Folklorists may have many individual accounts of how they wandered into their uncommon profession: a college course, a chance accident, an early or late interest in certain kinds of cultural experiences, a suddenly discovered love for certain kinds of traditional expression. A few years ago, a collection of short essays called Roads into Folklore was published in which folklorists talked briefly about how they had become folklorists—the roads were disparate ones.₅ In The Folklore Muse folklorists indeed muse on what it means to be a folklorist, and how they themselves may have found this undertaking. In the process they...

My days begin—as they have for decades—drinking a cup of coffee and writing poetry. I consider it a form of centering, looking into a different kind of mirror—not to comb my hair, but to remind myself of who I am.

Yet, when I turned fifty, I felt the need for a new avocation. I decided to forgo poems and spend mornings building a stone wall with my two hands in the backyard. In fact, I was hoping to impress my wife, folklorist Amanda Dargan, who had recently completed a project on the stonemasons of Westchester County. Westchester...

Stories, like Heraclitus’s river, are never the same twice. Audience members—be they listeners or readers—bring to the text their own context. Not only that, each audience member brings a different mental context to the same text each time they experience it. In other words, variation occurs not only in the text but in people—even the same person at different times. Textual variation has been relatively easy to document. Changes in people’s mental context, however, are slippery, fleeting, and intangible. Sometimes they find expression in texts, but more often, these changes are only observable in reactions and receptions....

Driving to New York City through a hailstorm, through swirls of sleet. Not easy to drive down this wet winter highway, but who expects the diagnosis of breast cancer to be easy? Cramped in our car’s back seat, I breathe stuffy air and long for a cold drink.

My husband drives; our good friend navigates. The two of them talk continuously: will parking be available at Sloan-Kettering? Will we have time for a pilgrimage to Ground Zero? I stare out the window.

Tense, eyes dry, I think about the books I read last night when I should have been sleeping....

“Every Nancy to her fancy.” “Live and Learn.” “Count your blessings.” My mother’s aphorisms spread across my childhood world like balm. Similar phrases still pepper her speech. When annoyed, she’ll exclaim, “That irritates my soul,” while a lively event is a real “barn burner.” We savor her mispronunciations. When my sister, Chris’s ESL students come to dinner, “Yuri” and “Hugo” merge to “Yugo.” In Italian restaurants, “risotto” becomes “rudito.” When I was young, my father, five siblings and I thought her speech funny and quaint, like the small Vermont town where she was raised. We laughed at her malapropisms, her...

In 1986, the United Nations sponsored an international conference on women whose major resolution agreed to find ways to relieve women of the universal burden of fetching and carrying water. Around the time of this announcement, I was on my way to Senegal, West Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer. With other evident problems, such as child care, illiteracy, poverty, AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, and general oppression, I wondered why carrying water should figure so prominently. Undoubtedly there were levels of the discourse and politics at this conference that made agreement on other issues problematic. But once I lived in Africa...

My mother was the seventh child of a seventh child. She latched onto that like a promise. But before she was twenty, she knew it was a false promise full of superstition and born of fear and loathing. Being the seventh girl of fourteen children—all girls but one—only insured that she would be invisible—too young to be trusted, too old to be coddled. She could not ever remember her mother, Grandma Clara, taking time from baking and cooking and cleaning and canning and running to help other women give birth to more and more babies or to...

Ethnography and intensive fieldwork live at the heart of what folklorists do. Going “into the field”—observing traditions, listening to people, recording their songs and stories and riddles and personal accounts and descriptions—is what provides the cultural understandings that folklorists use in their work. Folklorists come to know communities and “informants” (though that term, sanctioned by decades of use, may strike some as too impersonal, even slightly clinical), and complex relationships often evolve between folklorists and their folk collaborators, relationships that may involve years of human interaction and many layers of meaning. Though historically folk traditions have been presented...

Rook Lake is like many small towns in northwest Wisconsin. It is an ethnic mosaic of Slavs, Scandinavians, Germans, and Irish, and almost everybody is either Lutheran or Catholic. Streets are shaded by broadleaf trees, planted there early in the century. Outside of town, the area is surrounded by spindly pine forest, broken up by an occasional pasture. Most of the open areas are growing over in brush because the small-scale dairy farms that used to be so numerous here are now uneconomical. Most of the black-and-white Holsteins you do see are pets or one family’s source of fresh milk....

Percy and I are about the same age. When I came to live on the island in the early 1970s, Percy was doing a little bit of blacksmithing but his main work was welding. I had acquired some older farm machinery at auction, plowshares that needed new points, so I soon made his acquaintance. With his bushy blond hair and full beard streaked with premature gray, his sinewy arms, broad shoulders, and powerful trunk, he certainly looked like a rural blacksmith to me, and I was happy to have found him to facilitate my adventures with a tractor. He knew,...

Henriette Stiller flipped a garden burger on her hibachi. To her left, her husband, Robert Larrabee, laughed with his Bigfoot-hunting friends. To her right, the other Bigfoot wives cooked hamburgers and yelled at their kids whenever one strayed toward the enemy camp. Directly across the lawn, some thirty yards in front of her, camouflage-clad men stumbled in and out of Cray’s trailer. Henriette was backed up against her old camper, just a charred garden burger separating her from the Bigfoot world.

She wished they’d leave the sasquatches alone.

This was only Henriette’s second year at the Sasquatch Fest. Some of...

Historically, when folklorists recorded an “informant” singing a song, recounting a story, or even speaking a proverb or telling a riddle, they rendered it as a “text”: a block of words that could be written and printed. Sometimes the singer or teller or speaker was largely forgotten; sometimes the circumstances of the singing or the telling were ignored. A few students of folk materials, such as J. Frank Dobie, Zora Neale Hurston, and the compilers of the Federal Writers’ Project anthology of Louisiana folk materials, Gumbo Ya-Ya, tried to engender more holistic approaches by providing fictionalized or journalistic frameworks. But...

I was the first to recognize the walrus as being Gordon.

Me, Briscoe, and O’Neal were sitting in the back of my truck—a normal Friday night—watching The Lights jump around out in the desert and here came Gordon, sliding out of the sand and cacti.

Up until that moment, the night was pretty slow. The Lights were a little lethargic, possibly on account of how the crowd was one of the puniest in recent memory. Besides me and the boys, there was a Family of Three (Father, Mother, Young Son with a Baseball Cap and Skull Earring) and...

The all-day rain, light at first, worsened as evening approached, a ghostly mist rising from the warm hollows of the rolling terrain. Such weather exposed a dirty secret of the bunkhouses, which from the outside appeared to be in good shape, by highlighting the condition of the roofs; mine, for example, had a half-dozen leaks, one of them directly over the foot of my bed. On such a day, outdoor activities were pretty much ruled out, leading to a group sense of confinement not unlike what it must be like in prison. My bunkhouse boys spent much of the day...

Although folklore is hardly the only field intensely interested in narrative, folklorists do concern themselves with particularly fundamental forms of storytelling: the oral, the traditional, the stories that have persisted over time and space for long, long periods of time. They are particularly well situated to observe the power that narrative has to shape social meanings and convey cultural agendas, to see how very important stories are to human communication. Some folklorists have been great oral storytellers themselves, and it is appropriate that some of the contributors to this volume have chosen to turn to written narrative forms like the...

“I always pref-uhed to be a mistress than to be a wife,” Stella liked to pronounce, nose airily turned upward. She used this line through most of her life. If her amazed listeners burst into laughter, she would hunch slightly, green eyes alight, allowing herself a throaty, slightly snorting laugh.

I first heard this pronouncement not from Stella, but from my mother. Quoting Stella, Maw took on a deep, breathy British voice, though her own bubbling amusement diluted Stella’s blunt imperiousness. Most people who encountered Stella could not resist trying to reproduce her voice, as though performing the timbre and...

Legends and myths, especially those well known from classical literature or art, have had fantastically wide appeal to writers, including modern writers. One need only think of Joyce’s Ulysses or Auden’s “Th e Shield of Achilles” or even Giraudoux’s Elpenor. It’s hardly surprising that, in writing poetry or in other creative genres, folklorists—often professionally engaged in the study and teaching of these genres and so particularly involved in their nature—might turn to such “master stories.”

Mary Magoulick’s poem “A Cosmology of Women” actually came out of a course she taught on narrative. Along with Magoulick’s, other poems grapple...

Dalang: A tycoon lounges; his shoulders are massaged by a Swedish masseuse. Above him hang oil portraits.

(First puppets visible: Harlow [represented by the traditional puppet for Sita’s father]; Helga, a masseuse [traditional servant puppet].)

Harlow: I have so much to be proud of.

Sam: Yes, suh, you sure have so much.

(A bar, heretofore unlit, is illuminated; behind it, Sam [traditional puppet: Semar] is polishing glasses.)

Harlow: Look out those windows, Sammy, my boy. The Harlow Tower. We own one hundred percent of that. The Mercury Building. Sixty-five percent of that is ours. And over there, the Empire State Building...

Although folklorists long gave their attention mostly to verbal traditions, they have also been involved in the examination of material culture. They look at folk art and folk artifacts and at the processes of making and using folk objects, at the whole of folklife. Folk architecture has been of great interest, but so too have quilt making and blacksmithing, and even chainsaw carving, syrup making, and hide tanning. The popularity of Foxfire-type student and community projects and staged folk festivals has made the general public more interested in these aspects of traditional culture too, if perhaps out of a sense...

My mother’s response surprised me. “One of my mothers had a daughter who was killed in an accident. They put up a cross. It’s not there anymore, but I think she would talk to you about it.” If my mother had told me about this before, I had forgotten. “Where was the cross?” I asked. I could not remember seeing it at the location my mother described.

One of my mothers. It was a phrase my mother, a primary schoolteacher, used often to describe the female parents of her first-graders. Her mothers picked up their children from school, accompanied the...

Although children obviously belong to larger cultural groups, folklorists have long recognized that kids are also their own folk group with their own lore. William Wells Newell saw that in the 19th century when he published his classic Games and Songs of American Children, as did Alice Berthe Gomme with her similar work in England; and more recently The Lore and Language of School Children by Iona and Peter Opie has been widely recognized.₇ Children’s play and traditional games obviously have an attraction (perhaps it is in part the charm of childhood itself) that translates not only into research but...

BANZAI is a little-known mystical Oriental board game popular among Oriental schoolchildren who excel at it. This ancient board game of strategy and skill has had an underground, secretive existence and following since its origin in the Orient centuries ago, but it is relatively unknown in the United States and among the western nations of the world. As a game of great antiquity and mystery, it is believed by Oriental cultures to hold the secret of the control of all powers in the universe: If you master the game, you can master anyone and any power at any time. Conversely,...

Defining the term “ritual” can be problematic for folklorists and other scholars, especially as more secular behavior comes to be included under a rubric once reserved more for the religious. And the terms “custom” or even “folk custom” can be catchalls for a wide variety of things. Yet both seem to encompass a range of repeated, traditional behaviors that are special and capable of being isolated in some way. Ritual, of course, implies the ceremonial, even the liturgical, but rituals can be grand or small-scale, widely practiced or rather personal. Rituals may have a grandeur or just a reassuring familiarity,...

These two chapters are from Cabañuelas, A Love Story, the third in the Border Trilogy that includes the award-winning Canícula; Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (University of New Mexico Press, 1995). The novel is set over a period of nine months, January to September, but in two geographical locations twenty years apart: 1980 in Spain and 2000 in South Texas. The protagonist is a Chicana folklorist from South Texas who is in Spain researching festivals and is involved with an artist, Paco, who lives in Madrid but hails from Asturias, the northern region of Spain. In the longer...

As conceived by anthropologists and folklorists, worldview is certainly a very broad concept: the characteristic way in which a society envisions the nature of the universe and how people and things and forces operate within it. It is made up of many constituent parts, including a variety of folk beliefs (though that term has usually been used as a more acceptable stand-in for “superstition”). Whether benefi cent forces may be called in to protect us or witches wish us harm or fate is fickle or certain might all be aspects of a culture’s worldview.

Jeannie Banks Thomas’s whimsical “Salem, Massachusetts,...

I guess that’s love, when you give up what you want and where you want to be in favor of who you want to be with. And that’s what I’m doing, so I guess that proves I love Natalie. This thin girl beside me, sitting on the bus headed east. She’s huddled against the window under my big coat. I see her profile in the dark, her head bobbing against the pane as she sleeps.

Across the aisle, a mother scolds her son for fidgeting. The kid can’t sleep. The woman is big and ornery. She caused a scene in...