We were about 200 years late. For us,
it started in 2011, with a concert
featuring the traditional performer Elizabeth
LaPrelle. She sang the Child Ballad “Lord Bateman,” accompanied by a table-top box, which
contained a long scrolling quilt, which as it was
unwound revealed scenes depicting the various
verses. She called it a crankie. Well, my wife
Janet is a quilter. We exchanged looks: How
neat was this? We could make something such
as this for Fine Arts Salon at the next year’s
caving convention. Janet asked me, “What
songs about caving do you have?” We selected
“ The Ballad of Pete Hauer ”— a true story I’d
written about the mysterious death of a close
friend and his involvement with the murder of
a sort of innocent bystander.
Feature Article
The Sasha Polinoff After-Story:
This is the story of how seemingly disparate communities coalesced around a formerly prominent musician and sustained him in old age. As such, it takes place in comparatively humble or domestic settings and with a smaller audience.
It is very much the story after the story. It begins in the closing decades of the 20th century, when Russians and all things Russian were no longer in vogue—particularly, in the wake of the McCarthy years. It begins when Lower Eastside nightclubs that once featured a variety of ethnic music, were losing patrons, in part, because their first-generation audiences had moved out of the City to the “burbs” and could no longer find a place to park.
Folklife Center30th Anniversary
The Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library celebrated its 30th anniversary with a free Festival in City Park, outside the Library, in downtown Glens Falls on Tuesday, July 25, 2023, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Over 60 folk artists filled the park, demonstrating their crafts and sharing their traditions. Up close and personal, festivalgoers were able to witness firsthand the artists’ skills and to talk directly with the experts. Many of the artists offered a handson component to their exhibit.
A Tempest in a Teacup:
Much of the anthropological research on divination attempts to gauge its role in society, but the question remains: why is divination persuasive? An analysis of two tea leaf readings by a single reader shows that the fortunes bear a structural resemblance to folktales, with the client as hero. Like the plot in a folktale, the readings’ predictions focus on the struggle to complete the tasks of the life course, often with the help of donors. Culturally, the readings persuade by reassuring us that life imitates art, while at the psychological level, they encourage us to sift through our thoughts for people and events that fit the storyline. This is the first known study to apply a Proppian structural analysis to divination narratives. It is also a human interest story—40 years in the making—about how a grandmother who lived through hard times in the Hudson Valley of New York State taught her college-educated grandson to read tea leaves.
Reimagining Washington Irving’sThe Legend of Sleepy Hollow andRip Van Winkle in the ContemporaryDigital Era:
Washington Irving’s works The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle are considered some of the most important pieces of New York
Folk Studies and American literature. Their rich and contemplative narratives, as well as settings, have seen a huge readership across generations.
The main intention of this article is to focus on how the contemporary digital era has led to the reimagination and readaptation of Washington
Irving’s works through various digital and virtual means. With the advent of digital materials, such as e-books, Kindle, and audiobooks, we have
gained easy access to the works. Numerous interesting and engaging storytelling platforms have offered immersive experiences and helped to
engage new audiences interestingly and excitingly. Two platforms, among them, are virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. They
have broadened our minds to such an extent as to make us capable of critically analyzing the texts through various dimensions.
The Occupational Folklore of Horticulture in the Greater Rochester Area
I interviewed five horticultural workers in the Greater Rochester, New York area to understand this all too familiar work through a new lens. I conducted five individual interviews at each interviewee’s place of work, which allowed me to take photographs at each garden center and get a feel for what the work environment is like. My hope was to gain a better understanding of occupational folklore…Additionally, I wanted to learn about each person’s individual connection to the field of horticulture and what motivated them to continue working in the field…
A Bedtime Party
Readers may recall a piece of bedtime
lore about Lily White’s Party. Growing
up on Long Island in the 1980s, I learned
about this charming affair when my mother
would tuck me in at bedtime. My grandmother
transmitted the lore to my mother in 1950s
Brooklyn. Its questionable origins notwithstanding,
of interest to me are the shifting
form, function, content, and context of the
text’s retelling.
A Gram of Conversaton
In honor of New York Folklore’s 80th anniversary celebration, I would like to share with you an incredible personal story, which touches upon founder Harold W. Thompson, folksinger Peter Yarrow, my mother Mary Moore Walker, and her grandson, William Walker, who is a current member of the New York Folklore Board. My mother and her grandson had only seven precious months together before her death from cancer at age 64. However, as you will read in the story, the power of folklore and family traditions can make connections through the generations even beyond death.
History to Song:
For me, it all began in the Paul Smith’s
College Library, looking at historical
photos of Paul’s hotel with the librarian,
Neil Surprenant. Neil kept telling me
how major parts of the Paul Smith empire
were the idea of his wife, Lydia: the electric
company, the sawmills, the training of
their sons in hospitality. As he finished telling
me their story, I asked why there was
no large portrait of her on campus, and
only a dormitory named after her. He said,
“You’re a songwriter; write her a song.”
New York Finger Lakes Finns Dancing & Music
Probably the most popular Finnish fiddle tune, a polkka (Finnish), is Säkkijärven polkka, according to Finnish button accordion player and Finnish Dance Music historian and ethnographer Richard Koski. Richard writes, “Russia invaded Finland in November 1939. When the Finns beat back the Russians, the Russians left behind radio controlled mines. The Finns played Säkkijärven polkka over the radio about 1,500 times whereby its frequencies would confuse and defeat the Russian mines. This Winter War ended in March 1940… As a result of the peace treaty, Finland retained ts sovereignty, but ceded 9% of its eastern territory to the Soviet Union.” Richard’s new book of fiddle tunes, Finnish Dance Music of the Finger Lakes of New York State, includes numerous area references to the Finnish community, past and present, from the lower Finger Lakes area of Central New York.
Where the Orphans Played
Whatever I saw must have been a figment
of my imagination. And before I jump
into this, I also feel like I need to acknowledge
that I have an affinity for ghosts,
UFOs, cryptids, and the macabre. Spooky
shit. I have a bias on wanting to believe
such things. But I still don’t believe in the
thing I saw not so long ago, in the remains
of the abandoned orphanage outside of
my hometown.
“Peg Leg” Bates
One of the greatest privileges of my career in folklore was the opportunity to explore the legacy of Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates, a Black one-legged tap dancer, who owned an interracial Catskills resort for 38 years. In the fall of 2016, shortly after I became the Folk Arts Program Manager with Arts Mid-Hudson, Geoff Miller, the Ulster County historian, introduced me to Bates’ legacy. Miller had long wanted to do in-depth research on Bates and hoped that I could raise some funds and join him. We were awarded a grant from New York Humanities and began the project in 2021.
Tradition, Social Media and Community:
Shewly emerges as a compelling example, within a cohort of women in New York, who congregate and share experiences within their community, extending their interactions to a broader virtual community. …Traditionally, the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in Bangladesh and its diaspora enjoyed relative openness and freedom from censorship of male–female relationships. Criticisms directed at virtual activities, mainly by trolling, highlight anxieties surrounding the expansion of social ties into the virtual realm.
Taking the Wheel:
Like so many ancient crafts, handspinning is far from dead and gone, and there’s a vibrant international community of spinners with their own literature, events, and makers of new tools. Still, the old wheels are constantly at risk, as collectors pass away, institutions shut down and disperse their collections, and time and circumstances take their toll through water damage, fires, woodworms, pet damage, and lost parts. Collectors and users of old spinning wheels are a fraction of the larger handspinning community, so there are only so many homes for these grand old tools,
and each spinner can only take in so many spinning wheels.
Toppling the Tables:
South Asian regional cinema has consistently served as a medium for exploring the multifaceted nature of identity and complex social structure. Currently, amid the newly emerging film genres, a subgenre of horror, featuring supernatural entities, illuminates the role of religious belief and narratives in shaping South Asian worldviews. The emergence of such films topples the East/West dichotomies, by bringing to the forefront the dynamics between the regional/vernacular and the dominant/mainstream within the Indian context. Therefore, this study proposes an appendage of intersectionality to subalternity, arriving at the framework of intersectional subalternity, manifesting at the level of ideas and ideologies to study the movement from the periphery to the center in the South Asian cinematic genre.