Voices Journal Volume 2024: 1-2, 3-4

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

Every New Yorker who has ridden the subways for any length of time eventually cracks. The announcements are incomprehensible, the trains get stuck for seemingly no reason. On a particular day in 2003, even the air conditioner didn’t work in the car, and, yes, I cracked. I stormed out of the F train, which was stuck at West 4th Street, ran over to the motorman’s window and was about to give him a piece of my mind. When I saw the motorman and he saw me, we both burst out laughing.

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.

In addition to providing technical assistance and professional development to folk artists and folk cultural specialists, NYF supports a robust schedule of exhibitions, arts workshops, and concerts. Our “Ancient Arts in New Contexts” program focused on documenting and presenting the traditional arts of India and Guyana.

“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.

The year 2023 marked the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Champlain Canal, the “little sister” of the Erie Canal that opened two years later in 1825. At the Folklife Center, we were able to join the celebration by producing a video mini-series called Champlain Canal Stories, funded in part by a grant from the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership.

As a statewide organization, New York Folklore is always looking to strengthen our reach to diverse regions of the state. A grant from the National Endowment for t he Arts is helping us do just that! New York Folklore is prioritizing fieldwork. We are developing a network of community scholars who will document traditional arts throughout the state. These fieldworkers are supported by New York Folklore staff, headquartered in the Capital Region. Our fieldworkers represent diverse communities and levels of experience. We are excited to welcome (or welcome back!) this exceptional group of women to the field: Divena Ramessar, Akilah Briggs Melvin, Nada Odeh, and Ladan Nikravan.

Laurie was born and raised in Schenectady, but she has lived in many East and West Coast locations. She joined New York Folklore in 2009, enriching the organization through her many prior years of learned experience in the arts, banking, and finance.

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.”

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.

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.

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...

When we’re advocating for places we love, or that embrace meaning in our communities, we sometimes speak of those places as harboring “cultural capital,” a kind of “social currency.” But what if there were an actual currency of memory and meaning to prevent places with deep roots in a community from being sold or displaced? What if memories, associations, and values were transformed into units of meaningful exchange?

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.

Countries have anthems, branches of service have marches, lovers share “our song,” and big cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have million seller pop hits. So why can’t towns and villages celebrate with their own song? This is the story of one upstate hamlet in Essex County and how some elementary students created their very own hometown theme song.

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.