The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

Folklore

Folklore SECTION EDITOR James P. Leary 26414_U06.qxd 7/7/06 10:45 AM Page 349 Overview 351 Folk Architecture and Landscape 355 Bank Barns 357 Fish Tugs 358 Grave Markers 359 I–Houses 360 Sacred Sites and Shrines 361 Town Squares 362 Folk Arts and Crafts 363 Baskets 366 Knotwork 367 Quilting and Needlework 367 Rag Rugs 368 Wood Carving 368 Foodways 369 Catfish 372 Church Dinners 373 Lutefisk 373 Wild Rice 374 Folk Festivals and Celebrations 374 Julebukk (Christmas Masquerade) 377 National Folk Festival 377 Powwows 378 Queen Contests 379 Mennonite Relief Sales 379 Seasonal Displays 380 Folk Music and Dance 381 Fiddling 384 Garage Rock 386 Polka 387 Qeej 388 Irish Dance 389 Folk Song 389 Blues 393 Quinten Lotus Dickey (1911–1989) 394 Gospel Music 394 Hiski Salomaa (1891–1957) 396 Singing Societies 396 Folk Narrative 397 Dialect Jokes 400 Monsters and Tall Tales 401 State Jokes 402 James Douglas “J.D.” Suggs (1887?–1955) 403 Supernatural Legends 403 Wenabozho 405 Ethnic Folklore 405 Easter Eggs 408 Ethnic Saturday Schools 409 Paj Ntaub 409 Quillwork 410 Rosemaling 410 Workers’ Folklore and Cultural Traditions 410 Paul Bunyan 413 Flatboats 414 River Folk 415 Worker Poets 416 Recreational Folklore 417 Car Customizing 419 Duck Decoys 421 Fly-Fishing 422 Spearfishing Decoys 423 Section Contents 26414_U06.qxd 7/7/06 10:45 AM Page 350 Overview Folklore is at once a word with peculiar origins and meanings, a complex and evolving system of traditional artistic practices within cultural groups, and a field of study—all of which have significance within the American Midwest. William J. Thoms, an English gentleman-scholar, first fused folk with lore in 1846. A romantic nationalist who equated the artistic soul of England with the traditional expressions of its common people, Thoms discarded the Latinate term Popular Antiquities that had been used previously to encompass “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc.,” in favor of “a good Saxon compound, Folklore—the Lore of the People.” His neologism took hold quickly and, by the late nineteenth century, was recognized around the world. Thoms’s restrictive notion of folk as European peasants, however, has been abandoned for a broader, more fluid conception that includes anyone who participates in a cultural group. Individual midwesterners, for example, typically belong to several shifting, sometimes overlapping, cultural aggregations. A young African American man or woman in Detroit might be, by turns, a college student, a line worker in an auto plant, a hip-hop devotee, a member of a Baptist choir, a long-suffering Tigers fan, a weekend hook-and-line fisher, or a cook possessing family recipes. An elderly Finnish couple in northern Minnesota might be or have been coffee klatsch regulars, avid gardeners, ragrug weavers, accordionists, ardent Socialists, pious Lutherans, farmers, or, respectively, a miner and a Folklore v 351 shirt-factory seamstress. Disparate and fragmentary though they are, the ethnic, occupational, and recreational groups within which any midwesterner mingles each have what Thoms deemed lore: shared words, phrases, stories, songs, tunes, customs, beliefs, crafts, and related traditional activities that artfully express the experiences of their members. Missionaries, traders, soldiers, government officials , naturalists, and adventurers regularly chronicled the folklore of the Midwest’s indigenous peoples from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. In his memoirs Lamothe Cadillac (1718; reprint, 1947) writes of his experiences in the western Great Lakes country during the 1690s. Marred by notions of European superiority and reckless speculations—“all these tribes are descended from the Hebrews and were originally Jews”—Cadillac’s chapters on “customs” and “traditions” nonetheless include valuable early accounts of songs, ceremonies, and such mythological stories as the earth’s formation on a great turtle’s back. While non–Native American chroniclers generally shared Cadillac’s prejudices, a handful like the German ethnologist Johann Georg Kohl, who visited northern Wisconsin in 1855, were truly enlightened. Inspired by the Grimm Brothers’ inquiries into the folklore of German peasants, Kohl’s Kitchi-Gami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway (1860; reprint, 1985) was the Midwest’s first comprehensive, even-handed presentation of a culture’s folklore. In the early nineteenth century—when the Midwest was regarded in turn as the “West,” the “Northwest ,” and, eventually, the “Old Northwest”—curious travelers and ideologically fervent outsiders alike emphasized the unruly frontier nature of folk traditions emerging amongst the region’s immigrant and oldPaul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Courtesy...