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.”
Journal Articles
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.
Foodways
“You’re my first customer!”
I was delighted to be greeted with this exclamation
when, after rolling up to Sasha Kocho
Williams’ annual plant sale, I got enticed
into picking up some gorgeous homemade
bread, muffins, and cranberry lemonade
before I even made it to the array of plant
starts. Two of Sasha’s four children were
running the tent, selling a beautiful array of
baked goods in paper packets, eggs, flowers,
homemade salves, and more. A nearby
homemade sign noted there would also be
music later in the day. A short walk past it,
down the path would take you into Small
Change Farm proper, Sasha and her husband
Ali’s homestead farm in Potsdam, New York,
with its extensive vegetable and herb patches,
high tunnel, greenhouse spaces, and barns
lively with goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and
pigs.
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.
Book Reviews
(1) All of Us: Stories and Poems Along Route
17 is set in Middlefield, a mythical town in
the Catskills, New York. It’s one of those
villages with “real families, messy, earning
some kind of living or trying to.” (2) Jeffrey Tolbert and Michael Dylan Foster have returned to the source material, their edited volume The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, with a new ensemble cast to create…Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore, and the Folkloresque is a continuation of the themes….but with new applications after years of discourse.
From the Director
We are pleased and honored to introduce Rasel Ahmed, our Fall-Winter 2023 special issue editor. In early 2023, New York Folklore issued a Call for Proposals for guest editors and identified two talented emerging folklorists. Each proposed a specific theme or focus, with Rasel Ahmed’s issue focusing on folklore in a transnational context.
From the Editor
Folklore, not confined to boundaries of nationalism,
homogeneity, and diversity, manifests across
digital platforms, like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook,
shaping how people navigate in the virtual
era. These platforms enable rapid dissemination
of cultural expressions, transcending geographical
and temporal boundaries. The shift challenges the
approach to studying and defining folklore.
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.
Digital Phenology:
There is a long-standing association between phenology and traditional foodways. Arguably, all phenology is connected to foodways, in that whether hunting, fishing, foraging, propagating, and/or cultivating food, all food based in the landscape is inextricably connected to natural processes, ecological conditions, and seasonal cycles—whether or not they are explicitly and obviously food-related.
Fairy Tales for the Queer Desi:
Fairy tales have been retold, rewritten, and reproduced across media for centuries. Although traditionally, fairy tales have championed reproductive future by celebrating the heteronormative “happily ever-after,” indicated by the union between heterosexual couples, Queer rewritings of fairy tales and scholarship on this matter are not completely scarce in the West. There is, however, a dearth of Queer fairy tales for the Desi audience, and naturally, therefore, limited scholarship available on the matter….The absence of Queer fairy tales in traditional Indian folklore keeps Queerness invisible in the cognitive landscape of children while perpetuating heteronormativity.
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Ancient Art in New Contexts:
The Caribbean-themed mural was one of several culminating activities, which were developed and implemented through a NEA “Our Town” placemaking grant for 2023–2024. Conceived by Veena Chandra and Devesh Chandra, as a partnership with New York Folklore (NYF), the intent of the project was to recognize the connections of North Indian classical traditions with the Guyanese community in Schenectady.
Book Reviews:
(1) Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID offers a profound reminder that the pandemic was not merely a medical or logistical crisis but also a deeply cultural one. The book underscores how communities adapted, coped, and ultimately persevered through vernacular creativity and collective resilience in a social way. (2) Anna Morcom’s Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Culture of Exclusions (2014) explores the profound cultural shifts that occurred with the advent of British colonialism in India, particularly, focusing on the hereditary female dancers—once the most esteemed artists in precolonial India. With the onset of
colonization, their status shifted drastically.