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298 Epilogue “quoi faire?” The Lomax collection, like the Louisiana Creole phrase this epilogue takes its name from, is interrogative and convergent—a product of cultural collision that poses a myriad of challenging questions. Part Yoruba, part French, quoi faire is open-ended and blended, a riddle in its function as well as its structure. So too the songs in the Lomax collection, whose structure and etymology present countless puzzles—not only of why but of wherefore, how, who, when, for what purpose, and what to do now? In this study I have attempted to answer many of the minute quoi faires of the Lomax collection. Although many questions remain for future scholars in a variety of disciplines , the work presented here constitutes a foundation and a beginning. But what exactly sets this study apart from previous discussions of the Lomax materials, or for that matter from previous studies of traditional music in southern Louisiana? How does this study move our understanding forward? Why does the work conducted here matter? On the one hand, the answer to these questions is a simple and direct one: this is the first sustained e≠ort to gather all of this material in one place and to study it closely, and therefore it presents the first comprehensive examination of this important collection. On the other hand, the answer is multifaceted: in developing a close, tight reading of the Lomax collection, this study significantly advances the understanding of traditional music in southern Louisiana, not only challenging basic assumptions about the field but also enlarging and defining it, re-marking its boundaries, and providing fundamental tools for its cultivation. In addition to this general reorientation, this study presents a significant toil in the field in question, and there is much in the way of specific lore to be gleaned from the many rows and furrows of these pages. This study is the first e≠ort to transcribe, translate, and understand the entire 1934 Lomax collection. As noted in the introduction, over the years a number of scholars have made valuable contributions, which have been synthesized here and com- epilogue 299 bined with readings of newly transcribed and translated songs. The first achievement of this project was to organize, present, and discuss a large body of previously unexamined material. Previously, most of this material existed only in audio format at two archives—the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress and the Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore (ACCF) at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Now a single, written, searchable document of these songs exists. Folklorists have been mediators of orality and literacy since at least the seventeenth century, and my e≠orts here are no exception. When I began this project, the ACCF primarily held copies of French songs from the 1934 collection. In order to obtain copies of the English material , I worked with archivists at both the Library of Congress and the University of Louisiana to complete the ACCF’s collection. As a result of my e≠ort, the ACCF now holds an audio copy of the entire 1934 corpus. Moving on to more specific matters, the work presented here greatly expands on the scholarship related to traditional French song in Louisiana, by which I mean primarily French songs with identifiable analogues in the broader body of francophone folk songs. Before the work conducted here, there were no in-depth and extended academic studies of French traditional song in southern Louisiana. In 1942 Marius Barbeau pointed this out in a review of Irène Thérèse Whitfield’s 1939 collection, and it has remained true to this day. Although French scholars, particularly French Canadian scholars of traditional French song, such as Barbeau and Conrad Laforte, have included Louisiana French songs in their indexes and studies, there has been little e≠ort on the part of scholars of Louisiana vernacular song to align their findings with the broader transatlantic understanding of French song. The notable exception has been Barry Jean Ancelet, who has addressed these questions, mainly in liner notes and a few articles. My project begins to close the research gap in a number of concrete ways. To begin with, I demonstrate how the Lomax collection aligns with the standard reference work on French traditional song, Conrad Laforte’s Catalogue de la chanson folklorique fran- çaise. Again, with the exception of Ancelet, there has been little discussion of Louisiana traditional song in light of Laforte’s seminal study, and...

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