Our History. The New York Folklore Society was founded in 1944 by a group of folklorists, historians, writers, and enthusiasts—dreamers and visionaries emerging from the Great Depression. Sharing a vision for cultural democracy after World War II, they felt that it was essential to collect, save, and share the folk arts and cultural traditions of the many cultures that made up the urban and rural areas of the state, its historic regions, and the American literary traditions it inspired. The founders’ goal was to “plow back”: to give back traditional arts to the people who created and maintained them.
Column
From the Editor
A Call to Action.
Just before the new
year, along with hundreds of arts nonprofits across
the state, the New York
Folklore Society received
alarming news. New
York State’s deficit reduction
plan instituted in December 2008 included
extensive cuts to a number of state programs—
including the grants budget of the
New York State Council on the Arts. The cuts
to NYSCA meant that pending requests for
fiscal year 2008–9 funding, including the New
York Folklore Society’s request for general operating
support, could not be considered.
Still Going Strong
Karen Sell is a modern practitioner of
the age-old craft of wig making. A native
of Singapore, Karen studied hairstyling in
England, where she also took a course in wig
making. She worked as a stylist for the Vidal
Sassoon salons in London, then later in New
York when she immigrated to this country in
the late 1980s. In New York, she also worked
as a stylist at a salon that made wigs. There,
she styled and maintained wigs for clients,
then established her own wig-making business
about fifteen years ago.
Upstate
A
new web site that we recently launched at Traditional
Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY),
which we call “W is for the Woods”: Traditional
Adirondack Music and Music-Making.
Located at www.northcountryfolklore.org, it’s
a very impressive piece of work, a thorough
introduction to the traditional music of our
region, collected over a period of at least 75
years.
Downstate
“I am the accumulated memory and
waistline of the dead restaurants of New
York,” writes the poet Bob Hershon, “and the
dishes that will never be set before us again…” I’m with
Hershon—for where but in memory can I
ever again find the spicy taste of the prah
prig sod at Siam Square, with its unique mix
of lemon grass and spiced peppers? Ingested
into our very beings, these tastes play a part
in our social gatherings and, later, can define
our fondest memories.
Foodways
At Yankee Stadium, béisbol is as American
as alcapurrias—those plump, golden-brown
plantain patties stuffed with seasoned beef.
It’s so from the sunken rye and bluegrass
sod field to the breeziest bleacher top.
With roughly thirty percent of United
States baseball players now of foreign-born
Hispanic heritage and the House that
Ruth Built smack dab in one of the most
established Puerto Rican communities in
the nation, large, hungry, thirsty crowds
have directed the market toward foods
that reflect fans’ cultural heritage.
Play
In the years before the Revolution made it
America’s patriotic anthem, “Yankee Doodle”
was a song of derision that the British
heaped upon ignorant colonists hoping to
attain foppish stature by aping English gentlemen.
In Praise of Women
At nineteen, Maeve Flanagan is one of the
finest young Irish fiddlers in New York and
the world. Daughter of fiddler and multi-instrumentalist
Mike Flanagan—“My dad
knows every tune imaginable,” says Maeve—
and fiddle player and teacher Rose Conway
Flanagan, Maeve is well aware of the Irish
American musical and cultural legacy she
has inherited:
Good Spirits
Have you ever spent a night in a haunted
bed-and-breakfast? Having stayed in several
inns that pride themselves on their resident
ghosts, I know that stories about these
ghosts’ appearances can be the best part
of overnight stays. Introduced at breakfast
along with blueberry pancakes, waffles, or omelettes, such stories add a dimension
of wonder to what might otherwise be a
humdrum stay.
From the Director
As we look back
on our organization’s
sixty-fifth year,
I would like to thank
all of our supporters
on behalf of the entire
New York Folklore
Society family.
2009 was a year of
great upheaval and rethinking of the organization….Partnerships in
2009 … helped us to realize programming goals: Union College, the Albany Institute
for History and Art, the City of Schenectady,
and the Erie Canalway National Heritage
Corridor were invaluable in helping us to
continue to provide folklore and folk arts
programming
From the Editor
The articles featured
in this issue of Voices
contain a variety of
voices whose messages
are “traditional”—in the
surprising, the comforting,
and even the most
alarming senses of that disciplinary keyword. In the photo essay “Carving Out a Life:
Reflections of an Ithaca Wood-Carver,”
self-taught carver Mary Michael Shelley describes
how she responded simultaneously
to her Northeastern farm family heritage,
liberal arts education, and the emerging
feminism of her time to claim a form of
man’s work—carpentry and carving…
Upstate
We all know that time flies when we’re having
fun. As for me, I can scarcely believe that
thirty years have passed since the summer
of 1979, when Valerie Ingram and I, both
recent Cooperstown “folkies,” organized a
conference we called Getting the “Lore” Back
to the “Folk” for anyone interested in folklore,
particularly applied folklore, as it was called
in those days. It was the ’70s, and this was
a new field.
Downstate
Why do folklorists and scholars of
play so rarely explore the playful aspects
of sex? Perhaps, as I’ve always suspected,
a prudish element runs through the discipline.
Or perhaps, despite the similarities,
sex and children’s play seem to exist in separate
universes. Nonetheless, any folklorist
or ethnographer seeking to understand
New York City, in particular, can’t do so
without acknowledging a side of the city’s
life that attracts people from all over the
world for its anonymity and permissiveness.
Songs
New York City is special by any measure.
Who would think that “Finnegan’s Wake”—
immortalized by James Joyce, the ultimate
Dubliner—was actually written in Manhattan?
It’s true. John F. Poole, a theater manager and
writer, composed “Tim Finigan’s Wake” for
the singer-entrepreneur Tony Pastor sometime
around the beginning of the Civil War. It appears
in Pastor’s “444” Combination Songster, first
published in 1864…
Foodways
Long before our contemporary chefs developed
the New American cuisine, farmers
and horticulturists were the custodians of
taste, walking their orchards, vineyards, and
vegetable fields sampling fruits and saving
seeds from the most cleverly delicious tree,
bush, or vine. For a contemporary farmer to
grow a Bronx Seedless grape is to reclaim
that custodial role after almost a century
and reposition farmers as the guardians of
flavor and their family-owned farms as the
sanctuaries of quality.