Voices Journal Volume 2010:1-2

Folklorists are uniquely positioned to lend an important voice to the debates around immigration and immigration reform. As globalization brings the world together, folklore works to draw attention to that which is local, individual, and expressive. Throughout the next decade, it will be important for folklorists to continue to draw attention to the field of folklore through alliances with disciplines and organizations outside of folklore, thus providing a folkloristic perspective on contemporary life.

This issue of Voices offers readers a cornucopia of food for deep thoughts on New York. We experience the transcendent freedom of Vodou dancing in the city, survey the shape-shifting history of Rip van Winkle stories, and wend our way through the psychological landscape of a post-9/11 urban legend. We also encounter Afro-Colombian music in Queens and Native New York handcrafts.

Focusing inquiry on the kase, a drum pattern strongly associated with spirit possession, I compare episodes of transcendence that occur in Hall’s class [Pat Hall Dance and Movement Class, Brooklyn] with possessions that occur during the rites of Afro-Haitian Vodou, during acoustically similar if not identical performances. Reflections derive from documentation of classes; interviews with the instructor, lead drummer, and selected students; and my participation in classes. I argue that various experiences of transcendence in the class occupy points on a continuum, that the same may be true in the temple, and that an area of overlap may pertain. These statements challenge the divide between sacred and profane and bring nuance to notions of music and spirituality.

It was another dog day in August 2009 when we joined Diego Obregón for an interview at his Woodhaven, Queens, apartment. Diego kindly agreed to meet us at his home so that he could play a few tunes from his native Colombia, along with his vocalist Johanna Casteñeda. There in the basement, over the hum of the air conditioner, the sounds from his marimba (wood xylophone) were magical—all at once playful and effervescent—and with Johanna singing the traditional tune “Mi Canoita,” the sounds from Colombia’s Pacific coast spilled out over hot pavement.

For those who have inhabited the North Country in the last two centuries, rocks and minerals have been valuable resources. Like the virgin timber that provided easily accessible building materials for settlers’ simple cottages and barns, native stone was here in rich variety, as well. There were quarries for sandstone in Potsdam and Burke, limestone in Jefferson County and the Champlain Valley, Lake Placid granite, Gouverneur marble, and Granville slate. Men with experience in cutting and building with stone came from places like Scotland, Italy, Poland, and Wales to live and work.

Fundraising is about individuals and groups with different resources collaborating around a vision shared: a good and workable marriage, like the simple tin cup I imagined picking up in the forest. Funders are collaborators. As Bob Dylan put it, “I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.”

Since “seeing is believing” in our culture, visual evidence of a supernatural presence seems especially compelling. Ghosts in photographs and on videos get more attention than ghosts that whisper in the night. It should not surprise us, then, that orbs—bright spheres of light in photographs—...Some people believe that orbs represent ghosts; others believe that orbs come from glitches in the photographic process.

Korean-born, New York City–based educator and performance artist Maria Yoon has been married forty-four times now, and she’s only in her mid-thirties. Getting married— in every state of the union—is her primary focus at present, but not in the way her parents might have anticipated.... With a B.F.A. from Cooper Union, Maria serves as a teaching artist for New York City museums. Since 2001 she has also been working on a multimedia performance series entitled “Maria the Korean Bride” (MTKB).

The Hudson Valley Quadricentennial in 2009 spurred all kinds of special celebrations in cities along the Hudson River, from flotilla parades and festivals to art fairs, music performances, and exhibitions...For its part in the Quadricentennial celebrations, the New York Folklore Society commemorated these still-thriving cultural traditions with “North by Northeast: Baskets and Beadwork from the Akwesasne Mohawk and Tuscarora.”

Fleischmanns, New York, is an appealingly forlorn spot thirty minutes from Woodstock and fifty, if not one hundred years, from the rest of America. Its old-fashioned Catskills summers—fresh air, cool mountain nights, porch sitting, ball playing, swimming, and dozing off in lawn chairs...

Patron saint of the Catskills, Rip Van Winkle has belonged to all America, coast to coast, almost from the moment he was born, by passage through Washington Irving’s pen, in 1819. Only seven years later there was a Rip Van Winkle House along the road from Palenville to the nation’s first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House; in 1850 there was another Rip Van Winkle House on the corner of Pacific Wharf and Battery Street in San Francisco. Rip’s real-life presence was attested by nonagenarians who claimed to have known him and his hectoring dame.

The upcoming 150th anniversary provides an incentive for those of us who sing, teach, or write to conduct some research into Civil War songs. Because the Civil War years coincide with the rise of the American song publishing industry, there is a large vault through which to sort. Song artifacts relating to New York are particularly easy to find, in large part because the national broadside ballad press was centered close to New York’s City Hall and was at its zenith between 1861 and 1865.

Garrett Oliver, 47, is the brewmaster for the Brooklyn Brewery, a regional brewery in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn that turns out 310,000 gallons of beer annually. A native of Queens, Garrett became interested in the finer points of beer consumption when he lived in London in the early 1980s. There he discovered pub-brewed beers that were very different from the “industrial-style” brews that he’d known in the United States.

The folktale of the grateful dead was once widely known and passed on through both religious and secular traditions. Today most people would conjure an image of the popular rock band, which is said to have found its name from this story, as well.... The story has evolved throughout history in response to society’s psychological coping needs during times of crisis. This mythic theme has resurfaced from the earliest Judaic scriptures to contemporary urban legends.

(1) Pauline Adema draws us into her world of culinary superlatives, localism, and celebrations...By means of a comprehensive case study of Gilroy, California—the self-proclaimed garlic capital of the world—the author skillfully guides the reader to consideration of competing perspectives: resident/tourist, exotic/classic, commodification/production, personal/communal, global/local, dynamic/ stable, self/other, everyday/special, contemporary/traditional. (2) Although it is well known that Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) created collages, poems, and artistic installations in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, his darkly satirical fairy tales have been less accessible to scholars and general readers. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales not only gives us the tales, but also provides a wonderful selection of illustrations and helpful notes. (3) Sightings of large, elusive, hair-covered bipeds in remote parts of the Northeast go back to colonial times. Bigfoot: Encounters in New York and New England is a useful and well-researched collection of reports, from both written and oral sources, of those sightings.