Voices Journal Volume 2009:3-4

As we look back on our organization’s sixty-fifth year, I would like to thank all of our supporters on behalf of the entire New York Folklore Society family. 2009 was a year of great upheaval and rethinking of the organization....Partnerships in 2009 ... helped us to realize programming goals: Union College, the Albany Institute for History and Art, the City of Schenectady, and the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor were invaluable in helping us to continue to provide folklore and folk arts programming

The articles featured in this issue of Voices contain a variety of voices whose messages are “traditional”—in the surprising, the comforting, and even the most alarming senses of that disciplinary keyword. In the photo essay “Carving Out a Life: Reflections of an Ithaca Wood-Carver,” self-taught carver Mary Michael Shelley describes how she responded simultaneously to her Northeastern farm family heritage, liberal arts education, and the emerging feminism of her time to claim a form of man’s work—carpentry and carving...

I was born in 1950 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. I started carving at age twenty-two, when my father gave me a gift of a painted wood-carving he had made of me at the farm where I grew up. This gift from my father inspired me to begin to make my own carved and painted pictures. Since then I’ve made more than one thousand pieces in thirty-five years. I think of my pictures as a visual diary that helps me make sense of the events and feelings of my life.

When the first European settlers entered what is now New York State and its environs, they brought with them not only their material culture, but also an array of beliefs in mythical beings. Such creatures had been part of the European psyche for centuries. A central character in this pantheon was the "wild man" thought to inhabit the darker parts of the European countryside. Also known as the woodwose, wooser, or "wild man of the woods," it was conspicuous in folklore between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and holds a prominent place in later medieval European artwork and literature.

We all know that time flies when we’re having fun. As for me, I can scarcely believe that thirty years have passed since the summer of 1979, when Valerie Ingram and I, both recent Cooperstown “folkies,” organized a conference we called Getting the “Lore” Back to the “Folk” for anyone interested in folklore, particularly applied folklore, as it was called in those days. It was the ’70s, and this was a new field.

Why do folklorists and scholars of play so rarely explore the playful aspects of sex? Perhaps, as I’ve always suspected, a prudish element runs through the discipline. Or perhaps, despite the similarities, sex and children’s play seem to exist in separate universes. Nonetheless, any folklorist or ethnographer seeking to understand New York City, in particular, can’t do so without acknowledging a side of the city’s life that attracts people from all over the world for its anonymity and permissiveness.

I wish to share a personal account of my first folkloristic encounter: the series of events that led to my choice of a career in folklore. While many folklorists may recall their excitement and fascination with their first informants and the unique narratives or artifacts that they produced, my tale involves near-accidental fieldwork in the company of a less-than-savory group in American society: the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Long before our contemporary chefs developed the New American cuisine, farmers and horticulturists were the custodians of taste, walking their orchards, vineyards, and vegetable fields sampling fruits and saving seeds from the most cleverly delicious tree, bush, or vine. For a contemporary farmer to grow a Bronx Seedless grape is to reclaim that custodial role after almost a century and reposition farmers as the guardians of flavor and their family-owned farms as the sanctuaries of quality.

It was a beautiful spring day in Chinatown when I stopped by the Mencius Society to talk with Xiao Xiannian, a virtuoso of the Chinese hammered dulcimer known as the yangqin. Housed in a building on Grand Street near its intersection with Delancey, the Mencius Society—also known as the AiCenter, formerly the Wossing Center—provides instruction in Chinese and Western musical instruments, as well as a number of other arts education programs for youth and adults. It is also the home base of the EastRiver Ensemble, one of New York’s leading Chinese music groups.

Two years ago, while preparing to teach my fall Folklore of the Supernatural class, I looked up “haunted dolls” on eBay. A folklorist friend of mine had warned me never to order a haunted doll, even at a good price. “I’d never have one of those things in my house!” my friend had told me. Like the central character of the Grimms’ tale “The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is,” I could not resist the temptation to order a haunted doll. What harm could possibly come from this simple transaction?

Abner Cartwright, Alexander Doubleday. . . these composite names stand for an exceedingly odd couple whose identities have been stolen, accomplishments merged, and stories intertwined for more than a century now. What both men share is that their lives were hijacked after their deaths, and as a result, each was credited with something he did not do—that is, invent baseball.

New York City is special by any measure. Who would think that “Finnegan’s Wake”— immortalized by James Joyce, the ultimate Dubliner—was actually written in Manhattan? It’s true. John F. Poole, a theater manager and writer, composed “Tim Finigan’s Wake” for the singer-entrepreneur Tony Pastor sometime around the beginning of the Civil War. It appears in Pastor’s “444” Combination Songster, first published in 1864...

Images of jugglers appeared on the walls of Egyptian tombs more than four thousand years ago. They are the first known representations of an ancient craft that continues to entertain and fascinate. The English word “juggler” derives from the Old French jongleur, and these performers have been common at public events, carnivals, and on the streets since time immemorial. These days, jugglers appear at circuses and variety shows, as well as in public places.

(1) Girsa—pronounced geer-sha and meaning “young girls ” in Gaelic—is a group of eight Irish American teenagers, two generations removed from the Emerald Isle, who live in and around Pearl River in Rockland County. Their new, eponymous compact disc is as refreshing as a cool drink of spring water on a sweltering summer day. (2) “Seeking out a region’s folk tales and legends offers more than entertaining reading,” Melanie Zimmer explains in Central New York and the Finger Lakes: Myths, Legends, and Lore. “It offers a piece of ourselves." This book is a celebration of the regional identity of central New York as developed and preserved through folktales.