Alamo. In 1917 Adina de Zavala, a Texas-born Mexican American whose grandfather had served as the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, published History and Legends of the Alamo, which was based on decades of listening to legends in San Antonio’s Latino community. Told by people who were racially scapegoated as enemies of the defenders (even though many Mexican Americans died supporting Travis), these tales reveal a much different worldview than those circulating in historically white Texas communities. Most are supernatural legends, steeped in Catholicism, that grew from the fact that the Alamo had been a Christian mission. For example, Zavala repeats a story that circulated widely among Mexican Americans in the late 19th century, saying that when Mexican general Alrade ordered his troops to burn down the mission, they were repelled by the flaming swords of the ghosts of dead soldiers defending sacred ground. In the same time period, San Antonio Mexican Americans circulated tales of a ghostly padre who would approach pious, obedient children and reward them and their families with gifts. Alamo stories, like all legends, evolve with the times to reflect social change. Early European American versions tended to portray the battle in black-andwhite terms, casting the Anglos as all good and the Mexicans as pure evil, in correspondence with the border antagonism gripping Texas at the time. But later, as the Latino presence in the United States grew and Mexican Americans were increasingly viewed by Anglos as fellow Americans, the stories of the Alamo’s Mexican defenders came to play a greater role in Anglo accounts. One Alamo story—an account that historians tend to credit as true, though one that LEGENDS

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was largely untold in early Anglo legends—is now commonly known among Texas children of all backgrounds. The story tells of two brothers, Francisco and Gregorio Esparza, who fought on the two opposing sides—Francisco for Mexican general Santa Anna and Gregorio for Travis. After the battle, Santa Anna ordered that the bodies of all the defenders be burned, with one exception—Gregorio was given permission to bury the body of his brother. This tale accurately reflects the understandings of contemporary Texas legend tellers, who now see Latinos on both sides of the border as culturally connected. Thus legends, whether factually true or not, continue to communicate important social truths about how the tellers view their world as it develops over time.

CARL LINDAHL University of Houston Thomas E. Barden, ed., Virginia Folk Legends (1991); Ray B. Browne, ed., “A Night with the Hants” and Other Alabama Folk Experiences (1976); Adina de Zavala, History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions in and around San Antonio (1917); W. K. McNeil, ed., Ghost Stories from the American South (1985); William Lynwood Montell, Ghosts along the Cumberland (1975); Charles Harry Whedbee, Legends of the Outer Banks and Tar Heel Tidewater (1966).

Mardi Gras Celebrations The celebration of Mardi Gras along the central Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama marks the region’s historical and cultural difference from the rest of the South. Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”)—also known as Carnival, from the Latin for “fleshly excess”—is celebrated with costumed float parades in front of large crowds, smaller neighborhood walking societies, informal parties, and formal balls in New Orleans, Lafayette, Biloxi, Mobile, and other Gulf Coast cities. In contrast, a rural Louisiana Cajun and black Creole courir de Mardi Gras, or Mardi Gras run, is carried out by horseback-mounted revelers in over a dozen French-speaking communities of southwest Louisiana. Black Carnival parades and gatherings in urban areas are also distinctive from those of mainstream or elite white krewes. These include the Zulu parade and Mardi Gras Indian tribes in New Orleans and parades featuring the historic Molly figure in Mobile. Historically associated with French and Spanish populations along the Gulf Coast, Mardi Gras occurs in February or March, prior to Ash Wednesday and forty days before Easter. The Mediterranean-Latin roots of the celebration rest in pre-Roman and Roman rituals, many of which eventually became part of the Catholic liturgical calendar. Thus, the Gulf Coast Carnival season officially 152

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begins on 6 January, the Epiphany and Feast of Kings. Carnival season may be as short as three and a half weeks or as long as two months, depending upon the date of Easter. Carnival culminates on Mardi Gras day, when festive eating, dancing, and drinking precede the relative austerity and penitence of Lent. Just as Roman Catholicism absorbed pre-Roman Carnival elements, so too do the worldwide variations on Carnival now reflect regional cultural diversity. Gulf Coast Carnival represents a cultural creolization of French/Spanish, Native American, and African/Afro-Caribbean performance styles and structures. The earliest European settlers of the Gulf Coast celebrated Mardi Gras with informal intimate processions and festive masquerades in Mobile and New Orleans in the 18th and 19th centuries; officially sanctioned parades emerged after 1830 in Mobile and 1857 in New Orleans. Debates by both cities over who really started Mardi Gras are rendered moot by the fact that French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville named his camp along the Mississippi River (and below the current New Orleans) “Mardi Gras Bayou” in 1699. French/Spanish Catholic elites, and later their Anglo-American Protestant counterparts, founded the early public parades in New Orleans and Mobile. In part, the creation of official Carnival—with planned parades and recognized societies—was a means of civic control, shifting the celebration into the increasingly Anglicized locus of power. In New Orleans such Uptown elite white societies (or “krewes”) as Comus (1857), Momus (1872), Rex (1872), and Proteus (1882) continue into the present day. Today, as many as 60 different krewes parade in the roughly two-week period prior to and including Mardi Gras day. As an extension of ancient traditions of redistributing wealth, all parades throw beads, doubloons (introduced in the early 1960s), and other trinkets to the crowds that line the primary parade routes. The varied krewes both reflect and invert the social structure of New Orleans on a day when the upper classes play at being kings, fools, and mythological beings and suburban middle classes assert their right to be royalty for a day. Elite old-line krewes still select their royalty in secret and restrict invitations to their balls and social events. The newer krewes, in contrast, charge admission to their open gatherings that feature national pop performers in venues such as the Superdome. Most larger parades feature revered black high school bands and brass jazz bands. Some include school dance troupes, flag corps, and cheerleaders who get to strut their stuff under the watchful eyes of chaperones. The more formal parades, such as Rex, include white marching bands from high schools and the military. The Zulu parade of New Orleans’s black middle class—founded in 1909 by working-class tradesmen, longshoremen, and social-club members—features MARDI GRAS CELEBRATIONS

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club members who dress in grass skirts and “wooly wigs,” put on blackface, and throw rubber spears and highly decorated coconuts to the crowds. Though long thought to have originated as a parody of Uptown white stereotypes of blacks, recent thinking suggests that the Zulus’ mix of dignity and flamboyance may have its origins in various theatrical sources. In 1949 Louis Armstrong rode as the reigning King Zulu; recently, celebrity riders have included Stevie Wonder and Spike Lee. Zulu is the main parade attraction on Mardi Gras day, along with Rex, its white Uptown counterpart. Working-class African Americans, particularly those of Creole (French/ Spanish) ancestry, also invoke white stereotypes of “wildness” by masquerading pridefully in stylized Plains Indians costumes. The black “Mardi Gras Indians” invest months of time and money in sewing elaborate bead and feather costumes and practicing at local bars. Early on Mardi Gras day, nearly two dozen “tribes” appear to sing, dance, and parade through backstreet neighborhoods. These black “Indians” (some of whom can claim American Indian ancestry) speak in mythological fashion about their warrior life and customs, often invoking images of the colonial-era cooperation between local American Indians and runaway slaves. Their performance style, however, is essentially Afro-Caribbean, as expressed in competitive dance and song and the call-andresponse chants that mark their foot parades. While the Mardi Gras Indians and the Zulu parade utilize Carnival to make statements about group pride, many African Americans also work at the service of whites on Carnival, thereby reflecting the postcolonial social structure of New Orleans. Some, for example, lead horses for major white parades. Others dress in medieval-style pointed white hoods and cloaks and carry the kerosene torches (called flambeaux) that light the way for night parades Uptown. Although smaller in scale and less widely known than New Orleans Carnival, Mardi Gras in Mobile has been celebrated in various ways since the beginning of the 19th century. Mobile’s public Mardi Gras ceased during the Civil War but reemerged in 1866 at the hands of Joe Cain, a military veteran who dressed as a mock Chickasaw Indian chief and drove through the thenoccupied city as a kind of trickster figure. On Sunday before the Mobile Carnival, a jazz funeral procession (featuring Cain’s purported widows) still commemorates Cain’s revival. Many Mobile krewes (such as the Cowbellions, the Comic Cowboys, the Infant Mystics, and the Order of the Myths) date to the 19th century. The symbol of the Myths—traditionally the last krewe to parade on Mardi Gras—is Folly chasing Death around a broken neoclassical column and flailing him with a golden pig bladder. Although this imagery suggests a

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general Mardi Gras theme of mirth’s triumph over gloom, some assert that the broken column originally alluded to the broken dreams of the Confederacy. A black Mardi Gras tradition also emerged in Mobile with the onset of Jim Crow, featuring fallen aristocratic figures called Mollies wearing tattered clothes. Today, black Carnival has its own balls, parties, and parades with brass bands. In New Orleans and Mobile, Mardi Gras pulses between a complete integration, in the crowds and in some parades, and segregation, as white and blacks go to their own krewes and social events. (This segregation is particularly evident at the private masked balls among the Uptown elite.) It is also a day when male and female roles are heavily inverted and subverted; gay and cross-dressers’ costuming, contests, and parades are top attractions. The large float parades of Mobile and New Orleans Mardi Gras represent Mediterranean and Caribbean traditions of complex hierarchical metropolitan and colonial societies in polyglot port cities. The Cajun and black Creole courir de Mardi Gras of rural southwest Louisiana, in contrast, builds on more egalitarian peasant French traditions brought by Acadians to Louisiana in the late 18th century. In a manner not unlike Christmas mumming in Europe and the Caribbean, a band of masked male revelers—dressed as clowns, thieves, women, and devils—goes from house to house across the open prairie land on horses or flatbed trucks. Many Cajuns and Creoles wear the traditional pointed capuchon (hats with bells and streamers that mock clerics) and don masks fashioned from door screens painted with facial features. The groups are led by an unmasked capitaine, who may wear an elegant silk costume in the Cajun bands or simple work clothes in some black Creole Mardi Gras bands. The Mardi Gras bands come as quasi vigilantes and raucous celebrants in search of charité (charity) in the form of live chickens, rice, spices, grease, sausages, and other ingredients for a gumbo supper. The capitaine, standing apart from the group as a keeper of rules, tries to prevent the men from getting too disorderly or drunk and sees that they carry out their agreed-upon rounds for the day. At each visited farmstead, the capitaine or a flagman will arrive ahead of the band to see if the household will receive the roving throng. After hearing the (usually) affirmative response to the courtly request Voulez-vous recevoir cette band des Mardi Gras? (Do you want to receive the Mardi Gras band?), the clowns charge the house on horseback or foot. The men then dismount and dance together (which these men do only on Mardi Gras) to the Mardi Gras song and hold a competitive (and hilarious) chase for a live chicken. After catching and killing the chicken, the revelers put it and other spoils in a sack, which they send back to a club or hall where the cooking begins at midday.

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When the Mardi Gras runners depart from a house, they sing a word of thanks and invite the householders to a dance and communal supper later that night. By the end of the afternoon, the band heads back to their starting point. While the gumbo is being prepared, those who are sober enough entertain waiting crowds with stunts and various acts of bravado. Everyone then feasts on the gumbo, after which they join together for a dance that ends at midnight and begins the Lenten season. Similar black Creole Mardi Gras bands—though fewer in number—celebrate in tiny rural settlements established in the 19th century by manumitted slaves and other free people of color. The Creole Mardi Gras celebrations are usually smaller (15–50 men), more intimate, and, until recent urbanization, more focused on a tradition of polite comportment than today’s macho Cajun courirs. Presenting themselves more as gentle beggars than as vigilantes, the black bands usually take care not to trample house gardens or to urinate in public while pursuing the fowl. Older Creoles take great stock in such details and are critical of young men who do not behave or sing properly. While old traditions and Carnival groups continue, new Mardi Gras events and locales have emerged in recent years to meet current social concerns. In New Orleans, for example, gay krewes and their French Quarter costume contests have become highly visible. In New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the Krewe de Vieux and the Spanishtown Mardi Gras, respectively, have emerged as hipster satires on Carnival itself and on a variety of Louisiana and national topics, including sexual and financial scandals, corrupt politics, and pollution. In New Orleans, two single-gender krewes of mostly professional men (Krewe D’Etat, led by an unnamed “Dictator”) and women (Muses, whose Queen rides in a 15foot tall, sparkling electric high heel) host popular night parades that are filled with carefully crafted political and sexual innuendo. Many Uptown residents with children shy away from these nighttime revels and focus instead on catching fluffy animal toys thrown from less satirical and more “G-rated” daytime parades. A range of suburban Mardi Gras celebrations, like Family Gras, have also emerged, with children included and excessive drunkenness or sexual suggestiveness excluded. In the devastation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many questioned whether New Orleans and Gulf Coast Carnival would ever happen again, because of imperiled local logistics and a diminished population. Luckily, Mardi Gras—in this region where play is a serious cultural and historical tradition—came back strong in 2006. Some floats addressed the tragedy with selfparodying comedy; some attacked FEMA’s and other federal agencies’ incompetence; other floats were dark and empty to honor those lost in the floodwaters. 156

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The annual celebration has since become an agent of cultural and social return and recovery. Mardi Gras continues to express a sense of feast, fantasy, and social transformation through costumes and masks, performance and play, and krewe themes related to the life situations of the participants—all before Ash Wednesday’s penitent rituals and Lenten mood are invoked by the remaining believers in this Catholic-dominated region of the Gulf South.

NICK SPITZER Tulane University Roger D. Abrahams, Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson, Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul (2006); Barry Jean Ancelet, Capitaine Voyage Ton Flag: The Traditional Cajun Country Mardi Gras (1989); Les Blank, Always for Pleasure (film, 1978); Frank de Caro and Tom Ireland, in Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco: Readings in Louisiana Culture, ed. Marcia Gaudet and James C. McDonald (2003); James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (1997); Arthur Hardy, Mardi Gras in New Orleans: An Illustrated History (1997); Lisa Katzman, Tootie’s Last Suit (film, 2008); Samuel Kinser, Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (1990); Carl Lindahl, ed., Southwestern Louisiana Mardi Gras Traditions, special issue of Journal of American Folklore (Spring 2001); Pat Mire, Dance for a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras (film, 1993); Rebecca Snedeker, By Invitation Only (film, 2007); Nicholas R. Spitzer, in Creoles of Color in the Gulf South, ed. James Dorman (1996); Carolyn E. Ware, Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backward (2007).

Musical Instruments It would be fair to ask if any musical instruments are of uniquely or peculiarly “southern” origin. Just about every instrument ever played by a southern musician had its origins in a cultural context on another continent. Although the origins of certain forms may be interesting, far more interesting are the patterns of instruments’ vernacular use over time in the South’s various regions and cultures. One way to look at musical instrumental use and consumption in the South is geographical, examining patterns of instrument production and distribution. Another is to explore how the demand for certain types of instruments arose, based on the creativity and popularity of influential southern musicians. What are some of the key patterns—of adoption, adaptation, and innovation—that emerged as southern musicians created their distinctly regional musics? Many instruments are particularly associated with the South and southern musicians. These stretch well beyond the familiar fiddle, banjo, guitar, “mounMUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

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tain dulcimer,” jug, washboard, washtub bass, kazoo, ukelele, Dobro, flatbacked mandolin, Hawaiian lap guitar, and pedal steel guitar to include the gourd banjar, tiple, accordion, pump organ, upright piano, trumpet, cornet, trombone, saxophone, and electronic keyboard. The fundamental factor in the South’s musical history is the creolization of European and African cultures. Shaped by the varying diaspora and migrations of key ethnic groups, creolization came to be the driving force behind instrument use and musical practice in the South. The region’s history is most strikingly characterized by an eager willingness on the part of southern musicians to adopt and adapt instruments and techniques from neighboring ethnic, religious, and cultural communities. It is better to think of “musical instruments” not as fixed forms but as idealized symbols (representing certain complex ideas about music and music making) that have evolved and adapted over time. Thus the banjo, a reliably “southern” instrument, can be examined as a form, with particular instances of the type. Variations on this instrument’s theme date from the late 17th or early 18th century, when enslaved Africans introduced the banjar, a sophisticated gourd instrument with clear antecedents in West Africa. For perhaps a century and a half, the banjar was associated exclusively with black musicians. The instrument’s “Europeanization”—widely credited to the Irish American minstrel Joel Sweeney—was a radical transformation into a factory-precise musical machine. The banjar became the banjo, with the latter entirely displacing the former. What distinguishes “southern music” is not so much the particular instruments that southerners play, but how they play them. Southern vernacular music styles shaped the design and use of certain instruments over others based on availability, local popularity, and the ability of musicians to coax successful, satisfying musical performances from them. Certainly the earliest musical instruments in the region were American Indian, though the historical record preceding “white settlement” obscures any patterns beyond the blunt and complete hegemony of Anglo and African cultures. Little is known of American Indian musical instrumentation, use, or production before “contact.” This is not to say that existing southern tribes currently do not have their own musics, or that they have not preserved their traditional forms. Many Indian musicians have adopted drums and flutes, as well as songs and playing styles, from outside the region and from other native groups. In terms of instrumentation, however, most American Indian musicians in the South play the instruments of their white, African American, and Latino neighbors. 158

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The earliest instruments played by southern white settlers were probably the bugle and military drum, as suggested by recent archaeology at Jamestown. The fiddle, however, was the instrument of choice for virtually all the white ethnic groups who settled the South (thanks to the music of the Renaissance and the subsequent explosive spread of the violin throughout European folk music). The European fiddle and the African gourd banjar were a staple pairing for country dances in Old Virginia by the early 18th century. Larger banjars were still being played with drum accompaniment in New Orleans’s Place Congo in the late 19th century. In backcountry Virginia during colonial times, musicians likely knew the craftspeople who made their instruments (if they did not make them themselves). Instruments that were inexpensive and portable, and which could be easily repaired or modified, came to be associated with settlers of the backcountry. The fiddle was clearly the instrument of choice throughout the 1700s. Sometime early in that century, the backcountry Scots-Irish supplemented this instrument with the dulcimer, which they borrowed from their Germanspeaking neighbors in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The early 20thcentury mission and settlement-school movement in Southern Appalachia catapulted the “mountain dulcimer” to an elevated place in both official and popular Appalachian historiography. The widespread heralding of the dulcimer as the “official” folk instrument of Appalachia is far out of proportion to its actual historical use. Other instruments purveyed by Yankee peddlers in the backcountry included harmonicas and Jew’s harps. The German-made Hohner Marine Band harmonica—cheap, portable, and boasting a wide tonal range—was often called to “second” the fiddle at dances; skilled “mouth harpists” could even stand in for an absent fiddler. The Jew’s harp—a favorite folk instrument of Western Europe with analogues in West Africa—also earned a place in southern music making; factories in New England had been producing Jew’s harps since the 17th century. As the Victorian era progressed, southerners became increasingly enthralled with the mass-produced and the novel; at the same time, they became avid consumers of mass-produced, factory-made musical instruments. Some of these imported instruments—like the autoharp—became standard equipment of many southern old-time groups. Produced in northern factories, they were marketed in the South by mail-order catalogs, door-to-door salesmen, and wholesale distributors. During the last half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, string bands’ use of pianos, pump organs, autoharps, accordions, tiples, MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

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and ukeleles (as well as washtub basses, jugs, and other rhythm instruments) varied enormously from region to region in the South. Which stringed instruments ended up in which homes was largely determined by access to consumer markets for these commodities. Some traditions of instrument use hinged on the strength and popularity of specific historical figures: Joel Sweeney, Uncle Dave Macon, or Earl Scruggs on banjo; Bill Monroe or Jethro Burns on the flat-backed, F-holed mandolin; Uncle Josh Graves on lap-style Dobro; Sonny Terry, Deford Bailey, or Charlie McCoy on harmonica; and Hudson “Tampa Red” Whittaker or Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the chrome-plated, National metal-bodied resophonic guitar. Not to mention Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong on cornet and trumpet, and countless unnamed piano players who worked the South’s turpentine camps and barrelhouses. By the end of the 19th century, travelers and writers had identified a strong tradition of jazz, blues, ragtime, and vaudeville music in virtually every southern city with a black population. The region’s jazz and blues history follows rivers, railroads, and later highways, moving with the migration of African Americans through and out of the South. European music’s greatest influence on African-derived performances in the South rested in the region’s popular military bands. By the turn of the 18th century, military parades and concerts had become what jazz historian Marshall Stearns called “one of America’s favorite outdoor sports.” In 1853 travel writer Frederick Law Olmsted noted that “in all of the Southern cities, there are music bands, composed of negroes, often of great excellence. The military parades are usually accompanied by a Negro Brass Band.” By the mid-1800s, virtually every southern city boasted semiprofessional African American string and/or brass bands. One of these cities was New Orleans, which stands apart because of its particular merging of black and “colored” (or Creole) musicians into a single musical community. Under French rule, and in the initial decades after the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans’s Creoles of color comprised a separate class of mixedrace citizens who sustained a lively musical community that relied largely on classical European training and performance. As the 19th century progressed, however, white Louisiana increasingly conformed to southern Jim Crow practice, erasing generations of Creole privileges and applying the same segregationist restrictions to Creoles that had long governed their African American neighbors. Creole musicians thus brought to the table of jazz a virtuosic knowledge of European instruments and techniques, which joined the African-based understandings (and drums) of the city’s African American musicians. 160 MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

By the close of the 19th century, vaudeville had become popular in cities across the South. At the same time, classical music and opera troupes were touring southern circuits; within a few decades, some cities had even developed their own symphony and opera companies. During the 1920s, Atlanta hosted an opera festival, the Georgia Fiddlers Contest, and a Negro classical music festival. In small cities and crossroads towns throughout the South, musicians had access to, and played, a wide variety of instruments, including many drawn from vaudeville, circuses, medicine shows, and radio shows. Artists from outside the region regularly toured southern cities and often played with local musicians. Almost all of these instruments found their way into southern regional, vernacular music. Southern banjo-playing styles aptly illustrate this process of transmission and regional adaptation. A network of roadhouses in Atlantic seaboard towns brought banjo players from the urban North to the coastal South; their performances fostered a local tradition of tenor banjo playing, with picks used to draw the melody from the banjo’s four strings. Farther west, from the Piedmont to the mountains and valleys of the Upper South, banjo players picked with their fingers and played the five-string banjo exclusively. Farther west still, in the southern upcountry and mountain states, old-time banjo players preferred the style called “frailing,” where the thumb stroked the banjo’s drone string and the back of another finger down-stroked the remaining strings, yielding a droning sound that suited the tastes of the mountain Scots-Irish. These musicians likely learned and adopted the frailing style from African Americans sometime in the antebellum era, as this technique is almost completely absent from European stringed-instrument traditions (which rely on plucking). Frailing is common, however, in North African music making, and it may well have originated there. Of course, the origin of the instrument or style is less interesting than what happened to it once it was in new hands. Since well before World War II, southern guitarists have favored Martin, Gibson, and Fender guitars made in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California. After World War II, the South was inundated with cheaply produced but better-each-decade guitars from Japan, Germany, and Italy. Several models of foreign guitars (particularly electric ones) were designed and marketed expressly for American consumers and imported widely throughout the South. The competition from overseas caused a gradual decline in the industrial production of American guitars. Although fine guitars were still being made, most instruments owned by nonprofessional or lower-income musicians were MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

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inexpensive and sometimes crudely constructed, often having cheap plywood tops. The relative lack of industrially manufactured guitars from the South corresponds to the region’s generally slower pace of industrial development. The musical-instrument industry struggled through waves of market expansion and contraction, recession and depression. Although the South had made some fine instruments during the Jim Crow era, the production scale was always small. Not until the 1960s did large-scale instrument manufacturing prove to be a promising investment. Evidence of this success rests with Peavey and Gibson, currently the South’s largest instrument manufacturers. Mississippi’s Peavey Musical Instruments got its start in the mid-1950s building amplifiers for electric guitars and soon branched out to make a wide-ranging and well-respected line of acoustic and electric guitars and basses. In the 1970s Gibson Guitar Corporation brought its artistry to the South when it moved its headquarters from Michigan to Nashville. Gibson now produces electric guitars, banjos, mandolins, and Dobros in Nashville and crafts its semihollow guitars at a Memphis plant. While Peavey and Gibson build instruments on a large scale, the quantity and quality of southern music making has historically depended on the work of local instrument makers, working either singly or in small shops. The region is currently enjoying a “golden age” of fretted instrument making, with growing numbers of luthiers creating masterfully crafted instruments—fiddles, banjos, mandolins, basses, and electric and acoustic guitars—in virtually every state in the South. Their clientele includes musicians, dealers, and collectors from around the globe, pointing to yet another arena of southern folklife where outside interest is fostering new dimensions of creative production.

DOUGLAS DAY Independent Folklorist Staunton, Virginia Gavin James Campbell, Music and the Making of the New South (2004); Douglas Day, Mountain Valley Music: Grassroots Music from Western North Carolina and North Georgia (1990); Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (1968, 2002); Bruno Nettle, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (1965); Marshall W. Stearns, The Story of Jazz (1958); Joe Wilson and Robert Cogswell, Dixie Frets: Luthiers of the Southeast (1994).

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Música Tejana Música tejana, or “Tex-Mex music” as it is sometimes called, is the music of the Texas-Mexicans, or Tejanos. Inhabiting the same geographic area of south Texas, the Tejanos have successively been citizens of a Spanish colony, independent Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate states, and the United States of America. The development of música tejana is interwoven with the history of the Tejanos from the 1700s to the present. In a cultural sense, from the 1700s until the early 1900s, the Tejanos were basically a Mexican provincial people, living in an isolated frontier area of the southern United States. In the past 80 years, there has been a steady migration of Tejanos from the farms and ranchos of south Texas to the urban industrial centers in Texas and throughout the United States. Tejanos have incorporated aspects of Anglo-American culture, but overall they have resisted becoming a colonized and absorbed people. They have developed a unique regional Texas Mexican culture, which is one of the most distinctive subcultures in the South and one that is reflected in the Tejanos’ own musical styles. Over the course of two centuries, música tejana has resulted from a blending of early Spanish and Mexican music; French-European styles filtered through Mexico; Latin Caribbean music; and now Mexican and American popular music. Música tejana is thus an especially revealing indicator of the subregion of south Texas and the role of music in reflecting broader ethnic patterns within the South. Little is known about the beginnings of música tejana. Paintings and diaries depict fandangos, or dances, held in San Antonio and south Texas through the 1800s, but they give little descriptive information about the sound of the music other than to call it “Spanish” or “Mexican.” Violins and pitos (wind instruments of various types) usually provided the melody with a guitar for harmonic accompaniment. Sometimes a rustic drum called a tambora ranchera was used to accentuate the rhythm. By the mid- to late 1800s, Tejano musicians were playing the Spanish and Mexican dance music less and were adopting a new European style that was trickling in from central Mexico. In the 1860s Maximilian, backed by his French army, ruled in Mexico. In his court in Mexico City and in garrisons throughout the country, the European salon music and dances of the time, such as the polka, waltz, mazurka, and schottische, were popular. These styles were enthusiastically embraced in south Texas by the Tejanos. The Tejanos’ musical culture was also influenced by the Germans who began immigrating to the central Texas area in the 1840s. These German-Texans also favored the European salon music and dances. At times they would hire local Tejano musicians to play

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for their own celebrations. By the late 1800s, informal Tejano bands of violins, pitos, and guitars were almost exclusively playing European salon-music genres for the local dances. Taking root in this frontier area, far from its European and central-Mexican source, this music was being thoroughly adapted to the Tejano aesthetic. With French and German styles layered over the base of Spanish and Mexican music, the modern development of música tejana began. Between 1900 and the 1930s, three important Tejano styles began to distinguish themselves: the guitarrero tradition, música norteña, and orquesta tejana. The tradition of singing troubadours has a long history in Spain and Mexico. The guitarreros in Texas represented a continuation of that tradition and was the first to become solidified and commercially popular in música tejana. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, many professional guitarreros sang in the plazas and cantinas of south Texas towns. Their repertoire consisted of romantic, lyrical songs spawned by the popularity of the operatic style in Mexico and local ballads called corridos, which developed from the transplanted Spanish romanceballad tradition. When singing topical corridos of local or national events, the guitarreros were often the only source of news for the local population. La Plaza del Zacate, or “Haymarket Square,” in San Antonio was a favorite gathering place for many of these singers through the 1930s. In the 1920s American recording companies such as Vocalion, RCA, Okeh, Bluebird, and Decca came to San Antonio. Setting up makeshift studios in hotels, they made “ethnic records” of local groups to sell to the growing Tejano market. The guitarreros that performed in Haymarket Square were some of the first to be commercially recorded. Duets such as Pedro Rocha and Lupe Martínez, Juan Gaytán and Timoteo Cantú, and “Los Hermanos Chavarria” (the Chavarria Brothers) were well known in the plazas as well as on recordings by the early 1930s. Although the guitarrero style was mostly a male tradition, one of the most famous of these singers was Lydia Mendoza, a young girl with a beautiful quavering voice who became known as “La Alondra de la Frontera” (The Lark of the Borderlands). She began recording at an early age with her musical family but later enjoyed a solo career that included famed recordings of songs such as “Mal Hombre” (Bad Man) and “Pero Ay Que Triste” (But Oh How Sad). The commercial heyday of the guitarreros was short-lived, however. The same factors of urbanization that prompted the recording companies to see a commercial value in the style ultimately wrought irrevocable changes in the singing tradition. English- and Spanish-language radio and other mass media were taking over the guitarrero’s role as the major source of news and information. Also, by the 1940s urban attitudes about the separate functions of the singing and dance-music traditions had become blurred. The working-class 164

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conjuntos (groups) performing música norteña in the cities gravitated toward performing in the cantinas that had been the domain of the guitarreros. Previously performers of a strictly instrumental dance music, the conjuntos added romantic song lyrics and duet harmonies to their polkas and waltzes in the more permissive urban atmosphere without alienating their audience. The guitarreros then slowly faded from commercial popularity as their function had been usurped by the media and the dance-music tradition. Although singing guitarists, or “mariachis”—named for the famous central-Mexican musical groups—are prevalent today in Texas, their repertoire and style are part of a more general Mexican musical tradition made popular by Mexican movies and recordings of the past 60 years. Few of the old-style guitarreros remain. From the informal ensembles of musicians of the late 1800s, two styles of instrumental dance music emerged as the Tejanos entered the 20th century. A new German instrument, the diatonic button accordion, which was perfectly suited to playing the polkas and waltzes, was gaining great popularity among rural Tejanos engaged in agricultural labor. Shopkeepers and skilled Tejanos working in the small towns, however, were hiring small bands of musicians called orquestas típicas. The style of these bands was similar to that of the earlier violin, pito, and guitar dance ensembles, but they had become more organized and sophisticated over time. From the 1920s to the 1940s, lured by the economic promises of the urban American way of life, many Tejanos moved to the cities of south Texas—San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and Laredo. The rural agricultural workers had few skills to advance themselves in their new environment and became employed in low-paying, working-class jobs. The shopkeepers and skilled Tejanos from the towns moved into more upwardly mobile, middle-class positions in business and trades. In the cities, the difference between the aspirations and cultural values of the working-class Tejanos and the emerging middle-class Tejanos became more evident and pronounced. The working class, who suffered from discrimination and received few economic benefits from contact with Anglo-American culture, sought refuge within their own traditional culture. The middle class, encouraged by economic gains, however, saw the adoption of some American culture and values as a passport to greater opportunity and a release from Anglo-American prejudice. Working-class conjuntos developed one distinctive musical tradition, and the middle-class bands, renamed orquestas tejanas, developed another. By the 1940s and 1950s, these two dance-music styles were intrinsically tied with the identities of these different segments of the Tejano community. Over the basic foundation of the traditional Tejano music of 1900, the conservaMÚSICA TEJANA

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tism and resistance to acculturation of the conjuntos and the incorporation of Anglo-American stylistic traits in the orquestas tejanas created two unique Texas-Mexican styles. Música norteña, meaning “music of the North” (from the point of view of Mexico), played by conjuntos, is synonymous with the sound of the German diatonic button accordion. The instrument may have been brought and popularized by the Germans and Bohemians settling in central Texas or by the Germans working in the mining and brewing industries in northern Mexico. Newspaper accounts nonetheless show that by 1898 Tejanos in rural areas of the south Texas chaparral country were playing their Texas Mexican polkas, waltzes, and schottisches on a one-row, one-key button accordion. Norteña accordion music began as a solo tradition. The accordion gradually replaced the violins and pitos as the preferred instrument for dance music in the rural areas, but because it was played in the rural areas of the ranchos for the laboring people, the button accordion became associated early on with working-class Tejanos. As more of these Tejanos moved from the ranchos to the cities, the instrument was heard in the houses and cantinas of the barrios (Tejano neighborhoods). By the 1930s the popularity of the norteña style was such that accordionists, paired with guitarists or bajo sexto (a type of 12-string guitar, originally from central Mexico) players, began recording their own ranch-style Tejano polkas. Following the lead of the guitarreros by making “ethnic records” for American companies, the developing conjuntos were commercializing their style and bringing the nostalgia for the rancho to the city. Although accordion dance music had been popular for some 30 years in rural areas, two men, Santiago Jiménez, from San Antonio, and Narciso Martínez, from the lower Rio Grande Valley, were responsible for pioneering the norteña style on recording and radio broadcasts in the 1930s. Because of their popularity and exposure on recordings, their individual accordion styles became models for a generation of musicians. Jiménez had a smooth, fluid style of playing the polkas and waltzes he composed, and he emphasized the bass notes and chords of his instrument. Expanding his conjunto, he utilized a guitarist for harmonic accompaniment and added a tololoche, or upright string bass, for a stronger bass line. Martínez, meanwhile had a faster, more ornamented style than Jiménez and emphasized the treble buttons of his accordion. Rarely using the bass notes or chords of his instrument, Martínez delegated the harmonic accompaniment and bass line completely to his accompanying guitarist or bajo sexto player. Both musicians used the newer two-row, two-key model of accordion. In the 1940s, taking over the singing tradition of the guitarreros, these pioneer accordionists began to add song lyrics with duet harmonies to 166

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their previously instrumental dance music. The typical lyrics of lost love, often framed in a rural setting, seemed to reflect working-class Tejanos’ ties with the past on the rancho and their resistance to adopting urban American culture. By the 1950s música norteña was crystallizing into a mature style as a second generation of accordionists came to popularity in the working-class cantinas, clubs, and dance halls. Tony de la Rosa, from Kingsville, Tex., became an extremely popular performer in that decade. He used amplification for the four instruments that by this time had become standard in the conjuntos: the threerow, three-key button accordion, the bajo sexto, the electric bass guitar, and drums. De la Rosa’s conjunto was also one of the first of a score of groups to perform on what became known as the migrant trail. Areas like Fresno, Calif., and Chicago, Ill., accumulated large communities of transplanted Tejanos who paid well to have conjuntos from Texas play for their weekend dances. From the late 1950s to the early 21st century, the four-member amplified conjunto has changed little. Música norteña has continued its conservative stance toward Anglo-American culture by reflecting and reinforcing the identity and values of the working-class Tejano public. Because of his decades of crossing over into Anglo-American musical styles, Flaco Jiménez, son of the pioneer accordionist Santiago Jiménez, has been the exception to most of the música norteña musicians of the past 20 years. Although some younger Tejano audiences appreciate a more progressive conjunto sound that has added other American musical elements, most conjuntos have continued in the traditional style, such as Ramon Ayala y los Bravos del Norte, a constant favorite and recent Grammy winner in the música norteña category. In the late 1800s, orquestas típicas (small, genteel orchestras of violins, flutes, clarinets, mandolins, and guitars) formed in south Texas from the earlier informal Tejano ensembles. Their audience was primarily a middle-class one, made up of small-town shop owners and skilled employees descended from those tenacious Tejanos who had held their land in the face of the Anglo-American economic advance. With more continuous income from their clientele, these bands playing música tejana became better trained and more professional than ever before. When these small-town Tejano patrons moved to the cities in the 20th century, the orquestas followed. Orquestas tejanas developed in an urban environment among those Tejanos seeking to balance their traditional culture and the trappings of middle-class American culture. Striving to play in a smoother, more orchestrated style and blending Tejano, Latin, and American music, the orquestas tejanas took over in the cities where the orquestas típicas had left off. Paralleling the rise of the conjuntos, by the 1930s and 1940s the orquestas tejanas were solidifying their style MÚSICA TEJANA

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on recordings and were a necessity for the dances of the more upwardly mobile segment of Tejano society. Beto Villa, a saxophone player from south Texas, is recognized as the father of the orquesta tejana style. Patterning his orquesta after American dance bands like that of Glenn Miller, he used a full horn section, trained musicians, and written musical arrangements. Thus, the flutes and violins of the orquestas típicas were replaced by trumpets, saxophones, and trombones. The new orquestas tejanas’ choice of repertoire was American fox-trots and swing music and Latin Caribbean dances popularized in the United States by the orchestras of musicians such as Desi Arnaz and Xavier Cugat. But never straying too far from their ties to Tejano culture, these groups also played highly arranged versions of the same Tejano polkas and waltzes played by the conjuntos. In the 1950s the orquesta tejana style crystallized into a well-developed form, adding sound reinforcement, complex vocal arrangements, and some new instruments: the electric guitar, the electric bass, and the electric organ. By the 1960s and 1970s, two groups, Little Joe y la Familia and Sunny Ozuna and the Sunliners, were at the top of popularity. A new generation of orquestas tejanas was playing for a younger, educated, and more affluent Tejano audience. The groups still played American and Latin dance music, but fox-trots were replaced by rock and soul music and earlier Latin dances like the mambo and rumba were replaced by New York–Cuban salsa music and Caribbean cumbias from the música tropical style. But refusing to lose touch completely with their Texas Mexican traditions, these newer orquestas tejanas continued to embrace polkas as the core of their music. By the early 1990s, a young female vocalist from the Corpus Christi area named Selena Quintanilla Pérez, with her group Los Dinos, had become very popular in Texas and was poised to cross over into the mainstream American music market. Although she did use various musical styles such as cumbias and rock in her recordings before her tragic death in 1995, Selena owed most of her local popularity in Texas and Mexico to her recordings of orquesta tejana–style polkas. Today within the Tejano community one can find an audience for almost any style of Tejano, Mexican, or Anglo-American music. Country-and-western music sung in English or Spanish, Tejano rock and jazz, música tropical from the Caribbean, mariachi music, rap music in Spanish, and the veteran Tejano styles can all be heard on radio stations and in dance halls over south Texas. Tejano working-class and middle-class perspectives and identities have begun to change in the past years with the Tejanos’ greater numbers, visibility, and economic and political impact. Although diversity within the Tejano commu-

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nity has become more pronounced, música norteña and the orquestas tejanas continue to appeal to the largest segments of the Tejano community.

DAN W. DICKEY Austin, Texas Ramero Burr, The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music (1999); Kay Council, “Exploratory Documentation of Texas Norteño-Conjunto Music” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1978); Dan Dickey, The Kennedy “Corridos”: A Study of the Ballads of a Mexican American Hero (1978); Américo Paredes, A TexasMexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (1976), With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958); Manuel Peña, in And Other Neighborly Names: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, ed. Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (1981), The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music (1985); Chris Strachwitz, Texas-Mexican Border Music (1974).

Needlework Needlework encompasses all the branches of textile arts that utilize needles, including both plain work and fancywork. Plain work—simple mending and clothing construction—refers to the pragmatic skills practiced by men and women of all classes throughout the South. Fancywork—the adornment of ground fabrics with specialty fibers, beads, sequins, and other embellishments—refers to work that serves a more decorative function and was historically the province of elite young ladies. Today, plain work is no longer the burdensome, everyday chore that it once was. Few people hem trousers, whip stitch sheets, or finish buttonholes. Fancywork, however, is a popular pastime and means of self-expression. Today’s stitcher might specialize in cross-stitch, needlepoint, ribbon work, crewel, free embroidery, counted work, smocking, or drawn work. Unlike quilting (where layers of fabric are sewn together), tatting and knitting (where fabric is constructed from a knotted fiber), or weaving (where fibers are joined together to form a fabric), needlework requires a previously constructed fabric as a ground for decoration. When decorative needlework began receiving academic attention in the 1920s, southern examples were not readily available to researchers. Southern embroideries had tended to remain in families as heirlooms rather than entering public collections as artifacts, leading many researchers to assume that needlework was underdeveloped in the region. Until the 1990s, historians assumed that southerners were simply too poor, too busy, too uneducated, or too isolated from mainstream norms to participate in needlework in ways

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other than those deemed necessary for domestic sustenance. Although they acknowledged that southerners—male and female, young and old—required some elementary skill with needle and thread, they found few historical examples, in large part because everyday clothing and household linens typically endured such hard use. This was not the case, however, for decorative needlework, which was highly prized by its makers and their descendants and which still often retains its place of honor above the family hearth. Because many examples of such needlework were signed and dated, they invite investigation of the communities that produced them. Recent scholarship in the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, and Virginia shows that extant examples of historical needlework are far more common than previously assumed. Needlework’s history in the South begins with the region’s native residents, whose textile traditions utilized local materials. Early trade with Europeans yielded an enthusiastic adaptation of foreign tools and goods, as glass beads and steel needles supplanted shell beads, porcupine quills, and fishbone needles. American Indian needleworkers retained traditional motifs and colorways, however, and held onto distinct aesthetic repertoires that survive to this day in many Indian communities. From the time of settlement to the early industrial age, needlework was an everyday activity, with most southerners considering facility with needle and thread an essential skill. Men—especially those in the military, at sea, or on the railroad—regularly carried small sewing kits called “housewives.” On the home front, women were continually engaged in mending and creating. The girls and women who pursued fancywork, however, tended to be those whose class status allowed them both leisure time and educational opportunities. Girls in this group (who were usually white) learned counted work and free embroidery at a very young age. Between the ages of 6 and 10, perhaps under the guidance of a family member or a teacher at a nearby school, a girl would create a simple sampler with the alphabet and numbers. From age 10 to 16, she might work a more elaborate sampler, often under the tutelage of a governess or an instructor at a female academy. Young ladies in their mid- to late teens, in turn, would often create a pictorial embroidery, frequently with mourning motifs or scenes from the Bible and classical mythology. These complex and demanding projects served as the culmination of a young woman’s academic career and signified her readiness for adult responsibilities. In many cases, women would never again create embroideries of this complexity; further participation in decorative needlework was wholly at the woman’s discretion. The history of decorative needlework in the South is closely tied to the network of female academies that arose with westward expansion. Until the 1830s, 170

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Hungarian-born Clara Haluska Fodor (1920– 2008) made her home in Linden, Tenn., where she created a series of intricately embroidered wall hangings that masterfully combine Hungarian and southern needlework techniques. The recipient of a 2003 Tennessee Folklife Heritage Award, Ms. Fodor appears here with an embroidered and quilted wall hanging that she completed in 1995. Note how the density of her satin stitches makes the states look more like pieced fabric than embroidery. (From the collection of the Fodor family; photograph by Robert Cogswell, Tennessee Arts Commission)

many schools required their students to master needlework; a number of these schools retained needlework as an elective until the end of the 19th century. While the educational system was reinforcing the importance of needlework, local newspapers and popular publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book were publishing needlework patterns. Cross-stitch kits—still quite popular today— were readily available even before the Civil War. As the textile industry grew increasingly more industrialized, savvy merchants realized the appeal of commercially prepared charts, vibrantly dyed fibers, and machine-woven ground fabrics. They imported many of these new products from Germany, a practice that lent the name “Berlin work” to a style of cross-stitch and needlepoint popular from 1840 to 1890. When southerners participated in larger cultural trends like the mourning arts of the early 19th century (1800 to 1840), Berlin work of the mid- to late 19th century (1830 to 1890), and the colonial revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1870 to 1930), the styles (particularly as evidenced in embroidery) tended to stay popular for longer periods of time than they did elsewhere in the country. During the 20th century, Anne Champe Orr (1869–1946), a native of Nashville, Tenn., rose to national prominence as a quilt and needlework designer, in large part because of her popular needlework columns in Good Housekeeping in the 1930s. Orr was an entrepreneur who ultimately employed dozens of women to produce her designs and who directed a successful mail-order business from her home. At a time when textiles had become thoroughly industrialized, southern needleworkers were eagerly embracing new colors, ground NEEDLEWORK

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fabrics (or paper), fibers, gadgets, and tools. Orr represents the prosperous union of small enterprise and the domestic arts, a path that many women took toward self-employment. During her lifetime, needlework became a pastime of adult women rather than an exercise of schoolgirls. When freed from academic constraints, needleworkers could undertake projects as soothing tasks or creative expression. For those seeking simply to occupy idle hands, prepackaged kits were both inexpensive and readily available; the necessary materials—evenweave ground fabric (fabric with the same number of threads from left to right as from top to bottom) and stranded fibers—were of consistent and standardized quality. Embroiderers seeking more developed artistic expression could utilize the same supplies. One such artist, Hungarian immigrant Clara Haluska Fodor (1920–2008) of Linden, Tenn., spent much of her adult life embroidering a series of intricately detailed wall hangings dedicated to each of the 50 states of the Union. After completing this mammoth project, she began a second series of embroidered wall hangings, this time commemorating each of the countries in which she had lived. Her work, meticulous in every detail, is both wildly imaginative and completely familiar. Combining Hungarian needlework techniques with motifs from American popular culture, Fodor produced a unique tribute to her adopted homeland. Fittingly, in the months before her passing in 2008, Fodor had been planning an embroidered tribute to Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the site of many legendary performances and home to the Grand Ole Opry for over 30 years. Fodor’s Hungarian background points to one of the newest dimensions of the South’s dynamic needlework traditions. As the region comes to host evergrowing numbers of immigrants, so too does it host a variety of new needlework techniques, including Japanese temari, Palestinian cross-stitch, and Ukrainian whitework. Some native-born southerners have added these styles to their repertoires. In the 21st century, southern needleworkers can receive both encouragement and educational resources from the Embroiderers’ Guild of America (EGA, headquartered in Louisville, Ky.) and the American Needlepoint Guild (ANG, located in Madison, Wisc.). Both organizations sponsor a network of local chapters, with the EGA hosting 93 in the South and the ANG hosting 75. Both also offer certification programs in specific needlework skills, teaching techniques, and judging. Through these programs, the EGA and ANG are training a community of embroidery experts with hopes of both preserving and further promoting the artistry of needlework. The EGA and ANG also offer venues for needleworkers who wish to exhibit their work. 172

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Southern needleworkers additionally draw inspiration from popular needlework magazines, many of which originate in the region. The magazines Just Cross Stitch, Sew Beautiful, and Sampler and Antique Needlework Quarterly, for instance, are all published by Hoffman Media, a company founded in Birmingham, Ala., in 1983; together, they boast a combined circulation of 135,000. In addition to its magazines, Hoffman Media publishes books on heirloom sewing and counted cross-stitch and hosts special-interest seminars (including an especially popular one held each Christmas in Williamsburg, Va.). Another needlework magazine popular in the South is PieceWork, which is based in Loveland, Colo., and has a circulation of 60,000. The publisher of PieceWork, Interweave Press, also produces magazines and books devoted to other fiber arts, including beading, crochet, jewelry, knitting, quilting, spinning, and weaving. Taken together, the many publications of Hoffman Media and Interweave Press have become important determiners of style; their influence is clearly evidenced in the work of countless southern needleworkers. Needlework is no longer a daily chore practiced throughout the South. Nor is mastery of the needle a broadly accepted proof of domestic competence. The necessary materials for fine needlework, however, remain readily and inexpensively available. A packet of needles costs less than a dollar. For 25 cents, a needleworker can purchase a new skein of cotton thread. For a few dollars more, she can invest in cotton or linen to serve as the ground for her design. The novice can easily find willing teachers, while the expert can seek advanced training at a local guild. Though perhaps not as pervasive as it was a century ago, needlework as a hobby, pastime, or art is still a regular activity for many southerners.

JENNIFER C. CORE Tennessee Sampler Survey Nashville, Tennessee Christie Ann Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle (1994); Jan Hiester and Kathleen Staples, “This Have I Done”: Samplers and Embroideries from Charleston and the Lowcountry (2001); Kimberly Smith Ivey, “In the Neatest Manner”: The Making of the Virginia Sampler Tradition (1997); Susan Burrows Swan, Plain and Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1650–1850 (1995); Patricia V. Veasey, Virtue Leads and Grace Reveals: Embroideries and Education in Antebellum South Carolina (2003); Merikay Waldvogel, Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression (1990); Rick Warwick, Williamson County: More Than a Good Place to Live (2005).

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Occupational Folklife Whether by necessity, compulsion, or choice; whether predominantly physical, intellectual, or emotional; whether payrolled, privileged by communal compensation, or outside the purview of dominant political economies, labor—broadly defined—is a precondition for survival, an essential category of both private and social behavior. Such is the human condition, whether people live in thrall to a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers, a communist-bloc politburo, or the privatized markets of advanced finance capitalism. In work—an activity and a context that consumes vast tracts of our time and attention, ornately shaping our political consciousness—culture thrives. Such is the assumption that drives the study of occupational folklife (alternately known as “laborlore”). Occupational folklife is a contextual net for catching and analyzing ideas about work and culture, not in terms of political economy exclusively but, at a similarly intimate scale, in terms of what actually happens on a daily basis between working people and their materials, utterances, and actions. The venues for these expressive forms and exchanges are innumerable, both historical and emergent: in the cotton field or fish camp; on the shop floor or ship deck; in factory, laboratory, or gallery; in the union hall and on the picket line; deep in cubicle, kitchen, or coal mine; riding high in truck cab, cockpit, or office armchair; in the studio and onstage; on the street corner or in the state penitentiary; in the boardroom, classroom, courtroom, or hospital operating room; or facing the fickle glow of audience, computer monitor, welding torch, forest fire, or dwarf star. Any job site represents a site of cultural condensations around work, a nexus of overlapping and telescoping milieus, charged fields of social, economic, artistic, and political action. Occupational folklife encompasses all the expressive culture that radiates from the workplace in concentric circles—extending from onsite job processes, techniques, materials, verbal art, and common knowledge and experience through sartorial styles, housing conditions, unionism, reform movements, political tactics, and other behaviors, values, and objects that may range far afield of the primary work environment. Even in an age of breathless global-market territorialization, local cultural and ecological variables still determine much about the species, sites, and styles of work; in the American South, farming families fight to survive alongside multinational corporations. When surveying the many worlds of workers, scholars discover a map of multivalent meanings made of labor and its lack. In work, we encounter a tangle of cultural forms and formations that are specific to each occupation, an enacted knot of shared belief, tradition, ritual, speech, song, literature, humor,

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material culture, performance, and politics. However, not all threads of this knot are constructive or affirmative. In work, in its dignity and degradation, its naked economic and political dimensions, one also encounters an oftenesoteric psychological and physical world of authority, betrayal, anxiety, pride, shame, surveillance, secrecy, solidarity, skill, and artistry. Cultural negotiations of tradition and innovation, continuity and change, affinity and rejection, acquiescence and resistance, collectivity and individuation, and affect and identity exist as immanent within the economic base itself, not just as some theoretical superstructural spire suspended above the grit of our daily grind. Occupational folklife entails elusive tensions and collaborative relations as well as the more tangible slang, songs, or artifacts. Cultural and economic production is apparent in repetitive work rhythms, which ripple through our individual and collective identities and ideologies. Those identities may be overdetermined or imposed, like socioeconomic class, or volitional, like the dolly grip’s delight in her chosen profession. Deeply ingrained power relations compass the cartographer’s efforts to track the culture of work. After all, most of us are employed by others, whom we might respect or resent. Workers’ worldviews and expressive practices are coded according to the vectors of power, whether managerial, gendered, ethnic, racial, classed, or pushed by political party or faith. Wedded to production is the inexorable potential for injustice, oppression, and violence. Work offers both freedom from and imprisonment within hegemonic strictures, access to both communal and contested spaces. The disciplinary history of occupational folklife research reveals this layered potentiality of work culture. Since it is a nearly universally shared modality, work is a location of the vernacular, the everyday, the folk. Because of that very fixity in the everyday, labor can accrue a patina of banality, both for the worker and the observer. (But beneath that banality blooms a distinctive, often obscure culture.) As such, many historians have taken occupational folklife for granted, especially when linked to the labor of modernity, the largely mechanized and bureaucratic-managerial labor of the industrial and postindustrial West. Folklorists have historically defined “the folk” according to class, labor, or occupation—and in opposition to modernity—without always acknowledging the Marxian or post-Marxian implications of that slippery, spectral designation of imagined authenticity. Labor historians and cultural studies scholars like E. P. Thompson have brilliantly documented sweeping labor-capital struggles at the macrocosmic level, but the often overlooked, ingrown details of daily lived reality also inform broader processes of change and class consciousness.

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A critical mass of expressive culture—protest songs, pickets, and blogs, for example—might act as a catalyst for securing workers’ rights, clearing fresh paths to equity. The idiom “occupational folklife,” an awkward marriage of terms, is most closely identified with folkloristics and folklorists, who concern themselves most fully with “folklife,” the accumulation of everyday expressive culture, from foodways to funeral rites. But how should we define “occupational”? Generously, as in the entire range of human labor, from panhandling to presidency, or narrowly, as wage-earning and salaried jobs with a strong group dimension and an oral tradition? Although initially mired in outdated notions of authentically preindustrial, premodern labor, pioneering researchers have since prized open occupational folklife to allow an expansion of scope beyond the blue collar, embracing work cultures of emergent jobs, the industrial and deindustrialization, the high-tech, the bourgeois, and the governmental. After almost two centuries of exploring the frontiers of American work, both under the rubric of folklore or otherwise, American thinkers finally unloosed occupational folklife from traditional, agrarian, and craft-based occupations and a preoccupation with music—“John Henry” is of course probably the most famous example of an American occupational folk song—toward new horizons. Although early European examples provide academic precedent, the first surveys of coherent, collected occupational folklife in the United States occur in fiction and memoirs. Rhapsodizing about work and workers is a trope of American letters in which Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William James, and John Dos Passos all indulged, and in fact the reader might be most familiar with famous fictionalized or vernacular, rather than strictly academic or folkloristic, accounts of laborlore. Sometimes the two strains work in dialogue. For instance, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), the most famous of many devastating slave autobiographies, details the horror of the most pernicious form of American labor; folklorist Roger Abrahams later commented on the subversive function of one vernacular aspect of the slavery Douglass knew: corn-shucking songs. The first American folklorists to delve into the culture of workers tended to concentrate on documenting the regional folkways of those professions they perceived as endangered by technology, urbanization, or other socioeconomic shifts. John Lomax’s collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) remains a bellwether, but it excludes even the modest analysis and contextual detail of later efforts. Beginning with his Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner (1927), George Korson made a crucial contribution to the field, championing the industrial worker as a skilled artisan and tradition bearer. However, 176

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he abandoned his work with miners once he felt mechanization had superseded the twilight era of human-scale mining. The Depression and the Works Progress Administration nurtured several American folklorists with an occupational bent, some of whom embraced social activism and public folklore initiatives. Benjamin Botkin, director of the Federal Writers’ Project, sought to topple some of the hierarchies of tradition, collectivity, and authenticity that bridled folklorists; by insisting in the name of cultural pluralism that the modern, the industrial, and the political join the folkloristic discussion, he edged what he called “industrial folklore” into popular consciousness and toward the Popular Front. In his Palmetto Country (1942), Stetson Kennedy limned the lives of Floridian laborers of all stripes and colors, from Cuban American cigar makers to Greek spongers and railroad gandy-dancers; along with Zora Neale Hurston, he honored the ordeals of African American turpentiners. John Greenway published the exhaustive American Folksongs of Protest in 1953, painting the history of occupational folk song with an explicitly political tinge. Mody Boatright and Américo Paredes furnished two divergent perspectives on Texan work culture—the former through an ethnography of oil workers and cowboys in Texas, the latter explicating Gregorio Cortez, the hero of a Tejano border corrido, as a working-class symbol of ethnic and socioeconomic resistance. Important occupational-folklife research projects and subjects are myriad, but certain influential statements bear some scrutiny. Wayland Hand’s 1969 essay and call to arms “American Occupational and Industrial Folklore: The Miner” prefigured Only a Miner (1972), Archie Green’s seminal study of recorded mining songs and their complex web of vernacular, popular, political, and commercial cultural contexts. An erstwhile shipwright and union activist, Green coined the term “laborlore” in the late 1950s, and his work as a researcher, archivist, educator, writer, and congressional lobbyist has helped identify what occupational folklife can be and why it matters. Drawing from the currents of British cultural studies and his own research with firefighters, Robert McCarl has buttressed occupational studies with a rigorous theoretical framework of identity, diversity, and dialectical materialism. More recently, folklorists have contributed a wealth of research that furthers the study of laborlore, including titles on industrial pranking, early 20thcentury cigar makers, and the music of Piedmont textile workers. Since 1995 the Archie Green Occupational Folklife Fellowship has funded University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scholars investigating an exciting range of topics: African American lumber workers in the Jim Crow South, the business of women’s foundations, the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis and its OCCUPATIONAL FOLKLIFE

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position within the contexts of the civil rights struggle and local soul music, and Lumbee sheetrockers and the associated hip-hop scene in southeastern North Carolina. Even in the face of seismic changes, the field seems inexhaustible, despite its somewhat marginal status within the academy. Of course, evidence and analysis of occupational folklife need not be academic or even written; in fact, the most prominent cultural records tend toward other media. Rigid Western cultural dichotomies—vernacular vs. academic, folk vs. fine, low vs. high—might assume persistent delineations between cultural insider and outsider, between consultant and critic; but with assiduous cultural work, those specious oppositional poles will continue gradually to melt, giving way to collaborative, holistic reevaluations. Today we might view images by professional artists like museum-enshrined modernists Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn, which celebrate moments in 20th-century American labor, alongside the roughly contemporaneous vernacular art of union organizer and painter Ralph Fasanella and mysterious Cuban American cigar maker and collage artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos, who created from within and in response to their own work cultures. Today people consume occupational folklife as represented in cinema, on television, and (as always) in song, but without always considering what is at stake behind those portrayals, whether nominally fictional or documentary. The songs of Dock Boggs, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie—three 20th-century giants of occupational folk song—will continue to inspire subsequent generations of protest singers, “revivalists,” and workers. But contemporary audiences might feel more kinship to the workingclass anthems of Bruce Springsteen or the surreal descriptions of drug dealing, economic decay, and despair in the urban ghetto offered by rappers Ghostface Killah and Lil’ Wayne. Classic cinematic accounts of occupational folklife—from the fictional Citizen Kane (1941) and Matewan (1987) to documentaries like Harlan County, U.S.A. (1977)—must make room for equally relevant pop-cultural accounts of contemporary labor-capital and labor-government power clashes like Office Space (1999), The Wire (2002–), and Michael Moore’s pop-doc movies. But the trick is to reconcile sympathetic, artful representation and thoughtful analysis with real-world action in the ongoing battle against economic injustice and the rampant exploitation of workers. Finance capitalism, unprecedented migration, and dizzyingly accelerating scientific and political technologies have revolutionized the international flow of information, capital, products, and workers, transforming the nature of labor and class. The very study of occupational folklife implies a luxury, an overripe responsibility for advocacy and collaborative intervention, outside the academy and in the streets. How might 178

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our research and cultural production actually improve the lot of disadvantaged workers? How might workers access our fiery cultural critiques in order to kindle positive, populist change?

BRENDAN GREAVES University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

ARCHIE GREEN Labor Activist and Independent Scholar, San Francisco, California Mody Boatright, Folklore of the Oil Industry (1963); Robert Byington, ed., Working Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife, a special issue of Western Folklore (July 1978); David Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001); Norman Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (1981); Douglas DeNatale, in Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife, ed. Daniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zug III (1990); Patricia Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (1992); Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (1972), Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (1993); Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008); Américo Paredes, “With a Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958); Mark Warner, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay (1976).

Old-Time String Band Music Every summer, on the weekend after the Fourth of July, thousands of people gather in Murfreesboro, Tenn., for the Uncle Dave Macon Days festival. The crowds brave the heat and humidity to sit in the sun and enjoy the onstage competitions in old-time music and dance that take place Friday evening and all day Saturday. On both days, the music often runs until well past midnight. Musicians gather in shaded areas behind the stage, risking the almost inevitable chigger bites to sit on folding chairs, rocks, and instrument cases in order to swap tunes and socialize with old and new friends. Some players eventually go on stage to perform in the contests; many, however, never leave the jamming area. Uncle Dave Macon Days is just one of many festivals held throughout the South during the summer months at which players and lovers of old-time fiddle, banjo, and string band music come together to revel in their favorite sounds. Old-time music also flourishes year-round in a less publicly visible way at countless jam sessions in restaurants, bars, community halls, and private homes. Summer music camps—where people receive instruction in various instruments from master players—have emerged in the past few decades as OLD-TIME STRING BAND MUSIC

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another key vehicle for perpetuating the music. All in all, old-time music is in a healthy state as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close. Few other types of music evoke images of the traditional South with as much immediacy as the sounds of an old-time string band. One or more fiddles playing the melody of a fast “breakdown,” a five-string banjo doubling the melody or weaving a bit of harmony around it, and often a guitar providing harmonic and rhythmic support form the basics of a string band. Ensembles often add other instruments to lend spice to the texture—including a mandolin, for instance, to bring sparkle to the top end of the sonic spectrum, or a string bass to anchor the bottom. String band repertoires are heavily weighted to instrumental music, though vocal numbers are important as well. These range from fiddle tunes to which singers add rhymed couplets in a seemingly random fashion to traditional ballads and love songs. Old-time string band music is a much looser, less-structured style than its modern cousin, bluegrass, with which it is often conflated by the uninitiated and uninformed. The string band form that we know today is rooted in the coupling of fiddle and banjo that dates to at least the 18th century. Dance music played on the fiddle was a staple of the musical culture of the British colonists and was quickly picked up by enslaved African Americans. Enslaved fiddlers frequently played for white dances and no doubt performed a repertoire similar to that of their white counterparts when they did so. But they also paired the fiddle with African-derived ancestors of the banjo for their own amusements, and contemporary accounts suggest that they played something quite different on these occasions. Arguably the first African American music—that is, music that combined elements of both African and European musical traditions— was that played by enslaved musicians on fiddle and banjo. The combination of the fiddle and banjo was also at the core of the blackface minstrel ensembles that came to the fore of American popular culture in the 1840s. Inasmuch as these all-white ensembles typically included percussion instruments such as bones and tambourine, they also reflected some measure of African American practice. One school of scholarly thought contends that minstrel shows were the principal means through which white folk musicians first encountered the banjo; another hypothesizes that the transference came about through direct contact with black folk musicians. There is almost certainly some truth in both perspectives. Photographic evidence from the late 19th century onwards shows string ensembles of varied makeup, performing in a variety of social contexts. The rise of factory-produced banjos and guitars, together with the advent of mail-order

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commerce, made it increasingly possible for people in rural areas to obtain instruments relatively cheaply. These business innovations played a particularly important role in earning the guitar its now-prominent place in rural musical culture, including the string band. When record companies discovered and began to exploit the market for southern rural music in the 1920s, string bands were among the early stars. Groups such as Georgia’s Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and Tennessee’s Uncle Dave Macon and His Fruit Jar Drinkers (a name co-opted from an unrelated group) made recordings that showcased a variety of musical styles. String bands also figured prominently in the emerging medium of radio in the 1920s. Powerful stations in cities as diverse as Chicago (WLS), Atlanta (WSB), Fort Worth (WBAP), and Nashville (WSM) catered to rural listeners with broadcasts of live “barn dance” shows on which fiddlers and string bands were staples of the cast. Even at this juncture, the music played by string bands was being described as “old-time,” as radio programmers and record companies sought to capitalize on nostalgic images of America’s agrarian heritage. As the sounds of country music smoothed out and radio programming became more sophisticated in the 1930s, string bands gradually lost their foregrounded position to vocalists. A new, supercharged variety of string band music emerged in the late 1930s with the debut of Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys. Monroe, a Kentucky native, merged string band instrumentation (fiddle, mandolin, guitar, string bass, and later five-string banjo) with elements borrowed from African American music, such as a strong backbeat and explicit improvisation (which took the form of improvised instrumental solos played between song verses). This new musical synthesis ultimately became known as “bluegrass” music. Although older-style string bands lost their place in the commercial country mainstream, they continued to provide dance music and general entertainment on a local level across the South. String musicians would also gather in less formal situations to play together for their own satisfaction. Although the vast majority of the string bands that made recordings and performed on radio consisted of white musicians, recent research has revealed that the African American string band tradition remained strong in many areas of the rural South well into the 20th century. As entertainment markets developed and distinct musical genres emerged, white-owned record companies and radio stations apparently decided that string band music was saleable only to white audiences. As a result, they largely overlooked black fiddlers, banjo players, and string bands. Although a few field recordings made by folklorists

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fill some of the gaps in the documentary record, the picture of African American string band music in the 20th century is hazy at best. Beginning in the 1950s, the reissue of recordings from the 1920s introduced nonsouthern audiences to the sounds of some of the classic southern string bands. This initiated a revival of interest in the older forms that continues to this day. Particularly influential in this movement were the New Lost City Ramblers, a string band that specialized in re-creating the sounds and styles of earlier groups. Consisting of multi-instrumentalists Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley (later replaced by Tracy Schwarz), the New Lost City Ramblers recorded a series of influential LPs for the New York City–based Folkways label and toured widely on the folk circuit. Their music inspired many young musicians who did not grow up in traditional musical communities to try their hands at playing fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, and other instruments. The revival gained momentum through the 1970s. Throughout this period, reissues of older recordings proliferated, most of which were released by small, specialized labels that had not been involved with the original recordings. Musicians and string band enthusiasts sought out and recorded older musicians, often encouraging them to resume playing their instruments after a hiatus of several years. Across the country, younger musicians formed string bands; many of these recorded as well. One extremely influential group was the Hollow Rock String Band, based in the Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. The group’s fiddler, Alan Jabbour, had done extensive fieldwork with older traditional players, particularly West Virginian Henry Reed; the band’s repertoire reflected more of this influence than it did that of the early recording bands. This was an important shift of emphasis in the approach of modern string bands, as it represented an awareness of the fact that old-time music was not defined solely by what happened to have been preserved on 78-rpm records. As interest in string band music increased, the model continued to evolve. No longer were young musicians content simply to re-create performances from the past or emulate their sources. Instead, they sought to forge their own musical directions. This shift, plus the spread of music camps, festivals, and jam sessions, has brought new life to the old string band tradition. There has even been a revival of interest in string band music among some young African Americans. Old-time string band music is no longer a museum piece being kept alive by an artificial “revival.” Instead, it is a living tradition that is flourishing as a strong component in the musical landscape of the South—and beyond.

PAUL F. WELLS Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University 182

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Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd rev. ed. (2002); Paul F. Wells, Black Music Research Journal (Spring–Autumn 2003).

Opries An opry is a regularly occurring stage show, often hosted weekly on Friday or Saturday nights at a set location, that presents vernacular music and entertainment from community-based and sometimes professional touring performers. Though they may resemble, may have grown out of, and sometimes borrow from other recurring musical events—especially jam sessions, house parties, community dances, and open-mic nights—opries offer a more formal performance distinguished by the conventions of a clearly marked stage platform; a sound system; rows of chairs, pews, or tables arranged for a seated audience; an open space for dancing; concessions; and often a small admission fee. Over the past 30 years, small-town and rural opries, jamborees, jubilees, and barn dances—loosely following the model developed by the country-music radio variety show—have sprung up throughout the United States, with strongholds in the Midwest, Texas, and southern Appalachia. While opry music varies from venue to venue and region to region, it generally includes a mix of classic country, bluegrass, and gospel, with periodic doses of early rock and roll, old-time string band, and rhythm and blues. Unlike staged concerts in clubs or bars, opries strive for a family-friendly atmosphere free of drugs and alcohol. The contemporary opry stage-show tradition dates to the early 1950s, with the Lincoln Jamboree in Hodgenville, Ky., and Baldknobbers Jamboree in Branson, Mo., recognized as two of the oldest and continuously running examples. While local opries continued to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, the greatest growth seems to have occurred during the 1980s, a trend that folklorist Amy Davis attributes to country music’s gradual recovery from the onslaught of rock and roll and other pop-music genres. Many of the early, well-known stage shows (such as those still hosted in Renfro Valley, Ky., and at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.) featured professional talent and drew on the increased appeal of country music–based tourism. Many more opries, however, primarily served hometown audiences, promoted local musical performers, and set out to create valued community gathering spaces. These small-scale opries often grew out of the popular post-folk revival pastime of bluegrass and old-time-music circle jam sessions and/or maintained the custom of weekend stage shows developed in the earlier period of radio barn-dance entertainment. Though some opries are still aired on small-town stations, most have no broadcast affiliation. While each opry offers a distinctive experience, each also shares certain traOPRIES

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ditions with its counterparts. The prevailing do-it-yourself, homespun opry philosophy often creates an environment that reflects the idiosyncratic preferences of its founder, its regular musicians, and its loyal audience members. In many cases, the opry owner and operator—frequently an energetic and entrepreneurial local musician or business owner—greets those in attendance, directs the evening’s activities, acts as MC, and serves as stage manager. Prior to the show, musicians often congregate outside the venue and jam as audience members line up to pay and find their seats. The listed start time will likely not be religiously observed, and a preposted, unchanging lineup of performers is unlikely. Especially at the smaller opries, the night’s entertainment typically includes whatever musicians show up armed with instruments and ready to play. At the appropriate time, after the preshow socializing concludes, the regular attendees find their usual seats, ready to request and cheer for their favorite songs. Once under way, the formality signified by the stage and sound system falls away in favor of a casual, on-the-fly production method. The underlying aim of the opry points less toward unblemished professionalism and more toward a family-friendly, old-fashioned, week-ending good time. In many opries, the built environment plays a significant role in the total experience. Often the weekly music making unfolds in venues that hold particular significance for the community. Renovated old theatres (such as Goldie’s Best Little Opryhouse in Owensboro, Ky.) or vacant schoolhouses (such as the Rocky Branch Community Center in Maryville, Tenn.) are popular choices that help to both preserve and reinvigorate cast-off spaces while tying the event to the community’s history. The more rural opries—like the Rocky Fork Jamboree in Morgan County, Tenn.—often make do with minimal cinder-block or barn structures. Whatever the venue, opry organizers frequently adorn the space with an impressive patchwork of symbolic and sentimental vernacular decor. Murals are commonplace, with pastoral, western, and hillbilly scenes especially popular. Headshot photos of regionally and nationally famous musicians, interspersed with pictures of local musicians and opry regulars (ever more attainable with easy at-home photo printing), typically festoon opry walls, leaving little space free of decoration. Life-size cardboard cutouts of Elvis, George Jones, or Patsy Cline also regularly greet audience members. Often filling out the display are painted saws, state flags, religious icons, figurines, antique instruments, and/or stuffed dolls. Like the music, these items anchor the opry within the preferences and character of its host community. This contemporary local opry model stands at the intersection of several rich traditions of informal and staged music making. Though the radio barndance genre serves as the most immediate predecessor and conspicuous influ184

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ence, opries also draw heavily on deep roots in the early entertainment conventions of the minstrel show, vaudeville, and, most directly, the medicine show. With its fast-paced assortment of musicians, comedians, skits, and novelty acts, medicine shows were widely popular throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These productions—which numbered in the thousands and ranged from modest to lavish—sought to soften audience members to the wellpracticed pitch of the self-proclaimed “doctor,” armed always with the latest curative tonic, oil, soap, or herb balls. Toward this end, the peddling proprietors freely appropriated and presented any lineup of entertainers that might draw a crowd, including but not limited to white and black string musicians, blackface comedians, jug bands, and, later, jazz and Tin Pan Alley stylists from vaudeville and musical theater. Medicine shows proved most resilient along rural American backroads, lingering in small-town life long after government regulations and greater consumer awareness forced them off the road in larger towns and urban areas. With the emergence of radio in the 1920s, the staged vernacular variety show gained an even broader platform. From the earliest days of the medium, radio broadcasters and advertisers found a rapt audience in both outlying and newly urban populations for old-time musicians possessing a nostalgic rural sensibility. Broadcasters quickly organized these rustic offerings into a variety-show format, with fiddlers, string bands, sentimental balladeers, and ethnic and rural stock shtick all presented in rapid succession—a set-up much akin to the medicine shows. AM Station WBAP in Forth Worth, Tex., presented the first barndance program in 1923, followed in 1924 by the highly influential National Barn Dance on Chicago’s powerful WLS, a broadcast that could be heard throughout the Midwest and much of the South. This wildly popular program set the standard for a slew of similar programs that followed in its wake. When George D. Hay, announcer on the National Barn Dance, left WLS and joined Nashville’s WSM in 1925, he quickly began featuring local “hillbilly” musicians over the airwaves and launched the wsm Barn Dance. On a December 1927 broadcast, Hay, attempting to underscore the down-home character of the Barn Dance, made a now legendary reference to the program that preceded it, the Music Appreciation Hour: “For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” With this statement, and with the increasing success of the Nashville broadcast, the “opry” designation—though likely long a vernacular pronunciation of “opera”—became broadly affixed to the country-music stage show. During radio’s “Golden Age” of the 1930s and 1940s, the Grand Ole Opry loomed large. Exerting unequaled influence on the many barn-dance programs OPRIES

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that emerged in major broadcast markets, the show helped to solidify the popularity of country music throughout America. After World War II, as the Federal Communications Commission encouraged the growth of low-powered AM radio stations in small towns and rural areas, hundreds of hometown barndance programs sprang up to serve local communities. Although modeled after the Grand Ole Opry and other widely broadcast programs, the many modest postwar barn-dance shows helped reground the increasingly professional and corporate country-music genre in the voices, creative spirit, and social geography of small-town America. With the onset of television and the move toward prerecorded music on the radio, live barn-dance performances dwindled. Though staged country music found a visual home in the early days of television, the heyday of barn-dance programming as a national phenomenon had passed. Nevertheless, live country-music broadcasts remained resilient in some smaller radio and television markets into the 1970s, particularly in the Southeast, and in many cases provided a transition to the nonbroadcast opries of today. The current assortment of local opries also draws upon the legacy of informal music and dance events that once occupied Friday and Saturday evenings in rural America. Like the Scottish, Irish, and English ceilidh and country-dance traditions, Americans often marked the end of the week by holding a community frolic or old-time square dance, with young and old joining together to dance, play music, prepare and eat food, and sometimes drink alcohol. These gatherings, held in homes, barns, schoolhouses, or other shared social spaces, were popular throughout the 19th century and in some rural regions well into the 20th century. Fiddle music occupied a central position, with banjo and guitar accompaniment often added. These social dance settings offered members of dispersed rural “neighborhoods” an opportunity to gather, celebrate, and enjoy each others’ company. In the 20th century, many community dances moved out of homes and barns and into town, with schoolhouses becoming a popular site. These small-town and city dances tended to be more organized than their rural counterparts, frequently required admission, and often featured a musical mix that reflected the current trends. Today’s opries—especially those oriented toward clogging, modern square dancing, or country line dancing—owe much to this older community practice. For many musicians and music lovers, opries—like the stage shows, radio programs, and community dance traditions from which they emerged—fulfill a desire for social connection, festivity, and expression. These weekly events provide nonprofessional or up-and-coming singers and pickers the opportunity to stand onstage and perform their favorite song—be it an original, the latest hit, 186

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or a classic—to the delight of a supportive and appreciative audience. For many in attendance, the opry offers a safe space that perfectly suits their sensibility and values. These reasons perhaps explain the opry tradition’s ongoing surge in popularity. Opry events have also begun to garner attention outside of their home communities. With the growth of heritage tourism, opries have earned a respected place within regional and national tourism initiatives, including southwest Virginia’s Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail and the Blue Ridge Music Trails. With these projects, local events like the Hillbilly Opry in Pulaski County, Va., and the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Va., are opening their doors to regulars and tourists alike, spreading the enjoyment of face-to-face interaction and live music with new and eager audiences.

BRADLEY HANSON Brown University Ann Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones: The American Medicine Show (2000); “The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail,” <www.thecrookedroad .org>; Amy Nöel Davis, “When You Coming Back? The Local Country-Music Opry Community” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998); Burt Feintuch, Journal of the Folklore Institute (January–April 1981); Fred C. Fussell, Blue Ridge Music Trails: Finding a Place in the Circle (2003); Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up (1995); North Carolina Arts Council, Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Blue Ridge Institute & Museum of Ferrum College, “Blue Ridge Music Trails,” <www .blueridgemusic.org>.

Picking Sessions If it is after eight o’clock in the morning or within an hour or so of midnight, then somewhere around the South—in Virginia or Kentucky, Alabama or Tennessee, Florida or Louisiana—there’s very likely to be a picking session under way. Virtually every night, most afternoons, and on many more mornings than expected, musicians gather together in groups ranging from 3 to 30 or more to make music. They convene at community centers, inside cafés, at fast-food joints, in the back rooms of barbershops, under the shade trees and pavilions of public parks, on somebody’s back porch, in a friend’s living room, beside dirt-road country stores, and at music shops. Once gathered, they sit or stand for hours on end, instruments in hand, as they pick and sing their favorite traditional old-time, bluegrass, and gospel tunes. They do it with great fervor, and they do it just for the fun of it. Generally speaking, picking sessions are public events to which all comers are welcome, either as musicians or as listeners. Players range from the oldest PICKING SESSIONS

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Across the South, string musicians get together for informal picking sessions, singing, and playing favorite bluegrass, gospel, country, and old-time tunes. Far from being endangered, this tradition is vibrantly alive in small towns and cities alike, with news of the sessions—once spread only by word of mouth—now conveyed widely via the Internet. These musicians are part of a Pickin’ in the Park gathering in McCaysville, Ga. (Photograph by M. J. Keeling)

and most skilled to rank beginners and youngsters. For the most part, participants allow only acoustic instruments and frown upon amplified ones. And while the form of picking sessions may (and often does) vary from place to place, in general the musicians arrange themselves into loosely defined circles, typically with the acknowledged leaders or best players situated closest to the center and the novices, beginners, and less-skilled players toward the outer fringes. The basic or lead instrument for most picking sessions is the guitar, although fiddles and banjos will also take the lead. Fiddles, five-string banjos, guitars, and mandolins are almost always present at picking sessions. Less essential (but often seen) additional instruments include double-bass fiddles, mountain dulcimers, and harmonicas. In addition, tenor banjos, mouth bows, banjo-lins, washboards, accordions, bongo drums, hammered dulcimers, spoons, jugs, kazoos, Dobros, musical saws, bowed psalterys, bodhrans (traditional Irish drums), triangles, and a variety of other acoustic instruments appear from time to time, especially at old-time jam sessions. On rare occasions, a piano, if avail188 PICKING SESSIONS

able, will be included. The human voice is virtually always an essential part of the musical mix. So is dancing. Dancing is especially prevalent in the Appalachian regions of the South, where a picking session would seem a bit odd if there were not a flatfoot dancer or two (or more) on the floor and dancing to the rhythm of every nongospel tune that is played. The same is true for jam sessions in French Louisiana, though there dancers substitute the two-step or waltz for flatfooting. Several noteworthy items differentiate traditional old-time picking sessions from bluegrass sessions. The instrumentation in bluegrass sessions is usually much more restrictive than in their old-time counterparts. Bluegrass sessions typically allow only guitar, five-string banjo, fiddle, double-bass, mandolin, and voice. Old-time players enjoy picking sessions that form a circle. From within that circle they play toward and to each other. Old-time players generally sit or stand with their backs to any listeners who may be present; listeners at such sessions are expected to politely remain outside the circle of players while the jam is in process. Bluegrass players, on the other hand, are much more likely to be audience-centric and will often pay a great deal of attention to the performer-listener relationship. Bluegrass music is, by its very nature and history, a performance-based genre, and this characteristic is not usually discarded when community-based bluegrass jam sessions are under way. “Thou shalt not forsake the beat!” is the first “commandment” of “The Ten Commandments of Jamming,” a set of rules of etiquette that are adhered to by most musicians who get together to play communal music. While picking sessions are typically friendly, laid-back affairs, they follow an informal code of behavior that is sometimes spoken, sometimes written, yet always understood—sooner or later—by those who participate. The commandments of jamming—which have many variations and many competing claims of authorship—generally go something like this: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF JAMMING 1. Thou shalt not forsake the beat. 2. Thou shalt always play in tune. 3. Thou shalt arrange thyselves in a circle so thou mayest hear and see the other musicians and thou shalt play in accord with the group. 4. Thou shalt commence and cease playing in unison. 5. Thou shalt stick out thine own foot or lift up thine own voice and cry “This is it!” if thou hast been the one to begin the song, this in order to endeth the tune, which otherwise wilt go on and on forever and forevermore. PICKING SESSIONS

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6. Thou shalt concentrate and not confound the music by mixing up the A part and the B part. If thou should sinneth in this, or make any mistake that is unclean, thou mayest atone for thy transgression by reentering the tune in the proper place and playing thereafter in time. 7. Thou shalt be mindful of the key of the banjo, and play many tunes in that key, for the banjo is but a lowly instrument, which must be retuned each time there is a key change. 8. Thou shalt not speed up nor slow down when playing a tune, for such is an abomination. 9. Thou shalt not noodle by thine ownself on a tune which the other musicians know not, unless thou art asked or unless thou art teaching that tune, for it is an abomination and the other musicians will not hold thee guiltless, and shall take thee off their computer lists, yea, even unto the third and fourth generations. Thou shalt not come to impress others with thine own amazing talents, but will adhere to the song, which shall be the center around which all musicians play. 10. Thou shalt play well and have fun. Many of the seemingly impromptu picking sessions that take place around the campgrounds and backstage areas of large annual musical gatherings such as the Old Fiddler’s Convention at Galax, Va., or the Bluegrass and Old Time Fiddlers Convention at Mount Airy, N.C., will often diverge from the friendly and inclusive community picking sessions described above. Within the participant areas at these large music events, where hundreds or even thousands of skilled musicians are gathered, a different kind of picking session frequently occurs—one in which participants discard the usual standards of inclusion and openness and exclusivity becomes the rule. The prevalent sense of competition at such events seems to take over the mindset of many of the musicians in attendance, yielding scores of small, exclusive picking sessions beside, inside, and between the many tents and RVs that line the festival grounds. These sessions often last way into the night and beyond. Many such sessions are restricted to the four, five, or six musicians who have been expressly invited to join them; other players are not encouraged to participate, although listeners are usually welcome to gather around. The posture of the included musicians will very often signal their exclusive intent. Direct eye contact with potential intruders is clearly avoided, lest outsiders mistakenly assume that they have been invited to join the session. Newcomers often misunderstand this phenomenon, particularly when they are accustomed to the cordial friendliness and welcoming openness of community-based picking sessions. 190

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Picking sessions manifest themselves in a number of distinctive ways, depending on the geographic location, participants, physical surroundings, local traditions, time of day, musical preferences, and so on. The following four events typify many of the hundreds of picking sessions that occur every week across the southeastern United States. At the weekly Thursday-night jam session at the Silvermont Mansion Community Center in Brevard, N.C., musicians set up chairs in a large circle and place a single microphone on a stand in the center. Each musician in the circle takes his or her turn leading a song and, when finished, passes the microphone to the next person, moving in a clockwise direction. The music played at Silvermont ranges from bluegrass and old-time to country and gospel. This mixed session is truly open to all who want to participate, with even an occasional jazz or classical player joining the lineup. Every second and fourth Saturday of the month (or whenever there is a special event), pickers gather to play acoustic instruments at Old Alabama Town, a living history museum in the heart of downtown Montgomery. From 20 to 40 players participate on a typical Saturday afternoon, depending on the weather and whether or not there is an important Auburn or Alabama football game that day. Most of the musicians are regulars, and many have been participating in the session for years. The main jam takes place at the historic Rose House, but side jams often break off from this group and play elsewhere on the grounds, usually beneath a certain shade tree or on the front porch of an adjacent building. Montgomery-area musicians have been congregating here since 1988. The musicians usually, but not always, situate themselves in a circle. Breakaway groups will often play with those whose particular style they share. Generally speaking, the participating musicians play to each other, seldom acknowledging the presence of any audience members. Picking sessions that lie a bit outside the traditional community mainstream of old-time or bluegrass jams—like those in French Louisiana—often have their own culturally specific jamming etiquette and procedures. The Savoy Music Center near Eunice, La., every Saturday morning hosts an acoustic jam session that invites all comers to join in and play. They have just one very emphatic rule: no more than ONE triangle player is allowed to participate at a time. Not surprisingly, the beautifully handcrafted accordions of local master instrument maker and National Heritage Award recipient Marc Savoy are an integral part of almost every session. On Florida’s Space Coast, picking sessions happen every Sunday at Trailhead Park in the small town of Malabar. All players—including rank beginners—are welcome to participate in these sessions, which present a mixture PICKING SESSIONS

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of old-time, country, and bluegrass numbers. Newcomers to the event usually hold forth around the outer edges of the picking circle, at least until they feel comfortable playing along with the core group. The session can include as many as 25 pickers and 35 “grinners” (audience). This Sunday jam began in 1975 at the Castaway Point Tavern beside the Indian River Lagoon, where it happened every Wednesday evening. When a recent hurricane destroyed the tavern, local musicians reincarnated the jam at Trailhead Park. The mostly seated musicians who play here position themselves on a raised wooden floor beneath an outdoor pavilion. Audience members gather nearby, sitting in lawn chairs pulled to the edge of the stage on cooler days or resting in the shade of a large nearby oak tree on warmer ones. In recent years, picking-session participants have made effective use of the Internet to communicate with each other about music-related matters. Several online mail lists share information about specific regions and the picking sessions that happen there, and numerous websites announce and espouse community picking sessions. For example, Pickin’ in the Park—a trademarked entity licensed by Pickin’ in the Park, LLC—is a national membership organization of community-based picking sessions. With headquarters in Georgia, Pickin’ in the Park offers guidance to communities that want to establish their own locally based acoustic picking sessions. They offer a handbook with tips for getting started and a companion CD-ROM with standard artwork and templates for signage, posters, stationery, press releases, sponsor pitches, and even website design. Currently active Pickin’ in the Park chapters exist in Americus, McCaysville, and Summerville, Ga.; North Augusta, S.C.; and several locations outside the South. Anyone interested in observing or participating in a community picking session should have little trouble finding one. A good place to start is a local music store, particularly the kind that sells stringed instruments. An inquiry here will almost always provide one or more leads to local picking sessions.

FRED C. FUSSELL Buena Vista, Georgia Timothy Duffy, North Carolina Folklore Journal (Winter–Spring 1990); Fred C. Fussell, Blue Ridge Music Trails: Finding a Place in the Circle (2003); North Carolina Arts Council, Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Blue Ridge Institute & Museum of Ferrum College, “Blue Ridge Music Trails,” <www.blueridgemusic.org>; “Pickin’ in the Park,” <www.curmudgeoncafe.com/pickinthepark>.

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Pottery What distinguishes folk pottery from ceramics mass-produced with machines and molds or made by school-trained studio potters is that it is handcrafted in a locally based tradition of designs and methods learned in a family or apprenticeship setting. Fire-hardened clay vessels for storing and processing food and drink were indispensable in American life before affordable glass, metal, and plastic containers became available. This was especially true for the South, where the warm climate made food preservation even more critical. With the region’s modernization, folk pottery is no longer essential for survival, but it is still being made after becoming extinct as a tradition in other parts of the country. Most colonial pottery was earthenware, made from coarse-grained, redbrown clay and lead-glazed as in Britain and Germany, the main sources of the Euro-American pottery tradition. In the South, production of this early “redware” was especially prevalent in Virginia and North Carolina, some of it going beyond the utilitarian with decoration in contrasting colors of slip (liquid clay). However, by the time the southern interior was being heavily settled in the early 19th century, stoneware—a tougher product made from a purer, higherfiring clay—was becoming the dominant medium for traditional ceramics. Throughout the North and Upper South, stoneware was glazed the European way by throwing salt in the kiln at the height of firing to create a clear, orange-skin-textured coating of glass over the gray or tan clay, and it was routinely decorated with cobalt oxide that fires to a deep blue color. Salt-glazed stoneware was made sporadically in the Deep South but seldom was cobalt decorated. Instead, it often displays unintentional surface irregularities (brick drips, melted ash blown from the wood fuel, and puddled salt deposits) caused by firing in the regional type of kiln. In the late 1800s, two other glazes were introduced from outside the South: Albany slip, a smooth, brown clay glaze mined in the Hudson Valley near Albany, N.Y.; and feldspar-based Bristol glaze formulated in England, also smooth and colored white with zinc oxide. A fourth type of stoneware glaze, unknown in the North, has been used by folk potters from the western Carolinas to east Texas. Known to researchers as alkaline glaze, it is applied, like the latter two types, as a solution before firing. It employs slaked wood ashes or lime to help melt the other ingredients (sand and clay), producing colors in the green or brown range and sometimes a runny texture. Unlike the others, this distinctly regional glaze uses materials at hand that cost nothing. It was developed in the old Edgefield District of west-central South Carolina in about 1815, probably inspired by published accounts of similar glazes in the Far East (the only other part of the world where high-firing POTTERY

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Cheever Meaders of Mossy Creek, Ga., in many ways exemplifies the transformation of southern vernacular pottery in the 20th century. Meaders learned the trade from his father, making utilitarian wares for local use. Prohibition, the growing availability of inexpensive, nonpottery storage containers, and the Depression put most regional potteries out of business, but Meaders held on, determined to keep making pots. His persistence proved wise, as the demand for pottery (albeit largely for decorative use) steadily increased in the latter half of the century. Since his passing, his children, grandchildren, and other family members have kept the family tradition alive. This 1957 image shows Meaders with a variety of his wares, most of which were not “burned” enough to properly melt the glaze. (Photo by Kenneth Rogers, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution; from John A. Burrison, Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery [1983])

alkaline glazes are well known). From 1840 to 1855, three Edgefield workshops decorated their alkaline-glazed stoneware with white and dark brown slips, a technique adapted from European and early American earthenware. Edgefield also was notable for the large number of enslaved African Americans involved in the craft. The best known, David Drake (who incised his signature as “Dave,” his master’s initials, the date, and his own poems in the damp clay), produced some of the largest pieces of American folk pottery, including food-storage jars with a capacity of 40 gallons. Perhaps because of its dependence on slave labor, the Edgefield tradition declined after the Civil War, but its influence continued in the alkaline-glazed stoneware of North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas after Edgefield-trained potters migrated westward. A characteristic southern vessel type is the large, two-handled syrup jug, used to store the cane syrup made by farmers as an alternative to expensive sugar. Ceramic grave markers, dating mainly from the 1870s through the 1920s, also seem to have arisen out of economic necessity in lieu of expensive stone; either wheel-thrown or made as a clay slab, they are concentrated in the region bounded by Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and east Texas. Besides the cobalt decoration of the Upper South and the slip decoration of Edgefield, other stoneware decorative techniques include the placing of broken bottle glass on rims and handles to melt in contrasting streaks in the kiln (done mainly in North Carolina’s Catawba Valley), the addition of an iron-bearing mineral to darken the glaze, and the sculpting of faces or full figures on otherwise useful vessels. Certain aspects of production technology also are specific to the South, such as the wood-fueled, rectangular kilns (pronounced with a silent n, as “kill”) with their firebox at one end, chimney at the other, and arched ceiling. Northern kilns, by contrast, were round (beehive or bottle shaped). The place-name “Jugtown” for at least six communities testifies both to the importance of whiskey jugs in the South and the potters’ inclination to settle in clusters, many of which were located in the Piedmont near suitable clay. These rural pottery-making centers were dominated by key families who led the way in shaping identifiable local ceramic styles. A few of these families, such as the Browns, Coles, and Cravens, can be traced as potters for more than eight generations and are still active today. Those not born into such families often became potters after marrying into them, and members of different “clay clans” tended to marry one another, thus consolidating pottery dynasties. Family-based transmission of the clay-working skills (as opposed to the formal apprenticeship more common elsewhere) may be tied to the centrality of the kin group and agrarian life characteristic of the region. Folk pottery has been POTTERY

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practiced not as a hobby but as a way of supplementing a farming income or even as a full-time business. Prohibition and a decline in home food production lowered demand for folk pottery in the early 1900s. Rather than abandon clay work, some traditionally trained potters began making unglazed garden pottery or colorful artistic pieces and tablewares geared to a more affluent market. In some cases, the offspring of these transitional potters continue to make a good living at the trade today, while a once diminishing, now growing number of folk potters in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama remain faithful to the older tradition but, in catering to urban collectors, tend to emphasize more decorative wares. And a centuries-old Native American tradition of coil-built, pit-fired earthenware still lives among Catawba and Cherokee potters of the Carolinas (if not as vital as the Southwest’s Pueblo tradition). As the last stronghold of American folk pottery, as in other realms of folk culture, the South can be seen as a region in which old ways die hard.

JOHN A. BURRISON Georgia State University Cinda K. Baldwin, Great and Noble Jar: Traditional Stoneware of South Carolina (1993); Thomas John Blumer, Catawba Indian Pottery: The Survival of a Folk Tradition (2004); Joey Brackner, Alabama Folk Pottery (2006); John A. Burrison, Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery (1983; 1995); H. E. Comstock, The Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region (1994); Georgeanna H. Greer, American Stonewares: The Art and Craft of Utilitarian Potters (1981); Mark Hewett and Nancy Sweezy, The Potter’s Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery (2005); Charles R. Mack, Talking with the Turners: Conversations with Southern Folk Potters (2006); Nancy Sweezy, Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition (1984; 1994); Eliot Wigginton and Margie Bennett, eds., Foxfire 8 (1984); Charles G. Zug III, Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina (1986).

Powwows Powwows—a public and performative version of American Indian dance culture that began in the American West in the early 20th century—first appeared in the South in the 1960s and quickly came to serve a number of purposes. Tribes across the region grafted the highly popular powwow dancing onto extant community practices as a way of reinforcing local tribal and community traditions. Powwow dancing also encouraged innovative ways of demonstrating Native American heritage and culture, innovations that were especially attractive to a rising generation of Indian youth who longed for cultural expressions 196

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that they could claim as their own. The new forms of dance clothing, music, and performance that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, in turn, called attention to the powwow’s role as a vehicle for intertribal sharing. Powwow culture “brought people together,” recalled the late Derek Lowrey, a Tuscarora from Pembroke, N.C. “And we saw a commonality we hadn’t seen before. There was a cohesiveness created by powwows, especially between the generations.” Ray Littleturtle, a Lumbee who is also from Pembroke, observed that “powwow[s] pulled all of these communities together, and all of a sudden we had some new bridges to one another.” Powwow culture also served needs that extended its influence far beyond the world of dances and outfits. The emergence of the region’s first powwows coincided with renewed efforts to establish political and cultural boundaries that emphasized support for self-determination and cultural autonomy. When North Carolina enforced federal desegregation mandates in the mid-1960s, for instance, it also ended the decades-long tradition of Indian-only schools in areas across the state. In the wake of this change, powwows became one of the ways by which communities could express their commitment to the shared cultural practices that set them apart from the non-Indian majority. In neighboring Virginia, the Monacans also recognized the utility of powwows as a way to ameliorate the corrosive effects of deeply entrenched racial antagonisms. The Monacan Powwow—first held in 1993—challenged the area’s racial history by attracting the enthusiastic support of the non-Indian population and giving Monacans a rare forum for public self-presentation. It “demonstrates . . . our pride in who we are,” noted one tribal member. “It gives us a chance to show ourselves off in a good light to the county and surrounding areas.” Powwows also serve the avowedly political purpose of reminding outsiders that tribes are legitimate political entities. Since the 1960s, as one tribe after another has struggled to gain state and federal recognition, powwows have become an important vehicle for establishing claims to tribally specific cultural practices. By the 1980s, tribes across the South were using powwows as powerful public forums for presenting themselves to the non-Indian world. Doing so not only conferred legitimacy on the powwow as a civic and community event but also attracted the attention of non-Indian political leaders. Indeed, in a move that suggests the degree to which tribes have consciously used powwows to gain political leverage, organizers of Alabama’s 1983 Poarch Creek Powwow broadcast a congratulatory phone call from Alabama governor George Wallace over the entire powwow grounds. In North Carolina, the 1971 creation of the state Commission of Indian Affairs and the rise of powwow culture were, in the words of ethnomusicologist Chris Goertzen, “complimentary (and often exPOWWOWS

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Singers with a northern-style drum group gather around the drum at a 1993 powwow in Richmond, Va. As they sing, participants from a range of both southern and northern tribes (many in their dance regalia), as well as some non-Indian visitors, gather to listen. At least two of these listeners (both on the left) are holding up small recorders to catch the singing. Such recordings are now one of the principal ways that powwow singers learn new songs, with singers often moving from drum group to drum group with recorder in hand. (Photograph copyright Mark Wagoner)

plicitly linked) responses to the assault on community by integration—which was itself not a force acting alone, but a large last straw.” Indian interest in gaining formal and informal recognition also extended to urban areas; by the early 1970s, urban Indian associations in cities like Charlotte, Richmond, Baltimore, and Memphis were sponsoring powwows designed in part to call attention to their status as culturally unique groups. Goertzen notes that two decades later, “nearly all North Carolina Indian communities and intertribal organizations cultivate the powwow as their main, distinctively Indian public group experience.” North Carolina’s 2001 powwow calendar listed almost 50 such gatherings in that state alone, a figure that accurately reflects the situation across the South. One reason that southern powwows have become so popular is that they promote images and practices that Indians and non-Indians alike recognize as legitimate markers of Native American identity. Powwow artist Joe Liles has observed that “the powwow is completely independent of non-Indian society. [Local] tribes relate to it as totally theirs, even though it’s borrowed from other 198 POWWOWS

tribes. Indian people have always used outside cultural things to solidify their culture—schools, churches, [and] gospel singing, for example—but these are all tied to non-Indians. The powwow isn’t.” Clothing, forms of gathering, ritual, and public rhetoric all mark the powwow as distinctively Indian. Hence, when Dovie Ramsey—a Monacan from Virginia—wears dance clothing that clearly identifies her as a member of a specific nation and region, she does so as an affirmation of identity and heritage: “That was our grandmothers that wore the long dresses, you know. . . . And I think it best reflects your respect for them.” Southern powwow culture freely blends local and regional practices with traditions borrowed from Plains tribes. Clothing, singing, dance steps, and ritual all reflect this singular combination, yielding a powwow world firmly rooted in southern native cultures. In the South, for instance, contest powwows tend to predominate; even noncontest powwows are preoccupied with “exhibition” dancing that dictates the pace and structure of sessions. And unlike at Plains powwows, where dance sessions run from beginning to end without interruption, many southern dance sessions routinely include lengthy breaks when spectators are encouraged to patronize vendors and traders, who do a brisk business in food, crafts, trinkets, and dream catchers. Dance styles and clothing also combine current Plains powwow fashions with regionally distinct adaptations. Men’s fancy dance, grass dance, and northern traditional dance—and women’s fancy shawl, cloth dress, and jingle dress—are all quite popular in the South, though the southern versions of these Plainsbased dances tend to reflect local traditions and practices. Regional powwows increasingly feature men wearing southeastern-style turbans, bandolier bags, sashes, cloth leggings, and center-seam moccasins, while women who wear the cloth dress style often display regionally distinctive embroidery and design motifs. Song traditions offer an even more obvious example of borrowing and innovation. Although the overwhelming majority of southern drum groups carefully adhere to the patterns and styles of Plains powwow song genres, they are gradually adding songs that contain lyrics from tribal languages native to the South. These many combinations and innovations give southern powwows a regional flair that sets them distinctly apart from their Plains counterparts.

CLYDE ELLIS Elon University Clyde Ellis, in Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism, ed. Celeste Ray (2003); Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter, and Gary Dunham, eds., Powwow (2005); Chris Goertzen, Ethnomusicology (Winter 2001); Patricia Barker Lerch, Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for POWWOWS

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Survival (2004); Patricia Barker Lerch and Susan Bullers, Human Organization (Winter 1996); Christopher Arris Oakley, Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004 (2005).

Public Folklife Programs Currently there are some 50 public folklife programs scattered throughout the South. Operating on the local, state, and regional levels, these programs— staffed by dozens of professional folklorists—are engaged full time in collecting, documenting, disseminating, and celebrating the folk cultural expressions of the South. Their activities include exhibitions, festivals, publications, recordings, concerts, conferences/seminars, education programs, apprenticeships, media productions, and recognition award programs. Nearly all of these programs have come into existence since the 1970s, the result of actions by various federal agencies and of initiatives by local, state, and regional organizations. In anticipation of the nation’s 1976 Bicentennial celebration, the American public increasingly came to perceive folklife as a tangible, living legacy of the American historical experience. The Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife, directed by Ralph Rinzler, had fostered increased awareness of the nation’s folk cultural expressions since 1967. In 1973 the National Endowment for the Arts (established by Congress in 1965) hired Alan Jabbour to direct its newly created Folk Arts Program, providing for the first time a grants budget dedicated specifically to funding public folklife activities. Three years later, after several years of lobbying by folklorist Archie Green, Congress created the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Also in 1976, in celebration of the Bicentennial, the Smithsonian expanded its Festival of American Folklife to a summerlong extravaganza on the National Mall. Meanwhile, in the South, William Ferris and Judy Peiser founded the private, nonprofit, Memphis-based Center for Southern Folklore in 1972. In its early years, the center achieved regional and national recognition for its documentary films, many of which focused on the folk traditions of Mississippi. While dozens of libraries, schools, arts councils, museums, and other organizations in the South had produced a range of public folklife projects, the Center for Southern Folklore was the first organization dedicated exclusively to such activity. In 1974, with grant support from the newly created Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission became the first state arts agency to create a public folklife program; they hired Linda White as the program’s first director. This particular initiative was short-lived,

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however, and the Tennessee Arts Commission would go some eight years without a program before its renewal in 1984. In 1976 the Florida Folklife Program was established, when Al Head—director of the Stephen Foster Center, a state park operating within the office of the Florida secretary of state—hired Peggy Bulger as the director of Florida’s newly created public folklife program. Two years later, Head played much the same role in Louisiana, where he served as director of that state’s Division of Arts; there, he hired Nick Spitzer to direct Louisiana’s new folklife office. After a successful folklorist-in-the-schools residency in 1976, Alabama created its own folklife program the following year, hiring Hank Willett as director and establishing the office within the Alabama State Council on the Arts. In North Carolina, in turn, a large and successful Bicentennial state folklife festival led to the creation of the Office of Folklife Programs, under the direction of George Holt; this program eventually came under the umbrella of the North Carolina Arts Council. In 1977 Bess Lomax Hawes became director of the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), replacing Alan Jabbour, who had vacated that position to become director of the newly created American Folklife Center. Hawes made the creation and maintenance of state public folklife programs a cornerstone of her 15-year tenure at the NEA. With a modest grants budget and a tireless spirit of persuasion, she energetically pursued the goal of establishing a public folklife program in every state in the nation. To Hawes, state arts agencies—which had an ongoing, historical relationship with the NEA—seemed the most logical hosts for state public folklife programs. The South in particular had proven itself fertile ground for the establishment of such programs. In 1978 Hawes and her staff organized a meeting in Washington, D.C., of the directors of the nation’s eight state public folklife programs. Five of these programs were located in the South; four of these five, in turn, were within state arts agencies. This pattern of arts-agency sponsorship, however, was not the case across the South. Some state arts agencies, working with limited budgets and established groups of mainstream arts constituents, were reluctant to broaden their mission to include folklife. Many other such agencies devoted their resources almost exclusively to the awarding of grants. Public folklife programs, however, were more proactive. Operating without extant networks of incorporated constituent organizations, they produced festivals, exhibitions, concerts, music tours, and other programs. Many southern state arts agencies were uncomfortable with the idea of such production.

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Kentucky established its first public folklife program in the state performing arts center in Louisville. South Carolina, in turn, located its initial program within the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina. Georgia’s first program was hosted by its state humanities endowment, as was Virginia’s. And in Mississippi, the state’s folklife program migrated from state public television to the state arts commission and the state museum before landing back at the arts commission. In their early years, many of the South’s public folklife programs had trouble meshing their missions with the missions of their host agencies. Supported by fragile funding, they faced uncertain futures. Hawes and her colleagues in the region spent as much time attempting to shore up existing programs as they did trying to initiate new ones. The rapidly growing public folklife programs in the South and the nation also met with some opposition from segments of the academic folklore establishment, who argued that the purity of scholarship suffered when public folklorists—working at the behest of government agencies—produced public folklife programs. In 1978 this concern stimulated lively, and sometimes rancorous, debate in the South when the American Folklife Center entered into negotiations with the Interagency Archaeological Services (Department of the Interior) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over a proposed folklife survey of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway area in Alabama and Mississippi. Though the debate never came to a definitive resolution, the board and director of the American Folklife Center decided against joining the project, in part because of significant pressure from academic members of the American Folklore Society. The appropriate functions and activities of the newly emergent public folklife programs in the South continued to be the subject of lively discussion and debate for years to come. At the November 1977 meeting of the American Folklore Society, Camilla Collins and Burt Feintuch—faculty members of the Center for Intercultural and Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University—organized an open forum entitled “Toward a Professional Association for Folklorists in the South.” This forum resulted in a loosely organized association and a newsletter devoted largely to the activities of southern public folklife programs. It also stimulated the early planning for a “Conference on Folklore and the Public Sector,” organized by Feintuch and Collins and convened at Western Kentucky University in April 1979. The following year, the Kentucky Folklore Record published a special issue containing 14 of the papers from this conference, making this the first publication devoted exclusively to analyzing the work of public folklorists. Soon thereafter, Alabama and Florida hosted their own statewide conferences 202 PUBLIC FOLKLIFE PROGRAMS

on public folklife. In 1981 Peggy Bulger, working with the Southern Arts Federation, organized the “Southeastern Regional Conference on Folklore in the Public Sector,” held in Atlanta. In 1987 Bess Lomax Hawes, Adrian King (then director of the Southern Arts Federation), and Hank Willett (then the NEA’s regional representative to the southern states) met in Washington, D.C., to plan a conference of public folklorists working in the South. The result was the first Folklorists-in-the-South (FITS) Retreat, held in 1988. Participants at the retreat recommended that the Southern Arts Federation develop a full-time public folklife program. The following year, the Southern Arts Federation, with assistance from the NEA, hired Bulger to direct the nation’s first folklife program in a regional organization of state arts agencies. The Southern Arts Federation’s FITS retreat recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Beginning with slow, tentative development in the 1970s, public folklife programs have grown to become highly visible fixtures on the cultural landscape of the South. In the process, they have brought local, regional, national, and international exposure and recognition to scores of southern traditions, artists, and culture bearers.

HENRY WILLETT Public Folklorist, Montgomery, Alabama Robert Byington, in Public Folklore, ed. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer (2007); Charles Camp, “Survey of Current State and Local Public Folklife Programs,” American Folklore Society (1978); Burt Feintuch, The Conservation of Culture: Folklore and the Public Sector (1988); Archie Green, in Public Folklore, ed. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer (2007); Jon Kay, “A Survey and Analysis of Regional Traditional Arts Programs and Services,” Southern Arts Federation (2001); Kentucky Folklore Record 26, nos. 1 and 2 (1980); Henry Willett, “A Survey of Public Folk Cultural Programs,” American Folklore Society (1984; 1986; 1989).

Quilting, African American Many African American quilts are characterized by strips, bright colors, large designs, multiple patterns, asymmetry, and improvisation, all design principles with roots in African textile techniques and cultural traditions. The antecedents of contemporary African textiles and African American quilts developed in Africa over 1,000 years ago. The actual links between African and African American textile traditions occurred from 1650 to 1850, when Africans were brought to the United States from areas that are now Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana, the Republic of Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic QUILTING, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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of Congo, and Angola. When they came to the Americas, African women and their descendants combined African textile traditions with various AngloAmerican and Native American quilting traditions, creating unique, creolized arts—African American quilts. Their combined ideas were passed down from generation to generation, thus preserving both African textile traditions and many unique African American improvisations. African American quilt tops are made by either sewing pieces of cloth together (piecing) or sewing cutout shapes onto a larger fabric (appliqué). These tops are then sewn to an inner padding and a bottom cloth (quilting). All of these techniques were known in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States, yet many African American quilts are profoundly different from their European or Anglo-American counterparts. In West African textiles and in some African American quilts, strips are a dominant design element as well as a chief construction technique. For centuries in West Africa, most cloth was constructed from strips woven on small, portable looms by men working in professional guilds. Long narrow strips are sewn together to make larger fabrics for clothing or for display as wall hangings and banners. Hand-woven strips were also once a form of currency in Africa. Euro-American quilters sometimes use strips as well as one of many available geometric patterns. The bold colors and large designs in many African American quilts derive from the communicative function of textiles in Africa, where such colors and designs serve as indicators of social status, wealth, occupation, and history. Typically worn on ceremonial occasions, African textiles with bright colors elicited a more formal greeting than everyday denim and white cotton cloth. The strong contrasting colors that characterized these prestigious African textiles ensured a cloth’s readability at a distance in strong sunlight and thus served as clues to a proper greeting. In the Americas, African American women mastered a whole range of quiltmaking styles—from quilts that rely on careful piecing and symmetry to ones that feature improvisation and asymmetry—using colors that range from pastels to bright hues. Some women continue to piece together contrasting colors and values to create dramatic effects. Quilt-top patterns often feature large designs that are easily read while walking or riding by clotheslines full of clothing and quilts. Many African American quilters speak of “colors hitting each other right.” These quilts are best seen from a distance, in contrast to other African American quilts that are meant to be inspected in intimate settings. In West Africa, when woven strips are sewn together to make a larger fabric, the resulting cloth can have asymmetrical and unpredictable designs. An asym204

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This striking variation on a traditional logcabin pattern aptly illustrates the dynamic patterning and improvisatory spirit that characterize many African American quilts. The quilt’s asymmetrical strips—shifting freely in width, pattern, and fabric—challenge the eye to slow down and follow the flow, lending a sense of playful movement to the overall design. This quilt was created by Mozell Benson from Opelika, Ala., who learned to quilt from her mother and has continued to create masterful quilts throughout her adult life. In 2001 the National Endowment for the Arts honored Ms. Benson with a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor for excellence in the traditional arts. (Photograph by Maude Southwell Wahlman)

metrical arrangement of strips—a preferred aesthetic—was harder to create and thus was typically designed by older master male weavers. Many African American quilters retained this preference for asymmetry; lines, designs, and colors often do not match up but instead vary with a persistence that goes beyond a possible lack of cloth in any color or pattern. Skilled quilters make quilts with asymmetrical, improvisational designs. Another feature shared by African textiles and African American quilts is multiple patterning. In Africa, multiple patterns are important in royal and priestly fabrics, where the number and complexity of patterns decorating a fabric increase in accordance with the owner’s status. A cloth woven for a king or priest might include up to 30 patterns. Multiple-patterned cloth—made on commission by the oldest and best male weavers—communicates the prestige, power, and wealth of the wearer. While contemporary African American quilts do not communicate an owner’s status, they do retain this aesthetic preference for mixing patterns. Multiple patterning is a unique aesthetic mastered by quilters who save their favorite materials to use in many quilts. African American quilters also maintained an African preference for improvisation. Black quilters often take traditional Euro-American quilt patterns and then create variations on the dominant theme, establishing a pattern in QUILTING, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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one square and improvising upon it in successive ones. These African American quilt squares often change in size, arrangement, and color. Although African American quilters can and do create Euro-American patterns, they also maintain—through improvisation—African principles of multiple patterning, asymmetry, and unpredictable rhythms and tensions similar to those found in such other African American arts as blues, jazz, black English, and dance. Multiple patterning, for instance, has its equivalent in African American music, where the improvisations, or variations on a theme, are central to both jazz and blues. Art scholar Robert Farris Thompson even suggests that improvisational African and African American textiles can be read as music by looking for the “notes”—the bright spots of color. Appliqué is another sewing technique known in West Africa and remembered in the Americas. With bold appliquéd shapes, African cultures record court histories, religious values, and personal histories of famous individuals, using forms symbolizing balance, composure, courage, leadership, power, skill, and wisdom. Fon men, for example, have long made appliquéd banners to record royal Fon history in the Republic of Benin. While Euro-American appliquéd quilts are usually decorative, African American appliquéd quilts often tell stories and express ideas in the same manner as African appliquéd textiles. African American women, for instance, have long made appliquéd quilts to record historic events and/or to teach biblical stories. The most famous such textiles were made by Georgia quilter Harriet Powers in 1886 and 1896; they show scenes from the Bible, chronicle local historic events, and display symbols from Christian, Fon, Kongo, and Masonic traditions. With iconography drawn from their imaginations, from black culture, and from American popular culture (including magazines, television, and even cereal boxes), African American quilters have appliquéd textiles that illustrate the diverse influences that shape their lives in the United States. In the 19th century, multiple patterning, asymmetrical arrangements, and appliqué facilitated the hiding of secret signs that could be read by people traveling with the Underground Railroad. Oral histories recount that some families would put quilts in windows and on clotheslines as a way to communicate safe directions and safe houses. Log-cabin patterns, for example, might feature a red or black center to indicate a safe house. Nine-patch and flyinggeese patterns, in turn, could be coded with directional signs, easily hidden in the improvisational aesthetic tradition. Throughout West Africa, people have long believed that when a person dies, the body will disappear but the energy of the soul will remain to advise and

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protect descendants. In Nigeria this belief took material form in the concept of four eyes—for physical and spiritual, or ancestral, vision. This idea reappears in African American quilt-top patterns as four circles, or as variations of this theme (as in the quilt that Mississippi quilter Pecolia Warner calls Four Eyes of the Stove). Four eyes are a symbol of protection. Diamonds—in quilt patterns, on graves, or on the sides of houses—were also associated with protective ancestral powers and can be traced back to Kongo religious beliefs, from Central Africa, in the four moments of the soul: birth, life, death, and rebirth. African Americans hid these and a variety of other signs (often derived from secret African scripts) in graveyards, protective yard arts, and textiles. Some African American quilts also incorporate African charm traditions. In West Africa, religious writing is often enclosed in small, square charms, made from red leather, red cloth, or metal. Many West Africans wear these charms around the neck to ward off “evil spirits” (the energies of ancestors who are not honored or have no descendants to remember them). In the United States, this tradition takes the form of small, square red charms called “mojos” or “hands” (as in a “helping hand”). Historically, many southern African Americans kept a mojo in their pocket or wore it around their neck as protection from disease. When red squares appear in African American quilts (as they often do), they frequently refer to African American protective mojos, the helping hands of the ancestors. Mississippi quilter Sara Mary Taylor, for instance, made a “mermaid” quilt that shows both the small, square red charm and a blue hand touching it, indicating her knowledge of this charm tradition. Some African American quilts are explicitly made for protection; such quilts often incorporate symbolic designs and multiple patterns that are purposefully complicated so that “evil spirits” would have to read them all before they could do any harm. This tradition employs the same reasoning as the widespread southern practice of papering walls with newsprint; both derive from the protective power of writing inside West African charms. Another protective tradition found in African American quilts draws its inspiration from the Kongo peoples of Central Africa. The Kongo people make charms—which they call Nkisi—out of ceramic, wood, or cloth and then enclose in them “Medicines of God,” magical ingredients chosen for their names (which can be puns for verbs of action), their visual forms, or their symbolic values. The cloth charms, often red, are tied with twine or rope. Priests or priestesses make charms for clients who come to them with emotional, financial, physical, or political problems. The charms are activated by ancestral energies to help descendants with luck, protection, and wisdom. QUILTING, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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African descendants in both North and South America remembered Kongo religious ideas and re-created the charms in many new forms. Haitian “Packet kongo” charms, for example, feature a small cloth bag, now decorated with ribbons, sequins, and feathers at the top (as in Africa) or with a crucifix to show the Catholic element in the curing Haitian vodou religion. With each charm representing a protective ancestral spirit, Packet kongo sometimes have arms and earrings. In the United States, analogous charms took the form of the vodou doll, often with pins used to activate the charm, just as nails activated large wooden Nkisi charms in Central Africa. Images of vodou dolls also show up in appliquéd quilt-top patterns, as in those made by Mississippi quilter Pearlie Posey and her daughter, Sara Mary Taylor. These quilters refer to them as “Dolly Dingle,” “Cowboy,” “Hunters,” or “Men” quilts. For generations, African Americans have made improvised and symmetrical quilts, quilts with encoded messages, and protective quilts with red mojolike squares or charmlike figures. Quilts are but one of many vehicles through which African Americans have creatively encoded cultural knowledge wherever they could; others include graveyard arts, architectural embellishments, painting, and yard sculpture. It has taken scholars over 100 years to learn how to read and decode this information. African American quilt making is inextricably linked to the thrift and industry that characterize black culture; many African American quilters grew up in a time when there was no social security and the only way to survive was to keep constantly busy. Fusing a range of textile traditions (African, EuroAmerican, and others), African American quilt making is unique in the South and in America. By maintaining and expanding their distinctive aesthetic, African American quilters demonstrate the strength of African and other cultural traditions in contemporary American society, affirming the extraordinary tenacity of African American ideas over hundreds of years in the face of major historical obstacles. Practiced today all over the United States, this vital aspect of the nation’s artistic and cultural heritage must be recognized and celebrated so that it can be promoted and preserved in the future. A new chapter in this long-standing history will record the influence that African American improvisatory quilt making has had on contemporary American artists. Academically trained African American women such as Nedra Bonds, Carolyn Mazloomi, Faith Ringgold, and Sonni Ruffin incorporate and reinvent ancestral quilting styles in their contemporary textile arts. Anglo-American textile artists, such as Missouri’s Sun Smith-Foret, also draw inspiration from African American improvisational aesthetics and the African tradition of protective scripts. And the Kansas City filmmaker-philosopher 208

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Reginald Duke Gant says that his films have been inspired by the individualism seen in African American quilts.

MAUDE SOUTHWELL WAHLMAN University of Missouri at Kansas City Cuesta Benberry, Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts (1992); Roland Freeman, A Communion of the Spirits: African American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories (1996); Gladys-Marie Fry, Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South (1990); Eli Leon, Accidentally on Purpose: The Aesthetic Management of Irregularities in African Textiles and African-American Quilts (2007); Carolyn Mazloomi, Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts (1998); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983), Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (1993; 2001); Maude Southwell Wahlman, in Self-Taught Art in America, ed. Charles Russell (2001).

Quilting, Historically White Quilted items such as bed coverings, curtains, and clothing—all of which have a long history in Great Britain—came to America with the colonists. Along with these items came quilting skills, a variety of patchwork patterns, and quilt styles that changed over time. Coming to the South from the northern states, as well as from England and Scotland, the practice of quilting flourished in the land where cotton was king. Most traditional quilts in the South consist of three bound layers: a top of appliquéd or pieced patchwork; a cotton, polyester, or occasionally wool batting; and a lining or backing. The layers are held together with “quilting” (a hand- or machine-sewn running stitch) or with “tacking” (a heavy thread or yarn run at intervals through the layers and knotted). Less common are two-layered quilts, such as the historic Victorian “Crazy” quilts (which usually have no batting), and other novelty “quilts” such as the “Cathedral Window,” “Yo-Yo,” and “Pine Cone.” Today quilt making continues to be one of the most prolific art forms in the South, with traditional quilters, revivalists, and fiber artists continuing regional folk traditions, following national trends, and creating their own innovative designs. Many folklorists make a distinction between traditional and revivalist quilters. Traditional quilters learn their craft informally—by observation, imitation, and oral tradition—from family or neighbors, who pass along their community standards and aesthetic preferences. Revivalists usually learn from books, guild workshops, and formal classes, as well as from other members of QUILTING, HISTORICALLY WHITE

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Maybeth Wilson quilts her patchwork quilts on frames hanging from the high ceiling of her bedroom—a traditional quilting technique. After marrying in 1945, she moved from Oregon to Marion, La., bringing with her the quilting skills she had learned from her family. Ms. Wilson made quilts to use as bedcovers for her six children and has continued creating striking quilts in her later years. Like many quilters, she continues to learn newer quilting techniques, keeping up with this dynamic tradition. (Photograph by Susan Roach, 1984)

their quilting guilds. Not surprisingly, some traditional quilters today are influenced by the prolific quilting guilds across the South, in which women new to the art learn contemporary quilt-making techniques now being popularized in the latest revival of interest in quilting. Before we can arrive at a definitive list of the characteristic features of southern quilts, further analysis of quilts from across the country is necessary. Some general contrasts, however, are apparent. Traditional southern Anglo/ScotsIrish quilts, with their bright or pastel printed fabrics and intricate geometric patchwork patterns, contrast sharply with the bold, dark solids and simple large-scale patterns of Amish quilts and the bright solid colors of Pennsylvania German quilts. Although southern quilters strive for precise piecing of favorite complex patterns and tiny, close quilting stitches, they do not as often favor the elaborate quilting motifs of hearts, plumes, and florals so common in Pennsylvania German quilts. Southern quilts also stand apart in the names given to their patterns; the regional names of these patterns frequently do not follow

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those published in pattern compilations such as Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns (1993). Some scholars (for example, Maude Southwell Wahlman) have argued that major differences separate African American and historically white southern quilts. Other scholars (including Laurel Horton, Mary Anne McDonald, Susan Roach, and Anita Zaleski Weinraub) have found fewer differences between the quilts of these two groups, especially in quilts intended for everyday use. Many of the characteristics often attributed to African American quilt making—strip quilts, high-contrast colors, and improvisation—also appear in quilts from historically white communities. Indeed, many quilts made by southern African Americans are indistinguishable from those made by their white counterparts. Quilt researcher Faun Valentine, whose work focuses on West Virginia, has theorized a distinctive aesthetic for Scots-Irish American quilts. Yet before definitive aesthetic profiles can be determined for the South’s various cultural communities, additional comparative research is necessary. Since many documented quilts do not have complete information on their makers’ ethnicity, and since so many quilt makers have been influenced by the aesthetics of different groups, such determination may be difficult. Quilt types in the South have varied with the times; the socioeconomic status, location, and aesthetic standards of the makers; and the intended use of the quilt. In the early days of quilt making in the United States and England, women quilted more for leisure than out of necessity. In the southern colonies, fabrics for early quilts included imported silks and Indian cotton. By the 1840s, however, printed cotton fabrics from New England textile mills were becoming more popular. When textile mills moved into the southern states, fabric became more widely available, though it was still expensive. For settlers moving into new territory across the unsettled southern states, domestic goods and fabric were scarce, making quilting more of a subsistence craft. Although quilters have long bought at least some of their fabric, much traditional southern quilt making has been a salvage craft. In earlier years, fabrics included homespun, worn clothing, muslin flour and sugar sacks, tobacco sacks, and cotton-print feed sacks (especially in the 1920s–40s), as well as sewing remnants collected from the home and from family, friends, and neighbors. Now, fabrics also come from garage sales and clothing and textile factories. Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, trendy synthetic polyester fabrics and polyester batting became popular with some traditional quilt makers, although others—more affected by popular quilt revivals—used only cottons in coordinated colors for their quilt tops and linings and cotton batting in their quilts. QUILTING, HISTORICALLY WHITE

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Since quilts offered good insulation against the cold, damp winters of the South in the years before central heating, utilitarian quilts for “cover” became essential. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, cotton for batting was plentiful, even on small subsistence farms. But since fabric was scarce and expensive, quilt makers often made their simple “everyday” quilts from sewing scraps and recycled clothing. Patterns frequently used for these quilts include the “Nine Patch,” “Four Patch,” “Trip around the World” (also called “Step around the Mountain”), and a variety of strip and string layouts; all of these could be machine and/or hand pieced, and the string patterns might be machine pieced on a foundation of cloth or paper. Utilitarian quilts with block patterns often have a grid or “sashing” around the blocks. More complex patterns of stars, fans, and floral appliqués were also used in quilts made for everyday use. Today, traditional quilt makers in the South continue to make everyday quilts, though now families receiving these quilts tend to value them as heirlooms and include them in their home décor. Historically, more decorative “fancy” quilts with elaborate color-coordinated patterns and intricate quilting were made and valued by members of the wealthier classes (who, until the Civil War, sometimes assigned quilt-making tasks to enslaved women). The fact that many of the decorative quilts that have survived from the Civil War period have oral histories associated with them indicates the special regard in which they were held. Decorative quilts such as the “Whig’s Defeat” pattern were also made by working-class women, but in fewer numbers. Historic appliqué quilts with floral patterns such as the lily, tulip, “Rose of Sharon,” and “Whig Rose”—as well as other complex designs such as “Princess Feather”—survive and are sometimes still made today. Other past favorites include hexagon-based designs such as “Mosaic” or “Honeycomb.” Among the favorite patterns of the last century are “Grandmother’s Flower Garden,” “Double Wedding Ring,” and various star designs. Some traditional quilt makers hand sew their patterned quilt tops, especially the more decorative ones; however, many revivalist and traditional quilt makers, now as in the past, piece and quilt their quilts on the sewing machine (patented by Elias Howe in 1843). Today, while traditional southern quilters may still quilt by hand using wooden frames suspended from the ceiling or placed on chairs or “horses,” they also use commercial frames or small hoops. The majority of quilters hand quilt “by the piece,” stitching about one-fourth inch from the edge of each patchwork seam; a few quilters quilt “in the ditch,” running their stitches near or in the seam. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, quilters frequently quilted everyday quilts in an all-over pattern of con-

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centric semicircles called “shells” or the “Baptist fan.” Now some traditional quilt makers have moved away from quilting altogether and instead take their tops to other quilters or to shops specializing in machine quilting. Many contemporary quilters are turning to their own specialty sewing machines not only for piecing quilt tops but also for quilting; the machine quilting designs can be complex computer-generated repetitive patterns or individually designed and executed patterns, found more in art quilts. Public images of quilt making generally portray it as a group activity; however, traditional and contemporary quilt makers more often work alone, especially in piecing the quilt. Yet this is not always the case. In both urban and rural areas, senior citizens’ centers and women’s groups are reviving the oncepopular quilting bee. Some church-based women’s quilting groups continue to quilt tops for their members or the public and to make quilts for victims of fires and other disasters. Many contemporary quilt guilds are thriving in the South. Since such guilds are often connected through national organizations and quilt shows, they will likely have a homogenizing effect on regional and ethnic traditions; at the same time, however, they also serve to perpetuate the art form. Meeting monthly or more frequently, these guilds provide opportunities to share projects in showand-tell sessions, to learn specific quilt-making techniques, and to work on such group projects as organizing local quilt shows and making fund-raising quilts for community causes. Southern quilters, like those in other regions, have used quilts as a means of economic empowerment in various ways. Quilting circles and many individual quilters have quilted “for the public” to earn extra income. Church groups, women’s clubs, and guilds have all made quilts to raise money for various group or community causes. One long-standing (though now somewhat rare) means of fund-raising entails selling space for signatures on “signature,” “autograph,” or “subscription” quilts. Such quilts use various designs and include the names of subscribers written or embroidered in the blocks. While the signature-quilt tradition has almost disappeared, the practice of raffling quilts remains quite strong among groups ranging from quilt guilds to women’s clubs. In a typical raffle, group members will choose a quilt pattern and then each make a block; they then put the blocks together and quilt them. With raffle tickets selling for $1.00 each, sales of 3,000 tickets or more yield a substantial sum to donate to the group’s project or charity. While some church groups disapprove of fundraising raffles (regarding them as gambling), the quilt raffle remains a strong tradition in the South. Although quilts also are made for auctioning, this seems

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to be a less-common practice, probably because raffles generally raise more money than auctions. Even though quilts may not bring high auction prices at fund-raising events, southerners tend to value their quilts and hold their own—and their family’s— quilts in high esteem. In fact, many quilters will not sell their quilts, noting that they cannot get even minimum wage for their time. Perceiving their quilts as beyond pricing, many quilters would rather give them as gifts. As in the past, quilters still make quilts for family heirlooms or as gifts to mark occasions such as graduations, weddings, birthdays, and baby showers. Quilts made from family clothes and their remnants are cherished as scrapbooks of family life, functioning as multivalent symbols of love, family connections, and home. With quilts now valued as vital pieces of family heritage, families tend to keep them and pass them down, along with stories about their makers. Certainly, these sentiments about quilts have increased their symbolic value. Quilt documentation projects have also raised awareness of the value of this art form. Since the Kentucky Quilt Project in 1980—the first state quilt documentation project—many other southern states have hosted similar initiatives, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. These projects have yielded a range of state quilt books and, in the case of Louisiana, a website with a searchable database. Currently, the results of some of the state projects are being included in the National Quilt Index online database; this project will provide more accessible comparative data for in-depth analysis, especially in the case of Anglo/Scots-Irish quilts (which, in these state projects, are represented in higher numbers than those of other groups). Even though all of these projects have collected photographs and information on the form, history, and maker of each documented quilt, they have also had different emphases. For example, the Tennessee Quilt Project focused on quilts in the context of local history, while the Texas project documented quilts from the state’s first 100 years and then, in a later survey, the next 50 years (1936–86). States such as Mississippi limited their searches to quilts made before 1946, while Georgia and Louisiana included quilts made in any period. The Georgia Quilt Project cites the highest number of documented examples— nearly 10,000 old and new quilts—noting that these represent only a small percentage of the quilts in the state. The large numbers of quilts from the past and the tradition’s ongoing vitality indicate the importance of quilts and their symbolic nature in the South. The survival and proliferation of the quilting tradition may be attributed not only to a prevalent Protestant work ethic that abhors wasting materials and time, but 214

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also to the social, symbolic, and expressive functions of quilt making in maintaining community, family, and personal creativity.

SUSAN ROACH Louisiana Regional Folklife Program Louisiana Tech University Cuesta Benberry, Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts (1992); Barbara Brackman, Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns (1993); Ruth E. Finley, Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them (1929); Elaine Hedges, Pat Ferrero, and Julie Silber, Hearts and Hands: Women, Quilts, and American Society (1987); Laurel Horton, Quiltmaking in America: Beyond the Myths (1994), Mary Black’s Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life (2005); Mary Elizabeth Johnson, Mississippi Quilts (2001); Mary Anne MacDonald, in Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife, ed. Daniel Patterson and Charles Zug (1990); Bets Ramsey and Merikay Waldvogel, Southern Quilts: Surviving Relics of the Civil War (1999); Susan Roach, The Louisiana Quilt Documentation Project, <www.louisianafolklife .org/quilts> (2007), The Traditional Quiltmaking of North Louisiana Women: Form, Function, and Meaning (1986); Faun Valentine, West Virginia Quilts and Quiltmakers: Echoes from the Hills (2000); Maude Southwell Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (1993); Anita Zaleski Weinraub, ed., Georgia Quilts: Piecing Together a History (2006).

Religious Folklife Religious folklife is a person’s lived experience in the consciousness of an affecting sacred presence. This world of folklife finds expression in any of several worldviews, with performed ideas, behavior, and material objects taking on symbolic and allegorical meaning, bringing into harmony the natural, human, and divine. Santos, rosary beads, prayer rugs, the Koran, Zen koan, meditation, yarmulke, Hebrew school, yoga, and fasting are part and parcel of the religious folklife of the Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, and Hindu, while some Native Americans in the South practice traditional religious ceremonies interacting with the divine presence in the natural world. Because of space limitations, however, this essay will concentrate on religious folklife among Protestants in the South. It is meant to suggest main themes and commonalities within the many forms and expressions of southern religious folk culture rather than to cover everything. Southern religious life remains dominated by what religious historian Samuel S. Hill has termed “popular southern Protestantism,” with a BaptistMethodist hegemony that gives it a strong evangelical flavor and a personal RELIGIOUS FOLKLIFE

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emphasis. Conversion, colloquially termed being “born-again,” is the central episode in the believer’s experience; it follows conviction (a feeling of being condemned for one’s sins) and is followed by a life dedicated to Christ. Jesus as sacrificial savior and mediator between man and God takes on special importance, and a daily relationship to Jesus as a constant friend and comforter is maintained through prayer. Beneath the comparative solemnity of Presbyterian worship and the demonstrative Pentecostal meeting, Hill writes, the church members have much in common: orthodoxy of belief, natural piety, and biblical dogmatism. Regardless of class, educational level, occupation, race, or gender, the faithful share in the religious folklife of popular southern Protestantism. Awareness that life is lived in relation to Jesus, to God’s will and power, pervades daily experience; it is what urges the faithful to worship, to pray, and to witness for Christ in the presence of others. It shapes their perception of the world and constructs the values they feel they should live by, even when they themselves fall short in what they do. Living a Christ-conscious, religious life means living by one’s understanding of God’s will—what God would have one do. Moments of insight occur in many ways: reading the Bible alone or in the company of others (often with a teacher); hearing a sermon; listening to the testimony of another Christian; praying spontaneously; reflecting on one’s life and looking for allegorical patterns that reveal the working of God’s will (as in the path from sin to conviction to salvation); and, in certain persons at certain times, experiencing direct revelation—the impression of God’s thought on one’s mind—or the interpretation of divine symbols. The public expression of religious folklife can be found in youth groups, business breakfast meetings, gatherings of the faithful in churches and homes, and at school assemblies and sports events, among other places. Many powerful southern business leaders, sports celebrities, and politicians embrace this expression. Ex-president George W. Bush, and the (chiefly southern) born-again members of the Republican majority that ruled Congress from the mid-1990s into the early 21st century, exemplify it. It is useful to distinguish between this popular southern Protestantism and what folklorist William Clements has termed the “folk church,” whose defining characteristic is that it exists largely outside of society’s structures of economic and political power. Of course, religious folklife is to be found in both popular southern Protestantism and the southern folk church. Yet although the two share many features, they differ significantly in the expressive cultural forms of their religious folklife. Clements pointed to 10 traits that could usually be found in folk Protestant churches: scriptural literalism; orientation toward the past; consciousness of God’s providence in man’s affairs; and emphasis on 216

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A sense of deep intimacy with the divine is one of the key features of southern Protestantism. In many faith communities, believers experience this intimacy as the “touch” of the Holy Spirit, a holy “anointing” that transports believers to a place of spiritual rapture. In this 1996 image, Brother Samuel Bracey and his wife, Sister Mary Bracey, both “feel the Spirit” when they conclude a particularly powerful song set at the Long Branch Disciple Church in Newton Grove, N.C. (Photograph by Roland L. Freeman)

evangelism, informality, emotionalism, moral rigor, sectarianism, egalitarianism, and the comparatively isolated locations of church buildings (that is, isolated from official institutions such as banks, post offices, and “downtown” areas). Popular southern Protestantism shares many of these traits with the southern folk church, though not the latter’s orientation toward the past nor its marginality. Informality and emotionalism tend to be more intense in the southern folk church, while evangelism is directed primarily toward family, friends, and neighbors and not at the masses. The folk church is a small group and conducts its worship face-to-face among people who know one another. Popular southern Protestantism, in contrast, often includes larger groups, even megachurches; and it finds characteristic expression in televangelism, where large meetings are broadcast and the television viewer is at home experiencing a mediated rather than face-to-face relationship with the televangelist and congregation. Finally, whereas Samuel S. Hill suggests that popular southern Protestantism places great weight on baptism and far less on communion, the southern folk church emphasizes both sacraments; and when the folk church RELIGIOUS FOLKLIFE

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combines the taking of the communion bread and wine with foot washing and the annual homecoming service, it becomes the most powerful event in the church year. The performance style of the southern folk church is characterized by spontaneity and improvisation (led by the Spirit); by knowledge passed along from one person to the next by word of mouth; and by imitation rather than by formal instruction, apprenticeship, and schooling. The church buildings, usually plain and small, tend to be built by members of the community skilled in the construction trade; they have no need for architects or blueprints. Believers see the written word (as in the Bible, or the written words of a hymn) as but the tangible form of God’s presence; it is God’s felt presence that leads the singing, praying, preaching, and witnessing. Although doctrine and organizational bylaws are written down, official correspondence between churches is “by letter,” and the Bible gives the authority for many of the folk churches’ performance practices (such as speaking in tongues, baptism, foot washing, spontaneous collective prayer, and healing prayer with the laying on of hands), the way these performances proceed is guided by oral tradition. Lined-out, heterophonic, congregational hymn singing—prevalent among numerous African American Baptist congregations and a smaller number of white Old Regular Baptists— is a clear example of such oral tradition; this survival of a colonial-American performance style derives from the English parish church. Gospel quartets work out their parts by ear, sometimes with the help of trainers who sing for the others to imitate. Pentecostal congregations continue to sing 19th-century camp-meeting choruses; indeed, they continue camp meetings and tent revivals. The musical delivery of prayers and sermons may be traced both to traditional African performance practice and to the preachers’ and exhorters’ “holy whine” of the First and Second Great Awakenings. The congregation responds to this musical delivery with shouts and cries of encouragement. Spontaneous shouting, “anointing” by the Spirit, falling out, and other seemingly disruptive behaviors that would be deemed inappropriate in most nonfolk churches are not only acceptable but, in many folk churches, are expected and welcomed. Church members offer the right hand of fellowship and hug one another when greeting. These churches’ orientation toward the past not only venerates the “good old-fashioned way” but also, with a modified and transformed Calvinism, continues the tradition of “worker-preachers” rather than trained professionals and emphasizes the grace of God and an individual’s salvation through faith. In the southern folk church, lived experience forms, and is formed by, the performance of religious expressive culture: singing, preaching, praying, wit218

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nessing, baptism, and communion. Singing in the southern folk church characteristically occurs face-to-face in small groups, whether among family and friends at home or in a space where believers feel comfortable worshiping in song—not only in church but also in automobiles, buses, and other spaces that may be made sacred by singing. The singing often is egalitarian: everyone sings, not just a choir; and if the church does have a choir, it tends to have many choirs, and they all get a chance. Everyone is invited to sing. When soloists or small groups sing for an audience, the audience often becomes part of the performance, shouting and clapping along. The purposes of singing include not just worshiping God but also activating the inward presence of the holy. When done in a small group, face to face, as in church, that feeling increases in power with the sense that the whole group is equally involved; one feels close to the others and a part of something far larger than oneself. Praying in the southern folk church is characteristically spontaneous, not read from a prepared text or the Bible. The prayer acknowledges God’s greatness and power and asks for God’s grace and mercy; often it is very specific, mentioning the names of particular people and their individual needs, giving a homespun quality to the supplication. Prayer aloud may be offered on behalf of the group by a single individual volunteering or chosen for the purpose, or it may take the form of a group prayer, with individuals each praying their own spontaneous entreaty at the same time. As the feeling of the divine presence intensifies, some individuals’ performance style moves from speaking to a kind of musical delivery, characterized by more stable pitch intonation and a more regular rhythm, with a reciting pitch that occurs more frequently than any others—an improvised, chanted prayer, to which others may respond with words of encouragement. Some understand this musical delivery as an expression of the Holy Spirit, but few believe that this is the only way the Spirit expresses itself in prayer. Some folk churches practice a healing prayer. Preaching, while exegetical, is also characteristically spontaneous and oral and not read directly from a prepared text. Most folk preachers do not attend seminary (some say the seminary is like a cemetery—it kills the spirit) but rather receive God’s “call” and begin to feel the urge to preach. The preacher-tobe may try to ignore or evade it, but eventually he or she gives in to God’s call. The fledgling preacher typically receives several opportunities to preach and, if these trials appear to be aided by God and successful in the eyes of peer preachers, then the new preacher is ordained. Sermons are devoted to drawing people closer to the will of God, whether by convicting sinners and bringing them closer to conversion or by helping the Christian live according to God’s light. Verses from the Bible usually form the basis of the sermon, as the preacher RELIGIOUS FOLKLIFE

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brings to life the biblical characters and their predicaments through storytelling and commentary. Thus preachers make the Bible relevant to contemporary life through narrative; some preachers extend the range of stories to include people they have known, including themselves, thereby making their own lives a public example. Some congregations divide preachers into two types: prophets and teachers. The prophetic preacher tends to move the performance style toward a musical delivery that may even be taken as God’s words; the teacher, in contrast, is logical, does not appear anointed by the Spirit, and tends to make rational pleas based on evidence. Some preachers display both performance styles in the same sermon. Particularly in traditional African American worship, the congregation punctuates the minister’s phrases with shouts of agreement and encouragement, rising to hold the preacher in a rhythmic and musical embrace as the “whooping” or chanting preacher moves toward a climax. Witnessing, in which people testify to Christians and non-Christians alike about what they believe God has done and is doing in their lives, is also spontaneous and oral, but as certain events in one’s religious life—such as conversion—take on particularly meaningful weight, individuals develop practiced narratives in this genre. Conversion—known colloquially in the southern folk church as “getting saved”—is both a turning point and a focal point for witnessing. But other themes also abound, as believers narrate evidence of God’s will in otherwise ordinary-seeming events. Working from the belief that everything has a purpose, witnessing draws on the introspective habit of looking for God’s hand in anything that may occur. Many churches call this practice “giving testimony,” and some set aside a special time for it during services, often after the altar call. Witnessing outside of church is a staple of conversation among believers, while it takes an evangelistic form when directed at the unconverted. Baptism is a sacrament for the believer that inevitably follows soon after conversion. Directed by a minister, it often entails full immersion in the water of a creek or river in an outdoor ceremony that includes singing, praying, exhorting, and the spontaneous joyful expressions from everyone in attendance— family, friends, and church members—who congratulate the person baptized and share dinner and conversation after the baptism is over. In many folk churches, communion, the sacrament performed in remembrance of Jesus’s Last Supper, is practiced but once a year, though it is no less important than if it were done weekly. Indeed, communion is the most powerful time of all, particularly when the taking of the bread (symbolizing Jesus’s body) and wine (the blood) is coupled with foot washing. (At the conclusion of the Last Supper, Jesus—in a display of humility—is said to have washed his disciples’ feet. Foot washing is not part of communion in mainline Protestant 220 RELIGIOUS FOLKLIFE

churches.) Men and boys sit together on one side of the church and wash one another’s feet in water-filled basins distributed for the purpose, while women and girls wash each other’s feet in a different part of the sanctuary. Singing, shouts, tears of joy, and warm embraces signal the powerful feelings present. Family members often report reconciliations and spiritual renewals as a result of communion. Sometimes, communion takes place in connection with a homecoming service, during which family members who have moved to other towns and cities return to the homeplace and the home church, intensifying the meaning of the folk church group as a family of God.

JEFF TODD TITON Brown University William M. Clements, “The American Folk Church” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1974); Elwood Cornett, John Wallhausser, and Jeff Todd Titon, eds., Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky, Smithsonian Folkways CD 40106 (1997); William T. Dargan, Lining Out the Word (2006); Tom Davenport, A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle (film, 1986), <www .folkstreams.net>; Barry Dornfeld, Tom Rankin, and Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God (film, 1989); Samuel S. Hill Jr., “Religion,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 1, Religion, ed. Samuel S. Hill (2006); Loyal Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (1999); Beverly Patterson, The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches (1995); Thérèse Smith, Let the Church Sing: Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community (2004); Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (1988); Ruel Tyson and James Peacock, Pilgrims of Paradox (1989); Ruel Tyson, James Peacock, and Daniel Patterson, eds., Diversities of Gifts: Field Studies in Southern Religion (1988).

Rootwork (Hoodoo, Conjure) The man standing before the judge spoke with no regrets as he explained why he had murdered his wife. She had “put a root” on him, he explained, to keep him from seeing other women. And then, when that didn’t seem to work, she started “working roots” to kill him outright. The elderly white judge was not convinced. Instead, he decreed that there be no talk of “roots” in his courtroom. Not in North Carolina, not in 2005. When the defendant’s attorney objected, declaring that he was prepared to argue the relevance of rootwork to this case, the judge excused the jury and scolded the surprised lawyer. This was a trial, he declared, and not a “sideshow.” “Superstition,” he concluded, “has no place in this case.” ROOTWORK (HOODOO, CONJURE)

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Less than 40 miles from that courtroom, a billboard at the intersection of two state highways proclaims in bold red letters: “Lucky bingo numbers!” A few miles down the road, more signs and a gathering of late-model sedans and SUVs signal the office and store of one of the region’s most prestigious rootworkers. Nothing on the building’s exterior indicates either roots or spiritual practice. Inside, however, shelves of bottled oils with labels like “Jinx Off,” “Compelling Oil,” “High John the Conqueror,” and “Money Drawing Oil” suggest a world of practice and belief far more complex than simple lucky numbers. When I ask the clients waiting in the “doctor’s” anteroom why they are there, their responses only deepen this portrait of complexity. A schoolteacher, two longshoremen, a computer programmer, a farmworker, a college counselor—mostly African American, though some are white—describe a range of troubles, from difficulties with lovers to unexplained physical infirmities, problems with the law, and anxiety over a child’s welfare. All come seeking the counsel, assistance, and/or intervention of the rootworker. And all declare quite pointedly that rootwork is not “superstition.” Rootwork—also known as “hoodoo,” “conjure,” “conjuration,” and sometimes “trickeration”—is a complex and nebulous belief system with deep roots in the African American South. Boasting no dogma, ecclesiastical structures, congregations, or religious hierarchy, rootwork is perhaps best comprehended as a way of understanding the workings of nature and destiny. As such, it offers believers both a system of explanation and a system of engagement—a way to explain the often inexplicable workings of the world and a way to affect these workings, usually to the practitioner’s benefit. Bringing about these changes sometimes—though not nearly always—involves the use of roots and other plant materials; hence the name “rootwork.” As suggested by the clients in that North Carolina rootworker’s office, hoodoo’s realms of influence are quite broad. First among these is that of health; believers often turn to rootwork to ensure physical, mental, and/or spiritual well-being. (Hoodoo, however, rarely serves as a believer’s only health system; it is usually part of a larger, interconnected network of health alternatives that includes both biomedicine and the church.) Alongside, and intimately connected to, the realm of health is that of social relationships: believers contend that the manipulations of rootwork can ensure (or destroy) friendship and love. (The latter was clearly the wife’s intent in the aforementioned court case.) People also employ hoodoo to achieve financial security, to get or keep a job, to guarantee educational success, and to avoid or alleviate legal troubles. Along these same lines, practitioners often turn to rootwork to bring good fortune—to end a period of bad luck, provide protection from an enemy’s evil intentions, or 222 ROOTWORK (HOODOO, CONJURE)

simply ensure future blessings. (Hence the tradition’s long-standing link with lottery betting.) Finally, and not inconsequentially, rootwork can be used to bring harm or misfortune to others. In many parts of the South, rootwork put to this end is called “conjure.” Most contemporary rootworkers decry such practices (at least publicly), declaring that their purpose is only to help and heal. Yet the frequency of these denials—and the vigorous market in materials that offer believers protection from spiritual or physical assault—suggests that conjure is still very much a part of the broader rootwork universe. So too is Christianity, and more specifically, Protestantism. Although many African American churchgoers loudly condemn hoodoo as the “devil’s work,” the relationship between the two systems is actually more complementary than oppositional. Many clients who use the products or seek the services of rootworkers are also churchgoers; indeed, many are staunch churchgoers. They see rootwork not as a denial of God’s unlimited power but rather as a mysterious extension of it. “Remember,” reasons William Adams, a 93-year-old Texas preacher and rootworker, speaking in the late 1930s, “the Lord, in some of His ways, can be mysterious. The Bible says so. There are some things the Lord wants all folks to know, some things just the chosen few to know, and some things no one should know. Now, just because you don’t know about some of the Lord’s laws, it’s not ‘superstition’ if some other person understands and believes in such.” To Adams, and to many contemporary believers, the special knowledge held by rootworkers is God-given, granted only to the “chosen few.” The malicious knowledge held by conjurers, in turn, is said to be revealed by Satan. In either case, the understandings fit neatly within a Christian framework. However compatible hoodoo may be with Christian thought, rootwork’s underlying premises rest firmly in West African systems of belief. Rootwork draws its foundation from the West African understanding that destiny is part of a larger system that encompasses the natural, social, and spiritual realms, and that destiny’s course can be both foretold and manipulated by those with the power to act at the intersections of these interconnected worlds. A grounding assumption of this belief is that things in the natural world (such as plants, stones, animals, water, and dirt) and their parts and derivatives (oils, bones, hair, roots, excrement) hold an inherent measure of power. Some objects have more power than others; certain combinations of objects, in turn, hold even more power, with the aggregation acting to magnify their overall potency. The power itself, though, is neutral; it does not act, either for good or evil, on its own accord. It simply exists. Hoodoo’s second core assumption holds that individuals can access and maROOTWORK (HOODOO, CONJURE)

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nipulate this power. The degree to which they can do so, however, hinges on the scope of their knowledge. Much of this knowledge is widely known and shared in African American communities; it travels freely by story and example. Generations of practitioners, for instance, have known that chewing the root of Chewing John and then spitting it toward the person one hopes to influence will yield the desired result. In like manner, stories about the money-drawing power of lodestones have long circulated among gamblers and lottery players. Such knowledge (and the attendant ability to shift the course of destiny) is readily available to all. Other knowledge, however, is not so broadly held. The more esoteric understandings rest in the hands of specialists—those traditionally called rootworkers, hoodoo doctors, conjurers, and root doctors. These practitioners bring penetrating insight into ways of accessing natural and spiritual powers. They also command a mastery of combination, allowing them to magnify and focus these powers by bringing selected objects together in amulets or charms (often called “mojos,” “hands,” or “tricks”) and by ordaining the most effective procedures for their use. A rootworker might create a luck charm for a client, for example, by enclosing High John the Conqueror root, a lodestone, and various herbs in a red flannel bag and then anointing the whole with a special spiritual oil. The doctor would then instruct the client on how to use—and treat—the mojo to ensure its efficacy. Most contemporary rootworkers attribute their esoteric knowledge to spiritual revelation, explaining that their understandings were “given” to them by God. Others point to generational inheritance, claiming parents or close kin who knew the ways of hoodoo. Members of both groups also frequently cite exceptional birth circumstances that “marked” them for special knowledge, thus foreordaining their spiritual path. (For instance, children born with a “veil”— part of the amniotic sac—over their face are often seen as candidates for the “second sight” of rootworking; so too are those born as the seventh child of a seventh child.) Clients who seek a root doctor’s services, though, rarely ask about the sources of her/his knowledge. Their primary concern is simple effectiveness. The measure of this effectiveness, in turn, is largely local. Most root doctors work as lone practitioners without much contact with other hoodoo specialists. Though they usually know their regional counterparts (as they must, given that they are often called to undo or reverse their conjurations), and they frequently purchase ingredients from commercial mail-order houses, their formulas and procedures are very much their own. In keeping with the Protestant-based notion of individual spiritual revelation, traditional rootwork has no central224

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ized body of knowledge and no authoritative text beyond the Bible. Consequently, as many root doctors are quick to point out, even they cannot fully explain the causal connections between their preparations and these preparations’ effects. “Why they work is a mystery,” muses one well-considered North Carolina root doctor, reflecting on the roots, herbs, and minerals so central to his practice. “I can’t explain God’s work. And that’s what it is. They were here before time—before the beginning of time. And they’ve always had power. All of them are powerful. That’s just the way God made them. The trick is knowing how to use them.” This structure of individualized knowledge, along with the absence of a spiritual pantheon of saints and spirits to whom practitioners might turn when seeking counsel or assistance, sets hoodoo strikingly apart from its Catholicconnected counterpart, voodoo. Although both traditions share similar West African roots and emerged as vibrant health and spiritual systems during enslavement, their paths diverged as they adapted to the dominant Christian frameworks of their regions, with hoodoo developing across the Protestant South and voodoo blossoming in and around Catholic New Orleans. Generations of cultural outsiders have mistakenly used the terms “hoodoo” and “voodoo” interchangeably; so too have many African American Protestants, who often disparagingly collapse the two as “devilish” practice. Yet these two systems—both of which might be described as Afro-Christian creoles—are markedly different. One can hardly survey the history of African American social life in the South without repeatedly stumbling over references to rootwork. Early 19thcentury accounts pepper both journalistic descriptions of slavery and the published narratives of those who had been enslaved, including Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass. This chronicling continued in the early 20th century, when it was increasingly supplanted by scholarly essays by folklorists (including Zora Neale Hurston) and literary treatments by African American authors (including Charles W. Chesnutt, who in 1899 wrote The Conjure Woman). The 1930s brought scores of hoodoo accounts from Works Progress Administration interviews with elderly African Americans, along with a sizable catalog of blues songs (and a smaller one of recorded sermons) whose lyrics pointedly spoke of mojos, black cat bones, goofer dust, and hoodoo doctors. Complementing these sung descriptions were the countless advertisements for rootwork products that appeared in almanacs, cosmetic and beauty-supply catalogs, dreambooks, and spiritual supply catalogs aimed at African American markets through most of mid-20th century. Today, the ongoing vitality of the tradition is perhaps most easily accessed by simply turning ROOTWORK (HOODOO, CONJURE)

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to the personals pages in southern newspapers that serve large African American communities. There one will find recurrent listings for “spiritual advisors” who offer help with “uncrossing,” removing “fixed conditions,” and “taking off bad luck”—all veiled references to the spiritual assaults of rootwork. Although newspaper listings persist and antihoodoo rebukes from southern pulpits continue unabated, rootwork today is decidedly weaker than it was a century ago. Spiritual supplies that were once readily available at southern drugstores have now vanished from the shelves, dramatically diminishing the tradition’s public presence. Much the same fate has befallen the spiritual specialty shops that once served a hoodoo clientele. In their place, however, a growing number of botanicas—stores that address the spiritual needs of Latino populations and sell products for a host of African-based creole faiths—have sprung up across the South. Many of these shops now carry a variety of supplies used in rootwork, from roots and oils to candles and spiritual bath salts, all with labels printed in both English and Spanish. The principal source to which southern African Americans now turn for hoodoo materials, however, is probably the Internet. As local sources have declined across the South, so too has the number of rootworkers. While the region now boasts a number of younger specialists who blend the spiritual practices of voodoo, rootwork, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and various New Age systems, the traditional Protestant-grounded and revelationbased root doctor is now much harder to find. Perhaps that is why the judge at the opening of this essay could so readily dismiss rootwork as “mere superstition.” At the same time, however, the demand for services from those gifted with “extra” spiritual insight certainly persists. Requests for consultations with that rootworker down the road from the courthouse have increased so much that he was recently forced to open a second office in a nearby city. And though he is now in his eighties, he proudly notes that his youngest son “has the gift” and promises to carry on the tradition long after he is gone. “Eventually, this work will rise again,” he concludes. “There’s not much of it now, but it will rise again. It will come back . . . and come back strong.”

GLENN HINSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (2005); Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003); Zora Neale Hurston, Journal of American Folklore (October–December 1931); Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork, 5 vols. (1970–78); Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (2001); 226

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Catherine Yronwode, ed., “Southern Spirits: Ghostly Voices from Dixie Land,” .

Stepping African American step teams throughout the South dazzle audiences with their dynamic, synchronized stomping and clapping and their choreographed dancing to hip-hop tunes. A complex performance involving synchronized percussive movement, singing, speaking, chanting, and drama, stepping developed in the early part of the 20th century as a ritual of group identity among African American college fraternities and sororities. Stepping reflects the African and African American heritage of those who pioneered its development, as well as the verbal and movement traditions prominent among blacks in the South. Every year in late November at the Bayou Classic in the Louisiana Superdome, Grambling State University and Southern University compete in one of the most important historically black college football games in the United States. There, also, the best college step teams compete in the Bayou Classic Greek Show. Other competitive step shows take place throughout the South, as collegiate step teams vie for bragging rights while raising money for social causes. While such shows are the most public venue for collegiate stepping, most fraternity and sorority stepping happens on campus, where members of the nine historically black Greek-letter societies that comprise the National Pan-Hellenic Council celebrate their organizations through probate (or neophyte) step shows that present new members to the public. They also sponsor competitive step shows to support scholarships and other social causes. Stepping is a dynamic and vital performance for expressing and celebrating African American and other group identities. Popularized in films such as Stomp the Yard (2007), Drumline (2002), and School Daze (1988) and in TV programs such as A Different World (1987–93), stepping is now also performed by multicultural, Asian, Latino, and occasionally white fraternities and sororities, as well as by community, school, and church step teams. As other ethnic groups form step teams, they incorporate their own ethnic dance traditions into their stepping while retaining signature African American features. Stepping routines are orally composed and transmitted. When the stepmaster or leader is older than the steppers being taught, he or she may teach the routine by “breaking it down” into smaller rhythmic units that are imitated until everyone masters them. Composition is often collaborative in groups in which everyone is the same age. Circulating videotapes and DVDs of step shows (often available for sale online) aids in the transmission process, and instructive STEPPING

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video clips are readily available on YouTube and other websites. A number of regional and national competitions, as well as regional and national meetings of the nine historically black Greek-letter societies, further help to disseminate steps. A striking example of oral composition can be seen in the way steppers use the words and tune of Omega Psi Phi’s song—“All of my love, my peace and happiness, I’m gonna give it to Omega”—as an oral formula, borrowing and modifying it as they incorporate it into various step routines. While preserving the same tune, a high school step team substituted the words “I’m going to give it to my people,” and a church step team sang, “It’s all our love and praise and honor, we want to give it to our savior—Jesus Christ.” Each black Greek-letter society has “trade” or “signature” steps that are performed by its college chapters throughout the nation and convey the character and style of the organization. These signature steps have names, and members within the black Greek system recognize them as belonging to particular organizations by their visual and oral patterns. When a group performs the signature steps of another organization, they do so either to pay tribute to the originating group (called “saluting”) or to mock them by performing the step in an inept or comic manner (called “cracking” or “cutting”). Some well-known signature steps include Alpha Phi Alpha’s “The Grand-Daddy” and “Ice, Ice”; Alpha Kappa Alpha’s “It’s a Serious Matter”; Zeta Phi Beta’s “Sweat” and “Precise”; Phi Beta Sigma’s “Wood”; and Iota Phi Theta’s “Centaur Walk.” Stepping may have grown out of the popular drill-team traditions of African American mutual-aid and Masonic societies; it certainly reflects the same kind of emphasis on synchronized clapping and stomping. Interestingly, the founders of the first black college fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, were closely associated with black Masonic societies and held their first initiation in 1906 at a Masonic Hall, where they borrowed Masonic costumes for their ritual. The earliest written reference to what may be stepping appears in 1925, when an article on “Hell Week” in the Howard University newspaper describes Alpha Phi Alpha and Omega Psi Phi pledges “marching as if to the Fairy Pipes of Pan.” Stepping may also have grown out of the black Greek ritual of “marching on line,” in which pledges expressed their brotherhood or sisterhood by walking in a line across campus, displaying their group’s colors and symbols. Over the years, groups added singing, chanting, and synchronized clapping and stomping to their marching. Early step shows often had the brothers and sisters moving in counterclockwise circles; as stage performances for audiences became more common in the 1960s, however, line formations became prevalent. Terms for stepping vary among campuses and change over time; they include such 228

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Collegiate steppers in the “get down” stance echo a dance posture common in West and Central African dancing as they entertain audiences with their complex, synchronized clapping and stomping. Stepping easily stands as one of the South’s most dynamic and creative dance traditions. This 2002 image captures a fraternity step team from Virginia Tech. (Photograph by Hazen Robert Walker)

designations as “demonstrating,” “marching,” “bopping,” “hopping,” “blocking,” and “stomping.” Stepping reveals its continuity with African American dances that originated in the South during slavery. The most well-known dance of this period, “patting juba,” may have originated in an African dance called guiouba; it grew in popularity after slaveholders outlawed drums among the enslaved out of fear that they would use them to communicate and plan slave revolts. Without drums, slaves used their hands and feet to create the rhythm for their dances. Recalling this practice among enslaved dancers in Louisiana, Solomon Northup described “patting juba” as “striking the hands on the knees, then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left with the other—all the while keeping time with the feet, and singing.” Along with this percussive movement, dancers would sing and chant, often voicing a critique of slavery in coded language. When performing in a group setting, dancers would usually step juba in a counterclockwise circle, with both the words and the steps in a conversational, call-and-response form; the dancing relied on improvisation, low-step shuffling, and clapping, all of which are time-honored features of African American dance performance. African American dancers on the minstrel stage also performed the juba dance. The most famous such dancer of the 19th century, William Henry Lane, was called “Master Juba” because of his extraordinary step dancing. In the 1840s Lane held dance duels in the Five Points district of lower Manhattan with Irish step dancers like the white minstrel dancer Jack Diamond; in these duels, he freely blended African dance elements with Irish jigs. The frequency of such STEPPING

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blending may well account for the widespread white adoption of the term “jigs” to describe African American step dancing, according to dance historians Marshall and Jean Stearns. Thus, stepping may reflect Irish as well as African influences. Just as the early circular routines of fraternity and sorority steppers suggest the influence of patting juba, so too may they reflect another early African American dance form, the “ring shout.” Developed in black Christian churches during slavery, ring shouts feature counterclockwise movement, hand clapping, foot patting, stick beating (to foreground the rhythm), and call-and-response singing. Though ring shouts were primarily acts of worship, they also took place in some 19th-century secular contexts, such as house parties and gatherings of black soldiers in the Civil War. Ring shouts still occur among some church communities in the South and along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Stepping also embodies aesthetic features common in West and Central African dances. The counterclockwise circular movement of early step routines recalls not only patting juba and ring shouts but also a common dance pattern in Kongo culture that symbolizes the sun circling the earth, according to art historian Robert Farris Thompson. One of the most striking stances of African American stepping—the “get-down” position, in which steppers bend deeply from the waist or step with knees deeply bent—is common in Africa. Other characteristic features of African dance, according to Thompson, include call and response, dances that convey derision, the use of striking moralistic poses, an emphasis on correct entrance and exit, personal and representational balance, the establishment of clear boundaries around dances, looking smart, the mask of the cool, and polyrhythm (multiple meter). African American steppers exhibit all of these features, demonstrating the strong continuity of stepping with African culture. Indeed, steppers often claim that stepping originated in Africa. One Alpha Kappa Alpha sister, for instance, said that stepping “goes all the way back to African culture,” when different tribes competed through dance; and a Christian step team in Detroit, Mich., chanted, “Africa is where stepping began, from the beat of the drums to the sound of our feet.” Since the early 1990s, stepping has grown in popularity and spread beyond college campuses and African American fraternities and sororities to new practitioners, audiences, and venues. Latino, Asian, multicultural, and occasionally white fraternities and sororities around the country now step, as do many school, community, and church groups. Alpha Phi Alpha brothers from Howard University stepped for President Bill Clinton’s inaugural festivities in 1993, and the opening pageant of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Ga., featured

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stepping. African American fraternity and sorority members have played key roles in spreading stepping to new groups and contexts by teaching others to step, starting school, church, and community step teams to mentor youth and participating in arts organizations like Step Afrika of Washington, D.C., which uses stepping as a tool to promote education and intercultural dialogue. At the University of Texas at Austin, the Epsilon Iota chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha sponsors two different stepping shows for non-Greeks. The Non-Greek Step Show in the fall is the largest in Texas and includes high school and community step teams from across the state. In the spring, they sponsor “Step for Hope,” in which they teach students of different cultural backgrounds how to step and then perform on the main mall in front of a large audience. Participating in this step show led sisters of Sigma Phi Omega, an Asian-interest sorority, to start stepping in 1998. Another Asian-interest fraternity at the University of Texas, Omega Phi Gamma, has sponsored a Unity talent show since 1995, in which they perform their special step routine. The first intercollegiate Latino Greek step show on the East Coast, and perhaps in the nation, took place in the Bronx in July 1999. By 2006 Latino step shows were common on college campuses throughout the South and the nation. Increasingly, one can find step shows flourishing in the South in many contexts and among social groups quite different from the historically black fraternities and sororities that invented stepping. Despite the addition of salsa movements by Latino steppers, raas and garba dance movements by South Asian steppers, or Christian chants by church steppers, the stepping of these new groups retains many characteristic African American features. Stepping has proven to be a highly malleable tradition, able to incorporate new performers and styles as it functions to demonstrate group identity through its complex, synchronized percussive movements.

ELIZABETH C. FINE Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Carol D. Branch, in African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision, ed. Tamara L. Brown, Gregory S. Parks, and Clarenda M. Phillips (2005); Elizabeth C. Fine, Soulstepping: African American Step Shows (2003; 2007); Walter M. Kimbrough, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities (2004); Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (1996); Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (1979).

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Stories of Personal Experience As an astute pastor pithily noted, “Southerners don’t lie; they just remember big.” In every culture and region, people tell stories about their own experiences, with their accounts ranging from the most mundane recital of a day’s events to the most significant effort to make sense of consequential and defining encounters. It does seem, however, that the South has a particular wealth of accomplished tellers of engaging stories of personal experience (many of whom have attracted attention from folklorists), as well as a set of characteristic topics and themes. The many documented stories of personal experience play a potentially important role in delineating the actual variety of southern experiences; they also suggest how individuals go along with, resist, or simply trace their own path, regardless of local expectations or the historical master narratives so often taken to define southern distinctiveness. Stories of individual experiences have also served as a particularly salient resource for southern literature (for writers ranging from Eudora Welty to Alice Walker), for ethnographic innovations pioneered in the South, and for the field of oral history, which not only documents this region’s complex history but also redefines whose recollections and experiences count as part of the South’s larger story. Folklorists employ the terms “story of personal experience,” “personal experience narrative,” and “personal narrative” interchangeably to describe a relatively brief narrative account of an event that the narrating teller experienced in person, usually one in which he or she was centrally involved and that has had some impact on his or her beliefs, outlook, life trajectory, or character. Stories of personal experience thus may overlap with—but are conceptually distinguishable from—oral histories (in which the speaker serves as witness to large-scale historical events) and life stories (in which tellers make a concerted effort to cover many periods and salient events in their lives). Whereas oral histories and life stories tend to be elicited by an outside party, with their tellings often planned in advance, tellers regularly share anecdotes of personal experience spontaneously in the course of conversation. (Of course, this is certainly not always the case for the versions recorded and analyzed by folklorists, which tend to be told in contexts other than the everyday and spontaneous.) Stories of personal experience vary considerably in a number of dimensions: their length; how artful or tellable they are (that is, how interesting the events described are to the audience and how rhetorically effective their presentation is); whether the story is embedded in or relatively detached from an occasioning conversation (and consequently how easily it might be repeated or reported in another situation); whether a story proceeds in a linear fashion—reflecting a 232 STORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

closed temporal and causal order—or is more open-ended; whether the teller’s moral stance is certain and constant or fluid and under debate; and whether the story unfolds from the mouth of a single individual or collaboratively from more than one speaker. Folklorists have tended to focus on stories that cluster at one end of the spectrum—those told by one speaker that are maximally tellable, detached, and linear—and that lend themselves to analyses of artistry and the construction of identity. Linguists, conversely, are more interested in stories that are collaboratively told, embedded, and flexible and that offer insights into the exercise of social power (who gets their say, and who has to negotiate, interpolate, or quote others to get their point across). Some personal narratives focus on defining who the speaker is, while others (those termed “other-centered”) are more likely to offer a moral or practical example or a cautionary tale. And while most stories of personal experience are earnestly told as true, they are, of course, shaped by the teller’s perspective and rhetorical purposes; as such, they are susceptible to various degrees of embellishment, potentially to the point of straining the listeners’ credulity, intentionally or otherwise. The wealth of characteristic personal stories told in the South certainly defies simple categorization. The accounting that follows, however, suggests some of the ways in which these narratives fill in rich details of southern experience. Historically, one important genre that has influenced others’ perceptions of the South encompasses the tales often grouped together as Old Southwest Humor; notable among these are Davy Crockett’s outrageous boasts of his adventures (“I’m half horse and half alligator”) that painted the South as a frontier full of unrestrained and unrestrainable characters. A century later, the Works Progress Administration’s collection of slave narratives made public another wide-ranging body of stories, yielding an invaluable resource that documented slavery in the South from the inside and that honored the 1855 argument of fugitive slave John Little and many others since: “Tisn’t he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is—’tis he who has endured.” Stories of personal experience are often told within families, forming bonds, teaching lessons, and conveying morals among intimates and across generations. These stories often reflect specific southern customs, values, and patterns of behavior from particular periods. Elders, for instance, tell of the resourcefulness required to survive during lean times or explain how they set wayward youth back on a path of honesty and respect. Courtship stories often recount how courting once took place at church socials, typically under the watchful eyes of senior community members. Some of these stories convey an idealized view of romance that relates them to traditions of medieval courtly love; the woman appears as an untouchable object of desire to be pursued from a STORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

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distance until her heart has been won and the marriage takes place. Others retrospectively portray parental involvement as destructive, tragically yoking unwilling and unsuitable life mates. Narration by couples often provides a forum wherein partners debate different perspectives on common experience and negotiate the influence of each teller in defining what counts as family lore, experience, or identity. The particular challenges faced by ethnic and racial groups in the South have fostered rich stores of narrative—stories of African Americans’ struggles during the civil rights movement, Jewish southerners’ negotiations over keeping kosher in a pork- and shellfish-imbued cuisine, Cajuns’ outrage over being punished for speaking French at school, Latin American immigrants’ harrowing travels and their efforts to keep families together across national boundaries. Occupational groups also provide a fertile field for accounts about extraordinary, defining, often hair-raising experiences. Commercial fishermen along southern coastlines, for instance, tell stories about personal disasters or narrow escapes while at sea, reminding others of the unpredictability of their way of making a living and the dangers that await the unwary. Other hazardous occupations in the South, such as coal mining, also have traditions of personal disaster stories, highlighting personal heroism, luck, or the saving role of faith. Contact with the supernatural is a prominent theme in two kinds of southern personal narratives. In many of the region’s Christian traditions, churchgoers often tell conversion stories, accounts of answered prayers or extraordinary help in times of crisis, and stories of being touched directly by the Holy Spirit. Such accounts serve as vital means of testifying to one’s own faith and encouraging others to seek salvation and the comfort afforded by a personal relationship with Jesus. Many “ghost stories,” in turn, recount the narrator’s direct personal experience with frightening and imperfectly understood supernatural forces—sometimes the spirit of a loved one, often an emanation from a tragic or violent death. Such stories can serve many functions, entertaining children in one setting and inviting serious reflection on the nature of life, death, and the ties of relationships in another. The South is justly famous for its tellers of humorous anecdotes; many of their stories account, purport to account, or elaborate upon personal experience. Although told to be funny at one level, such stories frequently turn on wry observations about deeply held values, like the importance of hard work, pulling one’s own weight, and not boasting. Often these accounts draw upon reported speech for their comic effect, capitalizing on regional dialect or occu234 STORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

pational jargon to bring their characters to life. Traditional occupations, tasks, and amusements—horse or dog trading, searching for bee trees, hunting and fishing—afford opportunities both for ironic and rueful reflections on the teller’s past gullibility and for the spinning of tales that start out as apparent accounts of personal experience but eventually stretch into the realm of the fantastic. Personal contact with local “characters” also provides a fruitful source for comic stories, notably stories that tell of bringing outsiders (and especially northerners) into contact with the eccentric individuals. Such pranking stories not only establish boundaries between locals and outsiders; they also project a community identity that shows southerners as tolerant of a wide range of acceptable behavior. In addition to celebrating these narratives’ intrinsic appeal, folklorists have turned to stories of personal experience as sources of information about, or context for, many other aspects of southern traditional and vernacular lifeways and crafts (Jewish foodways in the South, for instance, and the actual use of vernacular houses by those who lived in them). The South is also notable for early and influential work in which folklore scholars’ own accounts of their experiences as fieldworkers become the basis for their ethnographies. Such was the case, for instance, with Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in her home community of Eatonville, Fla., and Stetson Kennedy’s accounts of infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. Southern women tend to receive much less attention as accomplished tellers of personal narratives, except for religious accounts or ghost stories. It should be remembered, however, that women often subsume their own experience into accounts of “what we used to do” (from stirring apple butter and birthing babies to laying out the dead)—accounts on which folklorists and oral historians have long relied for information about the domestic side of traditional life. The apparent imbalance in storytelling frequency may also reflect a tendency on the part of women to recount their experiences in private rather than in more overtly public settings. Such tellings often unfold in response to props or objects, like collections of photographs or cherished items imbued with stories and memories. Or southern women may tell their stories only to especially attentive listeners, among whom folklorists are often fortunate enough to count themselves. When interwoven into conversation, narratives of personal experience in their myriad forms serve as an expressive resource appropriate to the teller’s individual and regional identity—from the fabled outspokenness of the southern matriarch to the self-effacing style of residents of the Appalachians. Told

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as a way to convey a moral or define the teller’s identity, personal narratives vibrantly reflect the range of southern experiences, values, and personalities.

PATRICIA SAWIN University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Karen Baldwin, in Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, ed. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalčik (1985); Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (1986); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (2000); William Ferris, Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules, and Men (1998); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935); Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (1990); Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (2001); Patricia Sawin, Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories (2004).

Storytelling Storytelling—a means of description, entertainment, and teaching known in all cultures—has played a rich role in the South, where Native American, European, and African storytelling traditions have intermingled and enriched each other for four centuries. Despite its long history, storytelling is always new when it unfolds as part of a living tradition because the teller shapes the tale while interacting with an audience whose tastes and values inform the performance. Without the listeners’ interest and approval, the tale dies on the teller’s lips. Since tales always emerge in the moment, we cannot know the exact styles and stories of the earliest southern storytellers; nonetheless, written records give some idea of the tales’ content and how they were performed. Southern storytelling began with the region’s native peoples, including the Cherokee, who once inhabited the Appalachian Mountains from Alabama to West Virginia. As in all storytelling communities, the Cherokee recognized (formally or informally) certain individuals as narrative specialists. Around 1750 some of these specially trained narrators recited a long legendary history of the Cherokee, beginning with their divine creation and then tracing their migrations across North America. Nearly 150 years later, when James Mooney made the first comprehensive study of Cherokee storytelling, no one could remember this story; tribal elders did recall, however, that in the 1840s boys chosen to learn the sacred stories would sit all night around a ritual fire listening to their teachers and then strip and bathe in a stream to purify themselves. By the end of the 19th century the Cherokee no longer observed this ritual, though tribal elders still specialized in the most sacred stories. Of course, most 236 STORYTELLING

Cherokees knew and told many other types of stories, including local legends, tales of notable hunts and battles, and animal tales that featured a trickster rabbit (some of which resemble the African American tales of Brer Rabbit, a fact that perhaps reflects contacts between Cherokees and African Americans stretching back to colonial times). When Europeans first reached the South, they brought with them longstanding narrative styles with which they described both the Indians and their stories. Through their writings, Europeans introduced the New World and its people to the Old World. Explorers like the German John Lederer, who traveled through North Carolina in 1670–71, learned Indian history from traditions “delivered in long tales from father to son” that the tellers had memorized as children. Indians also taught Lederer about the natural environment—how, for example, snakes would hypnotize squirrels in trees to lure them to the ground and eat them. Although Lederer did not believe this particular tale, he nonetheless repeated it in his Discoveries (1672). Southern explorers, following a European tradition dating to medieval times, also told stories of their personal adventures, some of which were retold through succeeding centuries. For instance, Captain John Smith—who helped establish the colony of Jamestown, Va., in 1607—often told of his capture by the Powhatan tribe and how the young Pocahontas intervened to prevent his execution. Later historians dismissed this and other Smith narratives as fiction, though recent research supports the accuracy of some of these stories. Regardless of their historicity, explorers’ stories seized the popular imagination and blended into the tradition of the tall tale—a form that became the signature genre of the American frontier. Tall tales were so popular that they long dominated America’s periodical literature; as early as the 18th century and throughout the 19th, almanacs and weeklies were rife with tall tales celebrating southern wilderness heroes, both famous and nameless. Tall-tale performances became features of public life: just as John Smith told explorer tales for self-promotion, political celebrities like Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett (1786–1836) and Louisiana governors Huey P. Long (1893–1935) and Jimmy Davis (1899–2000) used tall tales to advertise themselves. A successful narrator’s tall tales sometimes even outlived him, as in the case of the Crockett almanacs, which were published for two decades after the hero’s death at the Alamo. Usually told in the first person and always presented as true, the tall tale typically begins with a credible situation in a recognizable natural environment and then adds a series of escalating exaggerations, ending as an unbelievable fiction. A plot known to folklorists as “The Lucky Shot” neatly characterizes this STORYTELLING

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genre. A man starving in the wilderness is down to his last bullet; he must kill game or die. Spying ten ducks perched on a branch, he tamps a bullet into his double-barreled, muzzle-loading rifle. But at that very moment, a bear charges him head-on, a panther leaps toward him from his left, and a boar charges from his right. With the ramrod still stuck in one barrel, he pulls both triggers at once. His one bullet kills the bear; the gun’s left hammer flies off and kills the panther; the right hammer, in turn, kills the boar. Meanwhile, the ramrod flies to the ducks, pinning their feet to the branch. The once-starving hunter collects his game; he now has food for a year. “The Lucky Shot” captures some of the most common themes of southern tall tales: the wilderness is filled with both terrifying dangers and life-sustaining abundance; and given one last chance, a lone man—through either resourcefulness or dumb luck—secures abundance from danger’s jaws. Versions of this plot have been documented in English in performances by African American John Jackson in Virginia and Anglo Jimmy Wilson in Arkansas, as well as in French by Louisiana Cajun Adlai Gaudet and in Spanish by numerous narrators along the Gulf Coast—testimony to the fact that southern storytelling readily crosses the most rigid boundaries of culture, language, region, and race. In contemporary southern settings, the tall tale is sometimes a large-scale affair; many county fairs and local festivals feature “liars’ contests” in which performers strive to tell the most preposterous tales. But more typical narrative communities are small, all-male groups that congregate at hunting camps, country stores, or courthouse squares. The teller usually speaks in a soft monotone of feigned sincerity, as if unaware that there is anything incredible about his story. Audience members who are “in” on the joke also betray no hint that the narrator is telling an outrageous lie. The ideal is to perform in such low-key fashion that eavesdroppers believe they are listening in on a normal conversation. (In the Ozarks in the mid-20th century, for example, storytellers in general stores would exchange everyday news until a tourist approached. Just before the visitor reached the store, they would start telling their tall tales—about, for instance, how one of their children rode to school on the back of a friendly bear—while trying to keep the visitor from suspecting that he was witnessing a joke at his expense.) If the tall tale draws its power by deftly walking the line between fact and fiction, other stories—like the märchen, or magic tale, the oral equivalent to the literary fairy tale—present an unvarnished fantasy world. The Europeans who settled the South may have carried only a few books, but they did bring a significant repertoire of märchen. Joseph Doddridge recalled that on the

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West Virginia frontier around 1770, “dramatic narrations, chiefly concerning Jack and the Giant, furnished our young people with [a] source of amusement during their leisure hours. Many of those tales were lengthy, and embraced a considerable range of incident. Jack, always the hero of the story, after encountering many difficulties, and performing many great achievements, came off conqueror of the Giant.” Such tales as “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack the Giant Killer,” beloved in 18th-century Britain, were equally popular in the southern colonies. More than two centuries later, the hero of the southern märchen is still typically named Jack, and the märchen are often called Jack Tales (or Jack, Tom, and Will tales, after the three brothers featured in many versions). Like the talltale hero, Jack—the youngest, smallest, and least promising of the three—relies upon resourcefulness and luck to outperform his brothers and save them from menacing giants, evil witches, and fierce animals. The performance settings for southern märchen are generally more intimate than for tall tales. Märchen telling typically takes place at home, within the family. The specialists tend to be the oldest family members and the listeners the youngest. Maud Long of Hot Springs, N.C., recalled how, around 1900, her mother told märchen at night to soften the children’s labor: “[A]fter supper, all of us were gathered before the big open fire, my mother . . . sewing or carding . . . [and] the older girls were helping. . . . [A]ll of us little ones would have a lap full . . . of wool out [of ] which we must pick all the burrs. . . . [A]nd to keep our eyes open and our fingers busy and our hearts merry, my mother would tell these marvelous tales.” Märchen telling also sometimes accompanied outdoor work. North Carolinian Frank Proffitt Sr., for instance, used tales to both goad and reward his son’s labor as the two worked together in the fields. When they finished hoeing a row, the elder Proffitt would tell a tale; then when the two resumed working, the boy would hoe quickly so that he could hear another tale upon reaching the next row’s end. By the mid-20th century, märchen were probably best known in the bedroom, told one-on-one by elders to their children and grandchildren; such sessions were often inventively personalized. In the 1940s, for instance, Kentucky märchen teller Sydney Farmer entertained her granddaughter Jane Muncy with nightly tales as the two shared the same bed. Though Sydney told Jack Tales, she changed the hero’s name to Merrywise to help her granddaughter identify with the hero and to subtly teach her that small, vulnerable people could triumph in life through wisdom and positive thinking. Sydney’s tales so influenced her granddaughter that Muncy—now an adult psychologist—retells them to her

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clients to foster the same resiliency and hope that her grandmother’s tales had given her. African Americans in the South brought with them vast repertoires of tales from West Africa; they also learned many märchen from Europeans. Through household situations in which black elders entertained white children, they passed on to European Americans many of their animal tales, most famously those revolving around the character Brer Rabbit. As a boy, white Georgia journalist Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908) learned many such tales from older blacks and later published them in his Uncle Remus books (named after a fictional slave who personified the oral tradition that Harris had tapped). These books brought Harris widespread fame, though readers soon recognized that their art lay in Harris’s ear rather than in his imagination. Long before and long after Harris wrote, rich African American narrative traditions thrived in households and at communal work and play settings. The wealth of this repertoire is exemplified in J. D. Suggs (1887–1955), a storyteller who shared 175 tales with folklorist Richard Dorson in the 1950s. Born in Kosciusko, Miss., to sharecropper parents, Suggs learned his first tales from his father at home. He traveled widely before settling down to raise a family in Arkansas and eventually moved north to Chicago and Michigan. Throughout his adult life, he shared his family tales (and ones he learned during his travels) with friends and coworkers. Suggs’s narrative style, like that of many African American storytellers, was dramatically expressive, marked by constant variations in pitch and rhythm as he impersonated story characters, imitated animal sounds, and interjected snatches of chants and song. He specialized in many genres, including animal tales, tall tales, witch legends, magic tales, traditional historical stories, and anecdotes revolving around the competition between a wily slave named John and his white master. Since the mid-20th century, the normally small-scale art of storytelling has acquired an increasingly public and professional face through the formation of storytelling societies and festivals. The largest venue for such performances is the National Storytelling Festival, held every October in Jonesborough, Tenn., which explicitly seeks to bring together traditional and professional narrators. At Jonesborough, in public library storytelling hours throughout the South, and on “ghost tours” (regularly conducted in New Orleans, La.; San Antonio, Tex.; Savannah, Ga.; and many other southern cities), master storytellers attract crowds of mutual strangers to experience together, in new ways, the power of one of the world’s oldest art forms.

CARL LINDAHL University of Houston 240

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John A. Burrison, ed., Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South (1989); Richard M. Dorson, ed., American Negro Folktales (1967); Carl Lindahl, ed., American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (2004); William Bernard McCarthy, Cheryl Oxford, and Joseph Daniel Sobol, eds., Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Jack Tales and Their Tellers (1994); Vance Randolph, We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks (1951); Leonard W. Roberts, ed., South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales (1955); Joseph Daniel Sobol, The Storyteller’s Journey: An American Revival (1999).

Voodoo The word “voodoo” is often misused to connote negative magic or senseless mumbo jumbo. In reality, voodoo is a synthesis of African religious and magical beliefs with Roman Catholicism that emerged in New Orleans during the 18th and 19th centuries. Similar religions evolved in other predominantly Catholic French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies of the Caribbean and South America; conditions in the English-Protestant North American colonies/states were not conducive to the development of an organized Afro-Catholic religion. Only in New Orleans, capitol of what was originally a French and Spanish Catholic colony, did the necessary circumstances exist for the emergence of voodoo. Like Haitian vodou, Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé, and other African-based New World religions, New Orleans voodoo was characterized by a complex theology, a pantheon of deities and spirits, a priesthood, and a congregation of believers. The rudiments of voodoo arrived in the French Louisiana colony with the first enslaved Africans. Most of these captives were Wolofs, Bambaras, Foulbes, and Mandingas from what are now the West African countries of Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Mali. The French, and later the Spanish, also imported Fon and Yoruba from present-day Benin, Togo, and Nigeria and Kongo people from the modern Central African nations of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Cabinda, and Angola. The name “voodoo,” like vodou in Haiti, comes from vodu, meaning “spiritual forces” in the Fon language. Newly arrived Africans were instructed in the Roman Catholic faith, where they found many elements to which they could relate. The supreme being common to most African belief systems was analogous to God the Father, and the deities who serve as intermediaries between humans and the supreme being became identified with Mary the Blessed Mother and the legion of saints. The rituals, music, vestments, and miracle-working objects of the Catholic Church seemed intrinsically familiar to Africans whose religious ceremonies VOODOO

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stressed chanting, drumming, dance, elaborate costumes, and the use of spiritembodying amulets. Through a process of creative borrowing and adaptation, they reinterpreted Roman Catholicism to suit their own needs. The Frenchman Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, speaking of the early 18th century, noted in his Histoire de la Louisiane (1758) that the slaves would “sometimes get together to the number of three or four hundred, and make a kind of Sabbath.” He also commented on their reliance on protective charms called gris-gris, derived from the word gregries in the Mende language. Court records from the Spanish Judicial Archives document a 1773 case in which several slaves, including a recently arrived Mandinga man, were tried for conspiring to kill their master by means of gris-gris. The word gris-gris is still used in New Orleans to denote an assemblage of magical ingredients employed by believers to attain love, control, success, protection, revenge, or luck. In 1809 nearly 10,000 immigrants arrived in New Orleans in the wake of the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the founding of the Republic of Haiti. The immigrants were more or less equally divided among whites, slaves, and free people of color. The Haitians of African descent, both enslaved and free, brought their vodou traditions with them and found ready acceptance among those who already adhered to some form of Afro-Catholic religion. Later in the 19th century, New Orleans voodoo absorbed the beliefs of blacks imported from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas during the slave trade of the 1830s–50s. These “American Negroes” were English speaking and at least nominally Protestant, and they practiced a heavily Kongo-influenced kind of hoodoo, conjure, or rootwork. While an extensive scholarly literature focuses on the present-day AfroCatholic religions of the Caribbean and South America, truly reliable documentation of early New Orleans voodoo is scarce. From the 1820s through the 1890s, numerous voodoo-related reports appeared in the New Orleans newspapers. Most of these highly sensationalized articles described police raids on voodoo ceremonies. Between 1936 and 1941, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration’s Louisiana Writers’ Project interviewed elderly black New Orleanians who remembered the voodoo traditions of the later 19th century. These oral histories, while sometimes contradicting each other, give eyewitness accounts that provide a valuable counterpoint to the newspaper reports. From these sources we can derive some idea of 19th-century New Orleans voodoo. New Orleans voodoo was dominated by priestesses called “queens,” the most famous of whom was Marie Laveau (1801–81). The few notable voodoo priests 242

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were referred to as “doctors.” These spiritual leaders served a racially diverse, mostly female congregation. Weekly worship services occurred in the homes of voodoo leaders. These sanctuaries were characterized by spectacular altars laden with statues and pictures of the saints, candles, flowers, fruit, and other offerings. The high point of the voodoo liturgical calendar occurred annually on 23 June, the Eve of St. John the Baptist, when a large celebration took place on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Both small and large voodoo ceremonies consisted of Roman Catholic prayers, chanting, drumming, and dancing, the purpose of which was to call the spirits to enter the bodies of the faithful and speak to the congregation. Participants were dressed in white. The religious portion of the service was followed by a communal feast. Voodoo queens and doctors also gave private consultations, performed healing ceremonies, and formulated gris-gris for individual clients. Although New Orleans voodoo is widely believed to be derived from Haitian vodou, important components of the Haitian religion are missing from published accounts and the Louisiana Writers’ Project interviews. The complex initiations by which one becomes a priest or priestess in Haiti are never mentioned. While many accounts refer to “the spirits,” the names of some of the most beloved members of the Haitian vodou pantheon are conspicuously absent. There is no allusion to Ezili Freda (the embodiment of femininity and romantic love), Ezili Dantò (the protective mother), Ogou (the warrior), Agwé (master of the ocean), and Gédé (lord of the cemetery). It appears that only Dambala (the serpent deity) and Legba (guardian of the crossroads and keeper of the gate to the spirit world) survived the voyage to Louisiana. One finds references to Daniel Blanc, Blanc Dani, and Dambarra, all manifestations of Dambala, and to a spirit variously called Papa Limba, La Bas, or Liba, analogous with the Haitian Legba. While the arrival of vodou devotees from Saint-Domingue in the early 19th century strengthened a tradition that already existed, New Orleans voodoo and Haitian vodou are not identical. By the end of the 19th century, repressive laws, police interference, and the disapproval of the Protestant Christian churches drove New Orleans voodoo, as an organized religion, underground. Public opinion turned against anything of African origin, and those in power used voodoo to exemplify the ignorance and superstition of people of African descent that made them unfit for citizenship. Such attitudes caused many to deny their former beliefs out of fear. Despite attempts at eradication by outsiders—and the alterations and disguises adopted by insiders—both the voodoo religion and the magical practices of hoodoo have survived in the fertile cultural environment of New VOODOO

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Orleans. Many of the religious aspects of New Orleans voodoo were incorporated into the Spiritual Churches, founded in 1920 by Mother Leafy Anderson, an African American minister from Chicago. Spiritual Church services combined elements of Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and voodoo. Voodoo’s magical component evolved into the practice known as hoodoo. Hoodoo “workers” operate strictly one-on-one, performing rituals and formulating gris-gris for individual clients. New Orleans hoodoo resembles African-based magical practices found elsewhere in the American South, but it exhibits a decidedly Roman Catholic influence, incorporating the use of altars, candles, incense, oils, holy water, and images of the saints. Around 1980 New Orleans experienced a sort of “voodoo revival.” Contemporary priests and priestesses, some of them initiated in Haiti, have established temples that serve a middle-class, mostly white community of believers and endeavor to educate the public about voodoo through workshops, newsletters, and websites. Motivated by the necessity of earning a living, some also give performances for tourists and conventioneers. Today a visitor at one of New Orleans’s voodoo temples is likely to experience a ceremony conducted in Haitian Kreyòl, at which the full pantheon of the Haitian deities is honored. The Afro-Catholic religion that was indigenous to New Orleans is, for the most part, being replaced by a recreation of Haitian vodou.

CAROLYN MORROW LONG National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution Ina J. Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (2005); Zora Neale Hurston, Journal of American Folklore (October–December 1931); Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork, 5 vols. (1970–78); Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau (2006), Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (2001); Martha Ward, Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau (2004).

Wood Carving Wood carving is practiced on every continent of the world and is not gender specific. Certain areas are known for particular genres of carving, such as totem poles in Alaska and Canada or carved human figures in India. In Appalachia one can find the Gee-Haw Whammy Diddle (or Whimmy Diddle), while in the western United States one can find small, hand-carved wooden cowboy boots. Traditional carvers learn informally through spoken instructions or by imi244

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tation. Informally trained carvers might well use the term “whittlin’” to describe their craft (“What am I doin’? It’s called whittlin’”) or to describe not a process but the object itself (“Why, that’s a piece of whittlin’”). “Wood-carver” or “carver” are also terms used by traditional artists. Sculpting usually denotes large pieces of work and often requires more tools than a simple pocketknife. The act of creating wooden sculpture requires the use of chisels and (in contemporary times) the possible use of a chainsaw. There are many types of wood carving. The “whittlin’” described above is normally done with a pocketknife. Wood carvings are often three-dimensional pieces “in the round.” A style of figure carving related to this process is called Scandinavian flat-plain wood carving. This is done with a pocketknife, normally without sanding or finish work. Chip carving is a technique whereby a knife is used to remove small chips from a flat plain; besides the flat plain, there is a second plain created beneath where the cuts intersect. Relief carving begins by clamping a piece of flat wood to a workbench. The carver then draws a design onto the wood and with a gouge removes the unwanted wood that surrounds the drawn patterns. The act of wood carving can produce pieces for use at every stage of life. For youngsters, a carver can create wooden toys, such as the aforementioned GeeHaw Whammy Diddle—a wooden stick about the size of a pencil and with rough ridges that when stroked creates the movement of an airplane-like propeller. The carved limberjack is a favorite toy whereby a human figure dances on a plank of wood on which the player taps rhythms with one hand and holds the dancing doll upright with the other. Favored adult carved items include wooden spoons, animal figures, human figures such as the Saint Francis, door handles, wooden chains, ball in cages, duck decoys, toy boats, walking canes, and groupings of humans and animals such as the crèche (nativity). Very often, wood carving is done by one or two persons working in solitude. For the single carver, wood carving is most often a hobbyist activity that takes place on a porch or in the workshop, garage, or basement of a home. Before the craft revival of the early to mid-20th century, wood carvings were often given away as gifts or traded for other pieces of material culture. After the beginning of the craft revival, wood carvings became a sellable commodity in the marketplace, and the hobbyist became a working professional. Sometimes the act of carving enters a child’s life when he or she receives a pocketknife and learns to whittle. The craft of carving may also be introduced at an early age to males through Boy Scouts, after a talented carver named Elmer Tangerman authored the merit-badge wood-carving instructional book in 1937. The town of Tryon, N.C., located in the southwestern region of the state, beWOOD CARVING

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came a center for wood carving by young boys with the founding of the Tryon Toy-Makers and Wood-Carvers by Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale around 1915. Vance and Yale taught young children wood carving and created templates and patterns of the figures to be carved. The motive for teaching youth how to carve wood was one of economics: some of the youth of Tryon in the early 20th century were from low-income households, and carving was considered one way to bring money into the home. The wood carvings were marketed as products of mountain people, and readers of the company catalog were told that the purchase of the carvings would help Appalachian children economically. One of the best known of the Tryon carvers was Pauline Miller Cowan, illustrating that wood carving certainly is not an activity for males only. Standing in opposition to the hobbyist working in isolation is one of the most successful group cooperatives in the United States, the Brasstown Carvers of Brasstown, N.C., which developed after two female educators from outside of the region founded the John C. Campbell Folk School in 1925. One of the founders, Olive Dame Campbell, noticed a small group of men “idly whittlin’” on a wooden bench, which sat on the porch of the Brasstown country store. She offered to bring wooden blanks to the men and have each man carve any animal that interested him. Campbell said that she would buy each finished piece to sell through the folk school. To her surprise—as she believed wood carving to be a male activity—females also began to work, and very often one person from a couple would carve while the other sanded and put a stain or finish on each piece. The Brasstown carvings have a unique look and design, which makes the finished pieces instantly recognizable in the marketplace. The look of Brasstown carvings has to do with the shapes and details given to each animal or human figure. The Brasstown Carvers normally work in walnut, apple, holly, butternut, or cherry, and the oldest pieces have a style and grace that make them prized as collectables. The status of “collectible” is especially true of the full crèche sets containing Joseph, Mary, the Christ Child, wise men, shepherds, animals, and angels—all in the stable. The Brasstown Carvers were different from other collectives and cooperatives in that these carvers were like one big family centered on the John C. Campbell Folk School. The carvers would all come as a group to the folk school each Friday, turning in their newest creations and getting paid by the school. The carvers worked as a unit on the school campus at times, in addition to working in their private homes. After more than 80 years as an organized group of artisans, the Brasstown Carvers are known throughout the United States and are respected for the overall quality of their work. From 1935 until 1973, the Brasstown Carvers were coordinated by a woman named Murrial “Murray” Martin. The Hall family—Lish, Jack, John, and Ben 246

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(all now deceased)—created works that have become highly collectible. They specialized in “mad mules,” Saint Francis, and crèche figures. Hope Brown, who has carved since the inception of the Brasstown Carvers during her teenage years, continues to carve cats, angels, and the Christ Child while in her nineties. The Brasstown Carvers illustrate how a phenomenon that often is done as a hobbyist activity and in seclusion can become a very professional activity in a work context that is a collective of artists. The reputation of the John C. Campbell Folk School was also enhanced by having Elmer Tangerman as an instructor for several decades. Tangerman (now deceased) wrote numerous books on the subject of wood carving, including the aforementioned Boy Scout manual, which continues in print. The act of wood carving is practiced throughout the world. The tools are easy to obtain; a carver can make or purchase at a relatively inexpensive price the knife or knives needed for work. Wood is available in many, but certainly not all, areas of the world. Often, the wood can be obtained at no price to the carver. While some carvers begin as young children, others do not carve until retirement. Done alone or in groups, wood-carvers continue in a tradition that goes back many thousands of years.

DAVID BROSE John C. Campbell Folk School Brasstown, North Carolina Simon J. Bronner, The Carver’s Art: Crafting Meaning from Wood (1996); John Hillyer, Woodcarving: Twenty Great Projects for Beginners and Weekend Carvers (2002); Elmer Tangerman, Carving Animals in Wood (1995), Whittling and Woodcarving (1962).

Zydeco Zydeco is the dance music of south Louisiana’s African French Creole population, played on accordion with frottoir (rubboard) augmented by guitar, bass, and drums. Old-time rural forms of Creole music—sometimes called “LaLa”—were acoustic and often paired just a fiddle and accordion with a washboard. Many styles of zydeco are played at country and city Creole dance clubs, church halls, picnics, trail rides, and festivals, from parishes along Louisiana’s Bayou Teche and across the southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas prairies to Houston’s Fifth Ward. The music represents a convergence of Cajun and other French song sources, African American blues and spirituals, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Some zydeco musicians perform with a more Cajun French sound harmonically and melodically, with preference for two-steps and waltzes. Many other players—especially in urban settings—now mix blues, ZYDECO

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soul, funk, and hip-hop into the music, reflecting the increasing impact of African American culture on Creole culture and identity. The first widely celebrated performer was the late “King of Zydeco,” accordionist Clifton Chenier, who was noted for blues and boogie, often sung in French, and always played on his big piano-style chromatic accordion. Chenier—a charismatic singer and virtuoso musician who sometimes wore the crown of zydeco royalty—was accompanied by his brother Cleveland on rubboard, with forceful rhythmic backing from his Red Hot Louisiana Band. Chenier’s ability to play Creole-inflected R & B carried him nationally to the black music circuit, while his prowess with more traditional zydeco and songs such as “Colinda” and “Zydeco et pas salé” endeared him to Louisiana Creoles. Although Chenier was the first musician to be associated with zydeco as an emergent musical genre in the 1950s, an earlier important figure in the music’s history was Amédé Ardoin, a diatonic button accordionist and singer who made 78-rpm recordings between 1929 and 1934. Ardoin’s compelling bluesy vocals and rhythmic complexity harkened to Creole culture’s African Caribbean inheritance. Some elders suggest that zydeco’s rhythmic format and melding of blues scales and French songs go back to Creole communities in the 19th century, though Creoles did not refer to the more urbanized music as “zydeco” until the mid-20th century. Amédé Ardoin’s next-generation cousin, Alphonse “Bois Sec” (Dry Wood) Ardoin, and Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot—now both deceased—carried the early sound of the bal de maison (house dance) to a new generation of Creole communities. Also important was the accordionist and vocalist Wilson “Boozoo” Chavis, whose 1954 song “Paper in My Shoe” exemplified the music’s representation of social experiences—in this case, of a youth hoping to court a girl despite her parents’ disapproval of his appearance. Boozoo Chavis would later lead a zydeco revival that began in the early 1980s. Queen Ida (Lewis Guillory)—born in the rice-farming town of Welsh, La.—represents the California Creole migrant community. Queen Ida first toured the south Louisiana homeland in 1977 and was the first major female Zydeco musician to play in public; she has been succeeded in the next generation by accordionist Rosie Ledet. The late accordionist Beau Jocque (Andrus Espre) followed in Boozoo Chavis’s footsteps by using the traditional button accordion, but he surrounded it with a highly amplified R & B, rock, and soul sound. The towering, gruff-voiced Beau Jocque was a key figure in the nouveau zydeco movement that began in the late 1980s and continues to this day. Its sound increasingly represents the latest urban and national African American influences in the music, though its artists also present old songs in a new style, or new songs in old styles. 248

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A new dance style, the “zydeco push,” evolved as part of the nouveau movement. In the zydeco push, dance partners lock their legs together, foregoing the traditional two-step of dancers swinging apart and coming together. (Many community elders consider the push’s closely held bodies in unison up-down movement too explicit.) The band most associated with urban contemporary nouveau zydeco and the push dance was Zydeco Force, led by bassist Robby “Mann” Robinson and accordionist/singer Jeffery Broussard. Other nouveau zydeco bands, such as Lil’ Brian’s Zydeco Travelers and Chris Ardoin with NuStep, added hip-hop and rap elements with electronic keyboards and sampling, while still using acoustic button accordions. Simultaneously, a movement that resisted this urban sound continued in the hands of accordionist Geno Delafose, who favored French lyrics and a more traditional accordion sound, while extolling the virtues of being a Creole cowboy from the southwest Louisiana prairies. Zydeco stylistic combinations and variations reflect the cultural and racial combinations of the Creole population on the French Gulf Coast. In French Louisiana and the French Caribbean, the term “Creole” originally referred both to descendants of the French and Spanish colonists from the Old World in the Americas and to their African slaves born in the New World. Creole also includes antebellum gens libres de couleur (free people of color) with African, French, Spanish, and Native American ancestry. These “Creoles of color” gained freedom under French and Spanish laws that fostered the emergence of a large, often light-skinned class in New World colonies. In general, being of “mixed” blood meant holding a higher social status. Today the term “black Creole” is widely used in southwest Louisiana; it also retains some reference to descendants of enslaved people from the French trade to Louisiana and the Caribbean. Many people in southwestern French Louisiana who currently identify themselves as just “Creole” also have some parentage and cultural influence from the Cajuns—the yeoman farming, fishing, and trapping petit habitants who entered the area between the 1760s and 1780s after their expulsion from present-day Nova Scotia. The cultural ties between Creoles and Cajuns are more significant than the genetic ones; the two cultures share many essential aspects of life, including Catholicism, festivals, foodways, Cajun and French Creole language, and music events that are today often simply called “French dances.” Cajun music and zydeco have been mutually influential as overlapped and distinct genres. The term “zydeco” is said to be a creolized form of the French les haricots (snap beans). Zydeco music is associated with the proverbial expression Les haricots sont pas salés (The snapbeans are not salted), which refers to times so ZYDECO

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hard that there is no salted meat to flavor the beans. The les haricots usage was first documented by Alan Lomax on a remarkable 1934 field recording of an a cappella juré (testifying) chant with hand claps and West African–style vocal fricative of the French song “Jai Fait Tout le Tour du Pays”; the counterpoint vocal line is the creolized “Oh mam, donnez-moi les haricots, Oh yé-yaie, les haricots, sont pas salés.” The spelling of zydeco—commonly found on posters advertising artists and dances, and on record and CD covers—stands alongside the alternate spellings “zodico,” “zordico,” and “zologo”; all are attempts to represent the Creole pronunciation. A closer phonetic spelling would be “zarico” (stressing the last syllable), which preserves the French a and r sounds. Zarico also has a possible West African source: a variety of Senegambian languages combine similar phonemes to mean “I dance” or “party.” Zydeco refers not only to the syncopated two-set dance numbers in a Creole band’s repertoire but also to the dance event itself. Old-time musician Bébé Carrière says that in the old days on the Louisiana prairies, word of a dance would be spread by someone on horseback yelling “Zydeco au soir . . . chez Carrière” (Zydeco tonight at the Carrière place). Similarly, the lyrics of the iconic 1949 song “Bon Ton Roulet,” recorded by Clarence Garlow, describes people going “way out in the country to the zydeco.” The cultural interchange between Cajuns and Creoles in southwest Louisiana has led many to overlook the differences between Cajun music and zydeco. Cajun music places more emphasis on developing the melodic line, while zydeco melodies are played much faster and consist of Acadian tunes or African American blues placed in an Afro-Caribbean rhythmic framework that produces an instrumental call-and-response. The rhythms are highly syncopated, with accents often shifting to various beats. A Cajun two-step tune can be transformed into a zydeco piece by increasing the tempo, simplifying the melody, and increasing syncopation. The rhythm may also change when a Cajun two-step accenting the first and third beats is played with the accents on the second and fourth beats. As one Creole musician says, “We put hinges on old Cajun music so it could swing!” Genres from outside Afro-Caribbean and Acadian culture, such as African American blues and Central European polkas and mazurkas, may be performed in a zydeco style. The same is true for the waltz, which Creoles inherited from Cajuns and other groups and made into a blues waltz. Creole singers and musicians have added many new themes to zydeco repertoires, including social humor (“Joe Pitre a deux femmes” and “Don’t Mess with My Tout-Tout”), food preferences (“Give Him Cornbread” and “Everything on

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the Hog Is Good”), and pride in place (“Dog Hill” and “Zydeco tout par tout”). Humorous and sometimes erotic animal songs about monkeys, chickens, and dogs as analogs of human foibles are also very popular. Some singers brag about their abilities as lovers, ramblers, musicians, horsemen, and even cruisers of fast-food joints. The public role of the zydeco bandleader as a kind of kingly rascal—both respected for his social power and beloved for his reputation as a musical trickster—persist. Zydeco dances in French and English are still essential entertainment for many. Unlike their Cajun counterparts, nearly all zydeco groups include a frottoir—a one-piece metal rubbing board worn over the shoulders and played with spoons, can openers, or thimbles. (This instrument’s antecedents rest in the scraped animal jaws or notched gourds of West Africa and the Caribbean and, later, in American washboards.) The current model, made in Louisiana by tinsmiths, became possible in the 1930s when cut sheet metal was introduced to the area for roofing and building siding. The accordion, used in both zydeco and Cajun music, probably arrived in the area in the 1880s. Likely brought by peddlers and possibly encouraged by the region’s German immigrants, its use was later reinforced by Sears catalog sales. Cajuns (and many zydeco musicians since the nouveau zydeco revival) use the traditional single-row, diatonic, pushpull accordion. Still, urban zydeco performers often use two- and three-row diatonic button accordions and larger chromatic piano instruments. The dance hall or Creole nightclub has historically been an essential social institution among Creoles. Men and women come to dances well dressed, incorporating the latest styles into their sartorial finery. At community-based dances, entire families—from children to grandparents—often attend. Sadly, in recent years, some dance halls have closed as rural populations have decreased with the fading agrarian economy. Likewise, the Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Festival—founded in 1982 and once a symbol for cultural resurgence of the African French people of rural and urban south Louisiana—has recently been overshadowed as a leading event, in large part because of the broader regional, national, and global embrace of Creole bands. This embrace has fostered the professional success of such popular accordion players as Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural and Terrance Simien. An entire generation has now heard zydeco in soundtracks of popular films and national commercials for everything from cars and hamburgers to express delivery services. Its national and global popularity outside French Louisiana has largely eclipsed that of Cajun music. On a more local level, family bands like Nathan Williams and the Zydeco Cha-Chas still bring traditional zydeco to urban Lafayette. And recently Cedric Watson, a

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young Texas-born fiddler with a Louisiana grandmother, taught himself French Creole and mastered the old Creole repertoire, and he now brings a hip rendition of traditional country La-La music to altogether new audiences. Equally encouraging for the future of Creole community life is the fact that family ensembles of fathers and uncles, sons and daughters, have emerged to play music at the many new Creole heritage and social events across French Louisiana. This is especially the case at trail rides, where people of all ages and affiliations dress in cowboy attire, ride in groups on horseback across rural lands, and then return to a zydeco dance party. In the 1970s many Creole musicians, club owners, and community leaders suggested that zydeco was apé mort (dying). Since then, the music has undergone a series of stylistic renaissances led by an array of dynamic performers. Now in the 21st century, zydeco—a vernacular Creole music that grew in rural south Louisiana communities— has produced a sound and musicians with worldwide followings. At the same time, local community gatherings continue to embrace bands, music, and social dancing that are as homegrown as ever.

NICK SPITZER Tulane University Les Blank, Dry Wood (film, 1979), Hot Pepper (film, 1973); Carl A. Brasseaux, Keith P. Fontenot, and Claude F. Oubre, Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country (1994); Mark F. DeWitt, Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World (2008); André Gladu, Zarico (1994); Robert Mugge, The Kingdom of Zydeco (film, 1994); Ben Sandmel, Zydeco! (1999); Nicholas R. Spitzer, Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana (film, 1986); Michael Tisserand, The Kingdom of Zydeco (1998); Robert Willey, From La La to Zydeco (film, 2005); Roger Wood, Texas Zydeco (2006).

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Bar and Bat Mitzvahs The Bar and Bat Mitzvah have become perhaps the most visible and important Jewish religious ritual in the United States. Traditionally, the Bar Mitzvah is a coming-of-age rite in which a 13year-old boy assumes the obligations of Jewish adulthood. Though not outlined in Jewish scripture or law, the Bar Mitzvah developed in the 13th century as a relatively modest ceremony marking the coming-of-age of Jewish boys. At 13, the boy is expected to follow the numerous Jewish commandments and can be counted toward a minyan (the quorum of ten Jews required before certain prayers can be recited). The name itself, which literally means “son of commandment,” reflects the new Jewish obligations that the boy is now expected to assume. In recent decades, congregations have also opened this rite of passage to girls, calling it the Bat Mitzvah (“daughter of commandment”). During the Bar and Bat Mitzvah, the celebrant leads the weekly Sabbath service and, most importantly, reads a portion from the Torah, the handwritten scroll that includes the first five books of the Old Testament. He or she then usually gives a short speech, often discussing a message drawn from that week’s Torah portion. The ceremony is usually the culmination of several years of Hebrew study and attracts friends and family to watch the boy or girl perform these duties. Typically, the Torah reading takes place on Saturday morning and is followed by a luncheon to which friends, family, and members of the congregation are invited. The celebrant’s family often orders special

yarmulkes (head coverings), with the name and date of the event printed on the inside, and distributes these to guests, who bring gifts for the boy or girl. Often, another (sometimes lavish) party takes place on Saturday night. These parties frequently feature themes that are unrelated to the religious nature of the event. A DJ plays dance music (ironically, the Village People’s disco classic, “YMCA,” has become a Bar Mitzvah standard), and young and old swarm the dance floor between food courses. Critics have long charged that these parties too often overshadow the sanctity of the ritual. In response, rabbis have begun to require “Mitzvah Projects” of the celebrants, in which they take part in some kind of community service in connection with the Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Until recent decades, the Bar Mitzvah was far less common in the South than it is today. In large part, this is due to Reform Judaism’s historical dominance in the region. In the late 19th century, the Reform movement dispensed with several traditional rituals, including the Bar Mitzvah. This was sometimes a source of controversy in the South. In Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, for instance, one angry congregant was almost expelled in 1898 for his verbal assaults on the new rabbi, David Marx, after he had gotten rid of the Bar Mitzvah ritual. For southern Jews growing up in Reform congregations in the first half of the 20th century, the Bar Mitzvah was supplanted by confirmation, a ritual borrowed from Christianity. Orthodox Jews, however, continued to celebrate BAR AND BAT MITZVAHS

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the Bar Mitzvah, though in a much less lavish manner than what has become common in recent decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, a growing number of Reform congregations brought back the Bar Mitzvah ritual. Since then, at a time when the overall Jewish community has grown increasingly fearful of intermarriage and too much assimilation, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs have become public expressions of Jewish pride and identity. They also facilitate a more intensive Jewish education, as children must learn to read Hebrew in order to read from the Torah and lead services. Today, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in the South are not significantly different from those in other parts of the country. A greater distinction exists between the rituals held in large and small communities. Large congregations in cities like Houston and Atlanta usually host two Bar Mitzvahs each weekend, and 13-year-old Jewish children get used to a prolonged party circuit, attending their friends’ Bar and Bat Mitzvahs each weekend. In smaller communities, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs are rarer and tend to attract more attention from other members of the congregation. For them, these rituals often symbolize the future of the Jewish people in towns that have seen their Jewish community decline. Members gather to watch one of their congregation’s children declare his/her commitment to being Jewish in the heart of the Christian Bible Belt. Since the 1970s, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs have become increasingly popular in the South, in large part because they are communal and public. They require an audience in order to be meaning254 BARBECUE

ful. For most Jewish kids, a Bar or Bat Mitzvah is the one time that their nonJewish friends from school visit the synagogue. It thus becomes an important interfaith event, giving non-Jews a chance to observe and take part in Jewish worship services. Parents often print a program that explains the various parts of the service for their nonJewish guests. Other than weddings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs are the religious rituals most often attended by those of different faiths. In this sense, this ritual not only confirms the distinct religious identity of Jews but also demystifies and normalizes Jewish religious practice within the larger culture. STUART ROCKOFF Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life Jackson, Mississippi Yosef I. Abramowitz and Rabbi Susan Silverman, Jewish Family and Life: Traditions, Holidays, and Values (1997); Roger Bennett, Nick Kroll, and Jules Shell, Bar Mitzvah Disco: The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party’s Never Over (2005); Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (1988); Mark Oppenheimer, Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah across America (2005); Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (2004).

Barbecue In the folklife of the South, few words evoke a more animated or panoramic response than this one: barbecue. Is it a noun, a verb, an adjective, a preposition? Is it a wedding feast, a homecoming attraction, a back-roads discovery, a plank in a politician’s platform? Is it

pork shoulder, beef brisket, mutton, goat, chicken? Is it sliced, chopped, pulled, or picked from the supine, smoky carcass of a whole hog? Is its sauce primarily tomato-based or vinegary, sweet or sour, hot or mild? Is barbecue authentic if it originates in some northern clime, such as Kansas City or Chicago? Can we even agree on the proper spelling of it—barbecue, barbeque, Bar-B-Q, or some other variant? Southerners tend to avoid direct challenges to one another’s preferences in religious expression, sports teams, politics, music, motor vehicles, and flags, but they will vigorously endorse or dispute your taste in barbecue quicker than you can give your preferred spelling of it—quicker, as an old vernacular expression used to claim, than a minnow can swim across a dipper. The intent of this brief treatise is not to parse the word, catalog the nomenclature, or analyze the styles of barbecue as food, but rather to look upon it as a social and cultural event more venerable in this region than the very term “South” itself. The practice of slowly roasting meat suspended on a rack of sticks over a bed of hot coals has been traced to the native inhabitants of the Caribbean “Indies,” and their word for such a rack, barbacoa, first appeared in print as barbecue in English dictionaries of the 1660s. Well before that, in the period framed by the Columbus voyages of the 1490s and the De Soto expedition to Tampa Bay in the 1530s, seamen toiling under the flag of Spain brought pigs ashore throughout the Americas, and it could not have been long before the first of them met their fate on a barbacoa.

More than three centuries after the start of European colonial exploration and settlement on the North American continent, the southernmost interior colonies all the way to the Mississippi River were still commonly referred to as “the Southwest Territories,” or simply as “the West.” Not until the early 1800s would they emerge as “the South”—a distinct region of the young nation set apart from the rest by many things, not least being its tenacious defense of slavery. By then, barbecues enjoyed a well-established history as a popular form of summer social entertainment. In the 1830s, Catholic churches in and around the Ohio River town of Owensboro, Ky., began staging summer extravaganzas featuring mutton barbecue and burgoo, a thick, spicy porridge of meats and vegetables; the tradition continues to this day. In the 1890s, famed southern pit masters such as Gus Jaubert of Kentucky and Sheriff John W. Calloway of Wilkes County, Ga., gained national attention for their prodigious barbecue feats, serving tens of thousands of eaters in spectacular orgies of smoky meat, sauce, and stew. The parallel existence of superior barbecues (both the events and the meats) and slaves or freemen of African descent was no mere coincidence. To prepare large quantities of slow-cooked pig or sheep and serve it to throngs of people required extended time outdoors, heavy lifting, watchful patience, and consummate skill. These demanding labors fell from the start to male slaves, and it was they and their descendants, down through the centuries, who came to be most directly identified with BARBECUE

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the creation of iconic southern barbecue, which remains, in the words of chronicler Jim Auchmutey, one of “the signature foods of the South [and] one of the fond traditions that makes the South the South.” This trenchant irony is neither isolated nor unique in southern culture. Just as the burdens and miseries of life for black slaves and poor people in general gave birth, through some mystical osmosis, to much of the best indigenous music of the South, so they did in like manner contribute to the region’s distinctive food. Without in any way approving of the inhumane conditions under which these artistic creations arose, Americans have grown to celebrate the artistry—whether jazz, the blues, or a well-turned pork shoulder— and to honor the people who, down through the ages, have infused them with such distinction. Barbecue—the public event—is at least as important in the contemporary South as it was when the likes of George Washington showed up for such extended feasts and celebrations in 18thcentury Virginia. (If you doubt that, ask any statewide political candidate in Kentucky how foolhardy it would be to pass up the annual Fancy Farm barbecue and picnic in the western corner of the state.) And, as a major menu meat, barbecue’s popularity has soared. Far from remaining a state or regional phenomenon, the many-splendored attributes of southern barbecue have long since transcended the boundaries of region, race, class, gender, or national taste. Along with fried chicken, catfish, sweet tea, pecan pie, and a few other 256

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staples, it is the South’s loving gift to a world hungry for peace, comfort, and a serene sense of well-being. JOHN EGERTON Nashville, Tennessee Jim Auchmutey, in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 7, Foodways, ed. John T. Edge (2007); Lolis Eric Elie, ed., Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (2004); John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue (2008).

Basketmaking, Lowcountry Travelers along coastal Highway 17 North near Mount Pleasant, S.C., across the Cooper River from Charleston, cannot fail to notice a unique folk art displayed on rough wooden stands on the edge of the road. Coiled baskets, made of golden sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea) decorated with russet bands of longleaf pine needles (Pinus palustris) and bound with strips of palmetto frond (Sabal palmetto), have been offered for sale on the highway since the 1930s. Widely recognized as the oldest African-inspired craft in America, Lowcountry baskets are appreciated today not only for their utility and beauty but as symbols of the region and of the people who make them. The tradition of coiled basketry goes back centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. In the late 1600s, European settlers and the enslaved Africans who worked the land in the new British colony of Carolina began experimenting with rice as a potential export crop. The skills associated with growing rice and processing the grain were familiar to many of the Africans, particularly

Lowcountry basketmaker Sue Middleton stands at her basket stand on Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant, S.C., in this 1994 photo. Basketmakers started setting up simple wood-frame stands along the highway in 1929 in an effort to circumvent the aesthetic restrictions and low prices of the white middlemen who marketed their baskets. Eight decades later, basket stands still dot the highway, offering baskets that are both elegantly simple and exuberantly creative. (Photograph by Dale Rosengarten, 1994)

people from the Upper Guinea Coast, where Europeans saw rice under cultivation as early as 1446, and from the inland delta of the Niger River, where rice has been grown for 2,000 years. On Lowcountry plantations, one particular basket—a wide-coiled winnowing tray called a “fanner”—was adopted as the essential tool for separating the grain from its chaff. To wrap and stitch rows of bulrush (Juncus roemarianus), basket sewers on the mainland used white oak splints (Quercus alba), while Sea Islanders fashioned strips from the stem of the saw palmetto (Serenoa repens). As plantation agriculture spread, people kept moving and the tradition of coiled basketry that had taken hold in the Lowcountry migrated with them.

When rice production expanded into Georgia and North Carolina in the early 18th century, South Carolina planters led crews of experienced “hands” to break the new ground and plant the crop. By the mid-1840s, rice operations extended down the coast of Georgia and into northern Florida; the range of the basket followed suit. With the breakup of the plantation system at the end of the Civil War, many freed people acquired land and began to farm for themselves. Coiled grass baskets remained in use in homes and fields and became a familiar sight on the streets of Charleston. People from rural settlements such as James Island, Johns Island, Edisto Island, and Mount Pleasant brought farm produce to market BASKETMAKING, LOWCOUNTRY

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in coiled rush baskets balanced on the head. In the early decades of the 20th century, as agriculture declined and jobs in industry lured tens of thousands of black southerners to the North, Lowcountry baskets could have gone the way of gourd and earthenware vessels, wooden mortars and pestles, palmetto fans and thatching. But the tradition proved to be resilient. Seventy-five miles south of Charleston, the Penn School on St. Helena Island introduced “native island basketry” as part of its agricultural curriculum for boys and kept bulrush basketmaking alive. Meanwhile, around the time of World War I, basketmakers in the vicinity of Boone Hall Plantation north of Mount Pleasant increased their output and expanded their product line in response to a new wholesale market and a budding tourist trade. Charleston merchant Clarence W. Legerton began commissioning baskets to sell through his Sea Grass Basket mail-order catalog and from his retail bookstore on King Street. Sam Coakley from Hamlin Beach acted as an agent for the community of sewers. Every other Saturday, basketmakers would bring their wares to his house for Legerton’s inspection. Mount Pleasant “show” baskets differed from agricultural “work” baskets in several ways: the sewers tended to be women, not men; sweetgrass was the principal foundation material rather than bulrush; palm leaf was used in place of white oak splints or palmetto butt to bind the rows of grass; and new forms were created and pine needles added for decorative effect. With the construction 258

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of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929 and the paving of Highway 17, basketmakers found a way to reach their market directly: they began selling baskets by the side of the road, setting them on chairs or overturned crates. As the tourist trade quickened, sewers responded with new basket shapes displayed on an innovative marketing device: the basket stand. Today basketmakers’ creativity and resilience are being put to the test as rampant development threatens the future of their art and the physical continuity of their community. Since the 1970s, suburban and resort development has drastically diminished the local supply of sweetgrass. The highway that once assured the survival of the tradition now threatens to run the basket stands off the road, and subdivisions and gated communities are displacing the very neighborhoods where basketmakers live. In spite of these dangers, Lowcountry basketry continues to thrive. “I’ve always seen [the basket] as an art and felt that it should be expressed that way,” remarks basketmaker Mary Jackson, who in 2008 was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. “The baskets are simple; the form and the handwork create the beauty.” To compensate for the sweetgrass shortage, sewers have reintroduced bulrush. Baskets are bigger and bolder. Some pieces are considered collectors’ items, with prices reflecting this status. Basketmakers also derive intangible rewards from the work. “There’s just so many positive things about it,” explains Mary Catherine Stanley, who retired from

teaching in 1998 and returned to basketmaking. “It gives you peace; it keeps you calm; it keeps you focused. It promotes creativity. You can make a living doing it. And even if those things were not there—if I couldn’t feel the effect of those things—I still would do it. Because when one gets through making [the baskets] and look at them and say, ‘Wow, did I do that?’” As symbols of the distinct Gullah culture of the South Atlantic Coast and as works of art, coiled baskets carry a lot of weight. Yet they remain what they have always been: vessels made of grass sewn with a flexible stitching element, useful for countless purposes. DALE ROSENGARTEN College of Charleston Joyce V. Coakley, Sweetgrass Baskets and the Gullah Tradition (2006); Dale Rosengarten, Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1986, 1994); Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout, eds., Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978, 1990).

Basketmaking, Native American One of the oldest Native American crafts, basketmaking among southern Indians extends more than 9,000 years into the past to the time when individuals began to turn local materials into useful containers. Native American basketmaking was born of functional need, developed as a sign of identity, and survived because of economic hardship and available markets. Although ancient baskets have not survived the varied climates of the South,

archaeologists have discovered enough fragments and impressions to know that Native Americans learned to make baskets several thousand years before making pottery. Lacking paper or plastic bags, cardboard boxes, wooden chests, tin buckets, cotton sacks, plywood drawers, and pottery bowls and platters, southern Indians created baskets that were essential to everyday living and responded to specific needs. They made baskets of varying sizes and shapes to gather, prepare, cook, serve, and store foods; to haul dirt, tools, kindling, and coals; and to safeguard personal and community valuables. Since baskets were made from local vegetation, Native American horticulture included activities that benefited wild plants that were readily available, easy to weave, and likely to make strong, flexible, and durable baskets. With controlled burns, pruning, and selective harvesting, Natives ensured sufficient materials for their present needs and adequate regrowth for future harvests. Europeans who invaded the South in the 1500s found most Native American groups using a variety of baskets made of river cane (Arundinaria gigantea), a native bamboo that grows from the southern coasts to the mountains. Cane’s growth habits and physical properties make it an exceptional basket material. Developing in dense stands, it prospers from thinning and will resprout as long as the roots remain intact. Because of cane’s physical properties, its stalks are lightweight, long lasting, and supple. Although Native Americans probably also wove with materials such as bark, tree BASKETMAKING, NATIVE AMERICAN

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saplings, grasses, and vines, river cane (sometimes called “reed”) is the basket material most often recorded by early Europeans. Cane preparation included harvesting, soaking, peeling, splitting, scraping, boiling, dying, and drying—processes that took as much as two-thirds of the total time spent on making a single basket. Each element, called a split or weaver, was made uniformly wide and thin to ensure a smooth surface and appealing appearance. To add the colors and designs that carried symbolic meanings, Native Americans harvested, pounded, and boiled dye plants such as bloodroot and pokeweed (for reds) and walnut roots or sumac fruits (for dark browns and blacks). Reliance on cane and red- or black-dye plants was a cultural expression shared by most southern Indian communities. Some may also have used goldenseal and yellow root to produce yellow dyes. Another hallmark of Native American basketmaking was the role of women. Among all southern Native Americans, women were the predominant makers and users of baskets, an association reinforced in daily work, myths, and ceremonies. Sacred stories told of female creatures who brought weaving to the world and through weaving saved the world. Ceremonies included women’s creation and use of baskets to reenact myths and represent agricultural bounty. Some, and perhaps all, tribes restricted the creation of sifters to married women and of ritual or medicine baskets to postmenopausal women. Some, and perhaps all, designated certain times of day for weaving 260

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sacred containers. The sanctions governing basketmaking reveal cultural respect for the biological power of women. The work of making baskets affected all tribal members. In daily life, women created baskets to gather such wild foods as fruits, tubers, and nuts and to plant or harvest domesticates such as corn, beans, and squash. Harvesting baskets included small carrying containers and large conical burden baskets that women suspended from shoulder straps or tumplines to distribute the weight they carried on their backs. Food-processing containers included square sifters and sieves with open-work bases to rinse foods and sift out particles. They wove broad, shallow winnowers to separate food elements, scoop fish from streams, and hold dough as it baked into bread. They created square, tight baskets to serve food or store seeds and tall, widenecked containers to keep vegetables and household goods. Although basket forms usually served multiple functions, they are visible signs of the subsistence strategies—a combination of farming, gathering, and hunting and fishing— that characterized Native American life in the South. Native American baskets were also aesthetically pleasing. In the early 1700s they appeared in colonial records and household inventories as trade objects valued by Europeans. The most popular were sets of baskets, from two to more than 30, nested within one another and so near in size that one could be used as a lid for the next. The creation of nested river-cane baskets was attributed to, among others, the Cherokee of the

Carolinas and Tennessee and the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, and Chitimacha of Mississippi and Louisiana. Southern Indians generally relied on three weaving techniques. The simplest was plaiting, or passing one horizontal weaver over and under one vertical weaver at right angles. The more complicated twill weaving required passing one or more horizontal weavers over and under more than one vertical. By varying the number of vertical passes, the twill weaver produced a variety of geometric patterns. Diamonds, herringbones, zigzags, rectangles, and squares might decorate even the utilitarian containers. The most difficult technique was double weaving, twill work that makes two complete baskets that are joined only at their common rim. Skillful weavers could create patterns on the interior basket that differed from those on the exterior basket. Utility baskets were plaited or twilled single weaves, while double-woven baskets, such as the nested containers, stored and protected valuables. All had square or rectangular bases with rounded rims. As the knowledge and skill to make baskets was passed down through families, certain traditions became associated with their creators and communities. Over time, these traditions served as cultural identifiers for basketmakers and their tribes. By the 1800s, basket traditions of materials, use, shape, design, pattern, and dye signified the customs, creativity, aesthetics, imagination, and environment of the Cherokee of the upper Piedmont; the Creek, Mikasuki, and Seminole of the lower Piedmont and Florida peninsula; and Native

Americans of the Coastal Plains, including the Choctaw, Chitimacha, Koasati, Houma, Tunica, Biloxi, and Chickasaw. Each tribe could be identified by certain basket characteristics, as could specific families within each tribe. Weavers guarded their techniques and patterns as family possessions and secret knowledge. As women (and sometimes men) of each tribe traded with and peddled to neighbors and strangers, baskets enhanced personal and tribal economies and reinforced cultural identities. Following the 19th-century American assault on Native American societies and the forced Removal to the West of the majority of southern Indians, the remaining remnants of tribes were restricted to marginal landholdings and reduced to poverty. Basketmaking continued primarily as an economic strategy to supply personal necessities and to bring badly needed money or goods to individual Indian households. Women sustained markets by bundling their baskets in sheets and carrying them on their backs to neighboring white settlements to exchange or sell in a cash-poor economy. As alternatives to handmade containers of natural materials became widely available in the mid-1800s, baskets became unnecessary for most households. Southern Native Americans then turned to art, academic, and tourist markets to support their work. Weavers usually expanded their customs to include different materials, colors, techniques, forms, and functions. As Native Americans abandoned their inherited foodprocessing practices in the early 1900s, basketmakers produced miniatures of BASKETMAKING, NATIVE AMERICAN

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traditional forms as decorations, toys, and personal ornaments. Weavers also borrowed and customized non-Native traditions, creating baskets that differed from any developed by their tribal relatives who had been removed to the West. In many groups, men became basketmakers, although the work and its underlying concepts generally remained the province of women. Among Native Americans with access to markets, basketmaking continued to be a significant expression of culture, even when it diverged from its origins. Among those lacking access to reliable markets, basketmaking was severely threatened. The introduction of commercial dyes in the late 1800s changed the basketmaking process and product. Red, black, and yellow continued as primary colors among cane weavers, but those who turned to different materials took advantage of the greatly expanded commercial palette that was inexpensive and easy to use. Intense hues that did not last as long as the subtle colors made from vegetable dyes soon appeared on every kind of weaving material. Ultimately, only the Cherokees returned to vegetable dyes. As the 21st century began, the North Carolina Cherokee, the Louisiana Choctaw and Chitimacha, and the Texas and Louisiana Koasati (Coushatta) were continuing to make cane baskets for the tourist and collector markets. Cherokee weavers had incorporated three additional materials—white oak, Japanese honeysuckle, and red maple—and two new techniques—rib and wicker work—to create baskets for tourists. Competing with one another for buyers, 262

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they began ornamenting baskets made from the new materials with rings, curlicues, crosses, and curls. The Cherokee reservation attracts tourists with its location adjacent to a national park and its successful casino. To guarantee year-round sales and influence the basket standards and prices in reservation shops, the artisans opened a craft cooperative that features baskets and sponsors basketmaking classes. The Choctaw and Chitimacha did not adopt new materials, but continued to weave with cane. Choctaws extended their basketry customs to include varied forms such as tiered wall pockets, heart or “bull-nose” baskets, elbow baskets with woven handles, and large hampers with flat lids, but the absence of reliable markets on or off their reservations continually threatens the survival of basketmaking. Like the Cherokee, they no longer depend on families to transmit basketmaking knowledge and skills and instead have turned to workshops and classes, occasionally with non-Native instructors, to train potential weavers. The Chitimacha, widely recognized for creating extremely narrow splits and curvilinear designs that can be traced to the Mississippian era (A.D. 900–1600), maintained their cane traditions with occasional help from white benefactors who recognized the quality of their work. In the early 1900s and again in the 1930s, whites purchased and marketed Chitimacha baskets, providing national exposure, enhancing individual economies, and stimulating basket production. With federal recognition and improved conditions on their small reservation, a handful of weavers have

begun documenting Chitimacha baskets in museum collections and saving “pattern baskets” in order to preserve and study their unique traditions. The Koasati continued traditional cane forms, including those of their neighboring (and sometimes intermarried) Choctaw into the mid-1900s. Influenced by a government worker, they turned to raffia and then to pine straw as available, inexpensive materials and began creating miniature animal effigies that have become their most common basket form. The effigies represent animals found in Koasati landscapes (such as turkeys, armadillos, alligators, and turtles) and have removable backs that serve as basket lids. Some Koasati weavers also became specialists with twisted Spanish moss sewn with raffia and ornamented with glass beads. In aggregate, a market made up of collectors, scattered shops, and local museums and festivals continues to sustain Koasati basketmaking. The Florida Seminole and Mikasuki and the Louisiana Houma substituted the more-available palmetto for cane in the 1800s to make utilitarian baskets for their own needs. Subsequently, the Seminole and Mikasuki became specialists with coiled pine needles or sweetgrass, a custom likely adopted from intermarried and adopted Africans. In the 20th century, successful reservation casinos and cultural centers led to tourism that, in turn, developed a market for their coiled grass baskets stitched with colorful embroidery threads and often topped with carved dolls’ heads or mounted on flat palmetto bases. Possibly influenced by intermarried

Africans and Europeans, the Houma started making circular containers by coiling undyed palmetto leaves into baskets and handles. Creative weavers of the 20th century further innovated by flattening palmetto leaves to braid into unique forms such as hats. Houma weavers stitch together the undyed braids with colorful aniline threads. By the early years of the 21st century, basketmaking in every southern tribe was threatened by diminishing resources, unpredictable markets, and alternative opportunities for potential weavers. The history of Native American basketmaking in the South, however, reveals that weavers have repeatedly found and devised ways to select available materials, prepare splits in varied ways, weave functional or desirable containers, and identify accessible markets. Among those whose basketmaking has remained viable, the determination to preserve their unique source of cultural identity that binds them to land and heritage shows no sign of diminishing. SARAH H. HILL Independent Scholar Atlanta, Georgia Dorothy Downs, Art of the Florida Seminole and Miccosukee Indians (1995); J. Marshall Gettys, in Woven Worlds: Baskets from the Clark Field Collection, ed. Lydia L. Wyckoff (2001); Sarah H. Hill, Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (1996); Dana Bowker Lee and H. F. Gregory, eds., The Work of Tribal Hands: Southeastern Indian Split Cane Basketry (2006); Claude Medford Jr., in Basketry of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Marshall Gettys (1984).

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Bluegrass Festivals Bluegrass music, which coalesced in the 1940s around the playing of Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys (and of bands that were offshoots of that one), has long been poised between folk and popular status, between constituting a grassroots subculture and having a niche on the “Roots” edge of commercial country music. The musicians perform in bands of about half a dozen participants, most of whom sing (the characteristic range is high) and also play fiddle and/or mandolin (usually both), banjo (played in a distinctive style), bass, one or more guitars, and perhaps a Dobro. There are hundreds of professional bluegrass bands in North America (and as far away as Germany and Japan) and considerably more parttime or amateur groups. A few bluegrass bands participated in the festivals of the folk revival during the 1960s. By the 1970s, however, bluegrass was sustaining its own festivals—hundreds of annual affairs ranging from smallish gatherings held in small-town, all-purpose arenas to events with audiences of over 10,000 fans, held in open areas such as campgrounds, fairgrounds, and fields transformed into concert venues a few times a year. During this same era and shortly thereafter, many old-time fiddle contests in the Southeast made room for bluegrass bands (with their own separate competition brackets). Although bluegrass as a family of musical styles now encompasses considerable variety in its mix of tradition and jazzy virtuosity, the genre as a whole has never lost its association with rural life and rural ways of thinking. 264 BLUEGRASS FESTIVALS

This association persists in symbiosis with the demography of the bluegrass audience. A typical festival lasts several days, with a climax featuring wellknown touring bands on Friday and Saturday, plus a lineup of bluegrass gospel performances on Sunday morning. A blue-collar cross-section of the white community attends on the weekend, while the elderly can constitute nearly the whole audience during the workweek. Many of these elders are retirees who tour the United States in recreational vehicles, often creating an annual routine—and ritual—by going from one bluegrass festival to another. They constitute a portable community very interested in old-fashioned rural culture, broadly understood. Throughout the week at such festivals, informal jamming and conversing in the campgrounds is at least as important as the staged concerts. While differences between bluegrass festivals would discourage labeling any one as “typical,” many do share a set of common features. Mississippi’s Two Rivers Bluegrass Festival exemplifies many of these shared characteristics. The festival takes place every April in the Greene County Rural Events Center, a semienclosed dirt-floor building that also hosts livestock shows, rodeos, and other events. Here—as is often the case with rural bluegrass festivals—tradition and bluegrass go hand in hand. The food, for instance, includes both familiar deep-fried festival fare and local country cooking (gumbo, jambalaya, and fried catfish in Greene County, though the local offerings might be barbecue and Brunswick stew in Ten-

nessee and the Carolinas). The festival also features a number of craft stands (including a quilt display and demonstration by the Greene County Quilters, displays by several woodworkers, and other craft-oriented booths), as well as community-service stands (including a book sale supporting the library and a facility to test blood pressure). The arrangements for festivals like this often reflect collaboration between community boosters and members of regional or state bluegrass organizations. For this southern Mississippi festival, the larger group is the Magnolia State Bluegrass Association, which includes about 1,500 members; they sponsor or cosponsor about 50 festivals each year in Mississippi. These numbers of both aficionados and events are fairly typical for bluegrass organizations across the South. Bluegrass festivals tend to gather a head of steam early in the week, when various local groups—who are generally not paid—command the stage. These enthusiastic amateurs typically include bluegrass ensembles, gospel groups, and a variety pack of country-music performers. With these acts, downhome credentials and local friendship networks substitute for the polish of the upcoming weekend’s professionals. The focus in these first days, when elders dominate the sparse audience, is less on musical genre than on values (wholesome, family-oriented, traditional, American). Not infrequently, some of those who helped arrange the festival get a bit of stage time here, thus providing a demographic bridge between the audience and the more skilled

performers to come. When Saturday arrives, local families swell the audience and the touring bands play. These groups (which at the Two Rivers Festival might include such acts as the mainstream bluegrass Jason Boone Band and the hybrid old-country/bluegrass Driskill Mountain Boys) show how high technical skill and excitement can add to—and be stacked on top of—the rural values that have been celebrated all week. The South hosts music festivals around other genres of music, but bluegrass festivals have become especially significant regional rituals. CHRIS GOERTZEN University of Southern Mississippi John Rufus Bealle, Ethnomusicology (Winter 1993); Robert Owen Gardner, Symbolic Interaction (Spring 2004); Philip Nusbaum, in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (1993); Neil V. Rosenberg, in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (1993).

Buckdancing, Flatfooting, and Clogging Buckdancing, flatfooting, and clogging are three names for the percussive step dancing of rural Appalachia and the South. Also known as “hoedowning” (in eastern Kentucky) and “jig dancing” or “jigging” (in the Ozarks), this type of dance is characterized by fast, percussive footwork that makes use of the toes, the heels, or the whole foot, with dancers creating a rhythmic accompaniment to the music. The roots of these dances can be traced to the arrival of the earliest settlers in America, beginning a process in which dance steps and

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The fluid stylistic exchange that has characterized the southern history of buckdancing, flatfooting, and clogging is exemplified in this image of a black American dancer clogging with a white string band at North Carolina’s Bluff Mountain Festival. The dancer, Earl White, grew up watching his grandfather buckdance with friends in eastern North Carolina. White went on to become a founding member of the Green Grass Cloggers, an influential freestyle clogging group that freely blended steps from both white and black dance traditions. (Photograph by Cedric N. Chatterley, courtesy of the North Carolina Folklife Institute)

styles moved freely from one culture to another. Buckdancing, flatfooting, and clogging are clearly multiethnic blends; they draw on jigs and other step dances brought from the British Isles and northern Europe, the West African dances of those who were enslaved, and the dances of the Cherokee and other Native Americans. Flatfooting and buckdancing are older terms that are generally used to indicate time-honored styles of idiosyncratic step dancing done by individual dancers. Flatfooting is a style of buckdance in which a dancer’s feet stay close to the floor with the heels down, rather than being up on the toes. As 266

early as the mid-16th century, dancers in Scotland used the term platfute (flatfoot) to describe a type of dancing. Evidence suggests that the term “buckdance” derives from the word “buck,” a demeaning 19th-century reference used by whites to refer to African American males. Some have argued, however, that “buckdance” came first. Whichever is the case, the terms are related, and countless references in the narratives of ex-slaves recall “buckdancing” at antebellum “frolics.” While these dance styles share some common steps, they have no prescribed footwork. Instead, they encompass a range of steps and styles that invite improvisation and

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spontaneity as individual dancers interact rhythmically with both the musicians and each other. Rather than remaining static, rural step-dance traditions have evolved over time, constantly adopting new dance steps into local repertoires. Dancers took some steps (for example, the Pigeon Wing) from itinerant French dancing masters at the end of the 18th century and borrowed others from stage dancers who performed British hornpipes and clog dances in wooden-soled shoes. Throughout the 19th century, various steps and elements of these urban dance styles became part of the rural southern dance tradition. It was not until the 1950s that the term “clogging” (a name derived from English clog dancing) came to designate southern Appalachian step dancing. This shift in terminology followed the advent of square-dance competitions in western North Carolina during the 1930s and 1940s and the emergence of a new, performance-oriented squaredance style. In 1928 and the years that followed, Bascom Lamar Lunsford invited local square-dance groups to compete onstage at his annual Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, N.C. Over time, as a direct result of these competitions, a new squaredance style evolved that combined individual percussive footwork with group square-dance figures. By the 1940s, dance groups were wearing matching costumes and tap shoes on stage. By the early 1960s, in turn, clogging teams in western North Carolina were beginning to incorporate synchronized footwork and more performance-oriented cho-

reography into their dance routines. This new style, called “precision clogging,” moved the dancing further away from the social context of traditional buckdancing by placing an even greater emphasis on competition and performance. Since the 1960s, the popularity of precision clogging has led to the standardization of steps and styles; national clogging organizations now host annual conventions, certify clogging instructors, and sanction contests. This widespread interest has led to the creation of a modern precision-clogging style called “contemporary clogging.” Although its roots lie in traditional southern Appalachian buckdancing, this modern style incorporates footwork borrowed from tap dance as well as Canadian and Irish step dancing. Dancers memorize prescribed sequences of steps and dance routines that are choreographed by clogging instructors and then perform these to recorded pop music at exhibitions and competitions. While this standardized modern form of clogging is now popular throughout the South, traditional buckdancers and flatfooters still grace the dance floor at rural dances. PHILIP A. JAMISON Warren Wilson College Philip A. Jamison, Old Time Herald (November 1993); Mike Seeger, Talking Feet: Buck, Flatfoot, and Tap: Solo Southern Dance of the Appalachian, Piedmont, and Blue Ridge Mountain Regions (1992); Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside, eds., Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America’s Southeast and Beyond (1995).

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Church Dramas Church dramas are a common feature of Christianity in the American South. Depictions of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ mark many congregations’ Christmas and Easter celebrations, while other short sketches frequently find their way into regular Sunday services. Larger productions for the purpose of evangelism can appear at any time of year, as they do increasingly at Halloween. While church dramas are not exclusive to the South, the church’s historically central place in southern culture makes them a significant feature of folklife in this region. The great variety of church dramas reflects the range of sources—heralding from different historical contexts and time periods—from which they have sprung. In the American South, church dramas have emerged more or less separately in African American churches and in historically white churches. The history of church dramas reaches back centuries to the European mystery and morality plays of the Middle Ages. Such plays were powerful tools for educating Christian populations that were largely nonliterate. Over time, short plays on biblical topics became longer and began incorporating more secular themes and ribald humor. By the time of the Reformation, churchsupported dramas had largely ceased to exist. Oral histories suggest that by the late 19th century, church dramas seem to have experienced a vernacular rebirth in rural churches across the South. Sometimes these plays assumed a playful character, as in church-sponsored 268

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“womanless weddings”; more often, though, they celebrated a sacred holiday or conveyed a moral message (as in The Hellbound Train). Locally produced scripts for these dramas often passed from generation to generation within congregations. Perhaps it was this tradition that eventually gave rise to the much larger church dramas produced in the early 1900s by such nondenominational churches such as Paul Rader’s Chicago Gospel Tabernacle and Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple in Los Angeles; both churches put on spectacular (and broadly influential) biblical dramas to entertain and educate the crowds that flooded through their doors. The pioneers of local church dramas in the South seem to have been African American churches, some of whom capitalized upon a rich history of spiritual songs to create dramatic musical presentations that mesmerized black and white audiences alike. African American playwright George H. Bass, when asked about the origins of black drama, noted, “Folk talk about minstrelsy, but it’s more sacred than that. Black drama begins in the church.” With plots often based directly on spirituals, these early black church dramas (with titles like Old Ship of Zion, The Devil Play, and Heaven Bound) wove together vocal music and dramatic action, relying on a common pool of religious symbolism to create stylized depictions of biblical themes. Probably the most famous and welldocumented example of this genre is Heaven Bound, a musical drama produced by Big Bethel African Method-

ist Episcopal Church in Atlanta every year from 1930 to the present. Unlike other African American dramas that gained fame by spreading from church to church, or even by making the leap to Broadway, Heaven Bound remained solely at Big Bethel, where congregation members kept strict control of the script, music, and direction. Conceived originally as a fund-raiser to help the church rebuild after a fire, Heaven Bound became a tradition not only for Big Bethelites, who have faithfully passed roles from one generation to the next, but also for black and white Atlantans, who have flocked to the production year after year. “Spiritual dramas” such as Heaven Bound serve many functions. They can certainly bring financial benefits to the hosting church (as evidenced by the economic inspiration for Big Bethel’s production). They also provide churchsanctioned entertainment. (Historian Randolph Edmonds emphasizes this function so ardently that he dismisses their educational aspects as mere “byproducts.”) Some scholars see these plays as forms of “collective spiritual expression,” while others highlight their instructive role, noting that they often present unacceptable social behaviors as negative examples for the congregation (sometimes even taking aim at particular people in the community). For their actors and audience members, however, these plays are first and foremost acts of worship aimed at bringing salvation to the lost. Historically white churches have also incorporated dramatic presentations into musical productions, particularly

in Christmas pageants depicting the Nativity. The use of drama as a common part of regular Sunday worship, however, can probably be attributed to Willow Creek Community Church (WCCC), an evangelical “megachurch” in the Chicago suburbs. One of the pioneers of “contemporary” worship services, WCCC incorporated a number of unconventional elements—including rock music and dramatic sketches—into its services, hoping to reach “seekers” alienated by more traditional churches. These methods have taken hold in many nondenominational (and some denominational) churches across the United States and are now prevalent in, though hardly exclusive to, the American South. The most publicized recent development in church dramas, particularly among historically white churches, has been the “hell house.” These elaborate dramatic productions (which take a variety of names but are most commonly titled Hell House or Judgment House) are usually presented near Halloween. An outgrowth of longstanding concerns among conservative Christians about Halloween celebrations, particularly among youth, hell houses offer an evangelistic alternative to the community-sponsored “haunted houses” that have become increasingly popular in recent decades. Hell-house productions typically depict people making choices about sin (often influenced by demons and angels) and the eternal consequences (heaven or hell) of these choices. Hell houses also often portray hell itself and frequently show some characters entering heaven. An early southern example of this kind of CHURCH DRAMAS

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drama is the hell house at Trinity Assembly of God in Dallas, Tex., which was created in the 1970s and was later documented in a 2003 film. Since then, hell houses have sprung up across the country, many the product of “kits” sold since the late 1990s by Abundant Life Christian Center in Arvada, Colo. The hell houses at both Trinity and Abundant Life have been widely criticized for their graphic, frightening, and controversial content, leading some southern churches to avoid gory or politically divisive topics in their productions in hopes of reaching broader audiences. Churches commonly offer drama as a tool for evangelistic outreach. The director of Abundant Life’s hell house claimed that the church grew 25 percent after the production’s five-night run in 1995, while longtime Heaven Bound participant Gregory Coleman emphasized that even the show’s most gifted comedians know that the “true purpose” of their roles is “salvation, not humor.” Church dramas produce powerful effects, not only on their intended audiences but also on the people producing them. The volunteer actors, directors, and crew members who produce these often elaborate presentations frequently leave them feeling a stronger sense of community with their fellow participants and a strengthened commitment to Christian life. Seeing the impact that their efforts have on audiences often profoundly affects these volunteers. Through their participation in these evangelistic productions, teachers, mechanics, nurses, and people from many other walks of life frequently discover 270

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and cultivate new identities as servants and ministers of the Gospel. MARSHA MICHIE University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Roger D. Abrahams, in Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson (1972); Gregory Coleman, We’re Heaven Bound! Portrait of a Black Sacred Drama (1994); Winona L. Fletcher, Black American Literature Forum (Spring 1991); Marsha Michie, “What God Has for Me, It Is for Me”: Living Religion in an Independent Pentecostal Church (2009); George Ratliff, Hell House (film), 2003; Mary Arnold Twining, cla Journal (March 1976); Michael S. Weaver, Black American Literature Forum (Spring 1991); William H. Wiggins, Black American Literature Forum (Spring 1991).

Cockfighting The sport, or cultural performance, of cockfighting involves pitting evenly matched pairs of game fowl in competition in the presence of wagering, often until at least one of the birds is dead or severely injured. As such, these events are part of a larger orbit of related sport or gamelike undertakings involving animal participation. In antiquity, such events may have been viewed as modes of mediation with the gods or methods of negotiating with unknown forces. Today, the identical behavior is more likely considered a social pollutant. All 50 states now ban cockfighting, Louisiana being the last state to enact such regulations, doing so in the first decade of this century. Current theory presumes that the domestication of game fowl took place from wild stock in the Far East prior to

Cocks battle it out as the handlers chant a relentless drone of encouragement to the birds in this Louisiana cockpit. In routine competition, participants are matched by weight and style—bare-heeled (the natural spur), knife (a sharp-edged weapon), or harpoon (a metal replica of the bird’s normal bony appendage)—or by other criteria. This particular cockfight was held in the early 1990s. (Photograph by Jon G. Donlon)

the birth of Christ, and rapid distribution of the sport and the bird followed normal trade lines. Certainly the sport spread throughout the Roman Empire, for cockfighting and reading cock entrails was commonplace among the Legionaries. According to travel narratives and other reportage, cockfighting was endemic throughout Europe, especially in the maritime nations, by the time of expansion to the New World. English and Spanish settlers alike imported the spirited bird to North America, both for food and for its noteworthy contesting. Certainly cockfighting was widespread throughout the southern United States by the early 1700s; laws to regulate the sport were among the first regulations enacted in the New England

colonies in the 1600s. Poorly substantiated but hardly unlikely legend tells us that presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson raised game fowl, and that Abraham Lincoln’s nickname “Honest Abe” came from his fairness as a referee of cockfights. In actual competition, gamecocks often use the bony spurs that grow naturally on the back of their legs as their primary weapons in “bare-heel” bouts. They are rigged out with small, generally tubular or pointed rodlike gaffs (occasionally called harpoons), or they may be fitted with sharp, strong knives. Cockfighters make the attachments from coral, turtle shell, stainless and other steels, space-age alloys cut from recycled turbine engine blades, or COCKFIGHTING

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chemically treated chicken spurs—all designed to make competition evenhanded (or -legged). A specialist group within the fraternity of handmade knife craftsmen custom fabricates the blades; a further subspecialty exists in the edgers, the people who sharpen the cockfight knives. These items are beautifully crafted, as if they constitute jewelry for miniature warriors. As a form of play, cockfighting offers both a fundamental exit from the everydayness of the “real world” and a trope, or representation, of a community’s social values. The animal breeders, owners, or trainers in these animalsurrogate sports tend to feel a strong affiliation with the gaming fowl. They see the cocks as representing the “stuff ” of their culture: bravery, courage, honor, and related social markers. Breeders actively seek these qualities in their birds and even breed them for these attributes. Thus, some cockfighters will describe rearing birds for endurance, speed, or stamina; “training” them to bring out these particular qualities; and enacting elaborate programs of development or feeding to maximize the bird’s individual potential. There can be no question that emotional connections to outcomes (entirely aside from wagering concerns) run deeply in these contests. Although cockfighting has been very popular in the American South, the naive notion held by many that the sport is somehow uniquely southern or lowbrow and rural does not fit the historic record. For much of its arc of popularity, cockfighting was a middleclass, yeoman, or elite pastime, with 272

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great estates, popular pubs, and commercial sport houses playing host to these contests. (Some theorists suggest that today’s orchestra pit is the residuum of previous theater designs with the cockpit in the center.) Although cockfighting was popular throughout the South, it was equally popular everywhere in the United States, the bird being well suited for the nation’s diverse climates and foodways. By the middle of the 19th century in the United States and much of Europe, activists and so-called do-gooders were powerfully bent on eradicating many leisure events supposedly associated with the rough rural roots of workingclass men. Tavern sports, such as ratting, badger and bull baiting, goose pulling, and cockfighting (to say nothing of whoring, drinking, and brawling) fell under the baleful gander of bourgeois authority. The eradication that began in earnest in the late 1800s was completed about a century and a half later. In 2007 Louisiana drew up the nation’s final regulatory apparatus, making it the fiftieth state to ban cockfighting. JON GRIFFIN DONLON Tokai University, Japan Jon Griffin Donlon, “Gaming and Gambling,” in Human Ecology: An Encyclopedia of Children, Families, Communities, and Environments, ed. J. R. Miller, R. M. Lerner, and L. B. Schiamberg (2002), Journal of Material Culture (Summer 1993), Play and Culture 3 (1990), Mississippi Folklife (Summer–Fall 1995), “The Recreation Reform Movement,” in Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, ed. Immanuel Ness (2002); Alan Dundes, ed., The Cockfight: A Casebook (1994); Clifford Geertz, Daedalus

(Winter 1972); The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1971); Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (1990); Mark Schneider, Theory and Society (1987); Page Smith, Charles Page, and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book (2000).

Coon Hounds On the porch or in the yard, the sleeping hound is an icon of what some outsiders perceive as the lazy South, a land of shiftless backwoodsmen with dogs too enervated to greet visitors, much less hunt. In truth, an immobile hound in the daylight, along with its red-eyed owner, implies a vigorous evening’s hunt, often through miles of pitch dark woods. In the South, night hunting for possums and coons has long been an important feature of rural life. The fact that possums and coons can survive in settled farming areas has made them available quarry for the poorest hunters. The animals provided rich high-calorie meat and useful, sometimes valuable, hides. And while hunters valued possums mainly as food, they respected coons as worthy game animals. A distinct hunting culture quickly evolved around coons—a culture that centered on the hounds that made the chase possible. Hunters cast their hounds at night when coons are actively foraging. The dogs usually work alone or in pairs; the hunt progresses as they puzzle out a coon’s trail and hopefully find the tree where it has taken refuge. Following time-honored tradition, hunters follow

the action by listening to their hounds. The music of the hounds is at once a practical way to follow dogs in the dark of night and a major reason why hunters so enjoy the hunt. Hunters have long waxed poetic about the voices of their hounds. The authors of The Coon Hunters Handbook, for instance, remember redbones that had “sung to us in tones we can still hear.” Coon hunters often describe the sounds of their trailing dogs as a “bugle” or a “bawl.” At the tree, hounds voice a staccato “chop,” a bark that hunters often interpret as an excited, “Come on!” Though determining pedigree is a risky task, most coon-dog breeds probably evolved from hounds brought from Europe during colonial times, combined with countless intentional and unintentional matings with other canines. Early hunters certainly bred more for hunting ability than for breed type. Nowadays, the black and tan, the redbone, the bluetick, the English, the treeing Walker, and the Plott are among the standard breeds that hunters say can potentially make good coon hounds. Coming from a recognized breed, however, does not guarantee that the dog will prove itself on game. A hound that runs only coons (that is, a “straight” coon dog), or even one that runs mostly coons, is always greatly prized among hunters. Although avid coon hunters may enjoy several good dogs over a lifetime, they usually rank only one or two as truly exceptional. And these dogs might not even belong to the hunter. Coon hunter James Mott, for instance, remembered that the best hounds he ever ran were a “company” pair owned by his COON HOUNDS

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employer, a large south Georgia quail plantation. The plantation manager had purchased the hounds for the workers’ communal use, as a way of controlling quail-egg-eating raccoons. Affection for special animals has long led hunters to bury their dogs with a measure of respect and ceremony. In north Alabama, the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard has helped meet this goal since 1937. With almost 200 interments from across the country (many of which feature engraved stones and heartfelt testimonials), the graveyard clearly holds a special place in coon hunters’ hearts. This cemetery, though, is admittedly an exception. For most hunters, a tattered photograph and an unmarked but remembered grave speaks with equal eloquence to the love of a favorite hound. Hunters in most locales generally know who has the best coon dog in the area; nonetheless, many join in coon hunting as a formal competition. Coondog field trials involve judging hounds over a course that has been scented by a dragged bag of coon bedding or droppings. The drag often ends at a tree or a body of water, complete with a tethered live coon. In 1948 a group of houndsmen who were not satisfied with the artificiality of field trials, and who wanted to combine the realism of the dark woods with a judged hunt for wild coons, organized the first “World Championship” in Wickcliffe, Ky. Years before, one of the hunt’s organizers had given a redbone puppy to Leroy Campbell, a notable coon hunter and dog handler then living in Blue Springs, Miss. It was this 274 COON HOUNDS

redbone, named Dan, that ultimately prevailed after several days of eliminations. In a well-worn tale, Campbell recalls the final cast of the competition, when Dan and another dog went opposite ways on a trail. Campbell knew that both dogs could not be right and that one would tree and the other would run down an ever colder back trail. Dan’s steady chop soon proved who had found the coon. In the years that followed, Campbell refused offers of thousands of dollars for Dan, who lived to be 14 and sired a multitude of offspring between hunts with his many admirers. Since Dan’s victory, competition has helped maintain interest in night hunting at a time when few hunters still hunt coons for food and fur. The late Mississippi writer Larry Brown once wrote that in coon hunting, “it all depended on the dogs”; his words still ring true, as hounds are more than ever the heart of the hunt. Many hunters no longer even kill the coons that their dogs tree. And hunters freely pay several thousand dollars for what Leroy Campbell would have considered a “straight” coon dog. Even though GPS-equipped collars now allow hunters to find their dogs on the blackest of nights, one hopes that such gadgetry will never make the hounds’ voices obsolete. WILEY PREWITT Independent Scholar Yocona, Mississippi American Kennel Club, “Scenthound History,” <www.akc.org/events/coonhound/ history.cfm>; Larry Brown, Field and Stream (October 2006); Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard, <www .coondogcemetery.com>; Wiley Prewitt,

“Coons and Possums,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 7, Foodways, ed. John T. Edge (2007); Marion Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas (1997); Bill Tarrant, Field and Stream (November 1990); Leon F. Whitney and Acil B. Underwood, The Coon Hunter’s Handbook (1952).

Dancing, American Indian Traditions The dance traditions of southern American Indians spiritually celebrate each tribe’s place in the world and in the immediate environment. For generations, Indians have danced to show respect to new crops, to give honor to wild game taken for food, to act out new stories and old legends, and to teach about life. American Indians in the South have danced for countless millennia, a fact underlined by the important role that dancing plays in the origin myths of the Cherokee and Muscogean peoples. Perhaps the earliest physical evidence of these traditions rests in turtle-shell rattles—found in present-day eastern Kentucky and used to accompany dancing—that date back more than 4,000 years. Dancing has always been an integral part of American Indian cultures; historically, it even figured into diplomatic negotiations between tribes. Indeed, dance is so important that legends say that if Indians cease to dance, the world will cease to be. This sense of significance continues today in the private, religious traditions of the stomp grounds and in the very public tradition of powwow. In addition to keeping traditional dances alive, many southern tribes are actively revitalizing

these traditions by conducting historical research and publicly performing the dances at festivals and other regional gatherings. Southern American Indian dance traditions bring together many aspects of native life. As a genre, dance cannot be separated from the songs that lead it, the instruments that accompany it, the steps that create it, or the ceremonies that surround it. By the same token, the dance experience encompasses the clothing worn by dancers, the masks made for dancing, the dance’s social functions, the many stories and legends about dancing, the dramatization that the dancing enacts, and the broader events at which dancing takes place, which often include food, storytelling, games, and a host of other traditions. These traditions have long been—and still are being—passed down orally and by imitation from one generation to the next in American Indian families and communities. There are no schools of native dance. Most traditional dances in the South take place in a circle or line, with dancers performing a simple, shuffling step; this step gave rise to the name “stomp dances.” Traditional dances also frequently pantomime the movements of animals, war, and hunting. For the most part, men sing the dance songs, accompanied by a single handheld drum or rattle, while women provide rhythmic accompaniment by stepping and shaking the turtle-shell rattles that they wear strapped to their lower legs. The history of American Indian dancing in the South is one of resilience and creativity. In the 18th century, the

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evangelical efforts of Christian missionaries and the new American government’s “Civilization Policy” had a dampening effect on southern native dance traditions. Traditional dancing was still strong, however, in the early 1800s. It even included a ghost-dance tradition, in which visionary leaders encouraged their followers to fast and dance, saying that doing so would lead the ancestors to reappear and would return the world to the way it once was. At the heart of the ghost dance were the leaders’ admonishments to get rid of everything that had come from the Europeans. The 1830–40 Removal of nearly all native people from the Southeast had a profound impact on regional dance traditions. The forced dislocation, and the deaths of so many who were “removed” (including many elders and respected holders of tradition), irrevocably transformed traditional life. People of many different southern tribes—all relocated to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma—found themselves living side by side; not surprisingly, this proximity led them to begin sharing songs and dances. Singers from one tribe would adopt the songs of another, often without understanding the meaning of the words that were in a different language; over time, the pronunciation of many of these adopted songs shifted, ultimately giving rise to a world of songs—and their accompanying dances—that were historically related yet culturally distinct. One of the traditions that survived Removal was the stomp dance, a religious tradition that had been a part 276

of Muscogean culture throughout the Southeast. During the second half of the 19th century, some Oklahoma Cherokees who wanted to revitalize their traditions began adopting the Creek stomp dance. Today, people in both the Southeast and Oklahoma practice this religious tradition, which finds its center at special ceremonial sites called “grounds.” These grounds physically reflect the structure of the old autonomous towns and have leaders, rules, and regular dances to which the public is not invited. Members of the grounds see each other as extended family and as fellow believers for whom the stomp dance, which often stretches through the night, is a deeply religious experience. The stomp dance is but one of many traditional dances still performed by American Indians in the South. Others include dances associated with the Green Corn Ceremony, a ceremonial occasion celebrated across the Southeast to welcome the new corn harvest. Historically, this four-day ceremony included dancing, fasting, feasting, forgiving, marrying, and reenacting the myth of the origin of fire. Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, and others continue this ceremony today, though—like other observances that entail spiritual purification through fasting, going to water, praying and singing for several days, abstaining from certain activities, and generally setting aside one’s physical self to nurture the spiritual self—the tradition unfolds largely out of the sight and awareness of cultural outsiders. Not all of the traditional dances that once held religious significance have

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Many American Indian tribes in the South are actively reviving traditional dances that date back through countless generations. In this 2006 photo, the Warriors of AniKituhwa—from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the mountains of North Carolina—are recreating the Cherokee War Dance/Welcome Dance. The dancers, from left to right, are Daniel Tramper, Bo Taylor, and Will Tuska. (Photo © 2008 by Barbara R. Duncan)

retained their spiritual meanings; many are now performed purely as social dances. In holding onto these traditions, American Indians both show respect for their ancestors and affirm their contemporary cultural identity. In addition to the stomp dance and the dances of the Green Corn Ceremony, members of southern tribes held onto a host of other traditional ceremonial and social dances. Cherokees, for example, have continued to perform the bear dance, the beaver-hunting dance, and the friendship dance. They also still dance the steps that traditionally precede the stickball game, the “little brother of war.” Among the Seminole people, dances such as the whooping-

crane dance and the firefly dance have survived and thrived. Some southern tribes, in turn, are revitalizing their dance tradition by bringing back dances that have not been performed for several generations. Using ethnographic accounts of the dance movements and wax-cylinder recordings of the songs, they are reviving traditional dances and reinvigorating dance repertoires that in many cases were decimated by Removal and by government cultural policy. Federally recognized tribes in the South now include the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, the Catawba Indian Nation, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians

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of Alabama, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians of Louisiana, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, the Alabama-Coushatta Tribes of Texas, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas. Their festivals (for example, the Cherokee Voices Festival and Southeast Tribes Cultural Arts Celebration) often include performances of traditional dances. American Indian dancing in the South is rich in both traditional forms that have survived through the generations and those that have been creatively revitalized; it also includes the vibrant practice of powwow dancing. Powwows became popular events across America during the 20th century, when they emerged as pan-Indian gatherings that publicly celebrated American Indian culture and identity. Now held throughout the South, powwows provide a way for members of federally recognized tribes, members of state-recognized tribes, and people of Indian descent to gather socially to share dance, storytelling, food, and demonstrations of living history. At the heart of these celebrations is dancing, much of which draws upon dances from tribes from the northern and southern Great Plains. These dances themselves are the evolved products of public performances that began in the late 1800s. Contemporary powwow dances include a grand entry, northern traditional, southern straight, fancy, grass, shawl, jingle dress, and more, with many marked by competitions that offer prize money for the best dancers. Every dance has its own 278

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music, steps, and regalia. The music is provided by men who sit around a large drum and sing and play in unison, with each lowering a single drumstick onto the drum’s taut head. The dance steps are as varied as the music. Some dances explode with quickened intensity for a short time, while others unfold slowly and in a stately manner. Each dance also features its signature regalia, which often incorporates elaborate beadwork, hand-sewn clothing, eagle-feather bustles, and dramatic constructions of animal hair and feathers worn on the head. BARBARA R. DUNCAN Museum of the Cherokee Indian JOHN C. STANDINGDEER JR. Independent Scholar, Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation James Adair, in The History of the American Indians, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (2005); William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, ed. Francis Harper (1791; reprint 1998); William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986); Robert J. Pearce, in Native Symbolic Expression around the Great Lakes and Beyond, special issue of Ontario Archaeology (2005); Frank G. Speck, Leonard Broom, and Will West Long, Cherokee Dance and Drama (1951); Russ Tall Chief and Tanya Thrasher, eds., National Museum of the American Indian National Powwow (2005).

Decoration Day Decoration Day is a custom of unknown origin practiced in cemeteries throughout the Upland South from western Virginia and North Carolina through the central and southern Appalachians and the trans-Appalachian

Decoration days, held annually at cemeteries throughout the South, bring together families, congregations, and communities to reflect on and show respect for those who have passed away. Typically held in the spring, these “decorations” often bring together local community members and those who have moved away to clean up the local cemetery, lay flowers on the graves, and hold a memorial service. In this 2004 photo, Jack Cable decorates an old family grave during the Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration in a cemetery that now lies within Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. (Photograph by Karen Singer Jabbour)

West as far as the Ozarks, eastern Oklahoma, and northeastern Texas. It is a communal religious event held in the cemetery in late spring or early summer. Preparations begin with cleaning and scraping gravesites during the days just before the designated Decoration Day. The graves are then decorated with cut or artificial flowers. Decoration Day (also called simply a “decoration”), held on Sunday in the cemetery, often substitutes for but sometimes precedes an indoor church service. The cemetery event typically includes gospel-hymn singing; a sermon or religious message; prayers; perhaps an offering for cemetery upkeep; and “dinner on the grounds,” once a picnic-

style meal but nowadays often served on permanent outdoor benches and tables at the cemetery or in a nearby church, community hall, or home. Before and after the event, there is time for visiting, touching up family graves, inspecting the cemetery, and conversing about people buried there. It is a day of reflection and of engagement between the community above ground and the community below ground. Many notice the custom’s similarity to the Day of the Dead in Hispanic America, a manifestation of the European All Souls’ Day. But there is no evidence that the two customs are cognate. Decoration Day, falling in the late spring or early summer, is closely DECORATION DAY

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associated with spring maintenance of community cemeteries, while All Souls’ Day is always the second day of November. Unlike All Souls’ Day, Decoration Day seems to have no special belief systems and practices associated with visiting spirits, and Decoration Day observances customarily fall on different Sundays for different cemeteries in the same community, permitting people to attend more than one decoration. The variable date bespeaks a fundamental connection to the decentralized Protestant (especially Baptist) worldview of the dispersed rural settlements in the Upland South. A somewhat different Decoration Day in the northern United States may have been inspired by southern decorations. In 1868, after his wife reported being moved by seeing decorated graves when she visited Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Va., General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Union veterans) issued an order for veterans to decorate with flowers the graves of their fallen comrades. True to its origins, the northern Decoration Day has always featured a special focus on the fallen in battle, and it evolved into the federal holiday today celebrated as Memorial Day. It has always had a fixed date (30 May), which distinguishes it from the old Upland South decorations. But some modern Upland South communities (especially in border states) have now adopted the fixed Memorial Day date. Often they presume that their local practices developed out of the national Memorial Day custom, whereas the opposite is much more likely. Many special customs are associated 280

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with Decoration Day, such as the oftcited rule that every grave in the cemetery must be decorated—a powerful statement of communal responsibility. In the old Upland South, decorations were also associated with the custom of remounding each grave annually with a mound of earth running the length of the grave. Remounding, which in effect reburies the loved one symbolically each year, supports the argument that decorations are ceremonies of family piety. But mounding is on the wane as a folk custom, yielding to the rise of the grassy cemetery style—with its concomitant power mowers—which is fast replacing the older bare, clean-swept cemetery style. Decoration Day has been historically intertwined with family reunions and church homecomings, but these customs seem increasingly to be scheduled on different dates, competing with Decoration Day for the time and focus of farflung families. On the other hand, decorations have become a cultural rallying point for communities displaced from their homes in the Great Smoky Mountains, keeping the custom in the forefront of regional social consciousness. Regional feature writers periodically rediscover Decoration Day as a topic for spring newspaper features across the South. Far from being relegated to the elderly, decorations today are full of children, teenagers, and young adults. Thus, despite its invisibility to much of the country (including the urban South), Decoration Day lives on in thousands of southern communities. ALAN JABBOUR Washington, D.C.

Alan Jabbour, Philip E. Coyle, and Paul Webb, North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project: Ethnohistorical and Ethnographic Investigations for the Proposed North Shore Road, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Swain County, North Carolina (2005); Donald Gregory Jeane, Journal of Popular Culture (1978); Lynwood Montell, in The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts, ed. Robert E. Walls and George H. Shoemaker (1989).

Decoy Carving Waterfowl decoys originated as handmade tools for subsistence living along the waterways and coastal regions of North America. Archaeological evidence suggests that American Indians made the first decoys. European settlers were quick to adopt the practice and soon were fashioning their own replicas of ducks and geese, carving wooden impersonators that lured waterfowl close to the fishermen-hunters’ guns. These fowl—notably canvasback and teal, pintail and redhead, and Canada geese and Brant, depending on the location—provided winter food for settlements along the birds’ migratory flyways. The use of decoys continues from the Pacific to the Mississippi and to the Atlantic Flyway, marking a time-honored connection between humans and the wild. Stretching over many generations, decoy making has evolved from utilitarian practice to sport to art. Nowhere is this history more evident—or more treasured—than on the mid-Atlantic coast. Along the Atlantic Flyway, migrating birds travel from New Jersey down through the Susquehanna Flats of northern Maryland to the banks of the

Chesapeake. Farther south, the birds’ migration continues to the Back Bay of Virginia, to Currituck Sound in northeastern North Carolina, along the Outer Banks to Core Sound, and—when winters are especially harsh—on to South Carolina. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, every coastal community along this flyway hosted carvers who made their living by fishing and hunting and who created and sold duck lures as a way to help feed their families. Over time, their carving skills developed into regional styles, determined in part by the waterfowl that frequented those particular areas and in part by the legacy of master carvers who had grown up in these communities when hunting was an essential part of the culture. Today, this tradition continues through contemporary carvers whose work ranges from re-creations of working-style decoys to wildlife art that appears in art galleries and museums. Back in the day of working decoys, wherever the birds flew, the work of local carvers was there to lure them. The decoys carved by Madison Mitchell, Mitchell Fulcher, brothers Steve and Lem Ward, and hundreds of others tell a story of hunting along these waterways when birds were so abundant that their silhouettes would darken the sky on a cold winter’s day. At that time, decoys— like boats and nets—were everyday tools on which men relied to make a living. Decoy carving was a necessary and common skill, like mending a net, laying out a boat, planting a garden, and building a house. Older fishermen would carve when it was too stormy to DECOY CARVING

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go out on the water to fish, often using scraps of juniper from local boat builders or debris that had washed up on the shore. They smoothed the decoys’ rough edges with broken glass and covered them with boat paint. These older carvers needed no guidebook to direct their knives or their brushes; they based their patterns on the knowledge that came from hunting these birds all of their lives. They knew how to color the feathers, how to shape the heads, and how to texture the oftenrecycled wood into the shape of each species of duck or goose. And as they carved in sheds and on store porches, younger men watched and learned, while children played in the shavings and everyone listened to the elders’ stories of fishing, hunting, and shared experience. These fishermen-hunters (no man in that day filled just one role) would stack their decoys in yards and fish houses while waiting for the fall and winter seasons. Then they would load the decoys into small skiffs, ready for the first cold wind and rush of fowl to the marshes and creeks. In the early morning hours, they would set out rigs of wooden ducks (sometimes numbering up to 100) to float on their anchors and convince the fowl flying overhead that there was a safe landing and fertile feeding ground below. If all went as planned, the migrating birds would land among the decoys, and hunters from duck blinds and sink boxes lying just outside the flock of decoys and ducks would gather another meal for their families. This subsistence practice was transformed in the late 1800s, when growing numbers of northern hunters—in 282 DECOY CARVING

search of the South’s fabled waterfowl bounty—began traveling to the region with guns in hand. Southern hunters increasingly found themselves acting as guides, caretakers, and decoy providers for these northerners. Many families opened their homes to these traveling hunters, with women cooking for and tending to the visitors who came during the winter months. Hunting-related activity became a source of income and enjoyment; the same men who had carved for themselves began to carve for others, with locally made decoys selling for $1 each as recently as the mid-1900s. Today, the decoys from this era are the most treasured of all, perhaps because they allow collectors (whether family members or sportsmen) to retain a tie to a time when hunting was truly a family experience. The process of “decoying” waterfowl currently happens much as it always has, although the introduction of plastic decoys (much more practical, light, and inexpensive) has made the use of wooden ones increasingly rare; now only traditionalists continue to set out wooden decoys—either ones that they themselves have carved or those from the rigs of their fathers and grandfathers. Yet while the practical value of wooden decoys has plummeted, their cultural value—as collectibles and, more importantly, as links to local heritage—has grown. Now seen as far more than just “tools,” wooden decoys connect coastal dwellers to the past, the land, and a way of life. At the same time, collectors from around the world seek these carvings as works of art, valuing some as fine-art sculpture and others as

classic folk art. Whatever its purpose, collecting decoys—as a connection to one’s heritage or as a celebration of artistry—has become both hobby and business in the nation’s growing fascination with Americana. This symbolic connection is particularly strong among those whose ancestors “lived” this tradition as hunters, guides, and fishermen. For these coastal families, the “keeping of decoys” means far more than building a collection of sculptures made by unknown carvers. Instead, decoys have become community heirlooms that tell deeply personal stories, pointing to broader coastal traditions of which the owners are still a part. In many cases, they also serve as important points of connection for carvers who are carrying on this tradition to the next generation. Today, this sense of place still runs deep among local families who see in these wooden symbols a shared heritage and “common bond.” For them, as for Morehead City’s Joe Fulcher—a thirdgeneration decoy carver and hunter— decoys are a “way of holding onto the past.” KAREN WILLIS AMSPACHER Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center Harkers Island, North Carolina Joel Barber, Wild Fowl Decoys (1954); Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, Harkers Island, N.C., <www .coresound.com>; Neal Conoley, Waterfowl Heritage: North Carolina Decoys and Gunning Lore (1982); Joe Engers, The Great Book of Wildfowl Decoys (1990); Harry M. Walsh, The Outlaw Gunner (1971); Steve Ward, Closed for Business: The Complete Collection

of Steve Ward’s Poetry (1992); Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art, Salisbury, Md., <www .wardmuseum.org>.

Dinner on the Grounds Dinner on the grounds is a warmweather tradition among many churches in the South, especially in rural communities. The practice developed among congregations whose churches had no space for indoor dining; when churchgoers wanted to share a meal—on special occasions such as homecomings, decoration days, graveyard association days, heritage days, family reunions, and all-day singings—they moved outside to the church grounds. These meals continue to provide congregations opportunities for extended worship and fellowship; occasions to host family, former members, and the local community; and chances to showcase favorite foods and recipes. Whatever the particular occasion, the ritual is often very similar. Typically, congregational wives and mothers cook large portions of favorite recipes early in the morning and bring them to the church house. Some churches have permanent tables and pavilions; most, however, set up long rows of temporary tables for these occasional feasts. Churchgoers enjoy the meal between such activities as a morning worship service and an afternoon singing. Diners sit at makeshift tables in folding chairs, on temporary benches, or sometimes on the ground under a shade tree. Children usually finish eating first and enjoy impromptu outdoor games while the adults talk among themselves. The entire event tends to reinforce tradiDINNER ON THE GROUNDS

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Few culinary moments can match the glory and sheer abundance of dinner on the grounds, when neighbors, relatives, and friends cook their favorite recipes for an outdoor gathering on the church grounds. Long a tradition in southern churches, these grand dinners make food a focus of community conversation for weeks afterward, as folks recall the delights of the laden tables. This particular dinner took place in Houston, Miss., in 1967. (William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

tional gender roles, with men leading the worship services and setting up the tables while the women cook, set out the food, and clean up after everyone is satisfied. 284

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The tradition of eating outdoors as part of reunion events dates back at least to the 18th century, when Presbyterians would meet for their biannual communion services. The practice was

later adopted by Methodists, Baptists, Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, and others in the free-church traditions. Meals, of course, have always been a significant conveyer of culture in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as suggested by the symbolic line that stretches from the Passover to the promised “Marriage Supper of the Lamb” in the book of Revelation. As a practical matter, dinner on the grounds facilitates community meals in rural churches that do not have the luxury of kitchens and fellowship halls. In Christian traditions that deemphasize communion and that host only occasional services with plain bread and grape juice rather than wine, long tables filled with favorite foods provide soaring aromas, rich tastes, and a tapestry of colors that make the occasion a sacred time. Thus, dinner on the grounds plays a significant role in transmitting rituals related to food, family, and location— all important in the American South. The concepts of “kin” and “home” are powerful components of southern life, and these outdoor dinners are occasions for children to come home, for members who have moved away to visit, and for neighboring churches to join together in fellowship. The sense of sacred space and time provided by the food and fellowship is accentuated when the meal takes place near the church cemetery. Churches across the South still host dinners on the grounds, though the tradition now faces many challenges: contemporary congregants often prefer larger urban churches with airconditioned fellowship halls and gym-

nasiums suitable for indoor meals; most southern women now work outside the home and thus have fewer hours to volunteer; families increasingly avoid cooking large traditional meals and instead purchase precooked dishes; and a societal focus on healthier eating habits disparages these dinners’ mainstays of fried chicken, hams, meat loaf, fried okra, pork-fat-flavored black-eyed peas, baked breads, homemade deserts, and an abundance of sweet iced tea. Despite the challenges posed by these cultural changes, dinner on the grounds continues to be a time for community bonding, passing on social traditions, and enjoying favorite southern recipes. DAVID G. ROEBUCK Dixon Pentecostal Research Center Lee University Gwen Kennedy Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture (1987); Gwen Kennedy Neville and John H. Westerhoff III, Learning through Liturgy (1978); Wade Clark Roof, in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy (2001); Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (2000).

Dogtrot House The dogtrot house—typically a two- or four-room home with an open central hallway that runs between and separates the two halves—is an image that symbolizes the American South and the endurance of its culture. While the columned Georgian mansion (the fabled “big house”) has long reigned as one of the region’s most iconic structures, the humble dogtrot left its mark DOGTROT HOUSE

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in a more subtle fashion. Its visceral design appealed to vernacular builders across the South and captured the imagination of the region’s writers, photographers, painters, and architects. In its simplest form, the dogtrot is a one-story, two- or four-room house with a wide central breezeway that separates the two similarly sized sides. A single roof covers the entire structure, while a covered porch often graces the front, giving the house a coherent, inviting appearance. The house’s name comes from its shaded, open-air hallway, a space that offers welcome respite from the stifling heat of southern summers. As the name “dogtrot” suggests, the house’s residents were not the only ones who took advantage of this cool passageway; their dogs, too, found shelter there, as apparently did other country creatures (an alternate name for this house is the “possum-trot”). Doors on each of the rooms typically opened onto the breezeway, making the shady dogtrot hall a favorite place for sitting and socializing. Many southern memories turn on the stories swapped, hair plaited, guitars picked, and quilts stitched on this cooler-than-anywhereelse porch. Marking the southern landscape from the Delta lowlands to the Smoky Mountain peaks, dogtrots provided homes for (and were built by) both whites and African Americans. Nonetheless, the dogtrot house is most often associated with poor whites, a connection concretized in Walker Evans and James Agee’s classic portrayal of rural Alabama, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Historian Wayne Flynt con286

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firms this association, suggesting that the dogtrot has become emblematic of poor white culture. “The characteristic architecture of the nineteenth-century South,” Flynt argues, “was not the fabled mansion but . . . the dogtrot. Its structure challenged the ingenuity of a people who built with little money, limited materials, and no formal training as builders.” This association has certainly not been lost on southern writers, many of whom have made the dogtrot house an integral part of their storying. Eudora Welty, for instance, uses a dogtrot as the setting of her novel Losing Battles (1970). Describing a common trajectory for the dogtrot’s emergence, with it moving from a single-room cabin to a double-room home, she portrays the house as “just what it seemed, two in one. The second house had been built side by side with the original—all a long time ago—and the space between the two had been floored over and roofed but not to this day closed in. . . . The makings of the house had never been hidden to the Mississippi air, which was now, this first Sunday in August, and at this hour, still soft as milk.” William Faulkner also makes frequent use the dogtrot, presenting it as home to both poor white and poor black families in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Dogtrots show up in The Reivers, The Mansion, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, with Faulkner’s examples ranging from the classic tworoom house with its open breezeway to homes with enclosed hallways and added second floors. Faulkner’s portrayals speak to a familiar southern pattern:

as the dogtrot’s dwellers became more affluent, they made predictable changes to their home, frequently hiding its original form—and its working-class associations—beneath siding and additional rooms. Perhaps the most detailed study of a dogtrot and the life that unfolded within its walls is Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Exploring a home in rural Hale County, Ala., through Evans’s photographs and Agee’s text, the book captures the texture of the house’s wood and its interiors in such detail that no viewer or reader could ever forget them. With an eloquence befitting a cathedral, Agee stalked the simple dwelling: Two blocks, of two rooms each, one room behind another. Between these blocks a hallway, floored and roofed, wide open both at front and rear; so that these blocks are two rectangular yoked boats, or floated tanks, or coffins, each, by an inner wall, divided into two squared chambers. . . . Where we stand, square toward the front, the house is almost perfectly symmetrical. Its two front walls, square, balanced, each of a size, cloven by hallway; the lifted roof; at center of each wall, a square window; the shutters closed; the porch and its roof and the four little posts like candles. In October 1973 Evans returned to Hale County, Ala., to revisit the dogtrot he had photographed some 40 years earlier. His guide was William Christenberry, a native of Hale County whose work as a photographer, painter, and

sculptor Evans greatly admired. Christenberry views the dogtrot as a compelling link with his childhood memories in Alabama. “The thing that appeals to me most is again that basic structure— such a simple design and yet so functional,” he reflects. “It makes no difference how hot it is in the summer in the Deep South, invariably there is a breeze going down this opening here. And I remember as a child visiting people in the country. They’d come in from work in the cotton fields and there’d always be a basin of water to wash your hands there or better still, a cedar bucket with a gourd dipper with spring water.” Christenberry’s photographed and sculpted studies of the dogtrot eloquently speak to its status as a structure of the past, now more likely encountered on the landscape as a hollow, decaying shell than as a vibrant home. Yet the dogtrot’s aesthetics and practicality continue to inspire contemporary architects. Architect Arnold Aho, for instance, tested a traditional dogtrot and discovered that the velocity of air flow through its open hallway exceeded outside currents by one and a half times for fully 73 percent of the year. Based on these findings, Aho developed a passive solar “neo-dogtrot” design that utilizes cross-ventilation as a natural alternative to air-conditioning. He developed the home as a model for low-cost, energyefficient housing. The dogtrot house is etched in the memory and imagination of southerners. Its image has inspired the region’s architects, writers, artists, and photographers. Like a pelican that soars just above the gulf waves, the dogtrot with DOGTROT HOUSE

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its winged rooms and central eye will always hover over the southern hills. WILLIAM FERRIS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; 2002); Arnold Aho, Neo Dogtrot Mississippi (1981); Patti Carr Black, Mississippi Piney Woods (1976); William Christenberry, interview in William Ferris, Painting in the South (film, 1983); William Ferris, Southern Quarterly (Fall 1986); Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People (1980); M. B. Newton Jr., “Dogtrot House,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (1989); William Turnbull, L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui (December 1984); Eudora Welty, One Time, One Place (1971).

Easter Rock The Easter Rock ceremony is an African American sacred ritual coordinated each year on the eve of Easter Sunday by women in Winnsboro, La. This oncewidespread tradition has long been associated with old plantation churches in the Mississippi Delta floodplain in northeast Louisiana; many elderly Delta participants say that their parents dated the Easter Rock to the years before the Civil War. Since then, selected families from the communities of Ferriday, Sicily Island, Clayton, and Winnsboro have assumed responsibility for continuing the tradition. Today, however, it remains alive in only in Winnsboro’s Original True Light Baptist Church, where it is coordinated by a single family. With wooden floors that amplify the percussive sounds of congregation members’ feet and movable pews that make room 288

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For generations, believers in northeast Louisiana have gathered on Easter’s eve to worship at Easter Rock services. Once widespread, this service now takes place only at the Original True Light Baptist Church in Winnsboro, La. In this 2004 image, Rev. Lionel Wilson leads the procession of saints (here, the church sisters garbed in white) while carrying a banner that symbolizes the cross. (Photograph by J. Nash Porter)

to rock in a circle, this rural sanctuary is ideal for the “Rock.” Churchgoers from a host of local churches now gather in Winnsboro for the Easter Rock service. During the opening, devotional part of the service, they sing spirituals, gospel songs, Dr. Watts hymns, and other long-meter hymns like “I Love the Lord, He Heard My Cry.” During the actual Rock, they sing old traditional spirituals like “King David,” intoning them in a chantlike manner. At this point in the service, the white-dressed rockers move counterclockwise—in a circular rocking motion—around a table placed at the cen-

ter of the church floor; while doing so, they follow a leader who carries a round banner representing the cross. The table around which they march is covered with white tablecloths and bears 12 lamps and 12 cakes, representing the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 disciples. While the table is being set, the “saints” (women participants) leading the procession sing “Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In.” At this key moment, the rockers transition into the second and heightened phase of the Rock. Now they begin to sing “King David,” an uptempo spiritual that churchgoers sing only on this annual occasion. Moving quickly to this fast piece, the rockers begin their distinctive rocking step. This second phase of the service is highly charged with emotion, leading some of the rockers and congregants to “catch the Spirit,” shouting and/or going into the ecstatic reveries that churchgoers call the “anointing.” The repetitive rhythm that the congregants’ feet make while dancing or rocking around the table is akin to the driving percussive textures of African drumming. In the Rock, as is in many African-derived sacred rituals, repetitive rhythms—whether from drums or from the sound of feet on a hard floor—lead some participants into the focused devotional state that yields shouting, “falling out,” or the descent of the Spirit. In the midst of this spiritual intensity, the rockers keep on singing “King David” and then shift to the spiritual “Elijah Rock” when signaled by the song leader or the person carrying the banner. The rocking, circling, and singing continue until the Spirit abates

or fatigue sets in, leading the rockers to move to the next section of the church program. Churchgoers say that in days past, the Rock lasted all night, until the “sun shouted” and the Easter sunrise service began. The Easter Rock ritual has clear African and Caribbean antecedents and shares many features with sacred circular ceremonies found throughout the African diaspora. The spiritual singing and rocking choreography bear a strong resemblance to 19th- and early 20thcentury ring-shout ceremonies (which both enslaved and freed congregations practiced in “praise houses” across the South) and to the contemporary marches of “singing and praying bands” on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. Most historical accounts of ring shouts, however, do not include the material symbolism that is an intricate part of the Rock. Yet such features appear in accounts of other traditional African American ceremonies, suggesting that the Easter Rock is a carefully constructed assemblage of traditional activities drawn from a range of contexts, including baptisms, funerals, jubilees, revival camp meetings, and nonProtestant, African-derived religious rituals. Whatever its roots, the Easter Rock still flourishes in Winnsboro, La., where it is dynamically kept alive by churchgoers who understand, embrace, and hold steadfast in the ritual. JOYCE MARIE JACKSON Louisiana State University Jonathan C. David, Together Let Us Sweetly Live: The Singing and Praying Bands (2007); Joyce Marie Jackson, in Caribbean and Southern: Transnational Perspectives on the

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U.S. South, ed. Helen Regis (2005); Harry Oster, Louisiana Folklore Miscellany (May 1958); Art Rosenbaum and Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (1998); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987).

Face Jugs One of the most intriguing products of southern folk potters, past and present, is the face jug. Where did the idea of modeling a human face on a jug (and other vessel types) come from, and what were the meanings of early examples? Emerging knowledge suggests that the answers are far from simple. A substantial number of face vessels were made in 1863–65 by enslaved African American potters at Thomas Davies’s Palmetto Fire Brick Works in South Carolina’s Edgefield District. They are distinguished by bared teeth and bulging eyes of white clay, set into the wheel-thrown stoneware to contrast with an often-dark alkaline glaze. Ceramics historian Edwin Atlee Barber speculated in 1909 that their inspiration came from the “Dark Continent,” and portrait pots were indeed made in Africa, perhaps early enough to have influenced the African American potters. Barber, who corresponded with Davies, says that the slaves made face jugs on their own time but offers no motive; it is known, though, that Nigeria’s Yungur people made figural vessels to contain ancestral spirits at shrines. Africa, then, is one possible source of the southern face-jug tradition. However, the slave-made examples 290 FACE JUGS

are not the earliest such pieces. Fragments of a vessel with a Europeanlooking face were excavated from the site of Phoenix Factory, a short-lived Edgefield operation of the early 1840s. A white potter who worked there, Thomas Chandler, then ran his own shop in the district where a jug stamped “CHANDLER / MAKER” was made no later than 1850; its happy face contrasts with the angry-looking ones by slaves. Before coming to South Carolina, Chandler worked in New York State, and in his northern sojourn he may have met potters of the Remmey family, who created the earliest dated Euro-American face vessels (1830s) as an extension of the German Bartmannkrug tradition (a jug with a bearded face molded on the neck). However speculative, this connection to Germany via the mid-Atlantic is not far-fetched: another potter, German-born Charles Decker, worked at the Remmey Pottery in Philadelphia before establishing Tennessee’s Keystone Pottery in 1871, where he and his son William made Remmey-style face jugs. Chandler’s example raises the question of influence between him and the slave potters—or were they working in separate traditions with different meanings? Another possible influence is England, where Toby jugs have been made since the 1760s. Depicting the figure of a jolly drinker with tricorn hat, these molded character mugs differ in spirit from the South’s face jugs. Perhaps southern potters drew on all three sources—Africa, Germany, and England. Conversely, it may be that none was an influence and the tradition arose

The latter decades of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of public interest in face jugs—an explosion largely driven by collectors and the folk-art market. Scores of southern potters now make their own versions of jugs that feature a sculpted face. Few of these potters are carrying on a tradition handed down in their families; most make these pots to meet market demand. In so doing, however, they often draw inspiration from older jugs, like those in this grouping of face jugs made by enslaved African American potters at the Palmetto Fire Brick Works in Bath, S.C., in the early 1860s. (Photograph by John Burrison)

from an anthropomorphizing impulse universal in clay-working societies. The current popularity of face jugs as an icon of southern folk art is due largely to Lanier Meaders of Mossy Creek, Ga. (1917–98). His father, Cheever, made a small number of them, but they became the cornerstone of Lanier’s career, bringing him national publicity in the 1960s. Cheever had learned of face jugs from William Hewell of Gillsville; Hewell, in turn, acquired the idea from his Ferguson in-laws, who made the earliest known north Georgia examples. In 1921 Casey Meaders, Cheever’s brother, brought the face-jug tradition to North Carolina’s Catawba Valley, where Harvey Reinhardt made them in the 1930s. Reinhardt’s work influenced that area’s famed folk potter Burlon Craig (who also visited Lanier Meaders in the late 1970s). Beginning in 1925, brothers Davis and Javan Brown made face

jugs at Arden, N.C., like those by their family back in Atlanta. All this indicates diffusion of a 19th-century Anglosouthern tradition of face jugs. For 19th-century African American potters, face vessels may have been made to place on graves or as a nonverbal protest against enslavement. For white potters of the early 1900s, they were occasional whimsies expressing a masculine “aesthetic of the ugly,” later to become tourist novelties and, now, a good source of income in the folk-art collectors’ market. JOHN A. BURRISON Georgia State University Robert Hunter, ed., Ceramics in America (2006); Jill Beute Koverman, ed., Making Faces: Southern Face Vessels from 1840 to 1990 (2001).

Fiddle Contests These days, most active American fiddlers attend several fiddle contests every FIDDLE CONTESTS

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year. Indeed, since dances accompanied by live fiddling have become uncommon in most parts of the United States, and since no major alternative opportunities for public performance have emerged, contests have become the main public venue for fiddling. These events build social and musical alliances, inspire practice, and help shape repertoires and styles. But every fiddler has mixed feelings about each contest that they frequent and, indeed, about whether competition is good for them or healthy for fiddling in general. In fact, many fiddlers and other musicians who attend contests regularly never compete. Some of the most avid performers concentrate exclusively on what most musicians do when they are not on stage: jam and socialize. Nevertheless, the competition itself, pernicious or not, is indispensable; without it, fiddlers and their fans would seldom gather and interact in numbers comparable to those seen at contests. Fiddling is vernacular violin performance, drawing mainly on repertoires based on traditional dance-music genres. Related fiddle repertoires—and congruent fiddle-contest traditions— reach from Scandinavia across the British Isles to North America. In the American South, performers and, to a slightly lesser extent, audiences are composed largely of white, blue-collar, often rural individuals. In many cases, the best fiddlers are intelligent, energetic men (still mostly men, though the rising fiddle world of children and teenagers is gender balanced) who do not thrive particularly well in formal educational situations. 292

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In the southern United States, contest formats correspond to a region’s dominant fiddle style (or styles). In the Southeast, fiddle “conventions” center on ensemble performance, specifically on old-time music and bluegrass. Old-time fiddle bands supplement the fiddle-banjo duo inherited from blackface minstrelsy, with a guitar and string bass furnishing harmonic support. The fiddle and banjo play in heterophony, that is, not quite in unison, since each musician plays a given melody in a way idiomatic to their instrument. Bluegrass bands are a little bigger than their oldtime counterparts, averaging half a dozen musicians. Like old-time bands, they tend to be groups of friends and/or family members. But bluegrass performances are different: most members of bluegrass ensembles get brief chances to step into the musical foreground in many tunes by taking solo “breaks.” Most southeastern fiddle contests reserve their important contest brackets for old-time and bluegrass bands, and they also have divisions for individual instruments (often plus an accompanying guitar) and for folk songs. In marked contrast to southeastern fiddle contests/conventions, Texas fiddle contests concentrate nearly exclusively on solo fiddling in an exciting, linear style packed with variation that is less rhythm oriented and more harmonically governed than that characteristic of older styles. One or several guitarists accompany the Texas contest fiddler with crisp, jazzy chords. In these contests, separate brackets are nearly all defined by the ages of the contestants. The oldest and the youngest players perform

early in a given contest, followed by the prime-of-life (and thus most expert) fiddlers. The best fiddling per capita in this style takes place in contests in Texas, though this style now dominates in most of the United States. Indeed, the so-called national contest in Weiser, Idaho, features the northwestern take on the Texas style (though a handful of true Texas fiddlers also attend). Between the Southeast and Texas, especially in the Tennessee Valley and the Deep South, many contests are in hybrid formats. For instance, the wellregarded Tennessee Valley Oldtime Fiddlers Contest in Athens, Ala., starts off on an October Friday evening like a southeastern contest, with competition brackets defined by performance medium (harmonica, mandolin, fingerpicking guitar, and others). On Saturday, those brackets gradually yield to age-defined groupings of Texas-style fiddlers, one of whom will be crowned “Fiddle King” late that night. This and several other contests in this part of the United States (and as far north as Minnesota!) also reserve a bracket for oldtime fiddling. Although fiddle contests are built around staged, structured competition between individual fiddlers or between fiddle-based bands, they must include much more than the competition itself to be considered satisfactory and to survive over time. These annual smallto medium-sized festivals are typically set in small towns, in part to allow room for camping, lots of jamming (which most fiddlers say is more fun and more important than the official competition), and the sale of crafts and

homespun fast foods. These aspects of fiddle contests, like the music itself, are believed to hearken back to an earlier time, which, in the way of nostalgia, is willfully considered to have been simpler and generally better. Historic small-town values of community and family frame how the fiddle community chooses to remember the past and become the focus for values expressed by behavior in all spheres in this regularly reconstituted weekend subculture. CHRIS GOERTZEN University of Southern Mississippi Chris Goertzen, American Music (Fall 1996), The World of Music (2003); Sharon Poulson Graf, “Traditionalization at the National Oldtime Fiddler’s Contest: Politics, Power, and Authenticity” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999).

First Monday Trades Days For generations, folks across the South have come together on the first weekend of the month for First Monday Trades Days, gatherings that revolve around the trading, selling, and buying of everything from coon dogs to bagged hush-puppy mix. Today, most such trades days take the form of sprawling flea markets; in their early years, however, these days were all about trading, with farm families, townsfolk, and outof-town traders coming together to engage in the lively back-and-forth of bartering. Whether the mode of exchange is mules or money, however, the spirit of these events has stayed much the same, with folks gathering for a day of socializing, eating, and good-natured haggling. Many of these trades days began FIRST MONDAY TRADES DAYS

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The true artistry of First Monday Trades Days always lies in the mouths of those doing the trading. Their oftenwitty and typically drawn-out bargaining regularly attracts the attention of all within hearing range, often creating miniaudiences for the unfolding dramas. In this 1999 image from the First Monday Sale & Trade Days in Ripley, Miss., the fellow in the chair is clearly enjoying the haggling as the potential buyer (left) elaborates on his offer for the caged goat. (Photograph by David Wharton)

in the 19th and early 20th centuries as “court days,” when circuit court judges would make their monthly visit to the county seat to hold court. Local farmers would often take this opportunity to visit town, enabling them to make their monthly purchases while catching the (often lively) court proceedings. By all accounts, the evolution from court watching to street-side swapping was inevitable. Folks from the South have long claimed that whenever you put two or more southerners together for any period of time, someone’s going to “talk up” a trade. That seems to be the story of the trades days, as the streets around the courthouses increasingly became sites of informal exchange, with town and country folk trading all manner of 294 FIRST MONDAY TRADES DAYS

goods: hunting dogs, used tools, cured hams, mules, stitchery, fresh produce, and nearly anything else of value. Itinerant peddlers—always on the lookout for opportunity—would also travel to town on these days, adding to a festive atmosphere already fueled by drinking, gambling, fiddling, and—not infrequently— a bit of fighting. Accounts from some southern towns offer an alternate explanation for the trades days’ origins. While still invoking the centrality of the monthly court sessions, they add that the county sheriffs would often take advantage of these gatherings to auction stray livestock and various unclaimed goods. Residents of Texas’s Van Zandt County, for instance, note that in the days of open-

range grazing, state law required that the sheriff round up the county’s stray horses and auction them to the highest bidders. Local farmers would stable the horses until the monthly court day— which happened to be on the first Monday—and then would bring them to the county seat of Canton. Soon others with horses to sell or trade joined the fray, turning Canton into a bustling horse-trading center and earning their First Monday Trades Day the alternate title of “Horse Monday.” This pattern apparently repeated itself throughout the South; folks in Abingdon, Va., for example, nicknamed their trades day “Jockey Day,” while residents of Lexington, Ky., called theirs “Mule Day.” One can imagine that all this activity around the courthouse square eventually began to take its toll, particularly when the activity involved growing numbers of horses, mules, and dogs. The inevitable congestion, rowdiness, noise, and rank odors prompted merchants in many towns to petition for the trades days’ removal from the town center. As a result, most southern trades days began to move farther and farther from the courthouse, yielding more room for growth as they moved out of town. This gradual distancing from downtown streets coincided with shifts in the structure of county governance, an increased ease of transportation, and changing patterns of leisure, spurring First Monday Trades Days to move beyond the strictures of a single day. Increasingly, First Monday Trades Days became first weekend trades days, with Monday often dropping out of the picture altogether. The name of

these gatherings, however, typically has not changed; First Monday Trades Day in Canton, Tex., for instance, now stretches from the Thursday through Sunday before the first Monday. Yet as with other trades days across the South, Monday still holds its place in the title, now more a salute to the past than an acknowledgment of present-day reality. As trades days have evolved, so too has the nature of their “trading.” Contemporary trades days tend to be flea markets, with cash as the operative mode of exchange. Mules and horses have largely vanished from the scene, as have the days when someone could come to the market with a basket and leave with a goat. Yet the art of the trade has not altogether disappeared. Some southern trades days, for instance, still draw crowds of hunting-dog enthusiasts, who come to trade both dogs and tales about them. (The Trades Day park in Canton, Tex., even boasts a life-size statue of two traders swapping a dog for a gun.) At other trades days, the trading is more subtle but still clearly evident. While many vendors travel these markets for their living, relying on cash sales and set prices, many other sellers attend on a far less formal basis. Setting up in the lots with homemade baked goods, hand-screened T-shirts, attic antiques, home-produced CDs, and discards from the garage, these sellers tend to be more open to bargaining and outright trading. Clever dickering, artful exaggeration, and finely spun fabrications are still everywhere apparent. So too are stories of the swaps. Folks in Ripley, Miss., for example, tell of the fellow who went to the local trades FIRST MONDAY TRADES DAYS

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day to trade his old shotgun. Within minutes, he had swapped the gun for a hunting dog; soon thereafter, he exchanged the dog for a sewing machine. And so the day went, marked by a series of trades that ended up with the trader carrying home a fine-looking shotgun. Only after he had returned to his house did he realize that the gun he now owned was the same one he had traded that morning. Contemporary First Monday Trades Days come in all sizes, from the small and strictly local to the sprawling and self-consciously regional. Among the best known are those in Scottsboro, Ala.—which began in 1902 and still takes place around the county courthouse—and Canton, Tex.—which started in the 1850s and now stretches over 100 acres. Both draw thousands of visitors each month, with attendance for Labor Day extending into the tens of thousands. The spirit at these grand gatherings is much as it always has been at the South’s First Monday Trades Days: social and celebratory, marked by moments of anticipation, grins of satisfaction, and a never-ceasing flow of artful talk. M. B. NEWTON JR. Louisiana State University GLENN HINSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies in Oral Narrative (1986); Paddy Bowman, Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin (Winter 1985); Center for the Study of Southern Culture, with photographs by David Wharton, “First Monday Sale and Trade Days, Ripley, MS.,” <www

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.olemiss.edu/depts/south/projects/ripley/ ripley01.htm>; Rick Sebak, A Flea Market Documentary (DVD, 2001).

Ghost Stories Ghost stories are found in virtually every culture. The protagonists are usually beings returned from the dead in human or animal form; in the South, they can also be the spirits of objects like trains, steamboats, or houses. The returning dead typically manifest themselves in three ways in these stories: as human beings, as specters, or as invisible entities that commit mischief. The reasons that tellers give for the ghosts’ return vary from one region to the next; in most stories, however, ghosts visit the living to avenge a wrongful death, complete unfinished business, deliver important information, reward the living, punish or protect, or reenact their deaths. In the American South, where Protestant beliefs dictate that departed souls spend eternity in heaven or hell, believers often treat the appearance of ghosts as an unnatural or frightening event. Visitations from family members, however, seem to fall in a separate category; southern narrators generally portray such visits as comforting. Traditionally, family members have told ghost stories to other family members, with grandparents, parents, or aunts and uncles conveying them to children. Today, ghost stories are just as likely to be transmitted from peer to peer in schools, dormitories, offices, and automobiles or at special social gatherings. These narratives typically take the form of lengthy, first-person stories of

encounters with the supernatural or of shorter, secondhand summaries or fragments. In the 21st century, electronic transmission has become one of the primary means of sharing ghost stories. Search engines like Shadowlands, for instance, invite readers to submit ghost stories pertaining to their particular city and state. Chat rooms and blogs have become popular avenues for telling ghost tales, while stories also regularly appear on the websites of ghost hunters. Television shows like Haunted History and Most Haunted feature firsthand and secondhand encounters with the supernatural in historically haunted sites. These televised and Internet-based accounts, in turn, often enter the oral tradition, fueling further tellings. Televised paranormal investigations like the Atlantic Paranormal Society’s visit to the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, Ga., for example, have added to the body of tales told by tour guides in haunted places. Even the lexicon of ghost hunters (for example, “residual hauntings,” “full-bodied apparition,” and “intelligent hauntings”) now regularly shows up in ghost stories told by young people, thanks to televised shows like Paranormal State. Because many ghost stories recount historical events and convey religious and traditional beliefs, they serve as what folklorist William Lynwood Montell refers to as “an unconscious form of generational bonding.” When passed down from family elders to children, ghost stories become family folklore, offering a priceless legacy for younger generations.

The particular history of the South has generated many of its most enduring ghost stories. The region’s tragic legacy of slavery and racism, for instance, has given rise to many tales. One of the saddest of these comes from St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast. In mid-May 1793, the slave ship York— loaded with Igbos captured in Africa— sailed up Dunbar Creek to a place now called Ebo Landing. Before the ship docked, the Africans revolted, causing the overseer and two crew members to jump overboard. Determined not to spend the rest of their lives in slavery, the Africans then climbed off the ship and marched into the water, singing, “The water brought us here, and the water will take us away.” At least 10 of the Africans drowned. Ever since, St. Simons residents have heard chanting, moaning, and the rattling of chains as the ghosts of the Igbos reenact their own deaths. The bulk of the ghost stories found in the South may well have their origin in the Civil War. One representative tale hails from Decatur, Ala., home of the Burleson/McIntire House on the south bank of the Tennessee River. During the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate armies used this house as a hospital and command center. One day in April 1862, as federal troops were crossing the Tennessee River near the house, they suddenly came under fire from Confederate soldiers perched on the roof of the nearby First National Bank building. One Union soldier was mortally wounded; he was taken by his companions to the Burleson/McIntire House, where he soon died. Because GHOST STORIES

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of the heavy sniper fire, however, his comrades could not bury him outside. Instead, they ripped up the floorboards in the front parlor and dug a hasty grave in the dirt below. A few days later, Union troops recaptured the city, disinterred the young soldier, and gave him a proper burial. Yet his spirit apparently was not satisfied. Area residents say they still see the young man’s ghost on the roof of the Burleson/McIntire House, and they sometimes encounter a ghostly woman in white—the soldier’s mother—who walks through the house carrying a candle as she searches for her son. Ghost stories are still very much a part of the southern folklore landscape. In fact, many businesses and communities are capitalizing on these stories’ popularity. A number of southern bed and breakfasts—such as the 1891 Castle Inn in New Orleans, La.—advertise their haunted history on their websites. Others—like the Marshall House in Savannah, Ga.—have been featured on the Travel Channel program Haunted Hotels. And many larger southern cities like Galveston, Tex., and Charleston, S.C.—as well as smaller towns like Bardstown, Ky., and Beaufort, S.C.— currently host formally organized ghost tours. It seems that ghost stories are showing no signs of “dying off ” any time soon in the American South. ALAN BROWN University of West Alabama Alan Brown, Stories from the Haunted South (2004); Don Farrant, Ghosts of the Georgia Coast (2002); William Lynwood Montell, Ghosts across Kentucky (2000); Troy Taylor, Spirits of the Civil War (1999).

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Ginseng Hunting Ginseng hunting in the South is a cultural tradition rich in verbal and customary lore that spans the most practical aspects of a rural economy to the most outrageous tall tales about patches of ginseng as big as football fields. Ginseng—’sang or ’seng, as is it commonly abbreviated in local parlance—is a root valued for its presumed medicinal benefits, most notably for its ability to increase physical and mental stamina. Formal histories of ginseng in North America often begin with the discovery of the root by a Jesuit priest just outside present-day Montreal in 1709. This discovery kicked off a thriving international trade fueled by Asian buyers who continue to favor wild ginseng over less-potent cultivated roots for their herbal medicines. The use of ginseng in America, however, dates much earlier, as American Indians had already been using ginseng in herbal medicines by the time of European arrival. The Cherokee, for example, continue to use ginseng as a central ingredient of most of their herbal remedies, revering it as a sacred herb that can reestablish balance and harmony. Early European settlers learned to use ginseng from both Asian and American Indian traditions. Particularly in Appalachia, ginseng remains a central ingredient in herbal medicines and teas. But ginseng in the South has always been appreciated more for its financial benefits than for its medical ones, making the hunt as important as the root itself. In fact, the folk history of ginseng in America is dominated by stories of its trade and not its use (as in the

cautionary tale of Daniel Boone’s loss of an entire boatload of ginseng when his barge tipped over in the Ohio River). The search for ginseng is referred to as hunting rather than collecting or gathering, situating it within the maledominated culture of hunting and fishing—practical recreation that assumes physical skill and local knowledge of the land. Most ginseng hunters also hunt local animals and fish local streams. While some women hunt ginseng, both for herbal remedies and supplemental income, men dominate the tradition. Most women rarely stay to chat with other hunters when selling their ginseng or compete with them with stories of the biggest root they ever found. More than any other form of hunting, the recreational aspects of ginseng hunting are overshadowed by its financial potential. In depressed economic times, ginseng is a local resource that people use to make ends meet. For many, ginseng operates as a personal savings account, where a few hours digging in the woods is equivalent to a withdrawal from the bank. Knowledge derived from casual conversations, observation, and personal experience, coupled with personal ethics and aesthetics, guide ginseng hunters in how to find, dig, dry, sell, and conserve ginseng. The landscape provides the greatest clues in the hunt. Hunters and botanists agree that the plant likes shaded spots near water with good drainage. Many hunters also believe that north-facing hills are particularly good hunting grounds. Other purportedly good places to find ginseng are near grouse nests, beside deer stands,

and, humorously, behind “No Trespassing” signs. Pointer plants such as blackberry, black cohosh, “three-way fern,” black and white walnut, and basswood are assumed to identify places ginseng grows, while Virginia creeper, Indian turnip, and spignet are often mistaken for ginseng. Because ginseng hunting can be financially lucrative, most people choose to hunt alone, using shovels, forked wooden sticks, or homemade “sang hoes” with a narrow steel blade to more accurately unearth the root. The responsible hunter will only hunt when the plant is fruiting (typically from September to April) in order to sow the seeds back into the ground to ensure a regular supply of ginseng in the future—steps now encoded in state laws. Upon finding a patch of ginseng, the hunter will dig only a plant with three or more prongs—which indicate that it is mature enough to produce berries—and leave the smaller plants to mature. There are, however, unscrupulous hunters who violate both the ethics of the hunter as well as the laws of the state by digging young plants, not sowing seeds, hunting out of season, and hunting on public and private lands without permits or permission. In order to thwart these illicit activities, some ginseng hunters will pull the leaves off young plants to keep them from being identified and harvested too early. Landowners have been known to aggressively guard ginseng patches on their land. Tension among competing hunters remains today, but since the 1970s a new antagonist has taken center stage: the federal government. In 1975 the governGINSENG HUNTING

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ment began to regulate ginseng hunting out of concern that it would become extinct through overharvesting. While many hunters agree that efforts need to be taken to protect ginseng, old perceptions of the government as faceless, out of touch, and capable of overreaching persist. Many hunters believe the rural ethics that guide their lives, economies, and recreations are dismissed by a classist government that values golf over hunting, science over experience, and the environment over people. Increasingly strict regulations frustrate many ginseng hunters who view state and national parks as shared public land. TOM MOULD Elon University Cary Bogue, in Foxfire 3, ed. Eliot Wigginton (1975); Barbara Duncan, in May We All Remember Well: A Journal of the History and Culture of Western North Carolina, vol. 1 (1997); Mary Hufford, Folk Center News (1997); Kristin Johannsen, Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America’s Most Valuable Plant (2006); Andrew C. Kimmens, ed., Tales of the Ginseng (1975); Tom Mould, Midwestern Folklore 25, no. 2 (1999); Ronan K. Peterson, North Carolina Folklore Journal (Winter/Spring 1995); David A. Taylor, Ginseng, the Divine Root (2006).

Gourd Martin Houses The custom of attracting purple martins to gourd nesting sites is one of the South’s oldest and most widespread folk traditions and part of the lives and seasonal routines of many southerners from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. This tradition began in preColumbian times.

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Old World gourds either came floating across the ocean in the ancient past or were brought, via the land bridge, by the first inhabitants of North America. Archaeological evidence suggests that American Indians realized the usefulness of gourds and began cultivating them as early as 9,000 years ago in Mesoamerica. Gourd agriculture spread northward into what is now the southeastern United States, where, it is believed, Indians first erected “trees” full of gourds to attract nesting purple martins. John James Audubon’s 1821 rendering of the purple martin—which he painted at a Choctaw village in what is now Mississippi or Louisiana—features such a gourd nest. The Indians recognized the benefits of having these birds as close neighbors because of the martins’ appetite for pesky insects and their aggressiveness toward other birds. Early historical accounts, as well as later ethnographic studies, of southern Indian groups document a mutually beneficial relationship between the martin colonies and these Native American communities. As anthropologist Frank Speck writes: “The artificial nest habits of the martins were deliberately induced in pre-contact times through the discovery by Indian observers that the birds consume insect pests attacking their corn plots and gardens, and, of still more importance, in a growing economy, drove away the crows and ‘blackbirds’ at planting time.” European and African American settlers—who were eager to learn from the native peoples better ways of surviving in this new land—soon adopted the

martin-house custom. As John Lawson described in The History of Carolina, “The planters put gourds on standing poles on purpose for these fowl to build in, because they are a very warlike bird and beat the crows from the plantations.” Over 100 years later, Englishman Philip Henry Gosse, writing from Pleasant Hill in Dallas County in 1838, described the custom as he witnessed it in the Alabama Black Belt. Whole fields are also devoted to the culture of the different species of melons and gourds. . . . The gourd . . . is cultivated, not to be eaten, for which it is not at all fitted, but to be used for utensils of household economy. . . . One singular use to which it is applied is that of birds’ nests; several gourds are frequently hung around a tree whose branches have been lopped, to entice the Purple Martin (Hirundo purpurea) to occupy them as breeding boxes; a practice learned, I believe, from the Indians. Some persons exercise their ingenuity in ornamenting the outside of the household gourds with carved lines and figures. If you ask rural southerners today about the practice of putting up gourd birdhouses to attract martins, their reasons for doing so are much the same. The late Sacred Harp singing master Dewey Williams of Ozark, Ala., was quick to assert the importance of martins on a farm: “Martins will run a hawk to death,” he said. They are “as watchful as a cat is to a rat.” Reuben Norrell of Tallassee, Ala., explained that he “always

put up gourds for them [the martins] to fight the hawks, keep them from eating the chickens.” Arlene Crawford, formerly of Coosa County, Ala., added that martins “protect the early stuff ” in the gardens. In the Mount Olive community of Coosa County, Ala., D. J. Cannon was known for his distinctive, domed-shaped racks hung with martin gourds. He claimed that the birds “take their weight in mosquitoes every day.” Weldon Vickery of Atmore, Ala., learned about the birds from his grandmother, a Creek Indian, who said that the birds were sacred to her people. For years, he has grown gourds and given away birdhouses, an effort that he estimates has attracted at least 3,000 martins to the area. As a former Escambia County commissioner, he appreciates the fact that the growing martin population has reduced the amount of spraying needed to control mosquitoes. For centuries, southerners have recognized the gourd martin house for its usefulness and compelling aesthetic qualities. Tens of thousands of gourd martin houses currently hang throughout the region, a testament to a very healthy folk tradition that symbolizes both cultural heritage and the close relationship between people and the environment in which they live. Each year, many southerners eagerly await the return of the birds as heralds of spring. Apart from their benefits to agriculture, the birds are a pleasure to watch as they dart after insects and raise their young in the free-swinging gourds. It seems likely that martin scouts that fly up through the South in February

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and March will continue to find nesting sites among many future generations of southerners. JOEY BRACKNER Alabama Center for Traditional Culture Alabama State Council on the Arts David L. Erickson, Bruce D. Smith, Andrew C. Clarke, Daniel H. Sandweiss, and Noreen Tuross, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (December 2005); Phillip Henry Gosse, Letters from Alabama (1859); John Lawson, The History of Carolina, Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country (1714); Frank G. Speck, Gourds of the Southeastern Indians (1941).

Gumbo When most people think of gumbo, they associate it with the Cajun and Creole peoples of Louisiana. The dish varies widely across the state, reflecting both larger cultural interactions and individual preferences. That noted, gumbo is generally a seasoned souplike dish served over rice. It may or may not contain any of the following traditional ingredients: meat and/or fish; seasoning vegetables (finely chopped onion, bell pepper, celery, garlic, and/or tomato); a main vegetable like okra, or a leafy vegetable like turnip or mustard greens; and any of a number of garnishes, vegetables, or herbs (which can include onion tops, green onions, parsley, and filé) meant to finish the dish. While most often linked with Louisiana, neither the name nor the idea for gumbo is unique to the area. The word “gumbo” comes to the New World from

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West Africa, where the okra plant—a key ingredient in many gumbos—was known as (ki) ngombo along much of the coast; in other areas of West Africa, it was called nkruma, the source for the American word “okra.” Because of this African connection, gumbos are also found in the Carolinas and in Puerto Rico. Gumbo has come to stand for Louisiana in part because it reflects and refracts so well the historical complexities out of which the dish emanates. The roots of Louisiana gumbo begin in that territory’s French colonial period, when enslaved Africans brought to French settlements both okra seeds and knowledge about ways of preparing food. These French and African settlers were, of course, pressing outward onto a landscape already occupied by Native Americans, who had their own rich cooking traditions. Some of these native groups dried and ground sassafras leaves, yielding a seasoning that they called kombo. Now known as filé, this seasoning has become a key ingredient in many Louisiana gumbos. A number of native groups also parched ground corn, which they would carry in pouches and mix with water as a subsistence food when out on long trips. This too would contribute to the eventual emergence of gumbo. Into this colonial mix of peoples and ideas came two great surges: the Acadians and the Haitians. The cultural impact of the latter group—and in particular their impact on the foodways of New Orleans—is not to be underestimated; the 1809 migration of Haitian

whites, slaves, and freed people of color doubled the population of the city practically overnight. No matter their color or status, the Haitians brought with them the distinct foodways that had developed on the island. Enslaved Haitians perhaps had the greatest impact on Louisiana cooking; many became domestics in New Orleans kitchens and revolutionized the city’s cuisine. In so doing, they also contributed to gumbo’s development. The first mentions of gumbo in the historical record appear right as the colonial period ends and the American one begins, underlining the fact that the exact origins of Louisiana gumbo may be irretrievable. Its form, however, appears to have been established early: a thick, brown soup served over a cereal. Since the late 19th century, with rice’s development as a commercial crop, rice has been at the bottom of gumbo bowls. Before that, Louisianans adhered more closely to the rest of the South and ladled their gumbo onto corn meal mush (known at first by the Native American term sagamité and later by the African-influenced couche couche). People in some parts of Louisiana maintain this tradition when they scoop potato salad into a gumbo bowl to “soak up the rest of the gravy.” The essence of gumbo is really its brownness. How this brown is achieved, however, varies by region and by dish. In some areas, cooks get the browning from the meat; in others, it comes from the roux. The color, consistency, and amount of roux are wildly variable, as is its place in the cooking process. Some

cooks begin their gumbo by making a roux and then adding seasoning, vegetables, and water. Others already have a roux made (often keeping a large bowl of it sitting in the refrigerator) and add it to boiling water, dissolving it spoonful by spoonful. The all-important gravy in gumbo can be derived from protein (chicken or sausage), carbohydrates (onion), or starch (flour); whatever the source, cooks try to extract as much flavor from the nonrice portion as possible. Historically, gumbos are a product of the need to cook meats for a long time. The extended cooking accomplished several things at once: it tenderized meat usually taken from an older animal (butchered only after it gave no more eggs or milk), it extracted the most flavor from what little meat there was, and—by breaking up the meat and stretching out its flavor—it fed large families or groups. Gumbo has, then, become intertwined with ideas of community and sociability. Families now serve elaborate gumbos, sometimes stuffed with a variety of rich meats, at holidays or other special occasions. Not only does gumbo tie one to one’s contemporaries, but it also—as a product of oral tradition—ties individuals to their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. Conventional wisdom holds that whenever a man argues about the “proper” way to make gumbo, he is really about to tell you how his grandmother made it. These two dimensions—social ties in the present and historical ties to one’s past—give rise to the oft-told

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anecdote about the individual who goes home in August and turns up the air-conditioning so that it will be cool enough, if only in their own house, to make a gumbo. Even this brief discussion of a few aspects of gumbo reveals the extreme variability and flexibility of the dish. Gumbo is, like any cultural touchstone, as much a focus for argument as it is for agreement, with differences often being distinct across regions, towns, and even families. These differences are, in point of fact, more consistent than any of the more sweeping claims sometimes made to differentiate between Cajun and Creole versions of the dish. The gumbos made by Cajun and Creole neighbors in Lawtell, La., for instance, are probably more similar to each other than the gumbos made by the Creoles of Lawtell and those of New Orleans. As is the case with so many folklore forms, gumbo reveals that there has always been a high degree of cultural integration in the South, even when social segregation was the law of the land. JOHN LAUDUN University of Louisiana at Lafayette Carl Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life, 1765–1803 (1987), Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803–1877 (1992); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992).

House Parties Musicians and partygoers across the South regularly gather at house parties for long evenings of conversation, dancing, and music. The crowds may be 304 HOUSE PARTIES

white, African American, Cajun, Latino, or American Indian; the music, in turn, may be blues, country, jazz, Cajun, or hip-hop. Mouth-watering food is a constant (gumbo, fry bread, chicken stew, fried catfish), as is liquid refreshment and a spirit of revelry. Some parties set out a hat or guitar case for tipping the musicians; others charge at the door to catch up on back rent, cover the musicians’ fees, or perhaps raise funds for a neighbor in need; still others rely on the sale of food and drink to raise a bit of extra cash. Southern house parties fueled country music creativity in the 1930s and 1940s; country music scholar Bill Malone calls them “one of the great seedbeds of country music.” They also launched the careers of generations of blues musicians, and today they provide fertile ground for hip-hop MCs and Cajun rock and rollers. While southern house parties have long been associated with grassroots music making, the association is nowhere stronger than in the Mississippi Delta, where these gatherings have provided a home for the blues for more than 100 years. Every Friday and Saturday night for most of the 20th century, African American audiences gathered to hear guitarists or piano players— often accompanied by a harmonica player and a drummer—play and sing. Sometimes a musician would rub a broom handle across the floor to provide rhythm; other times, a partygoer would “pat” rhythms on his or her body to accompany a buckdance. Once the music began, the audience would join in with their own verses and verbal encouragement.

In the African American South, house parties have long provided the most intimate and comfortable home for down-home, secular music making, whether it be blues, jazz, or hip-hop. The side-by-side proximity of musicians and dancers blurs distinctions between the two, drawing them together as cocreators in the ever-unfolding performance. This 1968 blues house party—held in the home of Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown in Kent’s Alley, Leland, Miss.—brought together “Little Son” Jefferson on harmonica and James Thomas on guitar, with Gussie Tobe taking on the singing. (William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Stories, jokes, and music are all part of the blues performance at a house party. As small rooms fill with smoke and the smell of alcohol, couples talk, dance the slow drag, and sing with the performer. As the music continues, the dancers speak to the singer, and he, in turn, responds to their words with his music. The blues singer learns to “talk the blues” with his audience, deftly integrating their conversation between his blues verses. When a verse ends, the musicians keep playing, turning the extended moment into a time for talking. The singer then sings another verse, giving the partygoers a chance to recall rhymes

and jokes to tell at the next verse break. The audience thus influences the length and structure of each blues as they force the singer to integrate his song with their response. Experienced bluesmen know that audience response is a reflection of their musical skill; a successful blues session is filled with comments and jokes that partygoers tell as the music unfolds. This “call and response” exchange between the blues performer and his audience finds its counterpart in African American church services, where a similar pattern develops between the preacher and his or her congregation. The constant verbal interplay at HOUSE PARTIES

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blues house parties means that the role of “performer” constantly shifts from the singer to his audience and back again. After a partygoer tells a joke, the performer recaptures his audience by changing the musical beat or striking louder chords. While he allows the center of attention to shift to members of the crowd, the performer nonetheless maintains overall control through his music. This pattern of back-and-forth interplay is well illustrated by the talk and singing at a 1968 blues house party in Clarksdale, Miss. The exchange begins when pianist Pine Top Johnson declares to Jasper Love, “You know one thing, Boy? I’m drifting.” Love replies, “He’s trying to drift outta Mississippi. I know what he’s trying to do.” Then Johnson sings a verse: You know I’m drifting, and I’m drifting, just like a ship out on the sea. Well, I’m drifting, and I’m drifting like a ship out on the sea. Well, you know I ain’t got nobody in this world to care for me. Pine Top thus introduces “Drifting Blues” by integrating both storytelling and music into his performance. Throughout the party, Pine Top and Jasper Love “talk” through the music. Pine Top sings a verse, for instance, and then says, “You know what I’m talking about.” Later, Jasper Love encourages Pine Top with the phrase, “Talk to them, Pine.” The performer “talks” through his music; to play it well is to talk clearly. So when Pine Top finishes a verse, Jasper Love replies, “Now it’s talking to me.” 306 HOUSE PARTIES

The distinction between music and talk blurs as blues talk mixes with verses, at times even becoming the focus of the performance. Such talk can take the form of short phrases or lengthy conversations. Brief phrases like “Play the blues, Pine” frequently punctuate the musical breaks after each line. (This same pattern of inserting phrases during instrumental breaks also marks the on-air commentary of blues disc jockeys, who often talk “over” recorded tracks.) Lengthier blues talk, in contrast, can pull the center of attention away from the verses, focusing it instead on the conversation between the singer and the audience. Such conversations can unfold like a verse within the song; they can include obscene tales, toasts, and dozens, all performed to the musician’s instrumental accompaniment. Localization is another way that house-party performers engage their audiences. Mississippi Delta artists, for instance, often insert the names of local towns in their verses. Hence, when Pine Top performs “Dust My Broom” at a Clarksdale house party, he sings, “I’m going to find me a Clarksdale woman if she dumb and crippled and blind.” Later, in “Santa Fe Blues,” he sings: I say Mobile on that Southern line, Jackson on that Santa Fe. You know I got a woman in Tutwiler, I got a woman in Sumner too. The state of Mississippi itself is an important point on the musical compass at Delta house parties. Pine Top tells Jasper Love, “I’m down in Mississippi, and I got to play the blues.” To be “down in Mississippi” is both a

geographical and an emotional state. Hence, when Pine Top and Jasper Love both declare their plans to move “up” to Chicago, they are not only talking about escaping from Mississippi. Jasper makes this pointedly clear when he tells Pine Top, “I’m glad we up here on Seventyninth and Cottage Grove, where we can be free . . . in Chicago, Illinois.” Jasper locates Mississippi on the “down” side of the blues map in both a literal and emotional direction; he suggests that to leave Mississippi is to move up to a better life. “I’m a Mississippi boy, but I done skipped from it now.” In this world of talk and song, Mississippi becomes the land of tribulation and misfortune. Thus when Pine Top sings the blues line “Love, I’ve had my fun if I don’t get well no more,” Jasper replies, “Long as you stay in Mississippi, you never will get well.” Later Pine Top sings that he is dying and plans to ship his body back home: “On the next train south, Love, look for my clothes back home.” Jasper Love responds by arguing that you should not send even a corpse back to the South: “You don’t want to go south. Tell him to go west or north. But don’t go south.” Exchanges like these reveal how house-party performers embrace their audiences through music. Performer and audience merge in the unfolding drama, as the blues—like the old hymns that Jasper often invokes—“pitches sound backwards and forwards.” Though the popular heyday of the blues has long past, blues house parties remain common in the Mississippi Delta. They now find a vibrant complement in hip-hop house parties, with the

two sometimes even unfolding together. In other regions of the South, where house parties feature different musics and different cultural norms, the mix of music, merriment, and dance still remains much in demand. When a musician finds an audience and a comfortable room where he or she can play, the party begins early in the evening and will last “into the wee, wee hours.” WILLIAM FERRIS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (1984), Give My Poor Heart Ease (2009), Mississippi Delta Blues (film, 1974); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (2002); Eudora Welty, “Powerhouse,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980).

Jack Tales Jack tales constitute a cycle of long, episodic, oral prose narratives that chronicle the adventures of a poor, uneducated, Appalachian teenage farm boy named Jack as he negotiates an ultimately successful quest for prosperity, autonomy, wisdom, and maturity. Jack tales stand apart from their many counterparts that feature a boy named Jack, where the name is merely a generic term for the main male character. These are stories unto themselves, joined together in a tale cycle that has delighted Appalachian listeners for generations. The appeal of Jack tales is both universal and region specific. On a broader, mythic level, the stories usually follow the ancient pattern of initiation rituals: separation (marked by a leaving of home in the real, and often surreal, JACK TALES

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world); transition (signaled by the successful completion of a series of tests, tasks, and other challenges); and incorporation (indicated by the return home with elevated status). In other words, Jack tales recount the journey of the traditional hero. More important to their appeal, however, is their markedly Appalachian perspective. Although the stories draw upon an international and widely distributed fund of traditional folktale types and motifs, Jack tales correspond most closely to variants of European (especially British and German) märchen. Mountain storytellers have modified these older stories to embody aspects of Appalachian folk culture, combining inherited narrative elements with their fertile imaginations and the regional ethos to create verbal art that both reflects and informs Appalachian identity and worldview. As folklorist C. Paige Gutierrez and others have pointed out, Jack’s success is usually due to the nature and nurture of his character. The stories portray him as a clever, quick-witted trickster—basically virtuous and kind, but readily capable of deceit, violence, and cruelty—who displays skill, courage, industry, perseverance, imagination, independence, a propensity for attracting good luck and supranormal assistance, and a deep knowledge of his mountain environment. The consistency and frequency with which these traits are associated with the character essentially define the Jack-tale subgenre. Although Jack tales have been collected throughout central Appalachia (especially in eastern Kentucky and 308 JACK TALES

southwestern Virginia), the center of the cycle seems to be the Beech Mountain area in northwestern North Carolina. For generations in the high mountains of Avery and Watauga Counties, such performers as Council Harmon, Jane Gentry, Marshall Ward, Stanley Hicks, Ray Hicks, and Frank Proffitt Jr. kept the tradition vibrantly alive until their deaths. Hailing from that same extended family, regional tale-teller Orville Hicks is now the area’s most celebrated keeper of the stories, having learned many of them from the old masters themselves. Unlike his mentors, however, Orville Hicks and other contemporary Jack-tale tellers now perform the tales in venues much different from those that gave the stories rise. Indeed, in recent years the telling of Jack tales has undergone a process that folklorists call recontextualization, in which the physical and social contexts of narration have shifted dramatically. Whereas tale-telling was once a spontaneous, organic, and everyday event—unfolding when tellers and listeners gathered to shuck corn, snap beans, grade tobacco, skim sorghum, rock by the fire before bedtime, or cool off on the front porch after supper—it now happens most frequently (or at least most publicly) at such formally scheduled occasions as school functions, county fairs, regional celebrations, storytelling festivals, church gatherings, library socials, and children’s theater productions. In these contemporary settings, semiprofessional artists tell Jack tales to (sometimes quite large) groups of complete strangers; their narrative style, in turn, is often closer to modern

performance art than to the older, traditional ways of telling. Removed from the historically grounded contexts of Jack-tale performance, and willing to modify the stories to suit their own artistic agendas, these narrators might be likened to the folksong revivalists of the 1950s and 1960s; they emerge as active players in the dynamic transformation of tradition. Their performances, of course, run the risk of diminishing the Jack tales’ Appalachian texture and functions, shifting their appeal away from the distinctively regional and toward the universal and mythic. At the same time, however, these contemporary tellers are keeping the Jack tales very much alive, introducing them to ever-new audiences in an ever-changing South. WILLIAM E. LIGHTFOOT Appalachian State University Elizabeth Barrett (director), Fixin’ to Tell about Jack (film, 1974); Isabel Gordon Carter, Journal of American Folklore (July– September 1925); William E. Lightfoot, in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Brunvand (1996); William Bernard McCarthy, ed., Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers (1994); Thomas McGowan, ed., Four Beech Mountain Jack Tales, special issue of North Carolina Folklore Journal (Fall/Winter 2002); Charles L. Perdue Jr., ed., Outwitting the Devil: Jack Tales from Wise County, Virginia (1987); Leonard W. Roberts, ed., South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales (1988).

John the Conqueror Root John the Conqueror is a magical, spiritembodying root used by practitioners

of African American conjure and hoodoo. The root, also known as High John the Conqueror, is carried in the pocket and rubbed when needed; kept in the house as an amulet; “fed” or “dressed” with various substances; boiled to make baths and floor wash; soaked in whiskey, oils, and perfumes for an anointing substance; or incorporated into the charm assemblages called mojo bags and lucky hands. Another root, called Chewing John the Conqueror, is chewed, and the juice is spit in the vicinity of the person or situation that one wishes to influence. Practitioners use John the Conqueror for protection from enemies and malevolent spirits; for luck in gambling, business, and money matters; to get a job; to obtain a favorable outcome in court cases; and for success with women. None of the “John” roots are ingested for medicinal purposes. The large tubers, rhizomes, or taproots of Jack-in-the pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum odoratum), beth root (Trillium), or some species of wild morning glory (Ipomoea)—all native to the southeastern United States—may originally have served as John the Conqueror. A few practitioners still harvest John the Conqueror roots in the wild, but most buy from a spiritual supply store or by mail order. These retailers offer a morning-glory relative, Mexican jalap root (Ipomoea jalapa), as High John the Conqueror, and Asian galangal (Alpinia galanga) as Chewing John. Such stores also sell incense, candles, anointing oils, perfumes, soaps, sachets, bath and floor wash, JOHN THE CONQUEROR ROOT

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aerosol sprays, sprinkling sand, yarddressing granules, and floor-sweeping compound that carry the powerful name of High John the Conqueror. The early 19th-century narratives of former slaves Frederick Douglass of Maryland and Henry Bibb of Kentucky describe the use of a protective root that may have been John the Conqueror. Reports submitted in 1878 by African American students at Virginia’s Hampton Institute also indicate that enslaved people carried John the Conqueror roots as amulets or chewed them and spit the juice. In the 1920s and 1930s, the famous Doctor Buzzard of Beaufort, S.C., influenced the outcome of court cases by chewing John the Conqueror root while glowering at the sheriff, judge, and lawyers through his purpletinted glasses. African American root charms like John the Conqueror probably have their origin in African religious and magical practices. In these traditional belief systems, every natural object has an indwelling spirit that can be summoned to the aid of human beings. The Kongorelated peoples of Central Africa, the largest ethnic group to be enslaved in the American mid-Atlantic states, incorporated twisted, swollen, phallusshaped roots, representing power and masculinity, into the charm assemblages called minkisi. The roots of munkwiza, a member of the ginger family, were chewed and spit to ward off enemies and detect sorcerers. The name “High John the Conqueror” suggests that a potent spiritual entity inhabits this magical root. High John may be equated with Funza, the 310

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Kongo spirit of power and masculinity. High John may also have West African antecedents. In his role as a protector against human enemies, authority figures, and malevolent spirits, he resembles Gu, the Fon and Yoruba warrior spirit of iron and warfare. His function as a bringer of luck in gambling, business, and money matters relates him to Eshu, the trickster spirit who governs chance and the crossroads. In his role as a “conqueror” of women, he is related to Shangó, the handsome and virile spirit of thunder and lightning. Zora Neale Hurston associated the indwelling spirit of High John the Conqueror root with the African American slave trickster hero Old John, a man of great strength and cunning. Stories of Old John and his adversary Old Marster constitute a cycle of folk narratives that parallel the better-known tales of Brer Rabbit. Other folklore texts assert that the character of High John is synonymous with Saint John the Baptist, the man who baptized Jesus, preached in the wilderness, was tempted, and conquered Satan. The prototype for High John the Conqueror could also have been a historic person, possibly a powerful hoodoo doctor, who became associated in the minds of believers with this African spirit. In coastal Maryland and Virginia, a conjurer was called a “high man.” High John the Conqueror, the indwelling spirit of a magical root, would appear to be a mélange of African deities, a legendary slave trickster, and a Christian saint, possibly combined with one or more powerful conjurers. In all of these possible manifestations, High

John personifies a strong, dark, virile, masculine spirit who protects his devotees and brings them success, wealth, and luck. He represents the resiliency and empowerment of black people in surviving slavery and its aftermath of poverty and racism. CAROLYN MORROW LONG National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (2005); Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (1998); Harry Middleton Hyatt, HoodooConjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork, 5 vols. (1970–78); Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (2001).

Juke Joints Juke joints are small African American bars, cafés, and clubs in the South’s rural areas and small towns that feature blues and rhythm-and-blues music— sometimes live but nowadays more often on a jukebox or blasted through the sound systems of disc jockeys who have replaced the live bands. Often dimly lit, these joints typically feature a few tables, a jukebox, a pool table, and maybe a small, slightly elevated stage; their decor ranges from beer posters stapled to particleboard walls to yearround Christmas lights strung across colorfully decorated interiors. Some juke joints serve beer by the quart; many offer barbecue or fried chicken and fish. And some now call themselves sports bars—as long as they have a TV for football and other games. Southern juke joints are direct de-

scendants of jookhouses, which in plantation times were tenants’ houses that were used for music, dancing, and gambling. The residents would clear the furniture from the largest room and spread sawdust on the floor in preparation for a house party, then clean everything up and put it back in order when the party was over. These events—which were also called fish fries, country suppers, balls, or frolics—typically served food and liquor (often moonshine). In older Mississippi telephone directories, the few joints that actually had phones were sometimes listed as beer parlors or beer gardens. Also called jooks, jukehouses, cafés, and—in the Carolinas—drink houses, many of these joints were (and continue to be) known simply by the proprietors’ names (for example, Bettie’s Place or Annie Mae’s Café). The designations “honky-tonk” (“tonk” for short) and “roadhouse” may be used, but these names typically refer to white country and southern-rock venues. Urban equivalents are blues bars, clubs, taverns, and lounges (although some city nightspots have also been called juke joints). Many people now use the terms “club” and “juke joint” interchangeably, though African Americans sometimes make a distinct class differentiation between the two. Some white visitors from New York in search of an authentic juking experience learned this lesson some years ago when they ventured into an establishment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Clarksdale, Miss. They were harshly reprimanded by the black proprietress, who told them: “This ain’t no juke joint! This is a NIGHTCLUB!” JUKE JOINTS

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The exuberant and enduring spirit of the juke joint has made these establishments a favorite theme of southern self-taught artists. This is particularly true for artists who paint memories of their childhood, recalling a time when jukes were prevalent in African American communities across the South. This portrayal, by African American vernacular artist Theresa Gloster, recalls the joints of her childhood in West Virginia and North Carolina. “A lot of them would have dots painted on the walls,” she remembers, “to let people know that this was where the music was.” Note also the postures of the dancers, which capture a range of deeply traditional African American dance moves. (Photograph by Glenn Hinson)

Many southerners will tell you that juke joints got their name from the jukeboxes that often provided their music; in fact, both terms stem from the partying expression “juke,” or “jook.” African Americans have long used jook as both a verb (to party or have a good time) and a noun (referring to a juke joint or an event at such a place). Scholars have suggested various African and Gullah origins for the word, locating its source in terms whose meanings are as diverse as “wicked or disorderly,” “to dance,” and “a place of shelter”—all 312

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of which could apply to a juke joint. Others connect the term “jook” with jute or with chock, a homemade brew from the Southwest (also called Choctaw beer). Whatever its exact origins, the term’s link with partying is so wellestablished that when coin-operated phonographs were introduced in the 1930s, they quickly became known as jukeboxes. Just as the word “jook” has different spellings, so too does it have different pronunciations. Jook—rhyming with “cook” or “book”—is a time-honored

and still-common pronunciation, although juke—rhyming with “duke”—is now more widespread, especially among the various phonetic spellings in print or on recordings. The connection between the term “jook” and music making runs deep in the South. Juke was the title of one of the most influential instrumentals in blues history, a number-one hit on the 1952 rhythm-and-blues charts for harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs (a Louisiana native) on the Chicagobased Chess record label; a year later, Oklahoma-born guitarist Lowell Fulson released the instrumental “Chuck with the Boys.” Texas’s Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded “Chock House Blues” in 1926, and the Jolly Jivers (Alabama bluesmen Walter Roland and Sonny Scott) did “Jookit Jookit” in 1933. The Library of Congress entered several 1935 field recordings from Frederica, Ga., by guitarist John Davis under the title “Jooking.” And many have cited dance tunes by the Mississippi Jook Band from 1936 as classic examples of rock-and-roll roots. Juke is one of the words from the blues lexicon (along with, for instance, “mojo”) that has passed into general usage as a catchphrase. It is even used by sportscasters, who often describe a football player’s elusive footwork as a “juke step.” In recent decades, it has become fashionable for venues catering to upscale audiences all across the country to call themselves “juke joints” and to appropriate the joints’ folksy style of decor; the term has often been misapplied in documentary work as well. Suffice to say that a tourist bar and

coffeehouse on Memphis’s Beale Street whose neon lights proclaim it a “Juke Joint” is not one. JIM O’NEAL Blues Scholar, Archivist, and Producer BluEsoterica Archives and Mississippi Blues Trail William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (1988); Birney Imes, Juke Joints: Photographs (1990).

Line Dancing Line dancing is a popular form of social dance in which individuals dance sideby-side and repeat short sequences of steps choreographed for a particular song or group of songs. Line dancing has become indelibly associated with country music, a connection that was forged in the early 1990s during the enormous increase in that music’s popularity. The dance’s roots and its current forms, however, extend far beyond the borders of country music. The precursors of contemporary line dancing hail from many folk traditions, the most commonly cited being the tap steps in 1930s swing and lindy dances (such as the Shim Sham) and the traditional dances of West Africa. Modern line dancing finds its direct origins in the disco craze of the 1970s, when fans appropriated the stage choreography in soul, Motown, and R & B performances and organized it into dances such as the Bus Stop and the L.A. Hustle. During the 1980s, two broad changes occurred in line dancing. The first was the rise in popularity of music videos (MTV was launched in 1981), which frequently included lines of backup dancers moving in choreographed LINE DANCING

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unison. Michael Jackson’s hit video for “Thriller,” for instance, imprinted the idea of line dancing on millions of viewers. The second major change was the decline in popularity of disco and the simultaneous rise of country music and the attendant creation of countless country music dance halls. Line dancing and country music became convenient bedfellows, as these new cavernous dance halls had lots of space for dancing. At the same time, recent country fans were eager to learn a way of dancing that did not involve the complicated partnering or “leading and following” of more traditional country dances. The result was a slow but steady incorporation of line dancing into country fan culture, with dances such as the Tush Push and Slappin’ Leather quickly taking hold. The event that transformed line dancing into a veritable phenomenon was choreographer Melanie Greenwood’s creation of a new line dance for country singer Billy Ray Cyrus’s recording of “Achy Breaky Heart” in 1992. Cyrus’s record label cleverly donated copies of an instructional video (and step sheet, or notated instructions) to country dance halls so that local dance instructors could teach fans the same dance that they saw in the popular music video. Soon thereafter, country fans across the nation were line dancing to the number-one hit record. The marketing blitz of record-plusvideo-plus-dance propelled “Achy Breaky Heart” to legendary status and established a business model adopted by countless new songs. Choreographers increasingly created individual dances 314 LINE DANCING

for specific country songs, prompting country nightclubs to hire local dance instructors to teach fans new dances each week as new songs were released. Fans, in turn, kept coming back to learn more dances. At the height of line dancing’s popularity, fans readily knew 70 to 80 complete dances, while magazines such as Country Dance Lines and 5678 disseminated new dances and helped create a sense of community among the dancers. A basic line dance typically involves 24 to 64 beats of choreographed steps, consisting primarily of walking steps, turns, kicks, and sideways travel. Dancers arrange themselves on the dance floor in lines, all facing the same way. In many venues, a DJ or selfappointed dance leader will call out “5-6-7-8” to cue the start of the dance. Dancers then perform the sequence of steps, repeating it until the end of the song. The last step in the choreographed pattern often involves rotating either a quarter or a half turn so that dancers begin the next iteration of the pattern while facing a different direction in the room, or “wall.” While several of the perennially favorite line dances (such as the Watermelon Crawl) are directly linked to country music—with its predominantly white fan base—a parallel tradition of soul (sometimes called “urban”) line dancing also thrives in African American communities. Across all line-dance communities, choreographers and participants draw heavily from many different genres of popular music. For instance, the Electric Slide—traditionally done to Marcia Griffiths’s reggae-

flavored “Electric Boogie”—has become a line-dance classic, frequently commanding the floor at house parties, informal social gatherings, and nightclubs. The techno-pop record “Last Night,” recorded by Chris Anderson, fuels an extremely popular line dance called “Chill Factor” in both country bars and top-40 nightclubs. DJ Casper’s hip-hop “Cha Cha Slide,” whose lyrics offer instructions for the dancers, has become a favorite of both fitness instructors and nightclubgoers. And Atlanta hip-hop DJ Unk’s “Walk It Out”—a song that started as a regional hit—became a southern and national hip-hop sensation as both song and line dance after it was featured in the 2007 Hollywood film Stomp the Yard. Line dancing’s social appeal comes from its combination of prescribed movement and individual freedom of expression. Its fixed choreography allows individuals with relatively little dance experience to participate while inviting more advanced dancers to add stylized elaborations that set them apart from the crowd. Because line dancing lacks the conventional male-female partnering of couples’ dances, it has become popular among friends who want to avoid both the social pressures and the technical difficulties of dancing with a partner. The lack of partnering also makes line dancing an extremely popular form of exercise and social entertainment among women’s social clubs, church groups, and gay and lesbian organizations. Throughout the South, middle-school gym teachers have added it to their syllabi as a way of introducing formalized dancing to young teens.

Although one can learn to line dance from courses, commercial videos, books, and instructional materials, most line dances are transmitted casually from friend to friend. This process invariably yields differences between communities in how a particular dance is done. But the speed and accuracy with which many line dances move through fan communities testifies to the centrality of line dancing within many cultural spheres, as does the sight of old, young, black, white, graceful, and awkward participants gamely crowding the floor at a wedding reception to dance the Electric Slide. JOCELYN R. NEAL University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jane A. Harris, Anne M. Pittman, Marlys S. Waller, and Cathy L. Dark, Dance a While: Handbook for Folk, Square, Contra, and Social Dance (2000); Christy Lane, Christy Lane’s Complete Book of Line Dancing (2000); Shawn Trautman, Line Dance 101: A Quick-Start Guide to Line Dancing (DVD, 2005).

Los Matachines The generic term Los matachines refers to a religious dance tradition that draws dancers and musicians together in devotional processions and dance events. Dating back to the conquest of Mexico, the tradition—which blends European and indigenous dance elements—exists in communities across the Americas, having made its way into the U.S. Southwest and the South when the Spanish brought indigenous groups from central Mexico to far-flung areas of the empire as part of their colonizing LOS MATACHINES

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project. The tradition is widespread and long-standing in Texas; recently, dance groups have surfaced in various other parts of the South, with some evidence suggesting that groups have existed for over 20 years in Georgia and North Carolina. While few scholars have explored matachines dancing in the South, Sylvia Rodríguez, Peter García, Claude Stephenson, and Brenda Romero have studied the tradition in New Mexico. The matachines dance groups in Mexico and in the United States reveal a wide range of differences, even as they display some essential similarities across the dance’s variant forms. Generally, scholars and dance groups recognize three main types of matachin dance traditions: de la pluma (of the feather), de la flecha (of the arrow), and de la palma (of the palm, or trident). In the South, most of the matachines groups dance the de la flecha or de la pluma because the root culture—or area of origin—is northern Mexico and south Texas, where these two styles predominate. In general, the dance tradition consists of music, dance steps, and particular dress and instrumentation, as well as a deep religious or spiritual devotion to a particular saint. In Bernalillo, N.Mex., for instance, this saint is San Lorenzo; in North Carolina and Georgia, however, the dancers tend to honor the Virgen de Guadalupe. The dancers generally wear a red nagüillas (a skirt made of two flaps of red velvet fabric and adorned with carrizo, or reed cane) and a vest displaying sequin-embroidered images of the Virgen, the Holy Cross, or other

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The religious dance processions of los matachines unfold as acts of public devotion, carrying on a worship tradition with deep roots in Mexico and Texas. Here, dancer Javier Ortiz leads Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz, a Laredo group whose original members journeyed from Mexico to south Texas in the late 1800s, and who shortly thereafter built a chapel to honor the Holy Cross. Every May, the dancers roll a wheeled pedestal holding an eight-foot wooden cross—gloriously bedecked with flowers—from this chapel to Laredo’s Holy Redeemer Church. Ortiz’s maraca adds to the sound of the procession’s drum and accordion, as do the strips of reed cane (trimmed with jingle bells) sewn onto the dancers’ outfits. (Photograph by Marlene Richardson)

religious symbols, as well as the dancer’s last name or the group’s church affiliation. If the dance takes place in December—as it does for groups honoring the Virgen de Guadalupe, whose feast day is 12 December—the dancers will wear long pants under the nagüillas (especially in areas where the temperatures are colder than those in Mexico or south Texas). While red and yellow predominate, some groups choose blue or other colors associated with the devotion of their particular saint. In the past, huaraches (leather sandals) were the required footwear; nowadays, dancers can wear boots or even tennis shoes to perform the intricate and strenuous foot-stomping dance steps. Headdresses called cupiles or coronas are common in some places; some dancers still don a hat with a long fringe covering the face to lend a semblance of anonymity. Sometimes only the capitanes or monarcas—the dance leaders, called “captains” or “monarchs”—wear the cupiles, which they adorn with bits of broken mirror or colorful beadwork. Most groups include an accordionist and one or more drummers. In New Mexico the violin is essential, for the music is more European; in south Texas and other parts of the South, however, the drum appears to be the most important musical instrument. This can be a simple snare drum bought commercially or a specially constructed instrument made by a drum maker in the community. Some groups insist on more traditionally made drums and will travel to Bustamante, Nuevo León, or other places in Mexico to purchase one

from a traditional drum maker who specializes in drums for matachines troupes. The dancers learn the steps from one generation to the next in rehearsals and unstructured apprenticeships. The musicians learn the tunes, or sones, in a similar way. The broad matachines repertoire encompasses over 50 sones. Most groups’ repertoires, however, feature no more than five or eight tunes, with different groups dancing to different sones. These repertoires always include specific tunes for dancing a greeting and a farewell, as well as a tune to be played and danced to when the group goes in procession. Usually allied to a church, the matachines dance troupe will dance for the patron saint and/or for the Virgen de Guadalupe, moving in procession from a designated area to the parish, where the dancers continue dancing. An image of the Virgen de Guadalupe or the honored saint generally leads the procession. Next come the musicians, the religious representatives (such as a priest or deacon) if they are present, and then the dancers. Parishioners or community members follow, often reciting a rosary and singing religious songs. Those who join the procession are often praying a manda, or vow; they dance or pray as a form of thanksgiving. As groups spring up in communities unfamiliar with the tradition, the religious and secular elements of the tradition are often modified. At San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Tex., for instance, matachines groups dance through the night of 11 December

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in honor of the Virgen de Guadalupe, much as they do in Mexico City at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. But in churches in Manassas, Va., the dancing and celebrating ends by midnight (if not sooner), as the mariachi band plays at the mass. Although the tradition exists in Greater Mexico (to use folklorist Américo Paredes’s term for the general area of the United States where Mexican Americans reside), recent immigrants from Texas and Mexico have brought the matachines dance tradition to places across the South where it had been heretofore unknown. The Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina, for example, now hosts at least three different groups that dance during the Virgen de Guadalupe celebration. In Mississippi and Florida, as well as in parts of Georgia where the Mexican presence dates back almost a hundred years, the tradition has historically existed mostly in private homes; now, however, groups are often sponsored by local Catholic churches. The ongoing migration of people from south Texas and Mexico to the South will no doubt nurture the dance tradition of los matachines, and the dancers will continue to celebrate and honor their faith with sacred dance. NORMA E. CANTÚ University of Texas at San Antonio Norma E. Cantú, in Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Genevieve Fabre (1995); Marlene Richardson (director), Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz (video, 1995); Silvia Rodríguez, The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley (1996).

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Lowriders The term “lowrider” refers to elaborately customized cars lowered to almost ground-scraping levels and to those who build and drive them. Although the tradition of lowriding emerged in the Southwest (a region known as Aztlan among lowriders) and the West Coast, lowriding has long been a vibrant part of southern car culture. As North Carolina lowrider Ruben Olmos asserts, “Lowriding has always been here, but not as big. It started in the West, and in the past those cars have been nicer. We’re getting there, though. The cars here are looking better every year.” Lowriding traces its roots to California in the late 1930s, where the work of master customizers signaled the rise of an automobile culture that foregrounded a highly personalized approach to owning and driving a car. Following the end of World War II, as Los Angeles resumed its position as an epicenter of automobile manufacturing, America’s burgeoning car cultures began to commingle with the Mexican American Pachuco movement. Together, they produced the first glimmering of the “low and slow, mean and clean” aesthetic that glorified vehicles that lay low and cruised slow, qualities that stood in marked contrast to the aggressive hot-rod culture that was developing at the same time. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, lowriding continued to evolve, and the criteria for what constituted firme ranflas—fine lowriders—began to crystallize. During this period, many lowriders began to form car clubs that gathered to exchange ideas, cruise, and

enter car shows. In 1977 Lowrider Magazine published its first issue; the publication has since become the premier voice of lowrider culture and is arguably a major contributing factor to lowriding’s spread throughout the South. All lowriders must lay low, with the baddest rides no more than an inch or two above the ground. Intricate paint jobs—often rendered in hypnotic, rococo patterns or depicting an epic Aztlan fantasy—adorn the most celebrated cars. These murals are frequently offset by elaborate chrome accents (particularly on the engine, suspension, grill, and door handles) that highlight the vehicle’s contours. Many lowriders also boast hydraulic suspensions, which allow drivers to raise or lower the car with the flip of a switch. Originally constructed from repurposed airplane parts, hydraulics have become a cottage industry among lowriders; the most adept lowrider can raise or dip his or her vehicle effortlessly, even while driving. Most dedicated lowriders also pay serious attention to their cars’ interiors and trunks, fastidiously upholstering them in leather, tweed, or velvet and fitting them out with elaborate steering wheels, stereo systems, and laser-cut plaques bearing the name of their car club. Lowriders choose their vehicles with a critical eye toward classic lines and designs: Chevy Impalas, Caprices, and Bel Airs; Lincoln Town Cars; and Cadillac Fleetwoods are all favored in lowriding circles. Lowriders also lean to the cool and classic in their choice of music: a Sunday drive wouldn’t be complete without a gently loping jam by Thee Midniters, Brenton Wood,

or Mr. Capone-E pumping out of the speakers. Popular portrayals of lowriding— presenting it as a monochromatic instrument of the Brown Pride movement, or as a confrontational practice tied to gang and drug culture—at best offer outsiders an incomplete understanding of the practice; at worst, they paint a deeply disparaging portrait of a vibrant cultural tradition. To be sure, lowriding speaks pointedly to conditions of alterity that continue to characterize the minority experience; any student of lowriding would be remiss in not recognizing the ways a car that is low, slow, mean, and clean might serve as both social record and social protest, challenging understandings of both automobiles and ethnicity. Yet lowriding entails more than confrontation and the affirmation of identity. Conversations with lowriders invariably invoke experience—the feeling of riding—as central to the tradition’s appeal. In Durham, N.C., Johnny and Ruben Olmos—members of the Lowyalty Car Club—tell a story that illuminates the nearly spiritual qualities of lowriding. In their tale, fellow club member Carlos Gomez takes Ruben’s 1985 Chevy Caprice (known as the “Sunday Driver”) for an afternoon cruise to relieve the pressure of several long weeks of work on the vehicle that he is customizing for an upcoming lowrider show. He is frustrated—fatigued by the arduous task of building a car from the ground up—and acutely aware that his family needs him at home. Reflecting on Carlos’s return from his afternoon cruise, Johnny remarks, “You wouldn’t have believed LOWRIDERS

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his facial expression. He was like, ‘Oh my god, this is what I needed. Just the feeling of it.’” Johnny’s portrayal of lowriding as an antidote, a pressure valve, and an existential endeavor suggests that there is more to lowriding than simply riding low, and more to riding low than staking out cultural territory. Indeed, to talk about lowriding at a Lowyalty Car Club meeting is to talk about feeling and experience, craft and effort. For these club members—and for their peers across the South—lowriding is art in its broadest, most transcendental terms. Lowriding is currently undergoing a renaissance throughout the South, thanks to the work of publications such as Lowrider Magazine and Drop Jaw Magazine; extensive online forums like LayItLow.com; and ambitious, dedicated southern clubs like Lowyalty in Durham; the City Knights Car Club in Fayetteville, N.C.; the Obsession Car Club in Atlanta, Ga.; the Drop Mob Car Club in Lexington, Ky.; and the Boulevard Aces in Dallas, Tex. As lowrider Carlos Gomez explains, some of the most significant contemporary contributions to lowrider culture are coming out of the South: “The difference between the South and the West Coast is that lowriding is not as big here, so everything feels fresh and new. A lot of people are getting motivated and wanting to do bigger and better things. It’s exciting to see the insane cars that are popping up around here, people really going all-out with their cars. There are just a few of us, so we stand out. It’s special because we’re making it grow.” Whatever the trials and rewards of 320

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lowriding, conversations with lowriders inevitably return to experience. I once asked Johnny Olmos if raising a vehicle, instead of lowering it, might be a more symbolically effective modification, as it would place the driver above everybody else on the road. “When you’re lowered, you are above everybody else,” he replied. “When you’re in a car that’s low, just the feeling of it is beyond what you felt before. It just flows with you. God Almighty, it’s a good feeling.” MICHAEL C. TAYLOR University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Brenda Jo Bright, Heart Like a Car: Hispano/Chicano Culture in Northern New Mexico (1998), Remappings: Los Angeles Low Riders (1995); Curtis Marez, Brown: The Politics of Working-Class Chicano Style (1996); James Sterngold, Making the Jalopy an Ethnic Banner: How the Lowrider Evolved from Chicano Revolt to Art Form (2000); Michael Cutler Stone, Bajito Y Suavecito: Low Riding and the “Class” of Class (1990); Calvin Trillin, Low and Slow, Mean and Clean (1978).

Marching Bands, HBCU Throughout the South, the football fields and stadiums of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) host some of the most elaborate and competitive musical performances presented to the public on a regular basis, as the schools’ marching bands offer exciting spectacles of showmanship, pageantry, and performative excellence. The performance traditions that we observe today on the campuses of southern HBCUs—traditions that frame and sustain game day as a vital,

distinct, and dynamic cultural event— have deep roots in a variety of American marching-band traditions. Drawing upon the discipline of black military bands, the spirit of provincial and municipal brass bands, the pageantry of minstrel bands, and the showmanship of concert jazz bands, HBCU marchingband performances are firmly grounded in a rich history of African American outdoor music making. Blending musicality, pageantry, and theatrics, HBCU marching bands have nurtured and developed a dynamic performance tradition whose innovative style and competitive spirit promote an emotional intensity that is unparalleled in non-HBCU marching-band performances. Perhaps referencing the marching band’s military roots or drawing parallels with the football contest, HBCU marching bands often refer to their performances as “battles.” With the field as its main stage, the stadium becomes as much a site for confrontation and competition between the bands as it does for the football teams. As the home and visiting bands vie for the audience’s support, the competitions fuel passionate rivalries between schools and conferences. These competitions neither begin nor end with the traditional halftime field shows. During the game, sections from each band (trumpets, trombones, tubas, and drums) take turns playing short musical pieces back and forth across the field in competitions known as “sectional battles.” Following the game, the entire bands engage in a musical duel of their own, appropriately referred to as the “fifth quarter.” Before,

during, and after the game—whether the football players are on the field or not—the stadium is inundated with the sounds of horns, woodwinds, and percussion instruments playing tunes in a manner designed to both please and engage the crowd. HBCU band members’ goal is to win the most “house”—the audience’s loud, energized participation. To win “house,” a band must invest their music and movements with meanings that the crowd both understands and appreciates. With audience members as key players in the performative equation, bands strive to keep their performances fresh, creative, and engaging while always embodying a shared sense of cultural values and aesthetics. Collegiate marching-band traditions in the United States have developed into two distinct presentational and cultural styles: “corps” style (as in drum corps) and “show” style. Early collegiate marching bands drew on the European aesthetic principals of precision, uniformity, and restraint. Evoking their military heritage, their music and movements were both restricted and carefully controlled. This Eurocentric model is known as corps style. Corps-style marching, for example, utilizes either a walking step or some variation of a low gliding roll step from heel to toe that limits the torso’s movement and emphasizes straight angular forms. Most of the corps-style bands’ repertoire draws from traditional European marches, chorales, and overtures. Show style, in contrast, blends precision drills with flashy high-step marching (90-degree knee lifts), natural upper-body swing, MARCHING BANDS, HBCU

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and popular music so as to highlight the performance’s entertainment value and excite the audience. Dance “breaks” or “breakdowns” are one of the core features that distinguish HBCU marching bands from their predominately white counterparts. While marching bands in the Big Ten Conference claim to have originally popularized high-step marching and natural upper-body swing, it was not until the predominately black colleges and universities in the South began adding dance steps to their field show routines, parades, and processionals that the show-style marching came into being. Just as the show style’s freedom of movement appeals to many African American band and audience members, so too does the musical repertoire. Although HBCU performance repertoires include classical and traditional marching music, they also dip into the rich pool of African American contemporary music, encompassing jazz, gospel, funk, soul, rhythm and blues, and hiphop. Marching-band performances become celebrations of African American aesthetics, featuring foregrounded percussion, the offbeat phrasing of melodic accents, overlapping call-and-response patterns, and multiple time signatures. Most HBCU marching bands memorize all of their music. This allows both band director and band to accommodate any last-minute changes in the field shows and to challenge the other team’s band in the improvisational “fifth quarter” band competition. These postgame competitions are unique to HBCUs. Led by the band directors, these musical battles pit the opposing schools’ bands 322

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against each other, with each playing full musical scores back and forth across the field until one band acquiesces and leaves its bleachers. Reminiscent of the jazz-band battles at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s and 1940s, fifthquarter competitions unfold as collective improvisations as directors choose tunes that challenge the opposing band’s depth, technique, sound quality, and ingenuity. The band that plays the loudest, sweetest, and longest—drawing on the widest repertoire and performing the songs flawlessly—“wins” the fifthquarter competition. Deeply emblematic of diaspora expressive traditions, HBCU band performances unfold as bold public declarations of what it means to be African American today. Through their musical choices; their dance routines; their treatment of public space; their commitment to evaluation; and their penchant for pageantry, competition, originality, adaptability, rhythmic complexity, and performer-audience conversations, HBCU marching bands embody aesthetics that transcend band membership and embrace values belonging to timehonored traditions of African American expressivity. Given that the bands are always assessing the crowd’s response and designing future performances accordingly, their performances become occasions to express, mediate, and challenge social issues, political ideas, and cultural values. HBCU football fields stand apart as one of the few places where tens of thousands of African Americans regularly gather and celebrate—before, during, and after the game—artistic ex-

cellence. Adding to the symbolic power of the bands’ performances is the fact that these proud, young, talented artists are college educated and thus excellent role models for their community. Band members are keenly aware of this responsibility. They know that they are staging one of the largest artistic performances presented to African American audiences on a regular basis. They also know that their performances reaffirm a vibrant spirit of community and perpetuate shared cultural values. With this knowledge in hand, HBCU band members lift their knees a little higher, dance a little harder, and blow a little louder— giving it their all and leaving it on the field. WILLIAM LEWIS Piedmont Council of Traditional Music Raleigh, North Carolina Robert E. Foster, Multiple-Option Marching Band Techniques (1991); Jaqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (1996); Laurie Dunivant Sneiderman, Black Issues in Higher Education (27 April 2000); Richard Alan Waterman, in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (1973).

Marching Bands, New Orleans In New Orleans, military bands playing brass, woodwind, and percussive instruments marched throughout the colonial era, extending a European tradition during the city’s French and Spanish periods. By the time that New Orleans joined America as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, marching bands had

become a fixture, a soundtrack through the seasons at carnival balls, parades, concerts, and funerals to ennoble the dead. New Orleans was a crossroads of humanity, what the French call un metissage culturel—a society of mingled bloodlines. The Creole identity formed through a meld of ethnic folkways. Music and food mirrored an exotic human mosaic. In town, free black musicians performed for opera, classical concerts, balls, tavern dances, and some parades. Marching bands, however, were a symbol of white military might, with many militia companies boasting their own bands. Yet, in a society so porous, as parade units reached into venues for concerts and balls, some musicians of color undoubtedly crossed the line. In 1809 New Orleans’s population doubled as some 10,000 refugees from the war in Haiti arrived in several waves. Free persons of color accounted for about a third of the emigrés, in equal number to whites and slaves. In 1815 a free colored unit joined General Andrew Jackson’s forces to defeat the British in the final battle of the War of 1812. For years thereafter, they marched in a memorial parade. Black musicians slowly moved into the parade culture. The 19th century was the golden age of brass bands in America. Most towns had a band. In New Orleans, following the violent repression of Reconstruction, African American musicians found minor standing in the prism of white society—ironically, in bands wearing uniforms, parading in military style. In the 1890s blacks began to MARCHING BANDS, NEW ORLEANS

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slowly change the repertoire as the military raison d’etre gave way to an ethos of parades as entertainment. As parades became events of spectacle, bands like the Onward (where cornetist Joe Oliver became a mentor to a teenage Louis Armstrong) and the Young Tuxedo signaled the high drama of a culture on the rise. Musicians from outlying plantations were pouring into town, fashioning a looser horn attack that raised a tremulous voice like singers in churches, reshaping the way players phrased melodic passages. “When I was in church,” Armstrong wrote years later, “and when I was ‘second lining’—that is, following the brass bands in parades—I started to listen carefully to the different instruments, noticing the things they played and how they played them.” In funerals, the clarinetists intoned lines of sadness, “the widow’s wail.” Instrumental takes on church songs, many from white Protestant hymnals, burrowed into the new sound of black musicians in the street bands. Meanwhile, white bands such as the Reliance, led by Papa Jack Laine, had ample business for parades and social events. Music permeated New Orleans at every level of class and color. A tide of Sicilian immigrants in the 1890s imported a march tradition with warbling clarinet lines that pealed into clouds of sorrow for the funerals. Still, the musical work broke down largely along racial lines. White benevolent societies, neighborhood groups, and carnival clubs tended to hire their own. Jazz dawned in the early 1900s as African polyrhythms engaged in Euro324

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pean instruments and melody. Descendants of slaves who played “by ear” opened an improvisational dialogue with classically trained Creoles, as the emerging idiom found greater stretch to swing and roll. The ring dances of African memory opened out, sending sinuous waves of dancers behind brass bands. As these dancers, the “second liners,” surged behind burial society and Masonic lodge members, early jazzmen coined a term: “funerals with music.” By the late 1920s, gyrating second liners caused white groups to recoil from brass-band funerals in which the slow solemn dead march segued into high-kicking struts after the burial, celebrating a “cutting loose” of the soul from earthly ties. The black funeral pageants formed a drama of possession on city streets, staking a claim on the urban space, even as the uniforms of Masons or benevolent societies looked back in time to a Judeo-Greco bearing in military rites that bid adieu to a notable citizen. Black funeral parades elevated anonymous folk to a pantheon of citizenry denied them in life. The descendants of Africa created radiant outfits—feathers, sashes, sporting hats, capes, wide fans—for annual parades of the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. Irish and Italian social clubs also held annual marches in a city that lived for parades. Dancing behind coffins became a hallmark of the black community, setting it apart from assumptions of a racial hierarchy; the second liners produced a line of performance art holding a mirror on the city. By World War II, the white marching

bands were in eclipse. From the 1940s to the late 1950s, black musicians in the Young Tuxedo and Eureka bands carried the tradition through lean years. In 1958 the alto saxophonist Harold “Duke” Dejean took over the Olympia band and molded it into the major brass band of the late 20th century. Notation cards disappeared from the instruments, while the repertoire discarded old marches and dirges. Swinging on hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” the Olympia also drew on rhythm-and-blues tunes “to quote with our inner selves,” as the late trumpeter Milton Batiste remarked. In the 1980s the Dirty Dozen Brass Band pushed the music to a new improvisational threshold, fusing swifter tempos of bebop with jump blues. ReBirth Brass Band followed the Dozen, absorbing disco and rap styles in a hypnotic, circular rhythm pushed by section-riffing horns and winds in unison, laying out looping lines with thin ties to melody. As younger bands veered into experimental zones, clarinetist Michael White and trumpeter Gregg Stafford plunged into excavations of the classical idiom, New Orleans style. They revived old melodies as light plays on a sunsplashed stream. White’s Dancing in the Sky CD imagines a celestial second line, while the post-Katrina Blue Crescent explores death and rebirth—notably in “Sunday Morning,” a paean to the church parades, a tradition now passing. As one branch of brass-band music veers toward stylizations of funk and rap, the trunk associated with pioneers like Oliver and Armstrong—renewed

by Dejean and Batiste—stands now in White and Stafford, among others, like a brawny oak in the dawn of jazz’s second century. Echoes of the military marches purr in the snare drums, while the horns and reed instruments raise the church songs, dance stomps, and hot blues, sacred and profane all of a piece, a line of music-as-memory that celebrates the city. JASON BERRY New Orleans, Louisiana Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954); Jason Berry, Black Music Research Journal (Spring 1988); Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music since World War II (1992); Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006); Henry A. Kmen, Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791–1841 (1966); Richard H. Knowles, Fallen Heroes: A History of New Orleans Brass Bands (1986); Al Rose and Edmond Souchon, New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album (1967); William J. Schafer with Richard B. Allen, Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz (1977).

Mardi Gras Indians The Black Mardi Gras Indians are African Americans (some of whom claim American Indian ancestry) who perform a colorful, elaborate, and symbolically laden ritual drama on the streets of New Orleans. Their dynamic street performances feature characters that play specific roles, polyrhythmic percussion and creolized music texts, and artistic suit assemblages that reflect ritual influences from both Indian America and West Africa. With roots stretching back to the 18th century, this unique tradition MARDI GRAS INDIANS

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has given rise to a rich array of customs and artistic forms and continues to testify to the historical affinity of the region’s Indians and African Americans. New Orleans hosts two Mardi Gras every year. One is the highly commercialized celebration planned for the aristocratic krewes, with their carnival balls and float parades. The other is the walking/masking festival that includes Baby Dolls, Skeleton Men, and the Mardi Gras Indians. Each celebration features unique traditions that are deeply rooted in its distinctive culture and environment. The Black Mardi Gras Indians draw upon American Indian, West African, and Caribbean motifs and theatrics to create a unique creolized folk ritual. In Louisiana, these three cultural groups came together during the French and Spanish colonial periods. Indians were African Americans’ first allies in resisting European enslavement and general labor oppression; they too were often enslaved. The shared experience of bondage led to many intermarriages between West Africans and Indians, yielding a legacy of mixed ancestry that is still evident among many Mardi Gras Indians hundreds of years later. Such ancestry, however, has never been a criteria for joining the Indian “tribes” or “gangs.” Wearing and performing the Indian mask has instead long served as a means of escape and a way to resist and protest the white hegemony that has so long defined Jim Crow New Orleans. No one knows exactly when the Mardi Gras Indian tradition started,

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but it was first documented in the late 1700s. Its early years were marked by fierce rivalries between African American “tribes” from New Orleans’s Uptown and Downtown districts, with the masked marchers carrying weapons and attacking their “tribal” adversaries. In recent decades, the resolution of these territorial rivalries has shifted from a physical to an aesthetic plane. In today’s New Orleans, neighborhood tribes—dressed in elaborately beaded and feather-laden costumes— display their dazzling artistry every year on Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph’s Day (19 March), and Super Sunday. The colorfully costumed Indians parade from house to house and bar to bar, singing call-and-response songs and boasting chants to the exuberant accompaniment of drums, tambourines, and ad hoc instruments. Alongside of and behind the procession, “second liners”—relatives, friends, and neighborhood supporters—strut, dance, and sing along. When the group meets an opposing tribe, the street is filled with dancing and general “showing off ” as the costumed participants proudly display their masques, hand signals, and tribal gestures, exhibiting a shared pride in “suiting up as Indian.” This street theater—with its percussive rhythms, creolized song texts, boasting chants, and colorful feather and bead explosions—reflects Indianness through an African-based lens of celebration and ritual. The most obviously “Indian” element of these performances is the full-body masque worn by tribe members, replete with a feather crown and detailed

The exuberant finery of the Mardi Gras Indians graces the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph’s Day, and Super Sunday, when African American neighborhoods ring with the sounds of their chants, songs, and parading revelry. The most lavish costumes adorn the tribes’ chiefs—here represented by Chief “Bo” Dollis of the Wild Magnolias (left) and Chief “Monk” Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles in 1992—who craft altogether new (and always dazzling) outfits each year. (Photograph by J. Nash Porter)

beadwork that typically depicts Native American themes. Though clearly a tribute to native culture, these elaborate costumes also show an overt connection to West African assemblage styles and beading techniques. Most of the patchwork scenes depicting Native Americans are flat and show warriors in battle or other stereotypically “Indian” scenes. Among Downtown tribes, however, the beaded images are more varied and often break into sculptural relief. Rather than conveying Native American themes, they offer Japanese pagodas, aquatic scenes, Egyptian regalia, and whatever other images their creators can imagine and then craft. Constructed anew each year, each suit testifies to countless painstaking hours on the part of the Indian who wears it in Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras Indians’ lavish outfits and spirited performances also reveal a distinct social hierarchy within each tribe, with different positions— chief, spy boy, flag boy, and wild man, in descending order of status—presenting themselves differently and filling particular roles in the unfolding performance. Many tribes now also crown their own queens, reprising and reinvigorating a role that was less prominent in the early, more violent years. The unique tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians has given rise to an array of distinctive artistic forms and shared customs. At the same time, this tradition displays strong ancestral ties to West Africa and testifies to the historical affinity of Indians and Africans, two groups that played leading roles in the

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creolization of New Orleans. In essence, the Mardi Gras Indians’ ritual performances speak to the need to celebrate life and death in all of their splendor and to address power and enact resistance through masking and dramatic street theater. JOYCE MARIE JACKSON Louisiana State University Joyce Marie Jackson and Fehintola Mosadomi, in Orisha: Yoruba Gods and Spiritual Identity, ed. Toyin Falola (2005); Maurice M. Martinez and James E. Hinton, The Black Indians of New Orleans (film, 1976); Michael P. Smith, Mardi Gras Indians (1994).

Moonshining The cultural groups that settled the South during the colonial era all brought traditions of making alcoholic beverages, but the so-called hard liquors—grain-based whiskey made from rye or corn and fruit-based brandy made from apples or peaches—have become the most iconic in the southern identity. When such liquor is made without a government license or payment of taxes, it is commonly called “moonshine.” Over the past century, owing in large part to popular culture, southern moonshine production has taken on something of a mystique. The sly mountainhollow moonshiner, the glass “fruit” jar, the proper old ladies sipping spirits for supposed medicinal purposes, and the hard-driving liquor hauler are all part of the southern moonshine stereotype. None of these, however, reflects southern “bootlegging” today. Indeed, the

Revenue agents discovered this 24-pot moonshine still setup in Franklin County, Va., in 1972. Each submarine pot could hold 800 gallons of mash, eight times the average capacity of the bulbous turnip-shaped stills that southern moonshiners used prior to Prohibition. Today’s large-scale moonshine operations produce “sugar liquor” rather than the grain-based whiskeys and fruit brandies upon which southern moonshining was founded. (Photograph courtesy of the Blue Ridge Institute & Museum, Ferrum College)

illegal distiller’s methods and markets have changed significantly since the U.S. government first levied a tax upon distillers in 1791. In the era before refrigeration and rapid transportation, liquor making offered many benefits to southern farmers. Fruit and grains that might spoil before they could be used or taken to market could be converted into alcohol. Liquor was less bulky than the raw ingredients used to make it. Thus, distilling was a useful and common practice in the southern agricultural system for generations. Early federal taxes on alcohol (1791– 1802, 1813–17) were instituted to pay for wars. Since the Civil War, alcohol has been continually taxed by the federal government. With taxes and licensing

came the need to enforce laws regarding distilling, and the cat-and-mouse game between revenue agents and moonshiners continues to this day. Operating an illegal still has always been hard, dirty, risky work. Before World War I, southern moonshiners used “turnip stills,” a turnip-shaped setup whose main parts are wooden “mash boxes,” in which the grain mash mixture ferments before distilling; the large rounded copper “pot” or “cooker,” in which the mash is heated; the copper bulb, or “cap,” placed over the mouth of the pot; and the “worm,” a coiled length of copper pipe immersed in water in a wooden box. A turnip-still operation reflected an investment in money and time. Access to running water was essential. While

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a licensed distiller could operate in the open, moonshiners had to protect their stills from revenue agents by choosing hidden sites. The backwoods and hollows of the South offered ideal settings for stills. To make grain alcohol in a turnip still, the moonshiner mixed in his mash boxes (or mash barrels) a combination of water, yeast, ground corn (or rye or wheat), barley malt (or ground sprouted corn), and/or sugar. The mash took a few days to ferment, longer in cool weather. The fermented mixture, called “beer,” was poured into the pot and heated over a wood fire. Before the mash reached the boiling point of alcohol, the moonshiner sealed the boiler with the cap, and the alcohol vapor passed through the arm of the cap into the worm. Cooled by the water surrounding the worm, the steam condensed and trickled out the end of the worm (known as “the moneypiece”) into a bucket. The alcohol content of the moonshine would weaken as the still ran, and the moonshiner later mixed strong and weak liquor to achieve the preferred proof. After World War I, three factors converged to make the southern moonshining industry more lucrative, farreaching, and productive. The first was Prohibition. Many southern states had already passed laws prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol by the time national Prohibition went into effect in 1920, essentially handing the entire liquor market to inland moonshiners and smugglers bringing alcohol in from off-shore distilleries. Second, the

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automobile and improved roads enabled moonshiners to efficiently reach markets in southern mill towns and larger cities. Third, most moonshiners switched from the turnip still to the “submarine still,” a larger flat-sided pot capable of holding several hundred gallons of mash in one firing. The southern Blue Ridge Mountains in particular became a hotbed of illegal distilling, and in some communities moonshining was a major economic driver. For instance, during the 13 years of national Prohibition, revenue agents in Franklin County, Va., destroyed 3,909 stills and arrested 1,669 people; from 1930 to 1935, more than 1 million five-gallon whiskey storage cans were sold there. The repeal of Prohibition failed to stop southern mountain moonshiners because the untaxed liquor could still be sold more cheaply than legal alcohol. To increase production, southern moonshiners eventually began using the “blackpot” method for running submarine stills. Instead of allowing mash to ferment in boxes or barrels and then transferring the mash to the pot, the still hands dumped the ingredients directly into the pot. They then placed a second smaller container of mash between the primary boiler and the worm to generate more alcohol. Finally, once the still had been run, rather than replace the mash, moonshiners added large amounts of sugar to the leftover mash in the pot and used the same mash several times to make increasingly harsh “sugar liquor.” With several 800gallon, propane-fired submarine pots

at a single site, today’s moonshiner can produce vast amounts of sugar liquor. Of course, making liquor and delivering liquor have posed separate challenges to moonshiners. Much has been made of the connection between auto racing and moonshining, but in truth few professional auto racers have honed their talents driving cars full of whiskey—North Carolina’s Junior Johnson being the most notable exception. The stronger connection between southern stock-car racing and liquor hauling was in the local garages of 1940s and 1950s. The mechanics who built race cars could also modify “liquor cars” with powerful engines and enhanced suspensions. In the 1960s, haulers largely switched to vans and pickup trucks with camper tops. Today, the old-style illegal southern moonshine industry is but a shadow of what it was in its pre-1960 days. Turnipstyle stills live only in pictures and museums. Few moonshiners make fruit brandy or high-quality, grain-based whiskey. With the demise of southern mill towns, today’s sugar liquor is primarily consumed in unlicensed bars in large cities. With electronic surveillance equipment, strong conspiracy laws, and improved means for tracking money, illegal distilling is a riskier business. Nevertheless, the moonshiner remains something of a folk hero throughout the South, particularly in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and his activities have found their way into popular movies, television shows, and music. The 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tenn., featured working moonshiners

from Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and a few southern small-town festivals continue to highlight the tradition. VAUGHAN WEBB ANDREW PAULY RODDY MOORE Blue Ridge Institute & Museum, Ferrum College Jess Carr, The Second Oldest Profession: An Informal History of Moonshining in America (1972); Joseph Earl Dabney, Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James’ Ulster Plantation to America’s Appalachians and the Moonshine Life (1974), More Mountain Spirits: The Continuing Chronicle of Moonshine Life and Corn Whiskey, Wines, Ciders, and Beers in American’s Appalachians (1980); Rodger Doss, Shine (1996); T. K. Greer, The Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935 (2002); Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (1976); Jack Allen Powell, A Dying Art II (2004); Vaughan Webb, Roddy Moore, and Andrew Pauly, Moonshine—Blue Ridge Style (2008).

Mules The South developed a regional culture of “mules and men” that spanned more than 200 years. This culture was based on the mule, a hybrid born of a horse and an ass that is unable to reproduce offspring. Generations of southerners—dating at least back to the times of George Washington—fervently favored the mule over the horse. Indeed, southern stories claim that George Washington was the first American to breed the animal, leading the father of our country to also be called the “father” of American mule breeding.

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Washington once commented with pride on the “great strength of mules, on their longevity, hardiness, and cheap support which gives them a preference over horses that is scarcely to be imagined.” When Washington died, his will listed 57 of these sturdy creatures. Other prominent southern mule owners during the colonial period included Thomas Jefferson and John Skinner, editor of American Farmer. Travelers in the antebellum South often remarked on the strength of mules and the diverse labors that they performed. In Virginia, for instance, Frederick Law Olmsted noted that “immense wagons drawn by six mules each, the teamster always riding on the back of the rear wheeler, are a characteristic feature of the streets.” Olmsted marveled at how mules that were roughly treated, poorly fed, and consistently overworked continued to perform in good health. Southern farmers preferred mules to oxen because of their speed and strength, relying on them to pull deeprunning plows during both seeding and cultivation. The lives of African American workers and the mule are intimately linked in every period of southern history. As slaves before the Civil War and as tenant farmers afterward, blacks worked with mules; the ubiquitous team of mule and African American driver was essential to the southern economy. In 1925, 84 percent of the mule farmers in the Mississippi Valley were African American. During this same period in Anderson, S.C., white farmers spent more money on mules—which cost an average of $1.32 a day—than they did on 332

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paying African American farmhands— whose daily wage was $1.25. Farmers who owned mules often showed great care and love toward their animals. Alabama sharecropper and activist Ned Cobb, for instance, stressed that his mules were “more than slaves to me.” Pointing out that “she’d make you a living if you plowed her right,” he remembered fondly: “Oh, my mules just granted me all the pleasure I needed, to see what I had and how they moved.” Most mules in the South were raised in the border states and shipped to the “southern market.” The success of mule farms in the border states directly corresponded to that of the farmers who bought their animals in the Deep South. When cotton and tobacco prices boomed, the mule business prospered. One of the South’s largest mule markets was in Columbia, Tenn., where thousands of animals were raised and sold each year. Will Rogers called Columbia “the biggest street mule market in the world. What the thoroughfare of Wall Street will do to you if you don’t know what a stock is, Columbia will do to you if you don’t know a mule.” In the market’s heyday, traders classed their mules according to size and sold them for a variety of uses. Some of these uses are evident in the traders’ categories, which included sugar mules (for southern sugar plantations), rice and cotton mules, levee mules (for Mississippi River levee work), mine mules, railroad mules, and mountaineer pack mules. Today, Columbia still hosts an annual Mule Day, a five-day festival that brings hundreds of mules and thousands of visitors to celebrate the mule’s strength

and endurance with pulling contests, skidding competitions, a mule sale, and even a Mule Day beauty pageant. Mules reached their ascendancy in the South during the first 25 years of the 20th century, a period when their numbers doubled from 2 to 4 million; at that time, fully four-fifths of the mules in the United States were in the South. The number of horses and mules in the United States peaked at 26 million in 1920; by 1958 this figure had dropped to less than 4 million. Most of these remaining mules still worked southern fields. Indeed, as tractors increasingly displaced horses and mules in the West, livestock traders bought the animals and shipped them to southern farmers. From 1937 to 1946, prices for horses and mules declined in every area of the country except the South. Once southern farmers turned to tractors, however, the last mule market disappeared, and thousands of the animals were slaughtered for animal food. During the 1950s, half of the horses and mules that farmers sold each year— more than 357,000 animals—were fated for cat- and dog-food factories. Their death signaled the end of an era. As one trader wryly reflected, “I lived in a day when a man and a mule worked together. Now they’ve pensioned the man and eaten the mule.” While mule use has declined dramatically in the South, some farmers still breed and work the animals, particularly for logging. Most southern mules, however, are now raised for riding and competition. Thousands of mules show up at the region’s many mule festivals, which include the afore-

mentioned event in Columbia, Tenn., and the Great Celebration Mule and Donkey Show in Shelbyville, Tenn. There are also Mule Days held in Winfield, Ala.; Calvary, Ga.; and Benson, N.C. Not surprisingly, the mule’s longstanding presence in southern fields gave it a prominent place in southern music, particularly in country music and blues. The song “Mule Skinner Blues,” for example, was recorded by country artists ranging from Jimmie Rodgers and Roy Acuff to Bill Monroe, Dolly Parton, and Hank Williams Jr. Its lyrics celebrate the mule and the mule skinner in lines like: I like to work, I’m rolling all the time I can pop my initials on a mule’s behind. Mules also frequently appear in southern literature, showing up in the work of William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Doris Betts, Cormac McCarthy, and many other regional writers. In his widely quoted essay, “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature in the 20th Century” (1996), literary critic Jerry Leath Mills argues that to count as truly southern, a work of fiction must feature at least one dead mule. By this measure, Cormac McCarthy must be the most southern of all writers—59 mules die in his novel Blood Meridian (1985). In The Reivers (1962), William Faulkner eloquently praises the mule, asserting that its ability to endure and survive reflects a special intelligence. His MULES

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words offer a fitting epitaph for the long reign of this noble animal: “I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence . . . assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence: which is the ability to cope with environment; which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty. . . . [The mule] will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once.” WILLIAM FERRIS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill George B. Ellenberg, Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (2007); Robert Byron Lamb, The Mule in Southern Agriculture (1963); Jerry Leath Mills, Southern Literary Journal (Fall 1996); Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854, with Remarks on Their Economy (1904); U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1957); B. D. Raskopf and M. T. Danner, Public Horse and Mule Market at Nashville, Tennessee (1947); Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974); James Westfall Thompson, A History of Livestock Raising in the United States (1942).

Outbuildings While traveling the roads of the South, even the most casual observer will notice the prevalence of small buildings that cluster around older farmsteads. Referred to generally as “outbuildings,” these little structures of wood, stone, brick, aluminum, and sometimes chicken wire provide a testament to the way life has been sustained and enjoyed in particular regions. As the name suggests, outbuild334 OUTBUILDINGS

ings are associated with the outdoors. Rarely heated or cooled but often wired for electric lights, outbuildings have provided shelter for domestic activities that the main dwelling cannot accommodate. Such activities include, but are not limited to, elimination (outhouses); food processing (meat houses, smokehouses, and washhouses); warm-weather entertainment (barbecue houses and picnic shelters); food and crop storage (dairies, root cellars, corn cribs, potato houses, and pack houses); general storage (sheds and garages); and creative work (woodworking or welding shops). Outbuildings helped support a culture of self-sufficiency that developed throughout the predominantly rural South. For example, before electricity was available and refrigerators became a common household feature, outbuildings were indispensable to food preservation. Such buildings were linked functionally to the kitchen and were therefore located in close proximity to it. Well into the second half of the 20th century, many families throughout the South raised a few hogs and butchered one or two in the late fall. In order to conserve the large quantities of meat, people cured it with salt or sugar and smoked it in a smokehouse. Though smokehouses varied in size, they were usually constructed of snug-fitted logs or vertical planks; some were finished with horizontal weatherboarding. In the Lowland South, these structures were typically freestanding, but in the southern mountains they were often situated on top of a root cellar.

The nature and placement of outbuildings is a regionally specific tradition, taking different forms in different parts of the South. This house, washhouse, and cellar house stand in Ritchie County, W.Va. A wooden walkway connects the kitchen at the back of the house to a washhouse, where the McGinnis family washed clothes and dishes and readied jars for canning. The building to the far right is the cellar house, where they stored preserved fruits, vegetables, and meat. (Photograph by Katherine Roberts, 2003)

Families often used the smokehouse as a general meat house, equipped with tables, shelves, and curing troughs or barrels. For smoking, they hung cuts of cured meat from overhead poles. A fire built on the dirt floor or in a firebox inside the smokehouse produced smoke that swirled around the meat for several days, helping flavor it and preserve it for long-term storage. Cured meat was often stored in the smokehouse for months after it was processed there. For this reason, the smokehouse had to be vermin-proof. Naturally, smokehouses could get terribly hot on the inside, both from fire and warm weather. One North Carolina Piedmont farmer recalled setting bowls under hanging sausages to catch the grease that dripped down when the smokehouse heated up in the summertime. The dairy and the root cellar, in contrast, were built to stay cool. The dairy kept milk products fresh. In some parts of the South, particularly

on more prosperous farmsteads, dairies were freestanding buildings of brick, stone, or frame construction. These structures often had a room under the floor, where milk was stored in metal pans or canisters. Such structures typically featured gable or hipped roofs and side ventilation. The upstairs portion of these dairies could serve as a work space, where families would churn butter and separate cream. In parts of the southern mountains, “dairy” referred (and still refers) to a structure banked into a slope or hillside. (Such structures are elsewhere called “root cellars” or just “cellars.”) Here, families stored milk in containers on a dirt floor or half submerged in a stone trough of cold well or spring water. Such banked structures were also ideal for storing root crops (such as onions and potatoes), cured meat, and jars of preserved fruits and vegetables. After World War II, there was a decline in the need for the range of outOUTBUILDINGS

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buildings that had sustained domestic life in the South. More people worked at wage jobs, which meant they had the cash to pay for things they had once done themselves, such as producing food and performing repair work. And when electricity reached most southern households by midcentury, people began buying refrigerators, which simplified food preservation. These factors eventually eliminated the need for buildings such as the smokehouse, the root cellar, and the dairy. However, these older outbuildings persist on rural landscapes and attest to the former selfsufficiency of the southern farmstead. Today, families use many of these extant structures for general storage. Outbuildings are by no means a thing of the past in the South. Contemporary versions include barbecue houses and entertainment rooms, which provide shelter for large social gatherings such as Sunday dinners and family reunions. Though these recreational spaces vary from region to region, they often consist of a poured concrete floor, wood framing, screen walls, and a gable or hip roof. They are usually equipped with a barbecue grill or located in close proximity to an in-ground barbecue pit, and most have several tables and chairs. Unlike the outbuildings of the past, which were built for domestic work tasks, these structures facilitate leisure life. In contemporary suburban neighborhoods and in the yards of new rural houses, one frequently sees the all-purpose shed (often prefabricated and purchased from a large homeimprovement retailer) or the metal 336

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pole barn, where people store lawn and garden equipment, bicycles, and tools. Sometimes these structures serve as workshops, where people—many with farming roots—practice woodworking, welding, and mechanical arts or repairs. These contemporary outbuildings may shelter multiple regionally specific activities; unlike older outbuildings in which form bespoke function, however, the boxy, metallic structure of newer buildings reveals little about how they might be used. Larger social and economic developments across the South may be traced in the outbuildings on the southern landscape: access to technological advancements, increased prosperity and mobility, and participation in a global economy. Plentiful and varied, southern outbuildings speak at once of enduring social practices and changing lifestyles. KATHERINE ROBERTS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1969); Terry Jordan-Bychkov, The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape (2003); G. Noble and Richard K. Cleek, The Old Barn Book: A Field Guide to North American Barns and Other Farm Structures (1995); John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (1993); Camille Wells, Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 1993).

Porch Sitting Scholars generally agree that southern culture is as much about talking as it is about hot weather, cotton, mosquitoes, and mules. Historically, most of

this talking has taken place on porches, especially front porches. In fact, if there is any place in the United States where architecture has determined a part of the culture, it is the South and the talking that has been shaped in part by porch sitting. With its tradition of storytelling, the South has institutionalized the porch as a site of creativity—and porch sitting as the activity through which this creativity emerges. Until the mid-20th century and prior to the widespread use of air-conditioning, families gathered on front porches in the early evening to wait until their hot houses cooled off. The waiting process provided time for sharing the day’s events and for storytelling. Extended family members and neighbors were often incorporated into these communal gatherings. Porch sitting, in spite of the second word in the phrase, is indeed an activity. Although it usually includes groups of people on a porch, in its minimal form it may involve a single individual. A lone figure sitting quietly on a porch and staring off into space is probably not as idle as he or she may seem. Porch sitting allows for engagement with passersby, interaction with neighbors, and reconnaissance. That individual may yell out greetings, chastise children, note what the mail carrier or delivery men are doing, and observe the comings and goings of just about everybody in the neighborhood. A person sitting alone on a porch, therefore, probably knows more about what is happening in a neighborhood than many others who are rushing to and from their daily activities. In its more interactive form, porch

sitting is an activity that allows for tellers and listeners, for performance and audience. The exchange might be as simple as discussing the day’s dinner (among women, for instance, who are on a porch late in the morning shelling peas or beans and preparing for the day’s meal) or as formalized as a storytelling contest. As late as the 1960s, it was not unusual to eavesdrop on tales of Brer Rabbit and John and other traditional folk heroes as they traipsed across the imaginations of persons bringing them to life on southern porches. As Zora Neale Hurston points out in her various discussions and representations of activities on porches, reputations could be made or destroyed in these open-air competitive exchanges. In the storytelling dynamic as well as the visitor factor, porch space is the semipublic arena where one can entertain and engage with visitors (who at times might be unwelcome) without having to invite them into the more private space of the home. While the porch might in some ways be an extension of the home (for persons coming from the inside out), it can also place boundaries on the home (for persons coming from the outside in). Porch sitting can take the place of entertainment in a living room or family room. In terms of competition, porch sitting can also be a miniature playground for children in their games or an intimate playing field for adults arguing about everything from whether Jack Johnson or Joe Louis was the better fighter to whether astronauts actually landed on the moon. In public settings in the South, porch space was at times the democratic space PORCH SITTING

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in otherwise segregated environments. As Lewis Nordan makes clear in his novel Wolf Whistle (1993), blacks and whites mingle and engage one another on the porch of the store in his little southern town, even as they separate and are served hierarchically inside the store. Elderly males of both groups migrated to southern porches to get out of the way of activities going on in their homes. (Nowadays, restaurants such as McDonald’s allow for that option.) They could while away the hours with talk or board games such as checkers. As the architecture of the South has changed, so too has the widespread phenomenon of porch sitting. Decks at the backs of houses, along with side porches, have altered some of the interactive nature of porch sitting. Alteration, however, has not meant extinction. The tradition continues in its vibrancy on porches that are available, as it does in the literary representations and documentations of these porches. Just as southern talk followed the trail from shade trees during plantation days to porches, so too has it moved to decks and side porches to remain one of the most-practiced leisurely activities in the South. TRUDIER HARRIS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); Jocelyn Donlon, Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture (2001); Trudier Harris, Southern Cultures (Fall/Winter 1996); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle (1993).

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Pottery, Alabama Scores of family-owned pottery shops once dotted the Alabama landscape. Before electrification, Alabama residents needed their wares for the basics of life, including the preparation, serving, and preservation of food. Local potters provided crocks, churns, chamber pots, and storage jars to families and area merchants. Occasionally, their repertoire expanded beyond the utilitarian into artistic face jugs, vases, and figural vessels. These shops perpetuated regional and family folk-pottery traditions until changing technology and competition eventually eliminated their markets. As of this writing, only two Alabama folk potteries remain. Early settlers brought the European traditions of glazed earthenware and stoneware to Alabama, along with the basic technology of the potter’s wheel and large kilns. European forms such as churns, pitchers, and chamber pots were the staples of the early potters, who also produced ceramic smoking pipes, tombstones, and specialized forms such as fermentation jars. These potters— who included a number of African American artisans—located their shops near clays suitable for pottery production. In most southern states, such clays were found in the Piedmont geologic region; in Alabama, however, quality pottery clays could be found in all of the major geologic zones: the Cumberland Plateau, the Ridge and Valley, the Piedmont, and the Coastal Plain, including Mobile Bay. Some of these regions— such as the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, east-central Alabama, the mountains of northeast Alabama, the Tuscaloosa area,

“Burning” pots in a wood-fired kiln, where the flames race from the firebox (in the foreground) to the chimney at the kiln’s far end, is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Hence, when loading the kiln, potters strive to use space as efficiently as possible. This sense of practicality is eminently evident in this 1990 image of pottery stacked in Jerry Brown’s kiln in Hamilton, Ala. The vessels’ different hues correspond to the differing glazes in which they are dipped: the darkest pots are dipped in Albany Slip, the lightest in the white “Bristol” glaze, and the mid-range in either ash or a combination of other glazes. (Photograph by Alabama State Council on the Arts, Joey Brackner)

and the northwest counties of Marion and Lamar—attracted more potters than others because of the excellence of their stoneware clay. These areas developed into regional pottery manufacturing centers, or “jugtowns.” While the production of glazed earthenware in Alabama was shortlived and apparently limited to the Mobile area, the manufacture of stoneware became a viable industry in many Alabama communities. Alabama folk pottery reflects the two primary American stoneware traditions: the salt glaze and the alkaline glaze. Immigrants who settled the state from north of the Tennessee River—especially those from the

Ohio Valley and from Europe—used the salt glaze. Southern potters traveling west from the Carolinas, Georgia, and south of the Appalachian Mountains brought the alkaline-glaze tradition into Alabama. European potters and those from the northern United States carried the salt glaze into the Mobile area and northwest Alabama long before the Civil War. Salt glazing requires that salt be thrown into the hot kiln. The resulting gases cause a glass coating to form on the pottery. Pottery-making families from Edgefield, S.C.—such as the Leopards, Presleys, and Rushtons—brought the alkaPOTTERY, ALABAMA

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line glaze, a distinctly southern pottery tradition, to Alabama. They dipped their pottery into a glaze formula made of clay mixed with either wood ashes or lime, yielding a green-to-brown glassy surface on the stoneware after firing. These southern potters also used a type of rectangular kiln known as a “groundhog” kiln. The typical southern pottery-making family seemed to move from the Carolinas to Georgia, then to Alabama or Mississippi, and eventually to Texas. Many such families, however, stayed to create strong regional Alabama pottery traditions, such as those in DeKalb County on the southern edge of Sand Mountain, Rock Mills in Randolph County, Perry County, and Oak Level in Cleburne County. Intermarriages between pottery-making families in these communities solidified both the community’s and the families’ craft tradition for many generations. Late in the 19th century, an expanding railroad system introduced new types of pottery glazes to Alabama, including the brown Albany slip and white feldspar glaze, also known as Bristol glaze. This, and an influx of potters from Europe and the northern states, helped change local pottery traditions by introducing more glazes and forms. Today, two family shops—the Jerry Brown Pottery of Hamilton and Miller’s Pottery at Brent—and a handful of potters continue Alabama’s long tradition of folk-pottery production. Ironically, the appreciation of folk pottery grows each year as the number of shops diminishes. An informed clien340

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tele, including many art collectors, are now demanding the older, traditionally southern alkaline-based glazes as well as decorative forms such as the face jug. Alabama’s folk potters, whose market was once only a few counties in breadth, now maintain websites and ship their work throughout the United States and the world. JOEY BRACKNER Alabama Center for Traditional Culture Joey Brackner, Alabama Folk Pottery (2006), Alabama Heritage (Fall 2006; Winter 1988), in Made in Alabama: A State Legacy, ed. E. Bryding Adams (1995); Max Shores, Miller’s Pottery: Turning for Generations (University of Alabama Center for Public Television and Radio, 1997); Unbroken Tradition: Jerry Brown Pottery, <www .folkstreams.net> (1989).

Pottery, American Indian For more than 4,000 years, native potters of the American South have hand built ceramic containers for cooking, storage, transport, display, ritual, and other purposes. From simple beginnings with fiber-tempered wares, indigenous potters created astounding diversity in ceramic technology, form, and decoration, with wares ranging from the utilitarian shell-tempered cooking jars of the Virginia coast to the delicate painted effigy bottles of the Arkansas lowlands. Arrival of Europeans during the 16th century triggered cascading forces that ultimately truncated most of the ancient and complex native ceramic traditions. Introduced diseases and colonial wars reduced indigenous populations by

an estimated 90 percent. Transatlantic trade brought mass-produced commercial goods to native consumers, and metal vessels often supplanted traditional hand-built pottery. Although most southern native communities continued to produce traditional pottery throughout the chaotic 17th and 18th centuries, ceramic repertoires gradually diminished. By the 19th century, the accelerating modernization of native societies, fed by the global reach of industrial markets, further eroded potting traditions. The forced emigrations of the largest southeastern tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) to Oklahoma in the 1830s and 1840s sent cultural shockwaves through these communities, sharply curtailing traditional material practice. Archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that relocated Cherokee and Chickasaw potters produced utilitarian pottery for domestic use until the Civil War, while their Choctaw, Muscogee, and Yuchi counterparts hand built pots on a limited scale until the beginning of the 20th century. In the later 20th century, Oklahoma tribal artists—both self-trained and studio-trained—resurrected hand-built pottery as a fine art. Cherokee potter Bill Glass Jr.’s work exemplifies the incorporation of traditional southeastern motifs into contemporary forms, while Anna Mitchell (a Cherokee National Living Treasure artisan) pioneered a movement toward more traditionally inspired wares. Mitchell has mentored two generations of western Cherokee potters, including Victoria Mitchell Vasquez, Jane Osti, Jo Ann Rackliff-

Richmond, Lisa Rutherford, and Crystal Hanna, firmly reestablishing pottery as a traditional art form in the Cherokee Nation. A number of other contemporary potters from the Muscogee (such as Scott Roberts), Chickasaw (Joanna Underwood and Richard Henry), and Choctaw (Edmond Perkins) Nations have also adapted traditional southeastern forms and motifs in their hand-built earthenwares. Ceramic production also persisted in smaller native enclaves that remained in the Southeast through the 19th century, most notably the Pamunkey of eastern Virginia, the Catawba of South Carolina, and the Eastern Band Cherokee of the North Carolina mountains. Pamunkey potters produced utilitarian “colonowares”—hand-built copies of European forms—for sale to their white and African American neighbors from the late 17th through the early 20th centuries, although market demand for these plain-surfaced, shell-tempered wares declined sharply after the Civil War. In 1932 the Virginia State Board of Education sponsored a pottery school on the Pamunkey reserve to teach “modern” techniques and decorations in hopes of spurring a souvenir market for Indian curios. The native potters formed a cooperative that marketed the new mold-pressed and painted wares locally and in tourist venues such as the Eastern Cherokee Reservation. In the 1970s, Pamunkey potters experimented with reproductions of 17th-century Pamunkey wares as a way of reinvigorating their cottage industries and reconnecting their pots with their unique historical identity. Since the 1980s Mildred POTTERY, AMERICAN INDIAN

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Moore and other Pamunkey potters have produced “Powhatan blackwares,” burnished and incised pottery inspired by contemporary Catawba pottery. Like the Pamunkeys, Catawba potters of upstate South Carolina shifted from traditional indigenous styles to “colonowares” during the 1760s, when Catawba women began selling pottery to English backcountry settlers. By 1800 the trade in polished earthenware plates, cups, pans, pitchers, and tobacco pipes was a major source of income for Catawba families, and traveling potters found customers on plantations and in towns throughout South Carolina. The trade in utilitarian pottery declined around 1840 but continued locally around Rock Hill, S.C., into the 20th century. After 1900, Catawba potters reoriented to supply the tourist souvenir market, producing novel forms such as miniature clay canoes, animal effigies, and jars with “chief ’s head” adornments. By the 1920s, Catawba craftspeople provided much of the pottery for the mountain tourism industry in Cherokee, N.C. During the 1970s, Catawba pottery achieved broader critical acclaim with successful museum shows at the Columbia Museum of Art, the McKissick Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. The newfound prominence of Catawba pottery as collectible art spurred ceramic masters such as Sarah Ayers, Doris Blue, Earl Robbins, Arzada Saunders, Georgia Harris, Evelyn George, and others to innovate new forms and build larger and more refined wares for discriminating consumers. The current generation of Catawba 342

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master potters—including Monty Branham, Keith Brown, Billie Anne McKellar, Margaret Robbins, Caroleen Sanders, and Cheryl Sanders—now focuses on the collectible-art market, continuing the tradition of burnished, low-fired, temperless earthenwares that their ancestors devised in the 1760s. In the North Carolina mountains, Eastern Band Cherokee artisans crafted traditional stamp-decorated, grittempered hominy jars and pans for domestic use through the 19th century. After 1900, only Eve Catolster still made “old-style” pottery, primarily for ethnographic collectors. Then she and younger Cherokee potters began producing Catawba-style “smooth” pottery, a ware introduced by Catawba potters who had married into the Cherokee community. Growing tourist demand for “Indian curios” drove pottery production in the early 20th century, and tourists found burnished Catawba wares more aesthetically accessible than highly textured traditional Cherokee pottery. The commercial success of Catawba-style wares in the burgeoning tourist industry around Cherokee inspired Cherokee artists in the 1920s and 1930s—such as Lillie Bryson, Rebecca Youngbird, and Maude Welch, and, later, Cora Wahneetah, Louise Bigmeat Maney, and Amanda Swimmer—to adapt Catawba techniques to create new forms of blackened, polished ware that constitute the present-day Cherokee tradition. Their efforts have been promoted by the Qualla Arts and Crafts Cooperative and family shops like Bigmeet Pottery. Contemporary Eastern Band art-

ists—including Davy Arch, Bernadine George, Betty Maney, Melissa Maney, Shirley Oswalt, Joel Queen, Dean Reed, Alyne Stamper, Amanda Swimmer, and Mary Ann Thompson—are also leading a 21st-century revival of Cherokee traditional stamp-decorated pottery. Using ethnographic and archaeological pottery as models, these potters have recreated traditional wares and expanded their ceramic repertoires to encompass an exclusively Cherokee artistic and technological lineage. This initiative is particularly championed by Joel Queen, who has garnered awards for his traditionally styled wares at the Santa Fe Indian Market, Trail of Tears Art Show, and Red Earth Art Show. The Eastern Band traditional pottery revitalization directly informs similar efforts in Oklahoma, and eastern and western Cherokee potters have collaborated in joint exhibitions and workshops. Although historical contingencies have radically transformed the products and practice of native southern potters, many contemporary expressions of native ceramic art perpetuate unbroken lineages that span thousands of years. Like the preceding hundred generations of native potters, artists like Crystal Hanna, Joel Queen, and Cheryl Sanders continually adapt their practice to meet shifting circumstances and emerging opportunities while building from deeprooted tradition. BRETT H. RIGGS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Thomas J. Blumer, Catawba Indian Pottery (2004); Barbara R. Duncan, Brett H. Riggs,

Christopher B. Rodning, and I. Michael Yantz, Cherokee Pottery: People of One Fire (2007); Vladimir J. Fewkes, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (July 1944); Brett H. Riggs and Christopher B. Rodning, North Carolina Archaeology (October 2002); Brett H. Riggs, R. P. Stephen Davis Jr., and Mark R. Plane, North Carolina Archaeology (October 2006); Frank G. Speck, Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians (1907); Theodore Stern, Southern Indian Studies (1951).

Pottery, Georgia The folk pottery of Georgia, the last of America’s 13 colonies, embodies more of a frontier spirit and less of an Old World decorative impulse than that of her neighbors. Until a 20th-century tourist and collectors’ market emerged, the emphasis was on utilitarian stoneware needed on the farm: jugs to hold whiskey and cane syrup and carry water to the fields; jars for preserving vegetables, fruit, and meat, storing lard, and fermenting “home brew”; churns to make butter and buttermilk; and crocks and pitchers to cool and serve those dairy products. Georgia’s ceramic heritage, however, is a long one. The earliest pottery known in North America, dating to 2500 B.C., is from the Savannah River area. Indian potters worked without a wheel, kiln, or glazes. Earthenware jars and bowls for storing, cooking, and serving food, as well as ceremonial effigy pots, were their chief products; designs, when present, were incised or pressed into the damp clay. The forced removal of Georgia’s last remaining Native American group, the Cherokee, in 1838 terminated that POTTERY, GEORGIA

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The unpredictably drip-laden surfaces of alkaline-glazed stoneware speak both to deep southern tradition and to contemporary tastes. The Hewells of Gillsville, Ga., are one of the few southern families that have practiced this tradition for generations. Although their production focus has now turned to unglazed garden ware, they continue to make graceful and inventive alkaline-glazed stoneware in their wood-fired “tunnel” kiln. In this 1993 image, three generations of Hewells—Matthew, Chester, Nathaniel, Sandra, Grace, and Harold—hold a range of traditional forms while standing in front of their kiln. (Photograph by William F. Hull, courtesy of the Atlanta History Center)

pottery tradition in the state until 1990, when renowned Catawba potter Georgia Harris moved from South Carolina to Dallas, Ga., where she coil-built and pit-fired her earthenware until her death in 1997. Georgia’s first known potter was Andrew Duche of Philadelphia, who came to Savannah and, with encouragement from the new colony’s English trustees, built a workshop in 1738, evidently making lead-glazed earthenware, salt-glazed stoneware, and experimental china until his departure in 1743. A few other earthenware potters followed, but a distinctly regional pottery tradition 344

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did not take off until after 1818, when two potters from Edgefield District, S.C., introduced the recently developed alkaline-glazed stoneware to eastcentral Georgia’s Washington County, which became the state’s first pottery center. In the late 1820s, two more middleGeorgia centers spun off from Washington County as potters trained there moved west to Crawford County and Jugtown on the Upson-Pike county line. Uprooted by the Civil War, Bowling Brown moved from Jugtown to Howell’s Mills and John Brock moved to Sligh’s Mill to begin pottery centers

just northwest of Atlanta. Edgefieldtrained Charles Ferguson came to what is now Barrow County to establish a “Jug Factory” in 1846. His sons, and the men who married his daughters, carried on there, leading to a dynasty of some 60 related potters. At Mossy Creek in White County, the largest and most northerly of Georgia’s centers, potters from North Carolina settled as early as 1820; it was here that the famed Meaders Pottery opened in 1893. A final north Georgia center was created by potters from Mossy Creek and Barrow County at Gillsville, where the Hewells and Fergusons still practice the craft. Except for a small south Georgia center (three shops at Stockton), these concentrations of potters were located in the Piedmont, which afforded access to good stoneware clay and large numbers of farmers who needed their wares. Over time and with innovations by the pioneer pottery families, each of these nine centers developed its own set of distinguishing characteristics. For example, Crawford County, under the influence of the Longs and Bechams, produced both lime- and ash-glazed stoneware that was often darkened with “paint rock” (an iron ore) and marked with the potter’s initials stamped in relief on a handle top; forms included beehive-shaped jugs, flowerpot-shaped pitchers and cream pots, coffeepots, bowls, and unglazed, wheel-thrown grave markers. While there is no folk pottery that represents the state as a whole, the products of Georgia’s centers, seen together, compose a ceramic puzzle-picture different from each of the state’s neighbors.

The Great Depression further crippled the small number of folk operations that had survived earlier changes in rural life. At Mossy Creek, however, Cheever Meaders stubbornly continued to make useful vessels the old way as crafts enthusiasts replaced his former farming customers, while his wife, Arie, developed a line of colorful decorative wares appealing to this new clientele. Their son Lanier kept the alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition going after the 1960s until other potters, encouraged by his success, embraced it. Now folk pottery is flourishing again. This new crop of traditional potters, as well as earlier generations, are represented in the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, which opened in 2006 at Sautee Nacoochee in the Georgia hills. JOHN A. BURRISON Georgia State University John A. Burrison, Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery (1983; 1995); Lindsey King Laub, Evolution of a Potter: Conversations with Bill Gordy (1992).

Pottery, North Carolina North Carolina is the only state in the nation that possesses a balanced folkceramic heritage of lead-glazed earthenware, salt-glazed stoneware, and alkaline-glazed stoneware. This unique combination of the three major types of traditional pottery results from North Carolina’s position as a “border state” between the North and the South. From Virginia up into New England, earthenware and salt-glazed stoneware predominated: the former was produced in small, family-run shops; the latter, POTTERY, NORTH CAROLINA

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particularly after the mid-19th century, was made in very standardized, cobalt-decorated forms, most often in large factories. To the south and west of North Carolina, however, the picture was very different. Almost no earthenware existed, and the salt-glazed stoneware was normally unembellished and made in modest quantities in scattered communities. What best characterizes this southern region is the alkalineglazed stoneware that was “turned” and “burned” by many generations of potters from North Carolina south to Florida and west into Texas. The first pottery produced in North Carolina was lead-glazed earthenware. Although the earliest permanent European settlement occurred in the 1650s in the Albemarle region in the northeast corner of the state, potters did not appear for another 100 years. The Coastal Plain lacks first-rate clays; more important, the early plantation economy and active commerce with England, the West Indies, and the Northeast seem to have discouraged potters from setting up shop. Thus, the bulk of the pottery was produced in the Piedmont, largely by British and German immigrants who began to flood the midsection of the state in the middle of the 18th century. There, an abundance of readily accessible sedimentary clays; a rapidly swelling population; an economy characterized by small, independent farms; and a relative isolation from outside markets all combined to create ideal conditions for the folk potter. From the 1750s to about 1825, the most prominent craftsmen were the Moravians, who in 1753 commenced 346

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This sturdy stoneware jug—sealed with a glaze of simple salt, which vaporizes when thrown into the kiln and then coats the pot with a waterproof, glass-like finish—well represents the stoneware production of mid-19th century potters in North Carolina’s eastern Piedmont. Jugs like this would have been used to hold water, molasses, vinegar, and—of course—liquor. (Photograph by Charles G. Zug III)

building a palisaded settlement called Bethabara on the north side of what is now Winston-Salem in Forsyth County. For such a frontier community, their pottery was highly varied and included “bottles, jugs, jars, drinking vessels, bowls, pans, pots, plates, lighting devices, miscellaneous forms, and pressed ware.” No less remarkable was their emphasis on decoration: they “considered slip-decorated ware a standard item in their everyday production.” Under German-born masters like Gottfried Aust and Rudolf Christ, the potters concentrated on lead-glazed earthenwares, but they also experimented with English creamware, stoneware, and even faience. Through the first quarter of

the 19th century, these potters worked within a small, closely controlled craft community in which the pottery was owned by the congregation; the potter was a full-time craftsman, and the craft was perpetuated by the guild system with its ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master. The thoroughly documented achievements of the Moravians tend to obscure the work of a far larger body of potters who were simultaneously producing earthenwares across the Piedmont from Orange County in the east to Lincoln County in the west. Few of their wares were signed or decorated; thus, it is extremely difficult to attribute them to a particular potter, date, or place. The most common surviving forms are jars, dishes, bowls, jugs, and, less frequently, kegs, chamber pots, colanders, and grease lamps. Unlike the Moravian shops, these were family businesses run by farmer-potters, men who worked at the craft as a sideline in order to generate the cash or barter to acquire the goods they could not make for themselves. At some point during the first quarter of the 19th century, the potters began converting to stoneware, and by 1850 two highly concentrated centers of production had emerged. The larger one was located on the adjacent borders of Randolph, Chatham, and Moore Counties in the eastern Piedmont, which is generally referred to as the Seagrove area. There, at least 200 potters, most of British stock, produced large quantities of salt-glazed jars, jugs, milk crocks, churns, pitchers, and other utilitarian forms. The gray-green jug

in the accompanying photograph well illustrates their achievement. A sturdy, utilitarian container for molasses, vinegar, or “medicinal” liquors, it also exhibits a striking bulbous form, bold opposed handles, and a rich texture of brown spotting from the flyash blowing through the kiln. Other than the incised rings and “sine waves” on the jug’s shoulder, North Carolina pottery was rarely decorated in any self-conscious sense. The blue cobalt oxide so common on northern stoneware was expensive and hard to obtain; at best, it was used to delineate the gallon capacity, accent the handle terminals, or provide a bit of colorful trim. Pictorial designs such as trees, birds, and Masonic emblems are only rarely encountered. To the local potter, adding these entailed extra time and labor and made the pot no more “useful.” And, ultimately, his competition did not warrant such extra flourishes. Although the salt glaze prevailed in the east, the alkaline glaze was used throughout the western Piedmont and also in the relatively small number of shops in the mountain region. The major concentration of potters occurred in the Catawba Valley region along the western border between Lincoln and Catawba Counties; in a compact area once called “Jugtown,” 150 potters, most of German descent, turned out the thick, flowing alkaline glazes. The term “alkaline” designates the flux used to lower the melting temperature of this glaze. In North Carolina this was almost always wood ashes, which contain varying amounts of such alkaline substances as calcium, sodium, and potassium. POTTERY, NORTH CAROLINA

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Moreover, the potters designated two major glaze subtypes, based on the silica source: the typically brown and runny “cinder glaze,” made from the slag collected from early iron furnaces in Lincoln County, and the smooth, greenish “glass glaze,” which employed instead crushed glass from windowpanes and bottles. In all, the heavy use of the alkaline glaze—combined with the highly variable, unembellished forms in the salt glaze—firmly sets North Carolina in the southern ceramic tradition. By the early years of the 20th century, social forces like the Temperance Movement and the growing availability of cheaper, factory-made containers gradually combined to cripple demand for utilitarian pottery. Many potters quit and went to work in textile mills or furniture factories. Others, however, stayed at their wheels and, with ingenuity and attention to changing tastes, slowly transformed the old craft. During the 1920s and 1930s, they greatly expanded their repertory of forms and glazes, adapted new technologies, and developed new marketing strategies to reach beyond their communities and appeal to tourists, collectors, and middle-class homemakers. Their tenacity and willingness to innovate laid the groundwork for future generations. Today, pottery making flourishes across North Carolina. Since the 1970s, many newcomers have joined the old families, bringing new practices like crystalline glazes or raku firing but also learning to draw on earlier traditions in very creative ways. In the Catawba Valley region, a dozen or so potters, most of them trained by the late Burlon 348

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Craig, continue to refine the old alkaline glaze, burning their handsome face jugs, jars, and planters in wood kilns. And around Seagrove, venerable old clay clans like the Coles, Cravens, Lucks, and Owenses have been joined by numerous outsiders, to the point that over 100 family-run shops are now open. The salt glaze remains a central focus, and, as illustrated in the recent exhibition and book, The Potter’s Eye, it has evolved from the earlier whiskey jug or kraut jar into monumental forms of the highest artistic order. CHARLES G. ZUG III University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill John Bivins Jr., The Moravian Potters in North Carolina (1972); Douglas DeNatale, Jane Przbysz, and Jill R. Severn, eds., New Ways for Old Jugs: Tradition and Innovation at the Jugtown Pottery (1994); Mark Hewitt and Nancy Sweezy, The Potter’s Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery (2006); Barbara Stone Perry, ed., North Carolina Pottery: The Collection of the Mint Museums (2004); Nancy Sweezy, Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition (1994); Charles G. Zug III, Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina (1986).

Proverbs As metaphors of collective experience, southern proverbs embody the emphasis of the folk on generalized wisdom. The southern proverb repertoire—which has much in common with those of other U.S. regions—seems to serve some southerners as a set of universal laws against which individual experience is measured. With their characteristic use of metaphor and their

perceptions of similarity and difference, southern proverbs remain close to both poetry and philosophy. Proverbs have served several generations of southerners as guides to appropriate behavior and as informal channels of education. They remain in widespread use today, both in the South and around the world. Southern proverbs have their roots in the Old World, especially in Europe and Africa. Europeans and Africans alike adapted their traditions of proverb usage to a new natural and social environment in the South. The African preference for indirect and highly ambiguous speech—both as an aesthetic variation on drab everyday discourse and as a means of avoiding the sometimes painful effects and insults of direct commentary—had a counterpart in the South in the European proverb tradition. That tradition included British proverbs stretching from the 16th century’s “Beggars cannot be choosers” and the 15th century’s “Eat us out of house and home” to the 14th century’s “Look before you leap” and the 12th century’s “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” That tradition also included such literary proverbs as Saint Augustine’s “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” and the classical Greek proverb “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Biblical proverbs, such as “Cast your bread upon the waters,” “Pride goeth before a fall,” and “Money is the root of all evil” were particularly widespread in the South. In the colonial period, southern folk tradition also absorbed proverbs from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, such as “A word to the wise is sufficient” and

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Such proverbs are still used across the South. Like all forms of folklore, proverb wording is subject to variation, but structural patterns of proverbs are relatively fixed. The most common structural forms in southern proverbs are simple positive or negative propositions, such as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” or “Nobody’s perfect.” But double propositions (“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it” or “Young folks, listen to what old folks say, when danger is near keep out of the way”) are common in southern tradition, and triple propositions (“So I totes my powder and sulphur and I carries my stick in my hand and I puts my trust in God”) are not unknown. Multiple propositions provide an apt structure for making invidious distinctions, as in the biblical “Man proposes, but God disposes.” In their proverbs, southerners make distinctions by comparison and contrast. They emphasize the equivalence of things (“Seeing is believing”) or they deny it (“All that glitters is not gold”). Or they emphasize that one thing is bigger, or of greater value, than another, as in “His eyes are bigger than his belly,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” and “Half a loaf is better than none.” Proverbs purport to explain how things come about (“Politics makes strange bedfellows” and “New brooms sweep clean”) or to deny causation (“Barking dogs don’t bite” and “Two wrongs don’t make a right”). An important attribute of southern proverbs is their sense of authority, PROVERBS

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deriving partly from their detachment from common speech and partly from their allusive poetic nature. They are set off from ordinary discourse by such poetic devices as alliteration (“The proof of the pudding is in the eating” and “A miss is as good as a mile”), rhyme (“A friend in need is a friend indeed” and “Haste makes waste”), repetition (“All’s well that ends well” and “No news is good news”), meter (“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “A word to the wise is sufficient”), and parallelism (“Like father, like son” and “The more he has, the more he wants”). Because of their poetic qualities (their allusiveness and ambiguity), proverbs may be cited with equal authority in a broad range of situations. Their flexibility has sometimes made proverbs seem contradictory to modern readers. Are two heads better than one, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Some proverbs used by southerners tout the virtues of cautious conservatism (“Look before you leap,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and “Haste makes waste”), whereas others, equally authentic, urge hearers to “Strike while the iron is hot” (similarly, “Time and tide wait for no man” and “He who hesitates is lost”). But proverbs are not really contradictory. Just as a language gives its speakers words with which to praise or to criticize as necessary, the southern proverb repertory enables southerners to offer whatever advice seems appropriate to a particular situation, to advise either action or inaction, and to do so through heightened poetic language. In offering advice, a southern proverb might pursue either of two strate350

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gies. It might recommend acceptance of the situation or it might recommend action to relieve the situation. “Put up or shut up” and “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” are examples of the action strategy. Some proverbs counsel defensive action, such as “A stitch in time saves nine” and “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Some acceptance-strategy proverbs suggest that the situation is normal (“Accidents will happen” and “Boys will be boys”); thus, no action is called for. Some urge their hearers not to overreact (“Look before you leap” and “Barking dogs don’t bite”). Others counsel patience, for troubles come and troubles go (“March comes in like a lion, but goes out like a lamb”). Some even suggest that the hearer is responsible for the situation and must accept the consequences (“You’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it”). Yet other proverbs maintain that, no matter how hard the misfortune may seem, it can be borne (“Every back is fitted to the burden”). Though relatively simple in form, proverbs are perhaps the most complex of all folklore genres in their extreme sensitivity to context. The meaning and distinctiveness of the southern proverb does not lie in its form or content, but in the context of its use. And those contexts range as widely and deeply as southern life itself. CHARLES JOYNER Coastal Carolina University F. A. DeCaro and W. K. McNeil, American Proverb Literature: A Bibliography (1970); Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore (1975); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community

(1984); Kimberly J. Lau, Peter Tokofsky, and Stephen D. Winick, eds., What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life (2004); Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs Are Never out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age (1993); Peter Seitel, in The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb, ed. Wolfgang Mieder and Alan Dundes (1994); Archer Taylor, The Proverb (1931); Archer Taylor and Bartlett J. Whiting, compilers, A Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820–1880 (1958); Newman I. White, ed., The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 1 (1952).

Quartets, African American African American quartet music is a subgenre of gospel music with its own distinct history, performance style, and sociocultural role. This singing tradition has played an essential part in shaping African American sacred as well as secular musical expressions. The early groups—consisting mostly of men, although not exclusively—were originally known as jubilee quartets, later developing into what is known as gospel quartets because of their changing repertoire and performance style. African American quartet singers view the term “quartet” to be unrestrained. Reflecting on their views and what has happened historically, a “quartet,” within the context of African American music, is defined as a vocal ensemble that consists of a minimum of four voices and can expand to eight voices singing four-part harmony arrangements. Essentially, this definition is not determined by the size of the group, as is the case in the European classical music tradition.

After the Civil War, African American culture developed strong roots in large urban areas such as Birmingham, New Orleans, Memphis, and Nashville, as well as in the Tidewater region of Virginia. To specifically meet the needs of newly freed blacks, most of these urban centers, working with the Freedmen’s Bureau and the American Missionary Association (AMA), established institutions of higher learning. The AMA founded Fisk University in 1865 and the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) in 1868, and their immediate problem was obtaining funds for new buildings, equipment, and instructors. Fisk and Hampton developed mixed ensembles in 1870 and 1873, respectively, then established quartets that undertook a number of concert tours in America and in Europe. These institutions attained international recognition and became prototypes for other schools. The local community-based quartets were also influenced by these university quartets, incorporating their rhythmic precision and tightly blended and unaccompanied harmonies. In addition, minstrel companies and vaudeville troupes also used jubilee quartets in the 19th century. This is where some African American musicians launched their careers as quartet singers, including singer and comedian Tom Fletcher and the composers W. C. Handy (“Father of the Blues”) and Scott Joplin (inventor of ragtime piano). The earliest-known reference to barbershop music (1900) is also associated with black quartets. Several well-known black sacred and secular QUARTETS, AFRICAN AMERICAN

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quartets were established in neighborhood barbershops, including the New Orleans Humming Four and the Mills Brothers. Community-based jubilee and gospel groups combined the practices of all these traditions—the close fourpart harmony; the a capella singing style and spiritual repertoire of the university quartets; and the showmanship, humor, and entertainment of the minstrel and barbershop traditions. The result was a unique blend of musical aesthetics. In terms of musical style and repertoire, spiritual arrangements sung by jubilee quartets developed from the harmonized Western-influenced ensemble singing of jubilee choirs, the close-harmony barbershop singing style, and the call-and-response forms of folk spirituals and work songs. The entire group sang the chorus in harmony. The lead singer would then sing the verse, and the entire group repeated the verse along with rhythmic phrases. The jubilee quartets exerted an enormous stylistic influence over the gospel quartets that ensued later with more improvisation and physical antics on stage, demonstrated by such great quartet performers as the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Swan Silvertones. One of the first groups recorded (on cylinder) by Columbia in 1895 was the Standard Negro Quartette of Chicago. Although Victor Record Company recorded the first black sacred quartet on discs in 1902 (six single-sided discs of spirituals by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet), none was recorded again until 1920, when producers discovered the 352

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market potential of such groups. In Virginia’s Tidewater region, the Golden Gate Quartet’s recording career had a life of about 15 years, starting with Victor’s Bluebird label in August 1937. The Southernaires, believed to be the first community-based quartet to broadcast on radio, performed on a Sunday morning NBC network show for over 11 years starting in 1935. This is in contrast to the university-affiliated Utica Institute Jubilee Quartet that began broadcasting earlier in 1927 on an NBC network in New York, resulting in them having the honor of being the first quartet to broadcast live. By the 1930s, quartet music was heard by wider audiences owing to commercial recordings, live radio broadcasts, and a wider touring circuit. During World War II, groups like the Fairfield Four from Nashville, the Four Harmony Kings of West Virginia (a.k.a. the Swan Silvertone Singers), and the Zion Harmonizers from New Orleans all sang on the radio and were sponsored by various companies. In addition, women quartets like the Harps of Melody, based in Memphis, were also on the air with a number of radio spots during their career. The popularity of quartets somewhat declined in the 1950s, when many groups either switched to singing secular music or failed to adapt to modern performance styles. However, in some of the hubs, the quartet tradition is still vibrant because of the varied demand for sacred-music programs. The quartets have served a dynamic and transformative role in black communities and have set the stage for other singing groups.

This singing tradition is a collective manifestation of values and aesthetics, which continuously reflects a sacred and significant cultural expression of African Americans today. JOYCE MARIE JACKSON Louisiana State University Joyce Marie Jackson, in Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. John Lowe (2005), in Saints and Sinners: Religion, Blues and (D)evil in AfricanAmerican Music and Literature, ed. Robert Sacre (1996).

Quinceañeras Young Latinas traditionally celebrate their 15th birthday with a religious and semisecular event called a quinceañera; the term refers both to the young woman being honored and to the celebration. The essential components of the quinceañera are a religious celebration (usually a Catholic mass) and a dance. Other elements of the celebration testify to deep roots in European and indigenous ritual; the quinceañera includes vestiges of both the Spanish court’s presentation of the daughters of the nobility and the menses rituals of indigenous groups such as those found in the Lipan Apache. These references to life’s passage find contemporary expression in objects that the young woman carries and wears during the celebration, signifying her transition from childhood to adulthood. Like a baptism, confirmation, and wedding, the quinceañera is a life-cycle celebration that relies on the resources of the full community—the family, neighborhood, compadres/comadres, and others—and tends to survive

across class and (im)migrant status. The celebration’s structure reflects the many ways that the community comes together to make the fiesta happen. In the South, the celebration also fulfills a desire to reproduce the rituals of the past, and—in the case of immigrant groups—those of their places of origin. Traditionally, a young woman celebrating her quinceañera wears a frilly dress (usually lavender or white) that resembles a wedding gown, as well as a diadema, or tiara. Sometimes she also sports long, formal gloves and special jewelry. In a very stratified fashion, the honoree selects 14 young women—either friends or family—to be her damas; they in turn select their chambelans, or escorts. This corte de honor, or court of honor, accompanies the quinceañera during the religious ceremony and then performs at the dance. The ceremony is usually a Catholic mass, though it can also be a Protestant service. Whatever the religious setting, the corte de honor enters before the young woman, who is escorted in by her parents. The family and friends gathered at the service then usually hear a sermon or homily admonishing the young people to be chaste and to be grateful for their parents’ sacrifices and love. For several weeks before the event, the members of the corte de honor rehearse a choreographed dance that they perform at the salón de baile (the dance hall) on the day of the celebration. Traditionally, they danced to a timehonored waltz, such as Sobre las olas; increasingly, however, the court’s members are dancing to U.S. or Latino pop QUINCEAÑERAS

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With the quinceañera mass now behind her, this young girl smiles in anticipation of the party that lies ahead. Her sparkling white gown—offset by a glittering tiara, formal gloves, and matching scarf—testifies to the importance that this ceremony holds in Latino communities across the South. Most of these communities now boast one or more skilled dressmakers who specialize in dresses for quinceañeras and weddings. (Photograph by Al Rendon)

music, recorded by such artists as Whitney Houston or Shakira. In some cases, they dance to both a traditional waltz and a contemporary number. Alternately, the quinceañera may dance the waltz with her father and then join her corte de honor for the pop music. The family sometimes chooses the celebration’s music to coincide with a particular theme. For example, the court may dance to “Cotton-Eyed Joe” in a celebration with a country-western theme. Older family members and the family’s circle of friends offer support and participate in the celebration as madrinas and padrinos, or sponsors, to make the whole event happen. In effect, these sponsors subsidize the cost of the quinceañera, often footing the bill for the music, cake, and other celebratory elements. The immediate family does not, however, necessarily choose sponsors on the basis of their ability to help shoulder the costs (even though some of the objects of a more ritualistic nature would encourage this practice). Some sponsors are chosen for sentimental, personal, and social reasons. The “last doll” sponsor, for example, is usually a young aunt or cousin of the honoree. Her job is to present the quinceañera with a doll (often dressed in a gown identical to the honoree’s) at some point during the formal ceremony—an obvious symbol of the young woman’s transition from dolls and childish things to the adult world. In like fashion, while various sponsors may give the honoree pieces of jewelry (a watch, earrings, a ring), it is usually a close family member who gives her the religious medal— la Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexican

tradition, or la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in Cuban tradition. As an intergenerational event, the quinceañera includes children (often the younger siblings or cousins of the honoree), teenagers in the corte de honor, and elders in the roles of sponsors. At the center of the celebration, however, is the honoree; she is clearly the focus of the group’s attention. Over time, the quinceañera tradition has changed and evolved. It now allows a young woman, for example, to select a nontraditional color for her dress or to choose a celebratory theme that fits her personality. The major changes, though, seem to revolve around the dress; while the celebration now includes contemporary features and variants that offer ample room for breaking with the traditional format, it nonetheless holds onto the core elements of the traditional quinceañera. Testifying to the power of ritual, it remains embedded in the social fabric of Latino communities, even while some young women choose to forego a quinceañera and opt instead for a major gift from their parents (a car, a European vacation, a cruise). Cruise packages designed for and marketed to quinceañera celebrants have recently become available for those choosing to celebrate in this manner. As a folk religious celebration, the semisecular quinceañera exists in communities throughout Greater Mexico (folklorist Américo Paredes’s term for all those places where people of Mexican origin reside in the United States). Latina teens in Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas—as well as in Charleston, Knoxville, and Atlanta— QUINCEAÑERAS

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continue to celebrate this rite of passage. It has become increasingly popular in the South over the last few decades as the region comes to host growing numbers of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. NORMA E. CANTÚ University of Texas at San Antonio Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007); Norma E. Cantú, in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, ed. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez (2002).

Religious Road Signs Often done in a rough, hand-lettered style, numerous signs greet the traveler of southern back roads. Many proclaim abrupt and straightforward messages of salvation: “Christ Is the Answer,” “Jesus Saves,” “Get Right with God.” These terse testimonies set forth the central tenet of fundamentalist Christianity— which is that, above all, good Christians must believe in God. From this belief flows the strict moral order that determines the proper conduct of a righteous life. Simple and direct, these signs allow no leeway in interpretation. Just as their message is uncompromisingly to the point, so too one’s faith should be firm and unshakable. Sophisticated observers smirk at the homemade plywood placard that, in dripping leftover paint, says “Christ Died for Your Sins.” The sophisticate does not share the painter’s emotion and believes that surely such matters as religion, morality, and the afterlife are not to be summed up in four or five words. Given the aesthetic of southern

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Christianity, the roadside signs should not be so easily targeted for derision. Folk hymns have high, tight, restricted harmonies. Sunday meetings are demanding all-day affairs allowing little time for secular diversions. Country churches have almost no ornamentation and are noted for their stark, solitary settings, where their white clapboarded façades dominate the landscape. In this context, a terse proclamation that “Jesus Saves” is not only consistent but appropriate. To say more would suggest a degree of uncertainty rarely encountered among devout believers. A roadside sign, although a minimal statement, is densely packed with significance. It is an icon of faith, a modest but meaningful symbol conveying the truths upon which a stable, reasonable life can be built. JOHN MICHAEL VLACH George Washington University Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2005); Samuel S. Hill, ed., On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Religion in the South: A Southern Exposure Profile (1983).

Ring Shouts The ring shout is a distinctive African American religious practice that involves singing, circular marching, and a focused devotional intensity that invites the Holy Spirit’s active participation in the worship proceedings. In their important book Folksong USA (1947), folklorists John and Alan Lomax—who had witnessed many regional variations of this worship practice—suggested that ring shouts might best be defined by a

specific set of characteristics. The shout is not just sung; it is danced, and danced with the entire body. The dancers always move counterclockwise in a circle. During the shout, the dancers and singers always sing a song that takes a call-and-response form, with numerous repetitions that foreground the cooperative nature of the singing. These repeated passages favor rhythm over melody in a way that emphasizes the collaborative nature of the event. Finally, the worship continues for a long period and escalates in intensity. As this intensity mounts, the shouters feel the presence of the Spirit in their midst. The ring shout, properly speaking, becomes a physical, aesthetic, and spiritual expression of communion. Eyewitness observers of early ring shouts frequently reported that the shouts took place after the close of formal church services. Most of these observers additionally contended that the shouts were of West African origin. Scholars of African American culture have long associated ring shouts with the Tidewater areas of South Carolina and Georgia. This association arose, in part, from the fact that the earliest published accounts of ring shouts came from South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Union soldiers, journalists, and educators who came to the area during and after the Civil War observed and wrote about such shouts. Struck by this dramatic and singular form of worship, they maintained that the shouts had no analogue further north. Ring shouts, however, also thrived in the Chesapeake area of the Upper South, particularly in

Maryland and Delaware. The shouts of these two areas take a somewhat different form. Accounts of shouts in the coastal Southeast, for instance, consistently describe a counterclockwise ring dance with a small group of singers off to the side keeping time. Reports from the Upper South, in contrast, often portray a circle of singers with a leader in the middle and commonly describe shouters jumping, leaping, and springing into the air as a manifestation of spiritedness, rather than marching in a counterclockwise fashion. Today, many scholars consider the ring shout to be the central form of worship developed by African American slaves and first-generation freedmen. Scholars have also noted that a general principle of circularity seems to underlie much African American expressive culture. The ring shout gives a religious underpinning to this principle of circularity. Recent ethnographic work with ringshout groups in the Tidewater areas surrounding the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays suggests that the centrality of circularity in African American culture perfectly corresponds with patterns of mutual aid that underlie rural African American social life. Since the early 19th century, rural community members maintained the cohesiveness of their communities by enacting patterns of social and economic reciprocity. When one family needed to kill a hog, for example, others in the area would come and help. The family that received this aid would then return the favor to those who had helped them.

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This pattern of mutual aid extended into the realm of religious organization. When one church held a camp meeting that featured ring shouts, for instance, leading members of ring-shout groups from other churches would come to the host church and sing and shout. (These ring-shout groups, which had built a stronghold for themselves in their home churches’ prayer meetings, came to call themselves Singing and Praying Bands.) The Singing and Praying Band of the church that had hosted the camp meeting would then travel and assist the prayer bands and churches that had helped them at their services. The cultural imperative of reciprocity and the attendant principle of circularity underlie this system of fellowshipping. More abstractly, this tradition of mutual aid has both an aesthetic and spiritual dimension. Aesthetically, worshipers articulate mutual aid in the call-and-response shout songs and in their collective circular movement, both of which embody an active spirit of cooperation. Spiritually, ring-shout worshipers enact this tradition in their belief that the Holy Spirit “runs from heart to heart and breast to breast.” The collective experience of the Spirit’s presence in the ring shout is the culmination of these traditions of grassroots social solidarity. Though the ring shout came to be practiced semisecretly at the end of more standard, institutional church services, this African-derived worship practice remained central to early African American Christianity. Its ethic of mutual aid and social solidarity proved highly adaptive to conditions in North 358

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America and has remained at the heart of African American culture. JONATHAN C. DAVID Philadelphia, Pennsylvania William Francis Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (1867; 1951); Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. (1963); Jonathan David, with photographs by Richard Holloway, Together Let Us Sweetly Live: The Singing and Praying Bands (2007); Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Black Music Research Journal (Fall 1991); James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, eds., The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925; 1977); John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Folksong U.S.A. (1947); Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964); Art Rosenbaum and Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (1998); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987).

Roadside Memorials Roadside memorials marking the site of an untimely death dot the southern landscape. While some of these memorials are evangelical or civic in nature, most mark accidental or violent deaths. Most are also created by family and friends, unlike the spontaneous shrines that emerge in response to public tragedies. The appearance of such memorials is relatively recent; though some graced southern roadways earlier in the 20th century, they spread more widely in the mid-1980s and swelled in number during the 1990s. Most roadside memorials com-

memorate teens and young adults—primarily males—who accidentally died relatively close to home. Such memorials are most likely to remain in place if they are not located in front of private property, if the family maintains them, and if they do not create a safety hazard. Their creation and maintenance is even more likely if family and friends have to pass the site regularly. While most noticeable on rural roads, memorials are also erected by suburban and urban families, though such memorials are less likely to remain in place. Today, the practice of marking death sites with a memorial appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. In the South, most such memorials take the form of a cross. While the cross was originally associated with Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox heritage, it has now been adopted on the roadside as a generalized symbol of death by Christian mourners from many other cultural and denominational backgrounds. Typically, southern memorials use the Latin cross, though many variations can be found. The crosses may be as small as 24 inches or as large as 8 feet. They may be painted or plain, wood or metal. Such memorials often begin as quick, temporary responses to tragedy, using whatever materials are convenient, such as scrap wood. But families or friends often replace these temporary installations with more elaborate creations that display woodworking or metalworking skills. In creating these memorials, communities tend to replicate their graveside traditions. Hence, some roadside memorials are simple and almost stark,

comprised only of an unmarked cross; others, in turn, incorporate a wide range of flowers, religious items, and personal mementos. Making a public statement and visibly identifying the deceased can be an important component of the tradition. In Louisiana—whether the family is Catholic, Protestant, or of another religious heritage—most crosses identify the deceased’s name and death date and often include the birth date, Bible scriptures, and/or other messages. Such public marking is not the case, however, throughout the South. In south-central Kentucky, for example, names on memorials are often obscured or replaced with nicknames, making the memorials private statements about a family’s grief rather than communal testaments. Some families change the decorations on roadside memorials every season and on the death anniversary. These practices reflect local traditions, such as Cajun Mardi Gras masks adorning crosses. Government regulations—or at least the enforcement of such regulations— certainly affect the prevalence of roadside markers. Louisiana and Alabama, for instance, seem to tolerate memorials, despite the fact that such markers are technically illegal. These states allow family and friends to express their grief if they do so in a safe manner by not creating a safety hazard that would lead to other deaths. Other states have tried either to prohibit memorials or to control them more aggressively, usually without success. This is a persistent tradition that does not easily go away. Most individual memorials fade in a few ROADSIDE MEMORIALS

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years as the family’s grief subsides. Road crews typically remove those that are not maintained. Others become institutionalized with strong support by the community. The media have encouraged the spread of roadside memorials by using their images as warnings in articles on road safety or drunk driving. During the 1990s many southern newspapers prominently featured such memorials, and television news shows told their stories. This broad media coverage introduced a new memorializing option for grieving families and friends. As a result, the tradition spread quickly throughout the South. MAIDA OWENS Louisiana Folklife Program Holly Everett, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture (2002); Maida Owens, in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino (2006); J. K. and C. L. Reid, Death Studies (June 2001); Thomas Zimmerman, “Roadside Memorials in Five South Central Kentucky Counties” (M.A. thesis, Western Kentucky University, 1995).

Rolley Hole Marbles Rolley hole is a traditional marble game in which players roll flint marbles into a series of holes dug into a carefully leveled “marble yard.” Though once common throughout the nation, the game is now thoroughly known and passionately played in only one region of the South: Monroe and Clay Counties on the central Tennessee-Kentucky border. Also known as “holes,” “three holes,” and “rolley holey,” rolley hole marbles appear to be one of a long list 360 ROLLEY HOLE MARBLES

Rolley hole marble champ Russell Collins knuckles down at a factory marble yard in Celina, Tenn. Once common throughout the nation, rolley hole survives as a vibrant tradition only on the central TennesseeKentucky border, where adult players match skills with locally made flint marbles. (Photograph by Bob Fulcher)

of southern cultural survivals, joining a host of other intergenerational pastimes with a stronghold only in the traditionnourishing mountains of Appalachia or, more broadly, in the southlands of Dixie. Playing with spheres is a universal and ancient impulse, one that likely evolved alongside the use and manufacture of various kinds of spheres for hunting, warring, decoration, and other domestic pursuits. People have long used naturally rounded stones, bones, nuts, and fruit pits as game pieces. Crafted stone and glass orbs from Egypt, Rome, North America, and Central America—some dating back 2,000 years—were probably the earliest marbles and were set into play in a

variety of ways. The earliest evidence of rolley hole marbles’ specific ancestry appears in famed French painter Jacques Stella’s Games and Pastimes of Childhood (1657), which featured his portrayal of “Nine Holes” and “Cherry Pit.” More than a century later, Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801) described a marble game that is similar to contemporary rolley hole: “There is also a game where four, five, or six holes, and sometimes more, are made in the ground at a distance from each other; and the business of every one of the players is to bowl a marble by a regular succession into all the holes, which he who completes in the fewest bowls obtains the victory.” Once a widespread American tradition with many international counterparts, the game of rolley hole marbles struggled into the 21st century as an adult pastime only on the central Tennessee-Kentucky border. In addition to requiring impressive, practiced sporting skills, this version of the game demands that players hold the traditional knowledge needed to construct the playing area and craft the game pieces. As such, few outside the community can join the competition, leaving its future to regional and family tradition. Yet this future seems well assured in these few counties of Tennessee and Kentucky, where players passionately hold onto the game. As rolley hole champion Russell Collins explains, speaking about his hometown of Moss, Tenn., marble playing helps hold the community together: “Most marble players just love sports, and if I didn’t

do this, I wouldn’t see these other fellows but once or twice a year.” While the play is geographically restricted, interest in the game is widespread. The Tennessee State Parks, the Smithsonian Institution, the Kentucky Folklife Festival, and ESPN have all sponsored rolley hole events. The game has also been featured in dozens of national and regional broadcasts, books, and articles. At contemporary TennesseeKentucky tournaments, two players form a team, each rolling his own locally made flint marble into a series of small holes dug into the “marble yard,” while preventing the progress of opponents by hitting marbles “out of edge.” Before each shot, a player can move his marble in any direction a distance equal to the width of the shooter’s hand (between the outstretched thumb and little finger), a centuries-old practice called “spanning.” Each player’s route requires “making” 12 holes, up and down a course of three dug pits, approximately seven-eighths of an inch in diameter. A player can extend his turn by hitting an opponent’s marble or by making a hole. As in croquet, the term “rover” indicates that a player has completed all but the final object in the course. After making that final hole, a player must take his marble from the yard. (The Grit Marble Club of Cochran, Ga., plays a different—and more widespread—version of the game, utilizing four holes in an L pattern.) Rolley hole marbles is analogous to croquet in so many respects that their histories are unquestionably ROLLEY HOLE MARBLES

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intertwined. Marble games and other mallet-wicket games—like Pall Mall and Ground Bowls—preceded croquet’s entrance into middle-class life in Britain (between 1851 and 1864) and America (after 1865) and certainly influenced croquet’s shape and popularity. In like manner, croquet seems to have contributed to the language and rules used by modern rolley hole players. Rustic croquet yards, featuring handcrafted equipment and local rules, existed near marble yards on the TennesseeKentucky line through most of the 20th century. Adding to the puzzle of the marble game’s origins, development, and evolution, “Indian Marbles”—currently played by Western Band Cherokee in Oklahoma, with rules clearly related to rolley hole—purportedly has a pre-Removal history. Constructing a marble yard requires laying clean loam soil (which may be screened onto a clay base) and leveling it for approximately 40 feet. Historically, players have constructed marble yards in public places—such as schoolyards, courthouse lawns, or alongside public roads—or on private property, where the yard sometimes rests under a shed or barn roof. Though limestone marbles were once common in the game, players in the Tennessee-Kentucky region now use flint marbles exclusively. They have devised a wide variety of methods to create durable, truly spherical marbles, including water tumbling and dry grinding (with pump drills known as “whirlygigs,” or with grinders powered by bicycles, automobile wheels, or electric motors). Community members celebrate these traditions—along with 362 SHOTGUN HOUSE

other southern and international marble games—every year at the National Rolley Hole Marbles Championship in Standing Stone State Park in Livingston, Tenn., and at the Monroe County Fair tournament in Rockbridge, Ky. BOB FULCHER Tennessee State Parks Burkhard Bilger, Noodling for Flatheads (2000); Robert Fulcher, 1986 Festival of American Folklife (1986); Dennis Webb and Mark E. Randall, Greenberg’s Guide to Marbles (1994).

Shotgun House Shotgun houses appear along the shores of the Mississippi River as far north as Iowa. Examples can be spotted in cities and towns from Georgia to Texas. At the dawning of the 20th century, examples could be seen most often on plantations, in mill towns and lumber camps, and in poorer urban neighborhoods. Oneroom wide and three or more rooms deep, the house’s roofline ran from front to back, and its entrance was in the gable end rather than on the longer side like most American dwellings. The shotgun house thus stood out as visually different. Its slightly deviant appearance is important because it signals an interesting history with connections to the Caribbean and even links back to distant African homelands. It is sometimes said that the name “shotgun” derives from the fact that a blast from a shotgun, when fired at one of these houses, would not hit anything because the doors were set in a straight line from front to back. In fact, the inner doors in these houses were most often arranged in a zigzag

pattern, alternating from side to side at each partition wall. The origin of the nickname for this house type remains a mystery, but it could trace back to togun, a Yoruba word from the Nigeria/ Dahomey border region that indicates a small house. Shotgun houses first appeared in New Orleans at the end of the 18th century as a result of the migration of free people of color from Haiti. Given the prolonged warfare initiated in 1791 during Toussaint l’Overture’s rebellion against France, many Haitian blacks sought refuge on other islands or in French-speaking enclaves in the United States. A small number—slightly more than a thousand people—made their way to New Orleans at the end of the 18th century. In the summer of 1809, however, so many arrived that they thoroughly transformed the city. In 1810 black New Orleanians outnumbered whites by a ratio of two to one; the freeblack population alone almost equaled that of whites. When these freemen built houses, they often chose a type of building they had known in Haiti called a caille. These structures were exactly the same house type that came to be known in New Orleans as a shotgun house: a structure one story tall and one room wide that contained several rooms, often four or more. Other features, such as extended verandas and the use of shuttered casements instead of doors and windows, were likewise features that signaled a West Indian background. During the latter half of the 19th century, the house form traveled, as Creoles of color settled in Mobile, Pen-

sacola, and other cities along the Gulf Coast. The shotgun house would also be sold as a prefabricated kit to the owners of company towns and plantations whose labor force consisted of black sharecroppers and tenants. Before long, large clusters of shotgun houses could be found at railroad yards, lumber and turpentine camps, oil fields, steel and textile mills, and other industries that needed to house large groups of workers. At the beginning of the 20th century, the shotgun house was often labeled not as a house but as a shack, a term considered appropriate for the run-down structures used by shortterm migratory workers. Given the building’s deep history in the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans were building the mud-walled, thatchroofed caille as far back as the 17th century, connections to traditional African buildings should also be considered. In the coastal regions of West and Central Africa, rectangular house plans are the most common form. Since these structures frequently have their entrances in their gable ends, they are the most likely models for the New World structures that we have come to call shotgun houses. The durability of this form across such a great distance and over such a long span of time indicates the tenacity of this traditional house type. The shotgun house’s association with Afro-Caribbeans and Creoles of color initially made it a marker of ethnicity. For those who understand the building’s history, it has become a sign of cultural pride. JOHN MICHAEL VLACH George Washington University SHOTGUN HOUSE

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Richard Allen Burns, Arkansas Review (April 2002); New Orleans neighborhood website, <www.bywater.org/Arch/shotgun .htm>; Rebuild New Orleans Project, <www .shotgunhouseproject.com>; John Michael Vlach, Pioneer America (January 1976).

Shout Bands Hear it once, and your soul will never forget shout band music. It is a tradition found only in the United House of Prayer for All People, an African American urban Pentecostal denomination concentrated in the southeastern United States. Massed trombones, anchored by drums, sousaphone, and often baritone horn, create a highenergy driving sound very different from New Orleans jazz, which is perhaps its closest cousin. Roots of shout band music stretch back to Africa, with important input from gospel-quartet singing of the mid-20th century—all passed down person to person without written notes. Shout bands seldom perform outside the church but rather use their music as an integral part of worship services, improvising on the spot to catch the emotions of the congregation and bring listeners into the Spirit. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcast. Isaiah 56:8

The United House of Prayer for All People sprang up during the Pentecostal Holiness movement of the 1910s and 1920s, led by charismatic evangelist Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace. Born in Africa’s Cape Verde Islands, he immigrated to New England and then 364

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began traveling nationwide, spreading his message of religious salvation. A key summerlong revival in Charlotte, N.C., in 1926 drew up to 20,000 people nightly, ending in a mass baptism of 643 converts. In 1927 Daddy Grace planted church headquarters—“God’s White House”—in Washington, D.C. With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord! Psalm 98

No one knows just when trombone shout bands began. Photos of 1920s House of Prayer baptisms show brass bands, but they featured a full range of instruments. The shift to massed trombones likely occurred in the 1940s, perhaps in houses around Newport News, Va. The music’s structure backs up the 1940s date and also marks shout bands as distinct from New Orleans Dixieland jazz bands. In New Orleans playing, the instruments join together to play the melody once through, then repeat the basic chord structure while each instrument takes a turn improvising a solo on top of the chords; finally, all come together for a last playing of the melody. A shout band song is structured more like the gospel-quartet singing of the 1940s and 1950s. First, the band plays the melody, supported by chords in quartetlike four-part harmony. This may be repeated several times with changes in ornamentation. Then the players shift into what quartet singers call “the drive,” a short rhythmic figure repeated again and again as the lead singer improvises exhortations. Shout band

The spirit is high at the United House of Prayer for All People in Charlotte, N.C., when the church’s shout band— the Madison Clouds of Heaven—fuel the worship with their exuberant praise. Propelled by the vocalizing sounds of massed trombones, such bands have graced services at United House of Prayer sanctuaries for more than six decades. This image captures a service in September of 2006. (Photograph by Daniel Coston, 2006)

players call this repeated pattern “backtiming.” Over the back-timing, two trombonists called “run-men” improvise call-and-response cries. Once the peak is passed, the band may return to the original melody or move seamlessly into another song. Young men (and a very few young women) enter the shout band tradition early, often as soon as they can hold an instrument. Players learn from the oldest members of the band, typically in their twenties, or from a “professor” who may teach several bands. Youngsters simply blow the root note of each chord. Becoming more adept, they move up to playing harmony notes and may eventually become run-men. Music infuses House of Prayer services in a way that seems extraordinary to listeners raised outside of the Holiness movement. The heart of the shout

band sound is the emotional power of the slide trombone, with its ability to sing or preach almost like the human voice. During a three-hour service, the band plays almost constantly, never stopping to announce a new piece, sometimes echoing the ends of a speaker’s phrases, other times bursting into full song. As in many forms of African American cultural expression, the music is not so much “composed” as “collaged,” made up on the spot out of phrases that players know or improvise. Clap your hands, all you peoples. . . . God has gone up with a shout, the Lord has gone up with the sound of trumpets. Psalm 47

The guiding purpose of the shout band tradition in the United House of Prayer is to help focus listeners on God SHOUT BANDS

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so as to invite visitation by the Spirit. It informs every aspect, from the use of trombones to the way music is assembled in the moment, to catch the congregation’s emotions. “It all means one thing,” says Cedric Mangum of the Clouds of Heaven, featured on Smithsonian Folkways’ shout band recording Saints’ Paradise. “They’re all playing, giving God’s praise.” TOM HANCHETT Levine Museum of the New South Marie Dallam, Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (2007); Tom Hanchett, in Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas, ed. Ann Wicker (2008); Susan Levitas, The Music District (film, 1999), <www.folkstreams.net/film>; Various Artists, Saints’ Paradise: Trombone Shout Bands from the United House of Prayer (Smithsonian Folkways CD).

Smokehouse Because southerners for at least two centuries have not been willing to live without pork, their farms commonly have included smokehouses. Although any kind of meat could be dried and smoked, it was the butchering of hogs that truly necessitated the construction of this particular outbuilding. Mid-19thcentury reports on southern pork consumption indicate that a male field hand was fed between two and five pounds of hog meat per week. Each year between 1840 and 1860, no less than 2.2 hogs were raised for every man, woman, and child in the South. This pork craving gave rise to a problem in meat preservation that the smokehouse solved. Because the meatpacking industry was not well developed in the southern 366

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states, every farmer was left to fend for himself. Thus, in a spirit of selfsufficiency and independence, southern farmers made the smokehouse a central artifact in the conducting of the annual agricultural schedule. Hogs slaughtered late in the fall, after they were well fattened from foraging on the mast that they found in the woodlands, could be kept after they were smoked until the following year’s butchering. Once the carcasses were cut into manageable sections, each piece was packed in salt for about six weeks. The pieces of meat were then washed and hung in the smokehouse to acquire the distinctive flavor of the slow-drying fire. In the popular mind, hickory is considered the universal fuel, but many different woods were used. In fact, some farmers in “Little Dixie” Missouri preferred fresh corn cobs, what they still call “meat cobs.” The quantity and kind of smoke varied considerably from locale to locale and from person to person, as the main arbiter in these matters was one’s own taste buds. There has also been considerable variation in the kinds of structures used as smokehouses. Large plantations used sizable buildings constructed to the same dimensions as dwelling houses, perhaps 18 feet by 26 feet. In colonial Virginia the smokehouse could have a tall pyramidal roof. Along the shores of the Chesapeake, a small brick house with diamond-shaped ventilators in the gables served as the meat house, whereas in the Alabama highlands, the smokehouse might feature a gableend doorway with a roof cantilevered several feet over one end to protect the

entrance. Some Missouri smokehouses are two-story affairs with a smoking chamber below and a meat-preparation area above. Taken collectively, the look of these various buildings might suggest a lack of cultural coherency. The behavior enacted in all of these structures is, however, consistent. Whatever their particular form, the cultural statement made is clear: “we will take care of our needs; we will have ham and bacon when we want it.” JOHN MICHAEL VLACH George Washington University Henry Chandlee Forman, Tidewater Maryland Architecture and Gardens (1956); Sam B. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (1972); Howard Wight Marshall, Journal of American Folklore (October–December 1979).

Southern Soul Music Southern soul—a danceable blend of gospel-based rhythm and blues, funk, and blues, with varying degrees of influence from country and rock—has been the predominant grassroots secular music among many middle-aged and older African Americans in the South and much of the urban North for the past several decades. Southern soul’s true home is the dance floor of southern clubs and juke joints, where it either complements or supplants older styles of blues. African American bands traveling the “chitlin’ circuit”—a loosely defined network of clubs, dance halls, auditoriums, and theaters that for generations has presented blues, soul, and rhythm and blues to African American audiences—typically perform a mix of

southern soul and straight-ahead blues. Within this exclusively African American performance circuit, southern soul singers are able to build more lucrative careers than their hardcore blues counterparts; they can also take their music to events at larger nightclubs, halls, and auditoriums; into the recording studios; and onto rhythm-and-blues radio stations. Southern soul, also called “soul blues,” maintains a solid niche among the segment of African American society that has traditionally supported various types of blues. To the mainstream media, to scholars and folklorists, and to the music trade at large, however, southern soul remains almost invisible—deemed too limited in appeal for the general public, too down-home for the “urban contemporary” market, and too commercial sounding for blues purists. Crossover to the (largely whitesponsored) national and international blues-festival circuit and to bluessociety venues has been minimal. Yet to many African American listeners, southern soul is the blues of the present day. Leading performers in the genre currently include Mel Waiters from Texas, Sir Charles Jones from Alabama, and Marvin Sease (who is based in New York but was born and raised in South Carolina). The soul sounds of Johnnie Taylor and Tyrone Davis have been especially influential on the contemporary generation’s style. The music’s origins, however, can be traced back to the “classic southern soul” of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Sam and Dave, as well as to the pioneers SOUTHERN SOUL MUSIC

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of soul—notably Ray Charles and Sam Cooke—who took the daring and controversial step of combining blues and popular sounds with the sacred stylings of gospel. Blues singers Bobby Bland, Little Milton, B. B. King, and Albert King and blues-funk stylist Bobby Rush have also been important figures in southern soul. Soul singers have typically developed their chops in the creative musical ferment of the African American church. In the music’s earlier years, most took their cues from such postwar gospel groups as the Soul Stirrers (from Texas) and the Five Blind Boys (both the group with that name from Alabama and the one from Mississippi) and then transferred these groups’ holy fervor to secular sensuality. Interestingly, many historic southern soul recordings emanated from studios that employed racially mixed or even all-white session bands, often consisting of young players who grew up with country music but learned to love the rock and roll and rhythm and blues that permeated southern airwaves in the 1950s and 1960s. The African American musicians who carried the load at most of the other recording studios, and those who toured the chitlin’ circuit with the singers, were steeped in blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and/or jazz. Southern soul music places its emphasis firmly on the singer, the lyrics, and the dance-floor rhythms rather than on instrumental pyrotechnics or extended guitar solos. In recent years, synthesizers have tended to replace horns and other instruments, a function not only of changing styles in music 368 SOUTHERN SOUL MUSIC

but also of economics. Studios in Jackson, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Chicago, and other cities continue to churn out product, with most of their successes in recent years either dance tunes or songs with overtly sexually oriented themes (a clear throwback to the music’ s blues roots). Odes to partying at the juke joint are also popular; in fact, the syndicated American Blues Network advertises the music as “party blues.” Currently, as in the past, adult African American women constitute the music’ s largest audience; not surprisingly, southern soul singers aim most of their lyrics directly toward them. Among collectors and fans, classic southern soul can also be “northern soul”—a curious term that refers not to the music’s geographic origins but to the popularity of a particular style of soul music offered by disc jockeys on the dance floors of northern England. Southern soul also constitutes part of the “beach music” scene in the Carolinas—again, not in reference to any coastal orientation in the songs but rather to the social milieu in which a new (almost exclusively white) audience has embraced southern soul as its favorite dance—in this case, “shag”—music. JIM O’NEAL Blues Scholar, Archivist, and Producer BluEsoterica Archives and Mississippi Blues Trail The Boogie Report Internet newsletter, <www.amazinmace.tripod.com/ jboogiemasononline>; Chittlin’ Circuit magazine; Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music (1986); Mississippi Blues Trail, <www .msbluestrail.org>; Southern Soul Internet

discussion list, <www.launch.groups.yahoo .com/group/southernsoul>; Preston Lauterbach, Memphis: The City Magazine (1 July 2006).

Square Dancing Square dancing has long been a part of the traditional culture of the rural South. Square dances, for groups of four or more couples, have their roots in popular European social dances of the 18th and 19th centuries (French cotillions and quadrilles, English country dances, and Scots-Irish reels); they also show the influence of African American and Native American dances. The earliest detailed account of southern square dancing comes from English folk music and dance scholar Cecil Sharp, who—with his colleague Maud Karpeles—observed dances at several locations in eastern Kentucky in 1917. Sharp interpreted these rural southern dances (which he called “The Running Set”) as survivals of 17th-century English country dances. He mistakenly believed that these old dances had remained intact and unchanged for many generations and that the remoteness of the mountains had kept them free from the contaminating influences of modernity. The southern square dance, however, is a distinctly American dance form, one that did not exist until the 19th century, when European social dances merged with elements of African American and Native American dances in the America South. Prior to the 20th century, dancing was a common recreation in Anglo-American, African American, and Native American communities.

Square dances often accompanied such community work gatherings as corn shuckings, molasses makings, and barn raisings; they also occurred at weddings and other festive occasions, particularly during the Christmas season. Most often held in private homes, such dances also took place in barns, taverns, or even outdoors on the bare ground. By the 1930s, square dances had lost their association with work parties and special occasions and had become public events serving a wider region and held in large community halls on a regular basis throughout the year. While these public dances are now relatively rare, they still happen in some rural communities, with dancers of all ages sometimes traveling several hours to attend on Friday or Saturday nights. Although the name “square dance” implies a square formation for four couples, southern square dances are often done with any number of couples in a big circle set. Today, the four-couple square is more common in northern West Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri, while the big circle is the dominant form elsewhere. Southern square dances are characterized by visiting couple figures (where each couple takes a turn leading the figure); a verse-chorus structure (such that the visiting couple figure performed by two couples alternates with a chorus or ending figure involving all of the couples); the presence of distinctive southern dance figures (such as “Bird in the Cage”); fast-paced music; and improvisational dance calling that guides the dancers through the figures. The practice of dance calling appears SQUARE DANCING

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to have emerged in African American communities in the early 19th century as a way to lead dancers who were not trained in the formal figures of French cotillions and quadrilles through the dances. The first documented dance caller was an African American musician at a formal New Orleans ball in 1819. By the mid-19th century, dance calling had become a common practice throughout the rural South. Such calling was the key element that transformed the earlier European dances into a distinct American dance form; this process paralleled the way that the African American banjo transformed European fiddle styles to become southern dance music. Without the African American practice of dance calling, southern square dances would not exist. Following World War II, a new form of square dancing, called “modern western square dancing,” developed from the traditional square dances of the western United States. With standardized dance calls, professional callers, recorded music, and western costumes, this new style of square dancing became popular across the country, competing with and displacing many of the older community-based rural dances. Today, modern western square dance clubs can be found throughout the South. PHILIP A. JAMISON Warren Wilson College S. Foster Damon, The History of Square Dancing (1957); Philip A. Jamison, Journal of Appalachian Studies (Fall 2003); Richard Nevell, A Time to Dance (1977); Cecil J. Sharp and Maud Karpeles, The Country Dance Book, Part V (1918); Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside, eds.,

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Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America’s Southeast and Beyond (1995).

Talking Out Fire “Talking out fire” is an ancient and widespread religious burn-healing ritual that dates back at least to the AngloSaxon period and continues to thrive in communities throughout the United States and in other parts of the world. It is practiced by ordinary people in everyday situations for the benefit of anyone who has been burned. Talking out fire is not one tradition but many—a complex folk medical system consisting of traditional beliefs, charms, and practices reinforced by taboos governing both the interactions between healers and patients and the passing of knowledge from one person to another. Almost all of these elements are evident in the following story, recounted by a college student who was spattered with hot grease while cooking in her apartment: “I was cooking . . . and there was some hot oil, and it was bubbling hot all over my face, and all my jaw here was burned and I ran to my mother’s house. She took me to this man and he told me to sit down and then he told me [that] whenever he got through, don’t say ‘thank you’ or it won’t work. And he took his hand and went like this over the burn. He never said anything; he was just steadily moving his mouth. And as he moved his hand down I could feel the heat vanishing. . . . It never did leave scars either.” One of the essential components of talking out fire is a verbal charm that typically has three parts: a description of angels approaching from the north,

south, east, or west; an appeal, directed to the angelic host, to come to the aid of the sufferer; and a benediction invoking the Holy Trinity. A representative example is this verse collected from an eastern North Carolina burn healer during the late 1980s: I saw six angels coming from the north Three had fire, three had frost. Go out fire; come in frost, Through the name of the Lord, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Though aptly classified as “verbal charms,” such verses—with their tight poetic structure, evocative imagery, and incantatory rhythms—are, paradoxically, almost never verbalized, at least not in a way that would make them comprehensible to the person being treated. The latter typically report that they heard nothing at all during the treatment process or that the healer’s words were mumbled or garbled. While some practitioners rely entirely on the charm, most combine it with rituals based on homeopathic or contagious magic to enhance the potency of the verse. Those in the latter group may either blow on the wound while making a fanning motion with one hand above the burned area or, alternatively, place a hand or fingers directly on the wound in order to channel what the healers believe to be God’s curative power through them and into the burn victim. Because folk burn healers invariably describe the ability to “talk out fire” not as a personal attribute but as a gift from

God, it is not surprising that they refuse to accept money or any other kind of remuneration for their services; some go a step further and tell those who come to them for help not to say “thank you,” since the healer is only the intermediary through whom God effects the cure. Taboos against accepting payment or even expressions of gratitude are two of the many prohibitions associated with talking out fire, the most important and widespread being that which forbids the healer from passing on her/his knowledge of the charm and related rituals to a person of the same gender. Like other healing traditions that rely heavily on magical charms and rituals, talking out fire has always been susceptible to dismissive and patronizing judgments by those who regard all forms of folk medicine as quackery. Since the mid-1990s, however, scholarly attention to the subject has increased significantly, and a much clearer picture of the tradition and its participants has emerged. Contrary to what was previously thought, burn healers and the people who seek their help are an extremely diverse group, including men and women of different ages, races, nationalities, religions, and occupations. For the great majority of these individuals, folk and biomedical burn healing are not mutually exclusive therapies but two of many options that may be used independently or in combination with one another to alleviate pain, promote healing, and reduce or eliminate scarring. As one prominent North Carolina physician and medical educator explained in a 1994 interview with CNN Medical News, “talking out fire” is a TALKING OUT FIRE

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“ceremony, and ceremonial activities have a profound impact on people’s mental functioning, their emotions, and their bodies. . . . We need to understand what is healing and therapeutic about a ceremony such as talking out fire, [and] what is healing and therapeutic about an encounter of talking with a physician about your problems. Both of those can be extremely important.” JAMES KIRKLAND Eastern Carolina University Erica Brady, ed., Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems (2001); Thomas Forbes, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (August 1971); Wayland D. Hand, ed., Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina (1961); James Kirkland, in Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today, ed. James Kirkland, Holly F. Mathews, C. W. Sullivan III, and Karen Baldwin (1992); Peter Lichstein, personal interview, Cable News Network (1994); Bonnie Blair O’Connor, Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions (1995).

Traders The South is a land where people are as drawn to trading as bees are to honey. Whether they bargain for mules, dogs, or cars, southerners cannot resist a trade. In the 19th century, Joseph Baldwin argued that in the South, “nearly every man was a speculator; at any rate, a trader.” Monthly “trade days” are familiar institutions throughout the region. First Monday in Ripley, Miss., for instance, began in 1893; today its traders occupy 50 acres with their goods. In Texas, monthly trade days exist in the towns 372

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of Canton, Fredericksburg, Livingston, McKenney, and New Boston. Canton’s “First Monday” is popularly called “Dog Monday” because so many dogs are traded there each month. Forced to move outside the town because of its size, Canton’s First Monday trade day now occupies 100 acres. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, trade days in the South focused on horses and mules. Many of these animals were raised in the cooler climate of border states by “graziers.” During “court days” in states like Kentucky and Tennessee, the streets would fill with stock and traders who bought and shipped their animals to livery stables in the Deep South, where they were sold to local farmers. When the animals arrived in the late winter and early spring, farmers visited livestock barns to look them over. For the next two or three months, the horse and mule barn was a center of business and social activity, and the livestock trader became the most important man in town. Mules were usually sold on credit with nothing down and one year to pay. These terms suited the dealer well, because the threeand four-year-olds that he sold were still unbroken. If the farmer broke the mule and kept him in good shape, the animal would be worth 50 to 100 dollars more the next year. Southern livestock traders began to trade on the road at an early age and quickly developed their own trading style. Mississippian Manuel Allen, for example, was an African American trader who always “traded slow.” Allen’s philosophy was “never to seem anxious to sell or trade if I wanted to make a

good deal.” Well aware of the tricks of the profession, he recalls one occasion when a man said his wife wanted to keep a mare for her buggy horse. “Right then,” Allen reflected, “I knew he was baiting me and wanted me to take the mare.” Both trader and customer typically conducted the trade with courtroom seriousness, and they remembered and often told stories about their trades for many years. The southern trade was a pact between men, from which one man emerged with honor or ridicule, depending on his judgment. The southern livestock trader is a shrewd judge of both animals and men. Known for his wit, he weaves humorous tales and anecdotes into his work with special skill. Deception and folk humor achieve rare eloquence among such traders, who insist that they never tell a lie to a customer. Mississippi mule trader Ray Lum, for instance, argued that “the truth always fits in better.” Rather than lie to a customer, traders will tell a veiled or embroidered truth, using wordplay and double entendre to describe their animal. Lum once sold a mule to a hunter and assured him that he could “shoot off him.” When the hunter fired his gun, the mule bucked, and—as Lum recalled with a laugh— the hunter literally “shot off him.” Lum also practiced a “singing” style that he used in both the auction and the trade, describing his animal with phrases like “broke to a queen’s taste,” “kept like a hat in a band box,” and “if a fly lit on her, he would slip off and break his neck.” Southern traders dressed well to

impress customers with the professional quality of their work. A trademark of their profession was the western hat. They also often carried a whip or cane, which they skillfully used to make animals prance before the customer. The trader’s dress, eloquence, and graceful manners set the customer at ease during the trade. William Faulkner was attracted to traders, whose stories and narrative skills paralleled his own as a writer. In The Hamlet (1964), Faulkner’s character Pat Stamper is a Texas trader who “played horses against horses as a gambler plays cards against cards, for the pleasure of beating a worthy opponent as much as for gain.” Stamper wears “a broad pale expensive Stetson hat” and is “assisted by a Negro hostler who was an artist as a sculptor is an artist . . . Stamper and the Negro, working in a kind of outrageous rapport like a single intelligence.” Texas trader Ben Green contends that the Irish were the greatest traders. Irish tinkers immigrated to the United States in the early 1800s. After the Civil War, groups settled in Atlanta, Nashville, and Fort Worth, where they began trading livestock with farmers. In the early 20th century, Irish traders typically traveled in two-family convoys that consisted of three cars pulling trailers and three trucks hauling mules. Often four generations traveled together, camping in tents with large carpeted rooms. As soon as Irish traders arrived in a community, local farmers would bring old mules to their camp to trade for young five-year-olds. The farmer paid “boot” to cover the difference in price between TRADERS

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the two animals. The traders would then haul the old mules to nearby cities (where they were used for light hauling) and return to the camp with fresh animals from the stockyards. Livestock traders prospered throughout the South until the 1950s, when tractors replaced the once ubiquitous mule. Responding to this shift, some traders became used-car dealers, adapting their talents to new forms of transportation and “horsepower.” Southerners have always traded goods for services. In a world where cash was often in short supply, farmers offered vegetables, meat, eggs, and firewood in trade for medical and legal services. Harper Lee pointedly illustrates this practice in To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) when Walter Cunningham pays for Atticus Finch’s legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, a crate of smilax and holly, and a croker sack full of turnip greens. When Scout asks, “Why does he pay you like that?,” Atticus replies, “Because that’s the only way he can pay me. He has no money. . . . The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.” Traders were and always will be a familiar part of the American South. Their legacy of storytelling and humor enrich and humanize the region’s folklore and literature in each generation. WILLIAM FERRIS University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (2005); J. Frank Dobie, Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest (1969); William

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Faulkner, The Hamlet (1964); William Ferris, Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules, and Men (1998); Ben Green, Horse Conformation as to Soundness and Performance Ability and Hoss Trades of Yesteryear (1963); Robert Byron Lamb, The Mule in Southern Agriculture (1963); Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960; 1982); S. G. Thigpen, A Boy in Rural Mississippi (1966).

Two-Stepping Two-stepping is the basic form of partner dancing done within the fan culture of country music. The dance, often called the Texas two-step, has been part of southern (and especially southwestern) culture for many decades and is an integral part of honky-tonk rituals for fans both young and old. In 1978 New York Times writer William K. Stevens described it as a “controlled, oldfashioned country dance of considerable grace and elegance”; today, however, it is more often viewed as a marker of down-home or redneck identity, although the version of it performed in country-dance competitions is a flashy, polished, and fast-moving display of technical prowess—always with boots and cowboy hats present. The two-step derives from a popular 19th-century “polite” social dance of the same name, although the original dance used a different basic pattern. That 19thcentury two-step was replaced in the 1910s by a new, trendier social dance called the fox-trot, named for its originator, vaudevillian Harry Fox. Dance teachers distilled Fox’s jaunty performance into a set of standardized steps, the most basic of which alternated two

glide steps with two quick, trotting steps in a pattern of “slow-slow-quick-quick.” By the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the West, Southwest, and Cajun regions— where partner dancing was an integral part of each community’s social fabric—the fox-trot was so widely adopted that even where it was not referred to by name, its rhythms became the default social dance. As one lifelong country fan and dancer recently recalled, “Back then, it was just dancing. I guess it’s what we call a two-step today, but we just called it ‘dancing.’” When the term “two-step” resurfaced in country music and culture, it was applied to the most common style of dancing at the time—a simplified fox-trot—thereby creating the new definition of the two-step as it is now done. Between World War II and 1980, country fans in different regions maintained different dance traditions. Leon McAuliffe, longtime steel guitar player for the legendary western swing band Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys, explained: “[West of the Mississippi] we played for dancing. East of the Mississippi they played a show . . . just for people to sit and listen.” Although there was some two-stepping in the Southeast during those years, the widespread adoption of the practice across the region did not occur until 1980, when the movie Urban Cowboy brought the dance and its native dance hall environs to rural and urban communities all across the country. The film’s featured two-step sequences launched a fad that brought waves of instructional books and videos to a newfound market of countrynightclub patrons. Since that film, the

term “two-step” and the dance have become a synecdoche for country music and honky-tonks in general. The basic form of the dance is done by partners in closed dance position, moving counterclockwise around the dance floor. In most country nightclubs, two-step songs make up approximately a third of the music played during a typical evening, while the rest is a combination of waltzes, polkas, line dances, and regional favorites such as the cotton-eyed Joe and the schottische. Two-step songs, which are usually in duple meter (2/4 or 2/2 time), are found in both traditional honky-tonk styles and pop-crossover styles of country music, as well as in Cajun music. The tempo of the dance has varied historically, but the current officially sanctioned tempo, according to the United Country and Western Dance Council, is 176 to 200 beats per minute, where each beat is implicitly defined as one quarter of a musical measure. Each “slow” step within the basic pattern occupies two beats, and each “quick” step occupies one beat, so the basic pattern of the dance (“slow-slow-quick-quick”) requires one and a half measures of music. This phrase overlap—where the length of the dance pattern and the musical measures do not match—creates interesting rhythmic interactions between the music and the dancers’ movements. There are an increasing number of two-step variants danced in different communities. Many dancers who enter two-step competitions prefer to begin the dance with the “quick-quick” steps. In the thriving gay country-dance scene, TWO-STEPPING

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dancers sometimes modify the dance so that both leader and follower face the same direction, standing front to back, in what is called the shadow. In some regions, the basic rhythm of the twostep is adjusted to a syncopated pattern. In others, such as Oklahoma, the twostep is replaced by a local variant known as shuffle (sometimes called triple-two), which substitutes a step-together-step pattern (a triple step) for each of the slow steps. One of the earliest references to the two-step in country song lyrics appears in Bob Wills’s “New Spanish Two-Step,” an extremely popular country hit in 1946. In subsequent decades, country singers have frequently mentioned the dance as a way of affirming their authentic connection to country music traditions. George Strait sang “It’s dance time in Texas where the wine and music flows / we’ll do that Texas two-step and that old Cotton-Eyed Joe” (“Dance Time in Texas”) in 1985, while Mary Chapin Carpenter sang “Find a twostep partner and a Cajun beat” (“Down at the Twist and Shout”) five years later in her recipe for the perfect evening out. Country artists have also used the dance’s name as part of poetic wordplay in their songs, such as when Tracy Byrd sang “The first step is the two-step, then we’ll talk” (“The First Step”) in 1994. The dance has also been appropriated as a convenient verbal metaphor for smoothly circumventing political issues or other controversies. Today, country fans throughout the South learn to two-step at independent dance studios, at large country nightclubs, and from friends and family. 376 WALKING STICKS

Given the pervasive presence of the dance within the fan community, it is no surprise that parents frequently teach their children and grandchildren the basic two-step, a practice that moves the dance squarely into the vernacular folk traditions of southern culture. JOCELYN R. NEAL University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James Bridges, director, Urban Cowboy (film, 1980); Jerry C. Duke, “CountryWestern Dance,” in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jeane Cohen (1998); Tony Leisner, The Official Guide to Country Dance Steps (1980); Shirley Rushing and Patrick McMillan, Kicker Dancin’ Texas Style (1984); United Country and Western Dance Council Official Rules (2007).

Walking Sticks “Years ago, if you wanted to get yourself a stick, you could just walk into any town around here and ask for ‘Stickman,’” recalled Arliss Watford, an African American wood-carver from the coastal plain of North Carolina. “Seemed like every town had someone called ‘Stickman,’” he reflected. “And since men were always looking for a nice stick—to be styling, you know— those folks kept busy.” Makers of walking sticks are not nearly as plentiful now as they were in the 1930s through the 1960s, the days to which Watford was referring. Yet stick makers still pursue their art in communities across the South, crafting sticks both mundane and fancy. And they still create sticks to serve—as Watford so eloquently observed—the purpose of “styling,” of presenting oneself unto

Throughout southern history, carved walking sticks have stood as telling testaments to both the carver’s skill and the owner’s style. The power of this testimony has been particularly pointed in African American communities, where carefully crafted sticks continue to step forward as centerpieces of stylish wardrobes. African American carver George SerVance Jr. used scrap wood from a North Carolina furniture factory to carve this remarkable Adam and Eve stick, which tells the biblical story in three separate vignettes, each carved fully in the round. Before creating this stick, SerVance—a devout churchgoer—had carved three sticks that each told a different chapter of the story. When his wife playfully challenged him to put the whole story in a single stick, SerVance responded by carving this masterful piece. (Photograph by Glenn Hinson)

the world with elegance and flair. When made for this end, the walking stick does far more than simply support an aging or unsteady body. Instead, or perhaps additionally, it becomes an emblem of self, an artful marker of identity that steps alongside its bearer, publicly inviting conversation while identifying its owner as a person of style. Walking sticks have served this purpose in the South since colonial days, when a cane—whether elegantly tooled or roughly crafted—was a requisite part of a man’s wardrobe. Painted portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries often portray elite white males cradling thin, smoothly finished sticks, frequently topped with heads of ivory, bone, silver, or gold. The primary decoration in these sticks lay in the carved or cast head, which typically rose in a line from a gracefully tapered shaft. Sticks carried by peoples of the working classes, in contrast, tended to be both more robust and varied, often revealing the skilled hand of a local carver. These sticks were also stylish, but their style spoke more to vernacular tastes, demonstrating a deep appreciation for wit, natural forms, clever constructions, and unabashed displays of the carver’s art.

With carvings that both delighted and challenged the eye—often encircling the entire shaft, and frequently culminating in a dramatically shaped handle—these sticks also commanded attention. This quality—the stick’s ability to draw the eye while making a bold sartorial statement—held particular significance for African Americans, many of whom came to these shores with a deeply grounded appreciation for the aesthetic and spiritual potential of carved wood. West Africa boasted a long history of artfully shaped sticks, from short ones used in herding to the longer carved staffs of community and religious leaders. In the South, these traditions easily translated into carved walking sticks, which emerged as potent markers of personal style in a world where both personhood and the very possibility of style were roundly denied by the whites in power. The sticks’ declaration of style thus came with a cost; many whites interpreted fancy sticks in African American hands as clear signs of “uppity” behavior. In 1852 the city of Richmond, Va., even went so far as to pass a law prohibiting African Americans—both enslaved and free—from carrying canes in public. Yet despite WALKING STICKS

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such interdictions, cane carving flourished in antebellum African American culture, and it indeed continues to this day, with walking sticks perhaps playing a more important stylistic role among African Americans than among any other segment of the southern population. Displayed style, of course, is but one dimension of a stick’s meaning. Style speaks to a stick’s performance in the world; many other layers of meaning rest in the act of a stick’s creation. Generations of southern stick makers, for instance, have testified to the intimacy of transforming the natural forms of branch or root into moments of carved grace. “The wood will show you what it’s supposed to become,” muses Mississippi-born stick maker James McGee. “Each piece has its own personality, and you just have to work with it, giving it time to tell you where you’re going. And when it’s right, when it’s done, it’s just like family. There’s a piece of you right there.” Given this sense of connectedness, it should come as no surprise that many southern stick makers keep far more of their sticks for themselves than they sell or give away. The widespread crafting and use of walking sticks probably reached its peak in the South in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. These sticks served a range of functions. Many—such as those whose carvings celebrated one’s service in the Confederacy or marked the glories of the bearer’s religious conversion—were commemorative. Others—like those proclaiming membership in fraternal organizations or testifying to the 378 WALKING STICKS

owner’s occupation—were declarative. Still others served religious ends (often depicting verses and/or scenes from the Bible), while many were purely honorific, crafted for presentation to public figures in honor of their service. (The vitality of this tradition became amply evident during the 2008 presidential campaign, when a 95-year-old African American stick maker presented candidate Barack Obama with a carved walking stick at a Bristol, Va., town meeting.) Most sticks, however, were simply created to delight the eye, inviting pause and comment by their arresting artistry. By the 1930s the use of walking sticks as stylistic statements had dramatically declined among southern whites, responding in part to shifting national tastes and the ready availability of commercially machined canes. As Watford’s opening statement suggests, however, carved sticks kept their cachet in African American communities, where stick makers continued to carve snakes, faces, human forms, and a variety of reptiles—all long-standing motifs in African American stick carving—into wood. The revived interest in vernacular and self-taught art that blossomed at the close of the 20th century brought about something of a renaissance in southern stick making. Carvers across the region discovered that collectors were willing to pay premium prices for uniquely artistic sticks. As a result, many woodworkers turned their sundry skills exclusively toward crafting canes, while many others who had perhaps once tried their hand at whittling but never seriously pursued it now found

themselves with knife and stick in hand. With this resurgence in interest came an explosion of carved, burned, shaped, and painted themes, yielding what may be an even greater variety of forms than ever crafted in southern walking sticks’ 19th-century heyday. Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr., Dolly Parton, comicbook superheroes, and even face jugs (in a move clearly aimed at folk-art collectors) now all grace southern walking sticks. So too do all the more traditional themes, from snakes and alligators to Masonic signs and commemorations of recent war service. Many of these sticks now rest in collectors’ displays. Many others, however, still step proudly alongside their owners, asserting identity while testifying to the skill of their makers. GLENN HINSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Catherine Dike, Canes in the United States: Illustrated Mementoes of American History, 1607–1953 (1994); William Ferris, in Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art, ed. Brenda McCallum (1982); Larry Hackley, Sticks: Historical and Contemporary Kentucky Canes (1988); Jerry King and Chris Nix, in Foxfire 10, ed. George P. Reynolds and others (1993); George H. Meyer, with Kay White Meyer, American Folk Art Canes: Personal Sculpture (1992); Susan Roach, in Public Folklore, ed. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer (1992; 2007).

Womanless Weddings From time to time, grown men hook themselves into bras, struggle into dresses, and perform a womanless wedding in front of family and neigh-

bors. Deeply rooted in the community, a womanless wedding is a mock wedding performed by an all-male cast. Although womanless weddings have taken place throughout the United States, these folk plays are believed to occur most frequently in the Southeast, where they are staged by both whites and African Americans. Womanless weddings are typically organized and directed by women and sponsored by mainstream organizations such as churches, schools, fire departments, chambers of commerce, and various civic and fraternal clubs. They are performed in venues such as church halls and school auditoriums for a cross-section of the community. Most frequently, a womanless wedding’s avowed purpose is to raise funds for a good cause; occasionally, organizers include womanless weddings as entertainment at a social function, mainly to help create a sense of community. Casts feature prominent citizens—mayors, ministers, coaches, bankers, doctors, lawyers, and police chiefs. Costumes range from reasonably realistic wedding attire to outlandish outfits such as hillbilly overalls or glaringly mismatched ensembles. The actors often play with male and female physical attributes by using huge balloons to represent breasts or wearing off-the-shoulder frocks that reveal hairy chests. Tracing the folk play’s history is difficult, although it seems reasonable to assume it is distantly related to European festival customs. Oral histories describe early 20th-century womanless weddings as ad-libbed affairs, with little plot and no formal script. However, WOMANLESS WEDDINGS

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The happy couple beams with joy in this 1940 image of a womanless wedding in Frankfort, Ky. Such mock weddings always featured an all-male cast, often chosen (as was clearly the case in this instance) for the difference in the “bride’s” and “groom’s” sizes. Typically organized as fund-raisers by schools or community organizations (this one was hosted by a Kiwanis Club), womanless weddings continue to delight audiences across the South. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

shortly after World War I, companies began producing scripts for use in community theatricals. During this period, commercially published womanlesswedding scripts appeared, both as booklets and in anthologies. For a fee, some companies furnished personnel to help stage local productions. One such company—the Sympson Levie Company of Bardstown, Ky., and Jackson, Mich.— has been credited with “inventing” the womanless wedding (its best-selling offering), although the company most likely drew on existing traditions. Womanless weddings were a particularly active tradition in southern towns and rural areas during the 1920s and 1930s. With increased mobility and more numerous entertainment options, performances became sporadic by the turn of the 21st century, although some communities and groups revive the folk play now and again. Although directors sometimes write an original script for such productions, they usually hunt up a published version at the local library or, more often, inherit from another group a script several generations removed from its original published source. Regardless, organizers freely make changes both out of respect for the community’s sensibilities and culture and because of practical circumstances, such as cast size. Often hosted by a master of ceremonies, the play usually has two acts: the wedding processional and the ceremony. The attendees often include a weeping mother, a jilted sweetheart, and an out-of-control baby, sometimes accompanied in older versions by an actor in blackface playing a mammy.

During the ceremony, the bride, played by the largest cast member, is joined in matrimony to the groom, the smallest available man. Their vows reflect a decidedly unromantic view of marriage as an institution that is frequently not in the groom’s best interests. Coerced to the altar by the bride’s father—who is sometimes armed with a shotgun— the groom contemplates escape routes. The bride is older, ugly, stupid, and desperate to marry, often because she is pregnant or has already had a child. Successful performances include a great deal of improvisation, with the interplay between the actors and the audience shaping the performance. Much of the humor springs from audience members’ seeing men they know well, often authority figures, behaving in raucous, ludicrous ways that contrast with their everyday roles. On occasion, a mock wedding reception follows, giving cast members and the audience a chance to mingle. The main organizing principle, then, is inversion: men become women, adults become children, whites become blacks, the sacred turns into the profane. By breaking down customary boundaries and bringing normally taboo subjects out into the open, communities acknowledge and express their complicated, often ambivalent feelings about the social realities and forces that affect their everyday lives, especially marriage, gender roles, sex, religion, authority, social class, racial relations, and rural life. Closely related variants include mock weddings, where both males and females cross-dress; womanless beauty WOMANLESS WEDDINGS

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pageants and talent shows, where all the contestants are men in drag; and Tom Thumb weddings, which are performed by children. JANE HARRIS WOODSIDE Johnson City, Tennessee Arthur Depew, The Cokesbury Party Book (1932); Hubert Hayes, A Womanless Wedding (1936); Mrs. James W. Hunt, The Womanless Wedding (1918); Theodore

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Johnson, ed., Baker’s Stunt and Game Book (1928); Walt Larrimore, Bryson City Secrets (2006); Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (2000); Michael Taft, North Dakota History (Fall 1989); Brenda Veradi, Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore (Fall–Winter 2000); Jane Harris Woodside, “The Womanless Wedding: An American Folk Drama” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987).

INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS Amspacher, Karen Willis, 281 Ancelet, Barry Jean, 49 Bernhardt, Jack, 115 Berry, Jason, 323 Boykin, Deborah, 105 Brackner, Joey, 300, 338 Brady, Erika, 92 Bronner, Simon J., 30 Brose, David, 244 Brown, Alan, 74, 296 Burrison, John A., 193, 290, 343 Cantú, Norma E., 315, 353 Core, Jennifer C., 169 Criswell, Stephen, 81 Dargan, Amanda, 77 David, Jonathan C., 356 Day, Douglas, 157 Dickey, Dan W., 163 Donlon, Jon G., 270 Drummond, Shelly, 84 Duncan, Barbara R., 275 Edge, John T., 97 Egerson, John, 254 Ellis, Clyde, 196 Ferris, William, 1, 285, 304, 331, 372 Fine, Elizabeth C., 227 Fulcher, Bobby, 360 Fussell, Fred, 187 Goertzen, Chris, 264, 291 Goldsmith, Tommy, 38 Greaves, Brendan, 174 Green, Archie, 174

Hanchett, Tom, 364 Hanson, Bradley, 183 Harris, Trudier, 336 Hill, Sarah H., 259 Hinson, Glenn, 1, 110, 221, 293, 376 Jabbour, Alan, 278 Jackson, Joyce Marie, 288, 325, 351 Jamison, Philip A., 265, 369 Jeane, D. Gregory, 58 Joyner, Charles, 350 Kirkland, James, 370 Laudun, John, 302 Lewis, William, 320 Lightfoot, William E., 307 Lindahl, Carl, 148, 236 Long, Carolyn Morrow, 241, 309 Malone, Bill C., 68 Marks, Stuart, 137 Marshall, Howard W., 35, Michie, Marsha, 268 Moore, Roddy, 54, 328 Mould, Tom, 298 Neal, Jocelyn R., 313, 374 Newton, M. B., Jr., 293 O’Neal, Jim, 311, 367 Orejuela, Fernando, 127 Owens, Maida, 358 Patterson, Daniel W., 121 Pauly, Andrew, 328 Prewitt, Wiley C., 142, 273

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Rankin, Tom, 142 Riggs, Brett H., 340 Roach, Susan, 209 Roberts, Katherine, 334 Rockoff, Stuart, 253 Roebuck, David G., 283 Rosengarten, Dale, 256 Sawin, Patricia, 232 Spitzer, Nick, 152, 247 Standingdeer, John C., Jr., 275 Sullivan, C. W., III, 64

Vlach, John Michael, 27, 89, 356, 362, 366 Wahlman, Maude Southwell, 203 Wald, Elijah, 43 Webb, Vaughan, 54, 328 Wells, Paul F., 179 Willet, Henry, 200 Williams, Michael Ann, 132 Wilson, Charles Reagan, 102 Woodside, Jane, 379 Zug, Charles G., III, 345

Taylor, Michael C., 318 Titon, Jeff Todd, 215

384

INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX Page numbers in boldface refer to articles. Abingdon, Va., 295 Abrahams, Roger, 176 Abshire, Nathan, 51 Acadians, 20, 49–50, 155, 250, 302 Accordion, 50, 51, 165, 166, 251 Acuff, Roy, 71, 333 Adams, James Taylor, 149 Adams, William, 223 Aesthetics, African American, 27–30; historically white, 30–34; symmetrical, 32 African Americans: music, 1–2, 43–45, 48, 49, 50, 110–15, 127–32, 160, 161, 180, 181–82, 206, 247–48, 250, 304–5, 323, 351–53, 367–68; quilts, 27, 203–9; aesthetics, 27–30; basketmaking, 35, 36, 90; storytelling, 78; family reunions, 83–84; fishing, 85; hoodoo, 95, 222–26, 309–10; foodways, 99–100; grave markers, 126; houses, 133, 135, 137; hunting, 140; Mardi Gras, 153–54, 325–28; religion, 220, 268–69, 288–89, 305; rootwork, 222–26, 309–10; stepping, 227–31; storytelling, 237, 240; pottery, 290–91; juke joints, 311–13; HBCUs, 320–23; mules, 332; ring shouts, 356–58; shout bands, 364–66; walking sticks, 377–78 Afrocentric Native Tongues, 130 Agee, James, 286, 287 Aho, Arnold, 287 Alabama: pottery, 89, 195, 196, 338–40; hunting dogs, 147; Mardi Gras, 152; powwows, 197; public folklife program, 201, 202; quilting, 214; dogtrot house, 287; roadside memorials, 359 Alabama-Coushatta, 278 Alabama State Council on the Arts, 201 Alamo, 150–51, 237

Allen, Manuel, 372 Allman Brothers, 48 Altson, Macky, 84 American Automobile Association, 54 American Children’s Folklore (Bronner), 67 American Folklife Center, 200, 201, 202 American Folklore Society, 202 American Folksongs of Protest (Greenway), 177 American Idol, 120 American Indians, 18, 19; basketmaking, 35, 36, 259–63; fishing, 86; folk medicine, 93; musical instruments, 158; needlework, 170; pottery, 196; powwows, 196–99, 278; storytelling, 237; dancing, 275–78; ginseng, 298; gourds, 300; Mardi Gras Indians, 326–28 American Missionary Association, 351 American Needlepoint Guild, 172 American Revolution, 124 American Service Hymnal, The, 117 American Southern Food Institute, 101 Americus, Ga., 192 Anderson, Chris, 315 Anderson, Jay, 97 Anderson, Mother Leafy, 244 Anderson, S.C., 332 Appalachia, 90, 133, 145, 150, 159, 183, 244, 265, 267, 298, 307–9, 360 Aquaculture, 87 Arch, Davy, 343 Architecture, 30–32 Ardoin, Alphonse “Bois Sec,” 248 Ardoin, Amédé, 248 Ardoin, Chris, 249 Arkansas, 36, 84, 340, 369 Armstrong, Louis, 154, 160, 324, 325 385

Army Corps of Engineers, U.S., 202 Arnold, Eddy, 72 Arnold, Kokomo, 46 Arrested Development, 130 Asheville, N.C., 42, 120, 267 Athens, Ala., 293 Atlanta, Ga., 68, 82, 107, 116, 129, 130, 131, 161, 181, 203, 230, 253, 254, 269, 320, 368, 373 Atlanta Constitution, 99 Atlantic, N.C., 88 Auchmutey, Jim, 256 Audubon, John James, 300 Aust, Gottfried, 346 Autry, Gene, 47, 71 Ayala, Ramon, y los Bravos del Norte, 167 Ayers, Sarah, 342 Bagby, George, 97 Bailey, Deford, 160 Baldknobbers Jamboree, 183 Baldwin, Joseph, 372 Balfa, Dewey, 52, 53 Balfa Toujours, 53 Ball, Edward, 84 Baltimore, Md., 86, 198 Bambaataa, Afrika, 127, 130 Bandy, Moe, 72 Banjar, 158, 159 Banjo, 158, 161, 180, 292 Banner, David, 131 Baptism, 220 Bar and bat mitzvahs, 253–54 Barbecue, 98, 254–56 Barber, Edwin Atlee, 290 Bardstown, Ky., 298 Barn-dance programs, 185–86 Barns, 32, 135–37 Basie, Count, 46 Basketmaking, 35–38, 90; Lowcountry, 256–59; Native American, 259–63 Bass, George H., 268 Bass, Jonathan, 98 Bass, Tommy, 96 386 INDEX

Batiste, Milton, 325 Baton Rouge, La., 156 Beaufort, S.C., 298 Beau Joque, 248 Bell, John, 149 Benson, N.C., 333 Benton, Thomas Hart, 178 Bernalillo, N.Mex., 316 Betts, Doris, 333 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 40, 96 Bibb, Henry, 225, 310 Bigham family, 123 Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking (Neal), 101 Biloxi, Miss., 152 Biloxi Indians, 261 Bird hunting, 143 Birmingham, Ala., 173, 351 Black Family Reunion Celebrations, 83 Black Greek-letter societies, 227–28, 230, 231 Bland, Bobby “Blue,” 49, 368 Bliss, Philip P., 116 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 333 Blue, Doris, 342 Bluegrass, 22–23, 38–42, 119, 180, 181, 189, 292 Bluegrass Album Band, 41 Bluegrass and Old Time Fiddlers Convention, 190 Blue Grass Boys, 39, 181, 264 Bluegrass festivals, 23, 41, 42, 72, 264–65 Bluegrass Unlimited, 40 Blue Ridge Mountains, 330, 331 Blue Ridge Music Trails, 187 Blues, 29, 32, 43–49, 304–7, 311–13, 367 Boatbuilding, 87 Boatright, Mody, 177 Bobb, Victor “Hickory Stick Vic,” 89 Bolden, Buddy, 160 Boll, Eleanor, 77, 78 Bolton, Henry, 64 Bonds, Nedra, 208 Bonnie and Clyde, 40 Bonsoir Catin, 53 Boone, Daniel, 299

Bossard, James, 77, 78 Botkin, Benjamin, 177 Bottle trees, 91 Bounce music, 130 Boykin, L. W. “Whit,” 146 Boykin spaniel, 145–46 Boy Scouts, 245 Brackman, Barbara, 211 Bradley, Dale Ann, 42 Branham, Monty, 342 Branson, Mo., 183 Brasstown, N.C., 246 Brasstown Carvers, 246–47 Brevard, N.C., 191 Bristol, Tenn., 70 British aesthetics, 30, 32, 34 Bronner, Simon, 64, 66 Brooks, Garth, 73 Broonzy, Big Bill, 46 Broussard, Jeffery, 249 Brown, Charles, 47 Brown, Davis and Javan, 291 Brown, Hope, 247 Brown, Jerry, 340 Brown, Keith, 342 Brown, Larry, 274 Brown, Milton, and his Musical Brownies, 71 Brown, William Wells, 225 Browne, Ray B., 150 Brownsville, Tex., 165 Brumley, Albert, 118 Bryson, Lillie, 342 Buckdancing, flatfooting, and clogging, 265–67 Bulger, Peggy, 201, 203 Burial societies, 103 Burns, Jethro, 160 Bush, George H. W., 151 Bush, George W., 216 Buzzard, Doctor, 310 Byrd, Tracy, 376 Cain, Joe, 154 Cajun music, 49–54, 247, 250, 251

Cajuns, 20, 21, 50–52, 152, 155, 249, 251, 304, 359 Caldwell, Erskine, 333 California, 56, 318 Calloway, Sheriff John W., 255 Caloosa, 86 Calvary, Ga., 333 Calvarymen, 117 Campbell, Clive “Kool Herc,” 127 Campbell, Glen, 119 Campbell, Leroy, 274 Campbell, Olive Dame, 246 Cannon, D. J., 301 Canton, Tex., 295, 296, 372 Cantú, Timoteo, 164 Capote, Truman, 333 Capp, Al, 96 Car culture, 54–58, 331 Caribbean, 20, 135, 255, 326, 362, 363 Carnival, 152–57 Carpenter, Aunt Arie, 96 Carpenter, Mary Chapin, 376 Carr, Leroy, 46 Carrière, Bébé, 250 Carter, Clarence, 49 Carter Family, 70 Carter Family Fold, 187 Carving, 89, 244–47, 377. See also Grave markers Cash, Johnny, 119, 120 Casper, 315 Castle, Vernon and Irene, 43 Catahoula, 145 Catawba, 196, 277, 341, 342, 344 Catholicism, 151, 152–53, 225, 241–42, 244, 249 Catolster, Eve, 342 Cemeteries, 58–64, 75, 278–80 Center for Southern Folklore, 200 Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 101 Chandler, Thomas, 290 Chapel Hill, N.C., 182 Charles, Ray, 368 Charleston, S.C., 82, 101, 125, 257, 258, 298 INDEX

387

Charlotte, N.C., 198, 363 Chattanooga, Tenn., 56 Chavis, Wilson “Boozoo,” 248 Chenier, Cleveland, 248 Chenier, Clifton, 50, 248 Cherokee, 7, 16–17, 36, 133, 137, 196, 236–37, 260, 262, 266, 275, 276, 277, 298, 341, 342, 343, 362 Cherokee, N.C., 342 Cherryholmes, 42 Chesney, Kenny, 73 Chester, S.C., 57 Chester County, S.C., 125 Chestnut, Charles W., 225 Chicago, Ill., 45, 46, 48, 70, 167, 181, 185, 269, 307, 368 Chickasaw, 261, 341 Children of Strangers (Morgan), 78 Children’s folklore, 64–68 Children’s Folklore (Mechling), 66 Chitimacha, 261, 262–63, 278 Choctaw, 36, 90, 261, 262, 263, 277, 278, 300, 341 Chopped and screwed, 131 Christ, Rudolf, 346 Christenberry, William, 287 Christianity, 15, 223, 234, 268, 269, 270, 285, 356, 358 Chuck Wagon Gang, 118 Church dramas, 268–70 Ciara, 131 Citizen Kane, 178 Civilian Conservation Corps, 133 Civil War, 78, 99, 126, 212, 297 Clarksdale, Miss., 306, 311 Cleburne County, Ala., 340 Clements, William, 216 Clinton, Bill, 230 Clipse, 131 Coakley, Sam, 258 Cobb, Ned, 332 Cocaine rap, 131 Cockfighting, 270–72 Cohen, John, 182 Coleman, Gregory, 270 388 INDEX

Collins, Camilla, 202 Collins, Russell, 361 Columbia, S.C., 125 Columbia, Tenn., 332, 333 Communion, 220–21 Confederate Receipt Book, 99 Congress, U.S., 88, 200, 216 Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, 142 Conjure Woman, The (Chestnut), 225 Consalvos, Felipe Jesus, 178 Cooke, Sam, 46, 368 Coon hounds, 8, 273–74 Coon Hunters Handbook, The, 273 Corn, 98 Cornbread, 98–99 Corpus Christi, Tex., 165 Cortez, Gregorio, 177 Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, 53 Count Basie Orchestra, 47 Country Dance Lines, 314 Country music, 32, 68–73, 120, 142, 183, 186, 304, 313, 314, 374–76 Courir de Mardi Gras, 152, 155 Courville, Sady, 50 Coushatta, 278 Cowan, Pauline Miller, 246 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (Lomax), 176 Cox, Ida, 44 Craft revivals, 36 Craig, Burlon, 89, 291, 348 Crawford, Arlene, 301 Creeks, 276, 277 Creole Jazz Band, 44 Creole music, 247 Creoles, 152, 155, 156, 160, 248, 249, 251, 252, 304, 363 Crockett, Davy, 233, 237 Crone, Laurence, 125 Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, 187 Crunk, 131 Crystal Springs, Miss., 147 Cuisine Creole, La (Hearn), 97 Cyrus, Billy Ray, 314

Dairies, 335 Dalhart, Vernon, 70 Dallas, Ga., 344 Dallas, Tex., 270, 320 Dance, 7, 51, 183, 189, 196–97, 199, 229–30, 247–52, 265–67, 313–18, 322, 324, 326, 353, 355, 357, 369–70, 374–76; American Indian traditions, 275–78. See also individual dance styles Daniels, Charlie, 120 Darden, Norma Jean and Carole, 80 Davidson County, N.C., 125 Davies, Thomas, 290 Davis, Amy, 183 Davis, Jefferson, 103 Davis, Jimmy, 237 Davis, John, 313 Davis, Tyrone, 367 Davis, Walter, 46 Dean, James, 56 Deathlore, 74–76 Death omens, 74 DeBeck, Billy, 96 Decatur, Ala., 297 Decker, Charles, 290 Decoration Day, 62, 63, 278–80 Decoy carving, 281–83 Deep Blues (Palmer), 44 Deep Enough for Ivorybills (Kilgo), 143 Dejean, Harold “Duke,” 325 DeKalb County, Ala., 340 Delafose, Geno, 249 De la Rosa, Tony, 167 Delaware, 357 Deliverance, 40 DeMent, Iris, 73 Dem Franchize Boys, 131 Desdumes, Mamie, 43 Devil on Wheels, 56 D4L, 131 Diamond, Jack, 229 D’Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne, 153 Different World, A, 227 Dinner on the grounds, 283–85 Dirty Dozen Brass Band, 325

Dirty rap, 130 Discoveries (Lederer), 237 Divine inspiration, 15–16 Dixie Chicks, 73 Dixie Hummingbirds, 352 DJs, 127 Doddridge, Joseph, 238 Dogtrot house, 285–88 Dollywood, 183 Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend (Gunn), 94 Dorsey, Thomas A., 110 Dorson, Richard M., 34, 240 Dotson, Louis, 90 Doucet, Michael, and BeauSoleil, 53 Douglas, Jerry, 41 Douglass, Frederick, 176, 225, 310 Dozens, 128–29 Drake, David, 195 Driskill Mountain Boys, 265 Drop Jaw Magazine, 320 Drumline, 227 Duche, Andrew, 344 Ducks Unlimited, 139 Dulcimer, 159 Duncan, Stuart, 41 Dupree, Nathalie, 101 Dural, Stanley “Buckwheat,” 251 Earle, Steve, 73 Eastern Band Cherokee, 341, 342–43 Easter Rock, 288–89 Eaton, Allen, 33 Eatonville, Fla., 235 Ebony, 84 Edgefield District, S.C., 193, 195, 290, 339, 344 Edmonds, Randolph, 269 Edmondson, William, 29, 89, 126 Egerton, John, 101 Elliot, Missy, 132 Ellison, Ralph, 100–101 Embroiderers’ Guild of America, 172 Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns (Brackman), 211 INDEX

389

Esparza, Francisco and Gregorio, 152 ESPN, 361 Eunice, La., 191 Eureka, 325 Evans, Walker, 286, 287 Everly Brothers, 142 Face jugs, 290–91, 340 Fairfield Four, 352 Family folklore, 77–80 Family Name, 84 Family reunions, 81–84 Farmer, Sydney, 239 Farmer’s Almanac, 109 Fasanella, Ralph, 178 Faulkner, William, 100, 140, 146, 286, 333, 373 Fayetteville, N.C., 320 Federal Communications Commission, 186 Federal Writers’ Project, 177 Feintuch, Burt, 202 Ferguson, Charles, 344 Ferguson, Gola, 145 Ferris, William, 200 Festival of American Folklife, 200 Festivals, 8, 23, 41, 42, 179, 264–65 Feufollet, 53 Fiddle, 159, 180, 291–93 Fiddle contests, 264, 291–93 Field, Charlie, 92 Fincastle, Va., 41 First Great Awakening, 218 First Monday Trades Days, 293–96, 372 Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S., 141 Fishing, coastal, 84–89 Fisk University, 351 5678 magazine, 314 Flatt, Lester, 39, 40, 41 Flax, Walter, 92 Flea markets, 293, 295 Fleck, Bela, 41 Fletcher, Tom, 351 Florida: car culture, 54; fishing, 85, 86, 88; public folklife program, 201, 202; quilt390 INDEX

ing, 214; basketmaking, 257; los matachines, 318 Florida Folklife Program, 201 Flynt, Wayne, 286 Fodor, Clara Haluska, 172 Foggy Mountain Boys, 40 Folk arts and crafts, 89–92 Folklife: and community, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 11, 14, 15; and meaning, 4–5, 6, 7, 9, 23; study of, 5, 6; and tradition, 11–12, 14, 15, 16–17, 24 Folk medicine, 92–97; stereotype of, 96 Folksong USA (Lomax and Lomax), 356 Fontenot, Canray, 248 Foodways, 80, 97–102, 104 Fort Worth, Tex., 68, 116, 181, 185, 373 Four Harmony Kings, 352 Fox, Harry, 374 Foxfire (Wigginton), 94, 96, 101 Fox trot, 374–75 France, Bill, 55 Franklin, Aretha, 367 Franklin, Benjamin, 349 Franklin County, Va., 330 Fredericksburg, Tex., 372 Freedmen’s Bureau, 83, 351 French Creoles, 49 French language, 51, 53 French Louisiana, 189, 191, 249, 251–52 Fresno, Calif., 167 Frizzell, Lefty, 72 Fulcher, Joe, 283 Fulcher, Mitchell, 281 Fulson, Lowell, 313 Funerals, 74, 75, 102–4 Furtado, Nelly, 132 Gainesvile, Ala., 76 Gaither Gospel Hour, 119 Gaither Vocal Band, 117 Galax, Va., 190 Galveston, Tex., 298 Games and Pastimes of Childhood (Stella), 361 Gangsta rap, 130

Gant, Reginald Duke, 208 García, Peter, 316 Gardening, 105–10 Garlits, Don “Big Daddy,” 57 Garlow, Clarence, 250 Gaudet, Adlai, 238 Gaytán, Juan, 164 Genovese, Eugene D., 100 Gentry, Jane, 308 George, Bernadine, 343 George, Evelyn, 342 Georgia: basketmaking, 35, 90, 257; pottery, 89, 195, 196, 343–45; gardening, 108; grave markers, 126; houses, 135; hunting dogs, 147; needlework, 170; picking sessions, 192; public folklife program, 202; quilting, 214; los matachines, 316, 318; moonshining, 331 Georgia Quilt Project, 214 Georgia Tom, 46 Germans, 50, 125, 135, 163, 166, 290 Geto Boys, 130 Ghostface Killah, 178 Ghosts along the Cumberland (Montell), 150 Ghost stories, 75, 150, 234, 296–98 Ghost Stories from the American South (McNeil), 150 Gibson, “Jockey Jack,” 127 Gibson Guitar Corporation, 162 Ginseng hunting, 298–300 Glass, Bill, Jr., 341 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 171 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 286 Goertzen, Chris, 197–98 Gold City, 117 Golden Gate Quartet, 112, 353 Gomez, Carlos, 319, 320 Good Housekeeping, 171 Gospel Hymns and Sacred Tunes, 116 Gospel music: African American, 1–4, 110–15, 351; white, 115–20 Gosse, Philip Henry, 301 Gourd martin houses, 300–302 Grace, Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy,” 364

Grambling State University, 227 Grandmaster Flash, 127 Grand Ole Opry, 39, 70, 71, 72, 118, 119, 172, 185–86 Grave markers, 121–26, 195 Graves, Uncle Josh, 160 Graveyard tales, 75–76 Great Depression, 46, 78, 99, 177, 345 Great Gospel Hymns, 118 Green, Archie, 177, 200 Green, Ben, 373 Green Corn Ceremony, 7, 276, 277 Greene, Richard, 40 Greenway, John, 177 Greenwood, Melanie, 314 Griffith, Marcia, 314 Gris-gris, 242, 243 Grisman, David, 41 Guitar, 161–62 Guitarreros, 164–65 Gulf Coast, 152–56, 363 Gullah, 259 Gumbo, 302–4 Gunn, John C., 94 Guthrie, Woody, 178 Gutierrez, C. Paige, 308 Guy, Buddy, 48 Habitat for Humanity, 108 Haggard, Merle, 72 Haiti/Haitians, 20, 21, 50, 242, 243, 244, 302–3, 323, 363 Hale County, Ala., 287 Haley, Alex, 83 Haley, Bill, 48 Hall-and-parlor house, 134 Halloween, 269 Hamlet, The (Faulkner), 286, 373 Hampton Institute, 310, 351 Hand, Wayland, 177 Handwork, 33–34 Handy, W. C., 43–44, 351 Hannah, Crystal, 341, 343 Happy Goodman Family, 117, 118 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, 42 INDEX

391

Harlan County, U.S.A., 178 Harmon, Council, 308 Harmonica, 159 Harps of Melody, 352 Harris, Emmylou, 72, 73 Harris, Georgia, 342, 344 Harris, Joel Chandler, 240 Harris, Wynonie, 47 Hart, Alvin Youngblood, 48 Haunted History, 297 Haunted Hotels, 298 Hawes, Bess Lomax, 201, 202, 203 Hay, George D., 185 HBCUs, 320–23 Head, Al, 201 Healing, 92–97, 370–72 Hearn, Lafcadio, 97 Heaven Bound, 268–69, 270 Hemphill, Joel and LaBreeska, 118 Henderson, Jocko, 127 Henry, Richard, 341 Hewell, William, 291 Hicks, Orville, 308 Hicks, Ray, 308 Hicks, Stanley, 308 Hill, Faith, 73 Hill, Samuel S., 215, 216, 217 “Hillbilly” music, 69, 71 Hillbilly Opry, 187 Hiltons, Va., 187 Hip-hop, 127–32 Histoire de la Louisiane, 242 History and Legends of the Alamo (Zavala), 151 History of Carolina, The (Lawson), 301 Hodgenville, Ky., 183 Hofer, Mary Ruef, 64 Hoggs, Dock, 178 Hog hunting, 145 Hogs, 145, 366 Holiday, Billie, 47 Hollow Rock String Band, 182 Holt, George, 201 Honky-tonk music, 71, 72 Hoodoo, 95, 221–26, 244, 309 392 INDEX

Horton, Laurel, 211 Hot Rod, 56 Houma, 261, 263 Hounds, 143–44 House parties, 304–7 Houses, 30–32, 132–37 Houston, Tex., 128, 130, 247, 254 Howard University, 228, 230 Howlin’ Wolf, 46, 48 Huie, William Bradford, 98 Humor, 234–35, 373 Hunt clubs, 139–40 Hunting, 8, 137–42, 273–74, 281–83 Hunting dogs, 139, 141, 142–47, 273 Hurricane Katrina, 156 Hurston, Zora Neale, 98, 177, 225, 235, 310, 337 Hurt, Mississippi John, 48 I houses, 134–35 Improvisation, 29, 30, 203, 204, 205, 218 Ink Spots, 46 Interagency Archaeological Services, 202 International Bluegrass Music Association, 42 Internet, 105, 109, 119, 192, 226, 228, 297 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 100 Invisible Man (Ellison), 100 Irish, 373 Ironworking, 89 Isaacs, 117, 118 Jabbour, Alan, 182, 200, 201 Jack Tales, 239, 307–9 Jackson, Alan, 73, 120 Jackson, Andrew, 149, 271, 323 Jackson, John, 238 Jackson, Mary, 258 Jackson, Michael, 314 Jackson, Millie, 49 Jackson, Miss., 107, 368 Jackson, Papa Charlie, 44 Jacobs, Little Walter, 313 Jamestown, Va., 31 Jason Boone Band, 265

Jaubert, Gus, 255 Jay-Z, 132 Jazz, 324, 325 Jean, Wyclef, 129 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 44, 45, 313 Jefferson, Thomas, 271, 332 Jerusalem Ridge Festival, 42 Jewish religious ritual, 253–54 Jew’s harp, 159 Jiménez, Flaco, 167 Jiménez, Santiago, 166 Jivers, Jolly, 313 John C. Campbell Folk School, 246, 247 Johnson, Junior, 331 Johnson, Lonnie, 46 Johnson, Pine Top, 306–7 Johnson Mountain Boys, 41 Johnston County, N.C., 37 John the Conqueror root, 222, 224, 309–11 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston), 98 Jones, George, 72 Jones, Sir Charles, 367 Jonesborough, Tenn., 240 Joplin, Scott, 351 Jubilee quartets, 351–52 Juke joints, 311–13 Just Cross Stitch, 173 Juvenile, 131 Kaine, Timothy, 148 Karpeles, Maud, 369 Keith, Bill, 40 Kelsey, Hugh, 125 Kennedy, Stetson, 177, 235 Kentucky: bluegrass, 39, 42; deathlore, 74; ghostlore, 150; barbecue, 256; dance, 265, 369; Jack tales, 308; roadside memorials, 359; rolley hole marbles, 360–62; traders, 372 Kentucky Folklife Festival, 361 Kentucky Folklore Record, 202 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 101 Kentucky Quilt Project, 214 Kickapoo, 278 Kilgo, James, 143

King, Adrian, 203 King, Albert, 48, 368 King, B. B., 48, 368 King, George L., 99 Kniffen, Fred, 60 Knoxville, Tenn., 331 Koasati, 261, 262, 263 Kongo, 207–8, 230, 242, 310 Korson, George, 176 Krauss, Alison, 38, 41, 42 Ku Klux Klan, 235 KWKH (Shreveport), 70 Laborlore, 174–79 Ladies Garden Club of Athens, 108 Lafayette, La., 152, 251 Lafayette Rhythm Devils, 53 Laine, Papa Jack, 324 Lamar County, Ala., 339 Lane, William Henry, 229 Laredo, Tex., 165 LaSalle, Denise, 49 Latinos, 20, 151–52, 226, 353–56 Laveau, Marie, 242 Lawrenceburg, Tenn., 116 Lawson, Doyle, 41, 119 Lawson, John, 301 Lawtell, La., 304 LeBlanc, Dudley, 53 Ledbetter, Huddie “Lead Belly,” 48, 178 Lederer, John, 237 Ledet, Rosie, 248 Ledford, Homer, 90 Lee, Harper, 105, 374 Lee, Robert E., 103 Lee, Spike, 154 Legends, 148–52 Legerton, Clarence W., 258 Lejeune, Iry, 51 Lejeune, Louis “Vinesse,” 52 Le Page du Pratz, Antoine-Simon, 242 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Evans and Agee), 286, 287 Lewis, Edna, 101 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 48 INDEX

393

Lewis, Laurie, 42 Lewis Family, 119 Lexington, Ky., 295, 320 Library of Congress, 200 Light Crust Doughboys, 71 Lil’ Brian’s Zydeco Travelers, 249 Liles, Joe, 198 Lil’ Jon, 131 Lil’ Wayne, 178 Lincoln, Abraham, 271 Lincoln Jamboree, 183 Line dancing, 12, 313–15 Literature, 100, 105–6, 286–87, 333 Little, John, 233 Little Joe y la Familia, 168 Little Milton, 49, 368 Littleturtle, Ray, 197 Little Walter, 48 Livingston, Tenn., 362 Livingston, Tex., 372 Log cabin, 132–33 Logan, General John A., 280 Logan, Onnie Lee, 96 Lomax, Alan, 52, 250, 356 Lomax, John, 176, 356 Long, Earl K., 145 Long, Huey, 99, 237 Long, Maud, 239 Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, The (Opie and Opie), 68 Los Angeles, Calif., 47, 318 Los Hermanos Chavarria, 164 Losing Battles (Welty), 286 Los matachines, 315–18 Lost Bayou Ramblers, 53 Louisiana, 20, 160; Cajun music, 49–52; houses, 135; hunting dogs, 145; Mardi Gras, 152, 155, 326; public folklife program, 201; quilting, 214; dance, 229; zydeco, 247–52; cockfighting, 270, 272; Easter Rock, 288; foodways, 302–3; roadside memorials, 359 Louisiana Folk Foundation, 52 Louisiana Hayride, 72 Louisiana Writers’ Project, 242, 243 394 INDEX

Louisville, Ky., 202 Louvin Brothers, 118 Love, Jasper, 306–7 Loveless, Patty, 73 Lowcountry, 35, 36, 256–59 Lowrey, Derek, 197 Lowrider Magazine, 319, 320 Lowriders, 318–20 Luck, Sid, 12–13 Ludacris, 129 Lum, Ray, 373 Lumbee, 197 Lunsford, Bascom Lamar, 267 Lynn, Loretta, 120 Macon, Uncle Dave, 70, 100, 118, 160; and His Fruit Jar Drinkers, 181 Magic Mike, 130 Magnolia State Bluegrass Association, 265 Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, 88 Malabar, Fla., 191 Malone, Bill, 304 Manassas, Va., 318 Maney, Betty, 343 Maney, Louise Bigmeat, 342 Maney, Melissa, 343 Mangum, Cedric, 366 Mansion, The (Faulkner), 286 Märchen, 238–39, 308 Marching bands, HBCU, 320–23; New Orleans, 323–35 Mardi Gras celebrations, 152–57, 326–28, 359 Mardi Gras Indians, 7, 154, 325–28 Marion County, Ala., 339 Martin, Eddie Owen, 92 Martin, Jim, 39, 41 Martin, Murrial “Murray,” 246 Martínez, Lupe, 164 Martínez, Narciso, 166 Marx, David, 253 Maryland, 137, 170, 242, 310, 357 Maryville, Tenn., 184

Mason, Robert L., 144 Masonic societies, 228 Matewan, 178 Matte, Travis, and the Zydeco Kingpins, 100 Matthew, Sonny, 29 Mazloomi, Carolyn, 208 McAuliffe, Leon, 375 McBride, Martina, 120 McCarl, Robert, 177 McCarthy, Cormac, 333 McCaysville, Ga., 192 McCoy, Charlie, 160 McDonald, Mary Anne, 211 McGee, Dennis, 50 McGee, James, 378 McGraw, Tim, 73 McKellar, Billie Anne, 342 McKenney, Tex., 372 McNeil, W. K., 150 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 268 McReynolds, Jim and Jesse, 40, 42 MCs, hip-hop, 127–28, 129 McTell, Blind Willie, 48 Meaders, Arie, 345 Meaders, Casey, 291 Meaders, Cheever, 291, 345 Meaders, Lanier, 89, 291, 345 Mechling, Jay, 66 Mecklenburg County, N.C., 123 Melle Mel, 129 Melody Ranch, 71 Memorial Day, 280 Memphis, Tenn., 48, 82, 131, 177, 198, 200, 351, 368 Memphis Minnie, 46, 100 Mendoza, Lydia, 164 Mexico, 19, 163, 164, 166, 315, 316, 317, 318, 355, 356 Mexico City, 318 Miami, Fla., 130, 368 Miami bass, 130 Miccosukee, 278 Mikasuki, 263 Mills, Jerry Leath, 333

Minstrelsy, 45, 180 Mississippi, 200; folk art, 33; hip-hop, 131; Mardi Gras, 152; pottery, 195; public folklife program, 202; quilting, 214; bluegrass festivals, 264, 265; blues, 306– 7; juke joints, 311; los matachines, 318 Mississippi Delta, 48, 304, 306–7 Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 106 Mississippi Jook Band, 313 Missouri, 36, 366, 367, 369 Mitchell, Anna, 341 Mitchell, Madison, 281 Mobile, Ala., 152, 153, 154–55, 339, 363 Mohamed, Ethel, 90 Monacans, 197, 199 Monroe, Bill, 22, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 51, 119, 160, 181, 264, 333 Monroe Brothers, 39, 70, 142, 144 Montell, William Lynwood, 150, 297 Montgomery, Ala., 107, 191 Mooney, James, 236 Moonshining, 328–31 Moore, Michael, 178 Moore, Mildred, 342 Moore, Rudy Ray, 130 Moravians, 346–47 Morgan, Kathryn, 78 Morgan County, Tenn., 184 Morton, Jelly Roll, 43 Moss, Tenn., 361 Most Haunted, 297 Mott, James, 273 Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 267 Mount Airy, N.C., 190 Mount Pleasant, S.C., 256, 257, 258 Mules, 331–34, 372, 373 Muncy, Jane, 239 Murfreesboro, Tenn., 179 Muscogean people, 275, 276 Muscogee, 341 Musical instruments, 38, 90, 157–62, 188, 317 Música norteña, 166–67, 169 Música tejana, 163–69 INDEX

395

Mutual aid, 357–58 Mystikal, 132 Nappy Roots, 130 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 176 Nashville, Tenn., 54, 68, 70, 73, 116, 126, 162, 172, 181, 185, 351, 373 Nashville Bluegrass Band, 41 “Nashville Sound,” 72 Natchez Indians, 261 National Assembly of Sportsmen’s Caucuses, 142 National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), 55–56 National Barn Dance, 70, 185 National Council of Negro Women, 83 National Endowment for the Arts, 53, 200, 201, 203 National Garden Clubs, Inc., 108 National Marine Fisheries Service, 88 National Quilt Index, 214 National Storytelling Festival, 240 National Turkey Federation, 139 National Wildlife Federation, 139 Native Americans. See American Indians Neal, Bill, 101 Needlework, 169–73 Nelson, Willie, 72 Neptunes, 132 New Boston, Tex., 372 New Deal, 36 New Grass Revival, 41 New Lost City Ramblers, 182 New Mexico, 316, 317 New Orleans, La., 20, 82, 351, 370; music, 7, 43, 48, 129, 130, 159, 160, 364, 368; Haitians, 21; foodways, 97, 101, 302–3, 304; cemeteries, 121; houses, 135, 363; Mardi Gras, 152, 153–54, 155, 156, 325–28; voodoo, 225, 241, 242–44; ghost stories, 298; marching bands, 323–35 Newport Folk Festival Foundation, 52 Newport News, Va., 364 New Southern Cooking (Dupree), 101 396

INDEX

Newton Grove, N.C., 1 New York City, 40, 127, 130 New York Times, 374 Nichols, Joe, 73 Nicholson, Jim, 37 Nickel Creek, 42 Nigeria, 207 “Night with the Hants” and Other Alabama Folk Experiences, A (Browne), 150 Nordan, Lewis, 338 Norrell, Reuben, 301 North Augusta, S.C., 192 North Carolina, 84, 178, 237; pottery, 89, 193, 195, 196, 342, 345–48; grave markers, 123; houses, 135; hunting, 141, 145; needlework, 170; powwows, 197; public folklife program, 201; quilting, 214; rootwork, 221, 225; basketmaking, 257; dance, 267; Jack tales, 308; los matachines, 316; moonshining, 331 North Carolina Arts Council, 201 Northup, Solomon, 229 *NSYNC, 132 N.W.A., 130 Obama, Barack, 378 Oberlin College, 40 O’Brien, Tim, 73 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 42 Occupational folklife, 174–79 Office Space, 178 Oklahoma, 276, 341, 343, 362, 376 Oklahoma Tornadoes, 51 Okra, 302 Old Fiddler’s Convention, 190 Old-time string band music, 179–82, 292 Old Virginia Gentleman and Other Sketches, The (Bagby), 97 Oliver, Joe, 324, 325 Oliver, King, 44, 160 Olmos, Johnny, 319, 320 Olmos, Ruben, 318, 319 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 160, 332 Olympia, 325 Only a Miner (Green), 177

Onward, 324 Opie, Iona and Peter, 64, 68 Opries, 183–87 Optimist’s Daughter, The (Welty), 106 Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, 352, 368 Orquestas tejanas, 165–66, 167–68, 169 Orr, Anne Champe, 171–72 Osborne, Sonny and Bobby, 40, 42 Oster, Harry, 52 Osti, Jane, 341 Oswalt, Shirley, 343 Outbuildings, 334–36 Outkast, 130 Owensboro, Ky., 184, 255 Oystering, 86 Ozuna, Sunny, and the Sunliners, 168 Paisley, Brad, 73, 120 Paley, Tom, 182 Palmer, Robert, 44 Palmetto Country (Kennedy), 177 Pamunkey, 341–42 Parades, 323–24 Paranormal State, 297 Paredes, Américo, 177, 318, 355 Parker, Charlie, 47 Parton, Dolly, 119, 120, 333 “Patting juba,” 229 Peavey Musical Instruments, 162 Peiser, Judy, 200 Penn, Dan, 100 Penn School, 258 Pennsylvania, 123, 136, 210 Pensacola, Fla., 363 Pentecostal Holiness movement, 364 Pérez, Selena Quintanilla, 168 Performance traditions, 7 Perkins, Edmond, 341 Perry, Sister Lena Mae, 1–4, 8 Perry County, Ala., 340 Petersburg, Va., 280 Petrucci, Armando, 126 Petty, Richard “The King,” 55, 56 Pevey, Bill, 146

Pickett, Wilson, 367 Picking sessions, 187–92 Pickin’ in the Park, 192 PieceWork, 173 Piedmont, 36, 123, 195, 346–47 Pigeon Forge, Tenn., 58, 183 Pineleaf Boys, 53 Pitre, Austin, 51 Plant, Robert, 41 Plantation lifestyle, 140 Plott, Johannes George, 145 Plott hounds, 145 Poarch Creek Powwow, 197 Pocahontas, 237 Poole, Charlie, and the North Carolina Ramblers, 181 Poor Man’s Medicine Bag (Waggoner), 94 Poor Richard’s Almanac, 349 Porch sitting, 336–38 Pork, 98 Port Royal, Acadia, 49 Posey, Pearlie, 208 Potter’s Eye, The (Hewitt and Sweezy), 348 Pottery, 12–14, 16–17, 91, 193–96; Alabama, 338–40; American Indian, 340–43; Georgia, 343–45; North Carolina, 345– 48 Powers, Harriet, 90, 206 Powwows, 196–99, 278 Praying, in the folk church, 219 Preaching, in the folk church, 219–20 Presley, Elvis, 48, 72, 120 Primitive Quartet, 120 Proffitt, Frank, Sr., 239, 308 Prohibition, 330 Protestantism, 215–17, 223, 225 Proverbs, 348–50 Public folklife programs, 200–203 Pulaski County, Va., 125, 187 Quartets, African American, 351–53 Queen, Joel, 343 Queen Ida, 248 Quicksilver, 42 INDEX

397

Quilting, 90, 91; African American, 27–28, 91, 203–9; historically white, 209–15 Quilt guilds, 213 Quilt raffles, 213 Quinceañeras, 353–56 Race music, 45 Rackliff-Richmond, Jo Ann, 341 Rader, Paul, 268 Radio, 68, 70, 114, 116, 119, 127, 185, 186, 352 Radio Book, The, 119 Rainey, Ma, 43, 44, 46, 49 Raleigh-Durham, N.C., 318, 320 Rambos, 118 Ramsey, Dovie, 199 Randolph County, Ala., 340 ReBirth Brass Band, 325 Redding, Otis, 367 Redford, Dorothy Spruill, 84 Reed, Dean, 343 Reed, Henry, 182 Reed, John Shelton, 98 Reed, Revon, 52 Reform Judaism, 253–54 Reid, Clarence “Blowfly,” 130 Reinhardt, Harvey, 291 Reivers, The (Faulkner), 286, 333 Reliance, 324 Religious folklife, 1–4, 9, 15, 104, 110–20, 124, 215–21, 241–43, 288–89. See also Christianity Religious road signs, 356 Removal, of Native Americans, 276, 277 Renfro Valley, Ky., 183 Reno, Don, 40, 41 Rice, 256–57 Rice, Tony, 41 Richard, Belton, and his Musical Aces, 52 Richardson, W. Lawrence, 111 Richmond, Va., 54, 55, 198, 377 Riley, Steve, and the Mamou Playboys, 53 Rinehart, John, 56 Ringgold, Faith, 208 Ring shouts, 230, 289, 356–58 Rinzler, Ralph, 52, 200 398

INDEX

Ripley, Miss., 295, 372 River cane, 259–60 Roach, Susan, 211 Roadside memorials, 358–60 Roanoke County, Va., 125 Robbins, Earl, 342 Robbins, Margaret, 342 Roberts, “Fireball,” 56 Roberts, Scott, 341 Robertson County, Tenn., 149 Robinson, Jonathan, 88 Robinson, Robby “Mann,” 249 Rocha, Pedro, 164 Rockbridge, Tenn., 362 Rock Hill, S.C., 342 Rock music, 48 Rocky Fork Jamboree, 184 Rodgers, Jimmie, 47, 70, 333 Rodríguez, Sylvia, 316 Roger, Aldus, and his Lafayette Playboys, 52 Rogers, Will, 332 Rolley hole marbles, 360–62 Rolling Stones, 48 Romero, Brenda, 316 Roots (Haley), 83 Rootwork (hoodoo, conjure), 221–26, 242, 309 Rose, Louis Moses, 150 Ross, Rick, 131 Rowan, Peter, 40 Rucker, Leon, 29 Ruebush-Kieffer, 115, 116 Ruffin, Sonni, 208 Rush, Bobby, 368 Rush, Otis, 48 Rushing, Felder, 107 Rutherford, Lisa, 341 Ryan, Irene, 96 Sacred Harp singing, 116 St. Helena Island, 258 St. Louis, Mo., 46 St. Simons Island, 297 Saints’ Paradise, 366

Salvador, Sallecito, 87 Sam and Dave, 367 Sampler and Antique Needlework Quarterly, 173 San Antonio, Tex., 151, 163, 164, 165, 317 Sanders, Caroleen, 342 Sanders, Cheryl, 342, 343 Sanders, Harland, 101 San Francisco, Calif., 42 Sankey, Ira D., 116 Saunders, Arzada, 342 Savannah, Ga., 297, 298, 344 Savoy, Marc, 191 Scarface, 128 School Daze, 227 Schwartz, Tracy, 182 Scots-Irish, 123, 124, 133, 137, 159, 161 Scottsboro, Ala., 296 Screw, 131 Scruggs, Earl, 39, 40, 41, 42, 160 Seafood, 85–87 Seagrove, N.C., 12, 13–14 Sea Islands, 90, 257, 357 Sease, Marvin, 367 Second Great Awakening, 125, 218 Seeger, Mike, 52, 182 Self-taught artists, 14–15, 16 Seminole, 263, 276, 277, 278, 341 SerVance, George, 14 Sew Beautiful, 173 Shahn, Ben, 178 Sharp, Cecil, 369 Shelbyville, Tenn., 333 Shenandoah Valley, 116, 135, 159 Sherwood, Grace, 148 Shore, Dinah, 47 Shotgun house, 135, 362–63 Shout bands, 364–66 Shreveport, La., 70 Signature quilts, 213 Silent Witness, 119 Simien, Terrance, 251 Simmons, Philip, 27, 28, 30, 89 Singing, in the folk church, 218, 219 Singing schools, 116

Skaggs, Ricky, 42, 73, 119 Skinner, John, 332 Slave narratives, 233 Slavery, 83, 102, 225, 229, 233, 255, 297 Slaves in the Family (Ball), 84 Smith, Bessie, 44 Smith, Captain John, 237 Smith, Clara, 44 Smith, Fiddlin’ Arthur, 100 Smith, Mamie, 44 Smith-Foret, Sun, 208 Smithsonian Institution, 200, 342, 361 Smith’s Sacred Singers, 117 Smokehouse, 335, 366–67 Snoop Dog, 129 Society for the Preservation and Revitalization of Southern Food, 101 Somerset Homecoming (Redford), 84 Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner (Korson), 176 Soul music, 49 Soul Stirrers, 352, 368 South Carolina: basketmaking, 35, 90, 257; grave markers, 123, 126; houses, 135; hunting dogs, 146; needlework, 170; pottery, 193, 342; public folklife program, 202; quilting, 214 Southernaires, 352 Southern Arts Federation, 203 Southern Food (Egerton), 101 Southern Foodways Alliance, 101 Southern soul music, 367–68 Southern University, 227 Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Festival, 251 Sparks, Larry, 41, 42 Spears, Britney, 132 Speck, Frank, 300 Speer Family, 117 Spiritual Church, 244 Spitzer, Nick, 201 Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine (Darden and Darden), 80 Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (Strutt), 361 Springsteen, Bruce, 178 INDEX

399

Square dancing, 267, 369–70 Stafford, Gregg, 325 Stamper, Alyne, 343 Stamps Quartet, 117, 118 Standard Negro Quartette, 352 Stanley, L. O., 55 Stanley, Mary Catherine, 258 Stanley, Ralph and Carter, 39, 41, 42, 119 Stearns, Marshall and Jean, 160, 230 Stefani, Gwen, 132 Stella, Jacques, 361 Step Afrika, 231 Stephenson, Claude, 316 Stepping, 227–31 Stevens, William K., 374 Stomp the Yard, 227, 315 Stonemasons, 123 Stoneware, 91, 193, 195 Stories of personal experience, 231–36 Storytelling, 78, 79, 236–40, 337, 373 Strait, George, 73, 376 String bands, 179–82 Strutt, Joseph, 361 Stuart, Marty, 119 Suggs, J. D., 240 Sullivan, Jerry, 118 Sullivan Family, 118, 119 Summerville, Ga., 192 Superstition, 76, 221 Supreme Court, U.S., 118 Sutton, Bryan, 42 Swan Silvertones, 352 Sweeney, Joel, 158, 160 Swimmer, Amanda, 342, 343 Sykes, Roosevelt, 46 Talking out fire, 370–72 Tall tales, 237–38 Tangerman, Elmer, 245, 247 Tanner, Gid, and His Skillet Lickers, 181 Tarpon Springs, Fla., 85 Taste of Country Cooking, The (Lewis), 101 Tate, Paul, 52 Taylor, James, 41 Taylor, Johnnie, 367 400 INDEX

Taylor, Sara Mary, 207, 208 Tejanos, 163–69 Television, 119, 186, 297 Tennessee: barns, 136; needlework, 170; moonshining, 331; rolley hole marbles, 360–62; traders, 372 Tennessee Arts Commission, 200–201 Tennessee Quilt Project, 214 Tennessee Valley Oldtime Fiddlers Contest, 293 Terry, Sonny, 160 Texas, 128, 177; blend of cultures, 19; basketmaking, 36; pottery, 89, 195; legends, 151–52; música tejana, 163–69; opries, 183; quilting, 214; stepping, 231; zydeco, 247; fiddle contests, 292–93; los matachines, 316, 317; traders, 372 Texas two-step, 374 Tex-Mex music, 163 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 160 Theriot, Roy, 53 Thibodeaux, Gladius, 52 Thomas, James “Son,” 29, 89 Thomas, Neil, 37 Thompson, E. P., 175 Thompson, Mary Ann, 343 Thompson, O. C., 118 Thompson, Robert Farris, 206, 230 Three 6 Mafia, 131 T. I., 129 Timbaland, 132 Timberlake, Justin, 132 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 105, 374 Toups, Wayne, and ZydeCajun, 53 Traders, 372–74 Trades days, 293–96 Tradition, 11–12, 14, 15, 16–17, 24, 29, 30 Travis, Randy, 73, 120 Travis, William Barrett, 150 Trespass and game laws, 138 Tryon, N.C., 245–46 T-Salé, 53 Tucker, Elizabeth, 64 Tunica Indians, 261 Turner, Curtis, 56

Turner, Joe, 47 Tuscarora, 197 Twain, Shania, 73 2 Live Crew, 130 Two Rivers Bluegrass Festival, 264, 265 Two-stepping, 374–76 UGK, 131 Ultimate Beagle, The (Mason), 144 Uncle Dave Macon Days, 179 Underground Railroad, 206 Underwood, Carrie, 120 Underwood, Joanna, 341 University of Mississippi, 102 University of North Carolina, 177 University of South Carolina, 202 University of Texas, 231 Unk, 315 Urban Cowboy, 375 Usher, 131, 132 Utica Institute Jubilee Quartet, 352 Valentine, Faun, 211 Vance, Eleanor, 246 Van Zandt County, Tex., 294 Variety shows, 185 Vasquez, Victoria Mitchell, 341 Vaughan, James D., 116 Vaughan Publishing Company, 116 Vaughn, Stevie Ray, 48 Vegetable gardens, 108–9 Vickery, Weldon, 301 Vicksburg, Miss., 121 Victory Gardens, 109 Villa, Beto, 168 Vincent, Gene, 56 Vincent, Rhonda, 42 Virginia: basketmaking, 35; car culture, 55; funerals, 102; hip-hop, 132; barns, 135; musical instruments, 159; needlework, 170; pottery, 193, 340, 341; powwows, 197; public folklife program, 202; quilting, 214; barbecue, 256; Jack tales, 308; conjure, 310; moonshining, 331; mules, 332; smokehouses, 366

Vlach, John Michael, 34 Vodou, 208, 242, 243 Voodoo, 225, 241–44 Waggoner, Tillman, 94 Wahlman, Maude Southwell, 211 Wahneetah, Cora, 342 Waiters, Mel, 367 Walker, Alice, 106, 232 Walker, Lawrence, 51 Walker, T-Bone, 46, 47 Walking sticks, 14, 376–79 Wall, Paul, 131 Wallace, George, 197 Ward, Marshall, 308 Ward, Steve and Lem, 281 Warner, Pecolia, 90, 207 Washboard Sam, 47 Washington, D.C., 40, 201, 203, 231, 364 Washington, Dinah, 47 Washington, George, 256, 271, 331–32 Waters, Muddy, 46, 48 Watford, Arliss, 379 Watson, Cedric, 251 Watts, Howard, 39 WBAP (Fort Worth), 68, 116, 181, 185 Weinraub, Anita Zaleski, 211 Weiser, Idaho, 293 Welch, Maude, 342 Wells, Kitty, 72 Welty, Eudora, 106, 232, 286 West Africa, 18, 19, 20, 35, 44, 83, 95, 126, 135, 158, 159, 204, 206, 207, 223, 230, 240, 241, 250, 251, 302, 310, 313, 325, 326, 328, 363, 377 Western Kentucky University, 202 West Virginia, 211, 214, 239, 369 Wheatstraw, Peetie, 46 White, Josh, 48 White, Linda, 200 White, Michael, 325 Whittaker, Hudson “Tampa Red,” 46, 160 Wickcliffe, Ky., 274 Wigginton, Eliot, 94, 96 Wildlife agencies, 138 INDEX

401

Willett, Hank, 201, 203 Williams, Dewey, 301 Williams, Hank, 47, 72, 120 Williams, Hank, Jr., 333 Williams, Nathan, and the Zydeco ChaChas, 251 Williamson, John Lee “Sonny Boy,” 47, 144 Wills, Bob, and the Texas Playboys, 51, 71, 375, 376 Wilson, Jimmy, 238 Wilson, John, Jr., 98 Winfield, Ala., 333 Winnfield, La., 145 Winnsboro, La., 288–89 Wire, The, 178 Wise, Chubby, 39 Wise County, Va., 149 Wiseman, Mac, 40, 42 Witches, 148–49 Withers, Carl, 64 Witnessing, 220 WLS (Chicago), 181, 185 WOAN (Lawrenceburg), 116 Wolf Whistle (Nordan), 338 Womanless weddings, 379–82 Wonder, Stevie, 154 Wood carving, 244–47 Woodward, C. Vann, 96

402

INDEX

Work, John W., 43 Works Progress Administration, 177, 225, 233, 242 Wright, Richard, 333 WSB (Atlanta), 68, 116, 181 WSM (Nashville), 68, 70, 116, 181, 185 WSM Barn Dance, 185 Wynette, Tammy, 119 Wythe County, Va., 125 Yale, Charlotte, 246 Yarborough, Cale, 56 Ying-Yang Twins, 131 Yoakam, Dwight, 73 Youngbird, Rebecca, 342 Young Jeezy, 131 Young Tuxedo, 324, 325 Yuchi, 341 Yung Buck, 129 Zavala, Adina de, 151 Zion Harmonizers, 352 Zuber, William, 151 Zulu parade, 153–54 Zydeco, 50, 247–52 Zydeco Force, 249 ZZ Top, 48