Voices Journal Volume 2009: 1-2

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.

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.

My late father, Samuel Margolis, was unwittingly caught in the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s. His troubles began when he was accused of being a Communist by coworkers who disliked him. He was investigated by the FBI and other federal agencies and lost his livelihood for several years, but he was eventually able to clear his name.

The Friday before my wedding in November of 2007, I drove to Mayyim Hayyim, a new-style mikvah, or ritual bath, in Newton, Massachusetts. Accompanying me were my sister Lois and one of my oldest friends, Roz, who had flown in from Seattle for the event. Mayyim Hayyim (Living Waters) was founded by Anita Diamant of Red Tent fame. She had once visited a mikvah and been underwhelmed by the experience. She knew that there had to be a reason why this tradition of dunking oneself had persisted through the millennia. It couldn’t just be about purifying oneself for one’s husband. There had to be more.

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:

Archives, historical societies, and museums today have inherited the task of caring for a swelling mass of audiovisual materials. A 2005 Heritage Health Index survey calculated a staggering 2,423,568 moving image collections and 2,189,992 audio collections safeguarded within the United States alone. Alarmingly, more than 40 percent of audio and video collections are maintained in unknown conditions. The same report concluded that many cultural institutions lack essential resources to care for these artifacts. These collections are in peril if left unattended, as over time the fragile plastic-coated tapes can deteriorate and fail to play.

Stonework must surely rank as one of the oldest of folk arts, if only for the longevity of the material used—hence its presence in the historical record. While an immense but finite supply of wood drew Europeans to the shores of North America, once they had exhausted local forest stands through clearing, burning, ship building, and construction, stone became the material of choice. The ensuing works in stone have been the longest lasting remnants of vernacular architecture.

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.

“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.

On behalf of the New York Folklore Society’s executive board and the editorial board of Voices, I want to congratulate Faye McMahon for winning the American Folklore Society’s 2008 Chicago Folklore Prize with her outstanding book Not Just Child’s Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2007. It brings all of us great happiness to see Faye receive this richly deserved award....According to the American Folklore Society’s web site, the Chicago Folklore Prize, “awarded to the author of the best book-length work of folklore scholarship for the year, is the oldest international award recognizing excellence in folklore scholarship.”

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.

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.

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.

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.