American Folklore and Aging

Traditional expressive culture created around the experience of growing old. During the 1970s, an area of shared interest opened for gerontologists and folklorists, as many in the social sciences abandoned explanatory, scientific paradigms of aging in favor of interpretive approaches. Gerontologists, in search of predictable patterns and processes, theorized aging largely as a social problem: The elderly “disengage” by mutual agreement (disengagement theory), or they actively resist disengagement (activity theory), or they form a discrete subculture in an age-stratified society (subculture theory), or they undergo identity crises, precipitated by the loss of former roles (identity crisis theory) (Mullen 1992:10–13). Folklorists, on the other hand, had long assembled collections—of ballads, riddles, tales, and tunes—from the memories of elders, little heeding a pattern linking the culture collected to an elderly consultant’s position in the life cycle.
As phenomenological perspectives gained ground in the social sciences, folklorists began to attend more carefully to contexts for performance and collection, and gerontologists, shelving the quest for predictable patterns, began to explore how the elderly construct and interpret their own experience. A mutually engaging domain for folklorists and gerontologists has been opened up by questions about how societies constitute the life cycle through culture, how and why intergenerational communication is staged, and what kinds of culture elders create around the experience of growing old.

Understanding the African Americans Community

Known as American Negroes in 1888 when the American Folklore Society (AFS) identified those American ethnic groups whose unique cultural traditions should be documented and preserved. Much debate ensued over the label attached to this group, which presently comprises between 11 and 12 percent of the total U.S. population. As was customary during the late 19th century, the founders of the AFS used the Spanishderived title “Negro.” However, pejoratives such as “darky,” “nigger,” and “coon” were not uncommon vernacular labels during that era and were often used unashamedly. Turn of the century activist Ida B.Wells-Barnett and her colleagues made the case that “Afro-American” ought to be adopted by the American population. For many, the designation “colored” was considered a polite and acceptable label until the 1960s. In the heyday of the modern civil rights movement, the label “Black” became the one accepted by many members of the group. This name appealed to those who felt that peoples of African descent should embrace their dark complexions and African physical features. Of course, several centuries of mixing between the various ethnic groups of the United States meant that a wide range of skin tones, facial features, and body types were evident in this population. By the 1980s, many began to prefer a designation that specified the country of origin. Since then, “African American” has been the preferred label. The founders of the American Folklore Society connected Negro folklore with the institution of slavery. They rationalized that efforts to collect Negro folklore must be undertaken before all of those who had experienced slavery died. The presumption seems to have been that traces of slave tradition would not be evident in the repertoires of the descendents of slaves. But even before the formation of the American Folklore Society, African American folklore had aroused the interest of a few talented persons. In particular, the musical traditions of the slaves had triggered the curiosity of individuals such as Lucy McKim Garrison and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who published collections containing Negro folk music in the 1860s.

Journalist Joel Chandler Harris’ fascination with the folktales he had heard as a child led him to publish seven volumes of folktales featuring the exploits of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Alligator, and numerous other animal characters. Three additional volumes were published after Harris’ death in 1908. Known as trickster tales, these narratives suggest that the slaves identified with ostensibly powerless heroes who used their verbal dexterity, cunning, and verve to outwit larger, more obviously powerful opponents. Such tales served to educate and entertain African Americans of all ages. Trickster tales and other folk narratives continued to be important to African Americans long after the demise of slavery.

Most late 19th- and early 20th-century folklore research took place in Southern environs. In particular, a chain of islands along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina known as the Sea Islands proved to be a rich region for fieldwork. Once a popular destination point for slave ships, these islands were inhabited by large numbers of Blacks whose connections with Africa were stronger than those of Blacks elsewhere in the United States. Until well into the 20th century, residents of the Sea Islands spoke distinctive dialects—gullah and geechee—clearly derived from West African language systems. In addition their verbal traditions, their material culture—house types, gardens, textiles, and like artifacts—reflect strong Caribbean and African influences. In the first decades of the 20th century, the field of folklore began to attract a few trained African American folklorists. Because Black informants were more apt to reveal provocative texts to other blacks, this was a particularly welcome development. The works of Thomas Washington Talley and Arthur Huff Fauset laid significant groundwork for future Black folklorists. However, of the early 20th-century Black folklorists, Zora Neale Hurston emerges as the most significant innovator. In her landmark text Mules and Men (1935), she included contextual information as well as the actual tales recited by her rural Black informants. During the folk-belief phase of research for this volume, she underwent the rituals necessary to become a voodoo priestess in New Orleans. Although her creative output was not limited to folklore per se, all of her literary endeavors reflected her appreciation for folklore.

Starting with the Harlem Renaissance, several African American literary figures dabbled in folklore collecting and research. Celebrated poet Langston Hughes published a lengthy volume on Negro folklore. His collection of short stories on the trials and tribulations of Jesse B.Semple contains prodigious quantities of Black folk speech. Most important African American novelists have expressed a profound debt to folklore. Literary giant Ralph Ellison relied heavily on African American folklore in his masterpiece Invisible Man, and later in the 20th century, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan acknowledged their reliance on folklore materials for their short stories and novels.

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created jobs for unemployed writers and teachers that entailed fieldwork collecting folklore and life histories from elderly ex-slaves. Coordinated by Benjamin A.Botkin, the project was an enormous one, yielding thousands of interviews. Many of the collectors had no formal training and were unaccustomed to thinking of Black traditions as worthy of respect. Rather than quoting the informants word for word, the untrained collectors summarized the tales in their own words. Still, the narratives contain a wealth of information unduplicated in other sources. Responsible folklorists are careful to acknowledge the collecting irregularities when using this data.

From spirituals to gospel, from field hollers to rap, the wide range of African American sacred and secular musical expression has long intrigued folklorists and ethnomusicologists. Like their African ancestors, African Americans considered music an essential component of everyday life. In most African communities, composing and performing music appropriate for each activity was an integral part of spiritual expression. The African impulse to produce and perform music survived the horrendous strains of the Middle Passage and became a mainstay of New World African Americans, who wove their own musical styles with those they heard from the masters. During the slavery era, the slaes’ musical aptitude was duly noted by the master class. Thus was born the still pervasive stereotype that holds that Blacks are born musicians who possess “natural rhythm.” Slaves are credited with introducing percussion instruments and a forerunner of the banjo with them to the New World. Polyrhythms, frequent use of percussion instruments and antiphonal or call-and-response patterns are distinctive features of African American folk musical expression.

Few academic debates proved more resilient than the one over “survivals” in African American folklore. Whether it is the rhythm of the music, the arrangement of blocks in a quilt, the personality of a hero in a narrative, the first question asked is often, “Where did it come from—Afirica or Europe?” In the first decades of folklore research, it was widely assumed that the Middle Passage—the brutal interim spent aboard slave ships between Africa and the Americas—combined with the devastating impact of the seasoning years, had eradicated all traces of African culture from the psyches of slaves, rendering them cultural blank slates. Advocates of this position maintained that slave lore was derived from inept, clumsy imitations of the European forms to which the slaves were exposed. However, as researchers began to scrutinize West African cultures, common denominators between African and African American folklore became increasingly apparent. Africanist William R.Bascom noted numerous motifs and tale types common to West African folktales. Folk-speech specialists such as Lorenzo D.Turner identified many African words and idioms within the English spoken by both White and Black Americans. For folk-music authorities, the emphasis on call-and-response structure and the polyrhythmic organization of African American musical expression signaled its connection to West African types.

Of course, European influences on African American folklore are undeniable. English is the first language of African Americans and, like their African ancestors, African Americans enjoy and value imitation. By the same token, the folklore traditions of Americans of European descent reflect borrowings from Black traditions. Most folklorists agree that African American folk traditions are syncretized. Blacks have retained many West African aesthetic principles and wedded them to those from other cultures to which they have been exposed. The songs, narratives, jokes, rituals, beliefs, and so forth that result are intrinsically African American. Throughout the late 19th century and well into the 20th, African Americans migrated from rural Southern roads to urban Northern streets. Folklore continued to function as an essential expression of everyday Black life. Older genres were modified to fit city environments. Bluesmen frequently replaced acoustic instruments with electric ones, and lyrics focused on the challenges posed by urban industrial life. Quilters modified their techniques to include sewing machines. Worship services took place in storefront churches rather than in pine-board ones. Thus, urban life altered but did not diminish the importance of folklore.
African Americans celebrate verbal versatility and have employed a variety of modes of verbal communication to express themselves. Children are urged to hone their oratorical abilities. Girls often begin by chanting the intricate rhymes that accompany “Double-Dutch” jump-roping sessions. Boys and many girls develop their skills by participating in ritual insult-swapping sessions known as “playing the dozens.” In some circles, sophisticated verbal artistry is conveyed in toasts—lengthy epic poems featuring the escapades of unlikely Black heroes. Other familiar genres of African American folk speech include signifyin’, capping, rapping, loud-talking, and marking. Friendly competition is often the hallmark of these forms as individuals vie for respect by showing off their verbal prowess.

Contemporary legends and rumors are as common among African Americans as they are within the dominant culture. Some cycles, like the Kentucky Fried Rat and the mouse in the Coke bottle, are well known by both Blacks and Whites. But cycles specific to the concerns of African Americans have evolved and are well contained within the group. Businesses that have unorthodox advertising practices and symbolically charged products are often identified in these legends. The notion that “the government” constructs elaborate anti-Black conspiracies is often promoted.
Not all scrutiny of African American folklore has been on verbal forms. In the past several decades, many folklorists have turned their attention to material culture, in particular house types and quilts. Throughout African American rural communities, shotgun houses have been cataloged. The floor plans for these houses line up a back exit behind a front entrance with no wall or structural interference between the two doors. Thus, it is said that if a shot was fired from either the front or rear of the house, the bullet would go straight through, without lodging in the home.

These houses are remarkably similar to structures found in many West African communities. There the folk explanation for the floor plan maintains that if the spirit of an ancestor wanders into the home, it will wander out the other side without getting trapped within. Many quilts made by African American women and men vary a great deal from other American quilts. Like many kinds of West African textiles, long, rectangular strips dominate many of the quilts. Conventional symmetry in which a shape or a color is balanced on one side by the same shape or color on the other seems to be less important to African American quilters than to other quilters. Many Black quilters prefer to fool the eye by knowingly constructing asymmetrical arrangements. Synthetic fabrics are used more often in African American quilts than in mainstream quilts, and red is the most frequently used color. Academic attention to African American material culture has triggered interest in the art world. African American quilts, baskets, sculpture, and other artifacts are found and sold in the finest museums and galleries.
African American spiritual life has always been a rich source of folklore. During the slavery era, African Americans combined West African and Caribbean folk-belief practices with Christian beliefs. A system of folk belief known as conjure or hoodoo evolved in many Southern locales. Believers presumed that conjure doctors understood how to use powers contained in nature, and some conjure doctors were accorded the same respect as preachers. Conjure or hoodoo are sometimes confused with voodoo, which is akin to vaudou in Haiti. These belief systems stem from Dahomean (present-day Nigeria) sacred practices. Dahomeans traded into slavery were transported to Haiti. Some of these slaves were then traded to New Orleans. Voodoo is an enormously complex system centered on root work and snake worship.

In voodoo as well as santeria (Cuba and the United States), candomble (Brazil and the United States), and shango (Trinidad and the United States), African religious principles are syncretized with Christian principles. More conventional Christian worship is also common in African American communities. Folklorists have been particularly interested in the delivery styles of African American preachers and the status afforded the congregation. African American congregations actively participate in all aspects of the worship service. Preachers frequently chant their sermons, all the while soliciting affirmation and testimony from their listeners. A lively, vocal congregation is the sign of a successful preacher. Young African Americans often complain about the speed at which the population at large appropriates appealing Black folk expression. Music, clothing, dance styles, and art forms shaped by African Americans are soon adopted by the dominant culture. However, the impulse to transform and invent folk expression is a strong one, and African Americans, like all folk groups, will continue to enjoy an exciting folk culture.

A Guide to Adirondacks Mountains

A five-million acre, mountainous region in northeastern New York, bounded on the north by the Canadian border, on the east by Lake Champlain, on the south by the Mohawk River Valley, and on the west by the Saint Lawrence and Black River Valleys. The Adirondack Mountains constitute part of the Canadian Shield and are not, as popularly perceived, a part of the Appalachian Mountains. About half of the 5,177 square miles is a state forest preserve; much of the area has been designated a state park since 1892, thus limiting development. To many New Yorkers, the region is simply referred to as the “North Country.”
The term “Adirondack” is a lexicographer’s nightmare. Authorities offer a variety of translations. It is said to be (1) Iroquois for “They of the Great Rock,” referring to a tribe of Indians who once lived along the Saint Lawrence River; (2) a Mohawk generic name for the French and the English; or (3) Mohawk for “tree-eaters,” the derisive term that Mohawks, or Iroquois as the French called them, used to describe their enemy, the Algonquins. Before European contact, both tribes vied for control of the region because its forests and numerous lakes and streams provided a good source for meat and furs. Trails crisscrossed the region linking its numerous lakes and also to the Saint Lawrence, but there is litde evidence of any Native American permanent settlements beyond seasonal camps.
European contact is generally dated from 1609, when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain accompanied an Algonquin war party on its way to attack an Iroquois village on what eventually became known as Lake George. Later in the same century, French and Dutch trappers from Montreal and Albany forayed into the region, but they did not establish permanent communities.
After the American Revolution, however, Vermonters, in particular, and other New Englanders, many of whom received land as payment for their military service, settled around the edges of the Adirondacks. Shortly thereafter, toward the end of the 18th century, logging in the eastern Adirondack region, along the headwaters of the Hudson River, stimulated settlement and development.
The southern Adirondack region would experience growth from a different source. By the late 1810s, tourists from New York City and Boston discovered the recreational value of the Adirondacks. The mineral waters found near Saratoga Springs drew crowds desiring to bathe in and drink the radioactive mineral waters, believing that the natural springs offered cures for numerous ailments. Equally alluring were fishing and hunting within the Adirondack Mountains. The pursuit of health and outdoor recreation provided the bases for a tourist industry that shaped much of the development and settlement patterns in the southern Adirondacks. By the 1840s and 1850s, hotels and rustic “camps” had sprung up throughout the southern Adirondack region. The growth mushroomed so quickly that shortly after the Civil War conservationists banded together in efforts to protect the tourist industry from logging interests that were encroaching from the northern Adirondacks. The heyday of tourism spanned more than three decades, from 1875 to 1910. In 1900, for example, a quarter of a million people visited the Adirondacks in the summer months alone. Many of these either rented camps, stayed in luxurious hotels, or vacationed in their own camp.
In the late 1870s, the area around Saranac Lake began to be touted for its healthy air. Medical doctors recommended extended stays in the region for the treatment of tuberculosis and other lung diseases. Numerous sanatoriums were constructed around the village, drawing thousands of famous and obscure patients, all seeking to breathe the curing Adirondack air.
Out of the tourist industry developed a folk tradition centering on the exploits and heroism of the Adirondack guide. The earliest guides, such as Sabael (ca. 1749–1855) or Mitchell Sabattis (1801–1906) were Abenakis. Local lore and some ethnographic research attributes Native Americans living in the region with producing both the Adirondack guide canoe and the Adirondack packbasket, two important items of Adirondack material culture that are rooted in Abenaki tradition. Eventually, Native American guides were replaced by White guides, some of whom were originally loggers or trappers. Other guides claimed to lead the life of outdoor hermits who spent their entire lives exploring the peaks and rivers of the region. Familiarity with the backwoods country allowed the guides to lead city tourists deep into the Adirondack forests on camping, hunting, mountain climbing, and fishing trips. The 19th-century Romantic impulse of educated city folk to touch the primordial world was adequately served by these guides. In some cases, these stalwart outdoorsman took on the additional responsibility of camping throughout the winter in a tent or an isolated camp helping a tubercular-ridden invalid strengthen his or her lungs and physical stamina, hoping to overcome the dreaded disease.
Popular narratives of the day described how these mountainmen-guides entertained their guests with oudandish tales about their marksmanship and hunting skills. Folk tradition continues to keep alive the memory of Native American and White guides, including among the latter the famous guide Mart Moody (1833–1910). Tales about his outdoor skills and eccentricities are shared among visitors and natives, and they have found their way into local literature, becoming part of the regional lore. The oral traditions about the older guides have become part of the narrative repertory of contemporary guides, and, in some instances, the older tales are even retold in the first person by the present generation of guides.
Despite the surge in tourism and health industries in the second half of 19th century, the interior of the Adirondacks remained largely unexplored. Accurate maps of the whole region were not available until the 1890s. It remained for the Gilded Age a wilderness, a place of mystery that offered potential adventures in uncharted regions. While popular urban icons of the age such as Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell spent their time at the racetrack and spas in Saratoga, only a few miles away an area lay untouched that offered the more adventurous the thrill of visiting an uncharted wilderness. The northern and western borderlands of the Adirondacks are marked with a very different history of settlement and development. Logging stimulated movement into the region. Vast tracts of pine and hardwood had attracted Canadian lumber interests as eady as the mid-18th century when French Canadian loggers harvested the forests along the northwestern fringes of the Adirondacks and floated logs north to the Saint Lawrence River and Montreal. The work was handlabor intensive, but the promise of a job lured many French Canadian lumbermen and lumberjacks to settle along with their families in the northern and western edges of the Adirondack region. As the industry moved deeper into the mountains in search of more timber, the workers and their families followed, gradually establishing small communities along the rivers and edges of the many lakes. There they cut white pine and either sawed it into timber to be transported south on railroad spurs or floated the logs north to the Saint Lawrence, where they became part of the Canadian market. Despite the efforts of conservationists to block logging throughout the Adirondacks, intensive commercial logging swept across the region. By the early 20th century, logging and several major forest fires had depleted the virgin forests, but many of the workers stayed behind, working in much smaller logging operations that harvested a second growth.
Small communities scattered throughout the region developed chiefly in response to logging, although a few sprung up where there were small-scale iron- or lead-mining interests. The Lake Placid-Lake George-Lake Saranac region developed a skiing industry and has hosted the Winter Olympics on two occasions. Along the western foothills of the Adirondacks, dairy farming emerged as the major industry. In some parts of the region, potato farming, fruit growing and other small cash crop farming developed. The central region, dotted by very small communities, continues for the most part to cater to tourists. Folklore for the entire Adirondack region has never been comprehensively and systematically collected, although independent researchers have published a moderate range of material about specific counties or occupations in the Adirondacks. These studies suggest that a rich lode of folk traditions might be found in the region. Native American material is sparsely represented in any collections and appears most frequently in older, uncritical publications. Hoping to appeal to the interests of tourists, some published accounts of local history contain examples of folk speech, proverbs, or tales about eccentric characters and bizarre occurrences. Personal narratives about roughing it in the woods appear alongside traditional tall tales describing the struggles to survive the onslaught of hordes of black flies and voracious mosquitoes or accounts of the superhuman skills of hunters. Along the eastern Adirondacks that border Lake Champlain, 19th-century eyewitness reports, publicized by local tourist interests, provide a historical setting for Lake Champlain monster sightings, a tradition that continues to intrigue tourists and local citizens. Other popularizers have sought to create belief in a Bigfoot-like creature living in the remote recesses of the Adirondacks.

Ethnic humor about the perceived idiosyncracies of French Canadians are commonly told by Adirondack folk. “Canucks” worked in the woods, and their difficulties with the language and the local customs of the dominant Anglo American culture provided situations for local humor and dialect tales. Even in the late 20th century, humor about the French Canadian shoppers and their efforts to avoid paying duty on items purchased in the States constitutes a viable theme in Adirondack and border humor. The richest body of lore yet tapped in the Adirondacks is from the region’s robust logging traditions. The oral recollections of the modern loggers and of the older native population in general are rich in both grass-roots history and folklore of logging. Personal-experience tales mix with traditional tall-tale motifs; the old lifestyles in the logging camps are recalled with nostalgia. Idioms of folk speech still spice the conversations of the men who spent much of their early life working in the bush and living in the camps. With ease, they can recall how, in the evenings, as the exhausted loggers gathered in the “doghouse” (the center of the bunkhouse), the loaders, road hogs, teamsters, and jacks pushed aside their “turkeys” (tightly rolled bundles of clothes) and sat down on “deacon’s benches” to swap lies.
Especially prized are tales about the prodigious strength and extraordinary skills of lumberjacks, about marvelous rescues from the dangers of logging, and about accidental injury and death. In cycles of stories, eccentric crew foremen and backwoods strongmen mature into local villains and heroes. Yarns are woven about the dictatorial policies of cooks who demanded total obedience to the unwritten codes of bunkhouse decorum. Many narratives recount practical jokes that initiated unwitting greenhorns into the world of the lumberman or that undermined the authority of a tyrannical foreman. Barroom brawls, which are often the result of grudges that fester in the logging camps or on the job, become sagas peppered with violence and brutality. In addition to swapping stories, the loggers maintained a rich singing tradition. Ballads such as “The Saranac River” or “Blue Mountain Lake” chronicle the work experiences of local lumbermen. “Tebo” tells howTebo died while breaking a log jam.

But these songs appear to be no more or less popular than such migratory lumber songs as the sentimental “Jam on Gerry’s Rock” or “Lumberman’s Alphabet.” Many of the logging songs collected in the Adirondacks are localized versions of songs that can be found throughout the United States and Canada, wherever the axes of the lumbermen rang through the forests. Collectors in this century also have found a rich tradition of Anglo, Anglo Irish, and French Canadian ballads existing alongside these American logging ballads. Efforts at revitalizing or maintaining some of the Adirondack folklife traditions seek to tap tourist dollars and to educate local people and visitors about Adirondack life. Woodcrafts, ranging from whittling pine chains, to weaving baskets that recapture traditional Native American patterns, to producing Adirondack chairs and canoes, provide glimpses of traditions that a few years ago could be found only in museums. Oral traditions, especially folksongs, are performed at folk festivals held during the summer and fall months throughout the Adirondacks. Several museums featuring examples of Adirondack folklife, including both arts and crafts, are open to the public. These public events and displays provide new audiences for the traditions of the Adirondacks.

Academic Programs in Folklore

Folklore programs in the United States and Canada. Folklore courses were introduced at several North American universities in the 1920s and 1930s, and in 1940 Ralph Steele Boggs established the first degree-granting program in folklore, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which remains a center for the study of folklore. Awarding both an M.A. degree and a doctoral minor, the curriculum in folklore at North Carolina is designed primarily for graduate students, though undergraduates may create an interdisciplinary degree with a concentration in folklore. Supported by several research collections—including D.K.Wilgus’ papers, Archie Green’s labor-song collection, the Southern Folklife Collection, the John Edwards Memorial Collection, the American Religious Tunebook Collection, and the Southern Historical Collection—the North Carolina program is especially strong in folksong and Southern folklife studies. Other emphases include African American folklore, ethnographic filmmaking, public-sector folklore, and occupational folklore.
The first Folklore Department in an American college or university was established at Franklin and Marshall University in 1948 by Alfred L.Shoemaker, assistant professor of American folklore. Although called the Department of American Folklore, the program was influenced by European folklife concepts and emphasized the study of Pennsylvania folklore and folklife. Franklin and Marshall’s short-lived Folklore Department first appeared in the catalog for 1949–1950 but remained in it only two years. By 1995, Franklin and Marshall offered only a single folklore course, and in the United States only Indiana University and the University of Pennsylvania had Folklore Departments. Stith Thompson joined the English faculty at Indiana University as director of freshman composition in 1921 and introduced the first folklore course there in 1923. After directing several M.A. theses and doctoral dissertations in folklore for graduate students majoring in English, Thompson established the first American Ph.D. program in folklore, at Indiana in 1949. After Thompson’s retirement in 1955, his successor, Richard M.Dorson, guided an expanded folklore program of courses and faculty to departmental status in 1963. Under Thompson’s direction, the program emphasized the comparative study of international folktales. Dorson continued to stress coverage of major international cultural areas in the curriculum, but, trained in the history of American civilization, he also added an Americanist orientation to the program. Warren E.Roberts, in 1953 the recipient of the first American doctorate in folklore, introduced a course in traditional arts, crafts, and architecture in 1961 and contributed to widening the range of the Indiana program, which emphasizes theoretical approaches in covering the entire field of folklore studies. An ethnomusicology program within the Department of Folklore and an Archives of Traditional Music strengthen the B.A. program as well as the M.A. and Ph.D. programs in folklore.
The second doctoral program in folklore was established in 1959, at the University of Pennsylvania, by Mac-Edward Leach. Leach remained on the English faculty at Penn after receiving a Ph.D. in Middle English literature there in 1930 and changed two literature courses into a general folklore course and a ballad course. Penn’s interdisciplinary graduate program in folklore first emphasized studies in ballads and folksongs and in folklore and literary relations, but by the time Leach retired in 1966, Penn had a comprehensive program covering the entire range of folklore studies. Influenced by sociolinguistic approaches and the ethnography of communication, the Department of Folklore and Folklife, offering an undergraduate degree and an M.A. in folklore as well as a doctorate, stresses social-scientific approaches to folklore. Another major center of folklore studies is the folklore and mythology program at the University of California at Los Angeles, where Sigurd B.Hustvedt introduced a graduate course in the traditional ballad in 1933. Wayland D.Hand joined the German faculty in 1937, introduced a general folklore course in 1939, and established an interdepartmental folklore program in 1954. By 1995, UCLA’s folklore and mythology program offered more than seventy-five courses, either directly or in conjunction with cooperating departments throughout the university, and awarded interdisciplinary master’s and doctoral degrees in folklore and mythology. A research institute, the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology, and other university research centers strengthen UCLA’s academic program.
An M.A. in folklore is offered in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in folk arts is offered through the Tamburitzans Institute of Folk Arts in the School of Music at Duquesne University. Western Kentucky’s program in folk studies, housed in the Department of Modern Languages and
Intercultural Studies, offers an undergraduate minor as well as an M.A. degree in folk studies. In Canada, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Université Laval have folklore programs, both awarding doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate degrees in folklore. In 1962 Herbert Halpert joined the faculty of Memorial and, encouraged and supported by E.R.Seary, professor and head of the Department of English and placenames scholar, developed a folklore program within the Department of English. In 1968 Halpert established a Department of Folklore that offers a complete line of folklore courses. Three archives support the teaching mission: the Centre d’études francoterreneuviennes, the Centre for Material Culture Studies, and the Folklore and Language Archive. Universite Laval, with folklore studies dating from 1944 when Luc Lacourciére was appointed to a chair in folklore, offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in folklore, with emphasis on French folklore in North America, through its programmes d’arts et traditions populaires in the Département d’Histoire.
Two institutions without formal graduate programs in folklore, Pitzer College and Harvard University, offer B.A. degrees in folklore. Folklore studies at Harvard date from 1856 when Francis James Child began collecting English and Scottish fblk ballads from books, broadsides, and manuscripts. Child did not develop separate folklore courses or a folklore program, but he incorporated folklore in his English courses and trained several notable American folklorists, including George Lyman Kittredge, successor to Child’s English professorship in 1894. Harvard became the center for the literary study of folklore in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the interest in folklore at Harvard was maintained in the 1930s by a group of Americanists, who promoted an interdisciplinary study of American culture to include folk and popular cultures as well as formal culture, and by Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord, who initiated field research in European oral epics. Harvard remains a center for the complement Harvard’s undergraduate degree program in folklore and mythology, awarded through its Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. Over eighty North American colleges and universities offer majors in other disciplines (notably English, anthropology, and American studies) that permit a folklore minor or concentration. These programs range from formal curricula to informal concentrations at all degree levels. For example, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in anthropology or English with a folklore concentration is offered at the University of Texas at Austin. Undergraduate majors as well as graduate majors in anthropology at Texas A&M University also may elect a concentration in folklore. Degrees in folklore at the University of Oregon are coordinated through its folklore and ethnic studies program, in which master’s students create their own program of study through an individualized program and doctoral students in English or anthropology may elect folklore as an area of concentration. Through its program in folklore, mythology, and film studies, the State University of New York at Buffalo awards an M.A. in English or humanities and a Ph.D. in English with a folklore and mythology concentration. A concentration in folklore also is available in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. George Washington University’s folklife program grants an M.A. in American studies or anthropology and a Ph.D. in American studies with a concentration in traditional material culture—a program that takes advantage of the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, the American Folklife Center, and other museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies in the Washington, DC, area. The folklore program at Utah State University is administered through the American studies program, and undergraduate and master’s degrees in American studies with a folklore emphasis are offered. Folklore concentrations also are available to history or English majors at Utah State. Master’s candidates may elect areas in general folklore, public folklore, or applied history/museology. Ohio State University has offered folklore courses since the 1930s and has a Center for Folklore and Cultural Studies, allowing undergraduate and graduate students a folklore concentration in an interdisciplinary program, which emphasizes folklore and literary relations and narrative theory.
The academic study of folklore has made considerable progress since Boggs established the first folklore program in 1940, but few degree-granting programs in folklore have developed. Most folklore courses are taught in departments other than folklore, typically in English and anthropology departments or in American studies programs in the United States and in anthropology and history departments in Canada.

Folklore of the college and university campus

Folk traditions of the college and university campus. The academic world consists of two principal subcultures—student and faculty—which, like all groups sharing common concerns over long periods of time, have developed constellations of folk belief, custom, folk speech, legend, jocular narrative, and ritual.
The most prevalent folk beliefs among university students (beyond the assumption that a college education leads to a job in “the real world”) fall into two arenas of potential anxiety: class attendance and examinations. In both contexts, certain excuses (such as “my grandmother is dying”) are believed to be more efficacious than others in obtaining pardon or permission for missing something for which the student has already paid. Virtually universal among American college students in their first two years of university work is the belief that there is a standard waiting period for a professor who does not arrive punctually. The most common system requires students to wait five minutes for an instructor, ten for an assistant professor, fifteen for an associate professor, and twenty for a full professor, although one also hears of ten minutes for a non-Ph.D., twenty for a Ph.D., fifteen for most faculty, all period if necessary for a full professor. This set of beliefs, like most folklore, is not learned from formal authority (indeed, such an obligation has yet to be found in the formal student rules of any American university), but from other members of the folk group: in this case, other students. University students in Germany, by contrast, routinely arrive in the classroom about fifteen minutes after the scheduled time, an acknowledged manipulation of time called der akademische Viertel (the academic quarter [hour]).
Students facing examinations, especially “finals,” try to affect their fortunes or their self-confidence by wearing lucky clothes (such as a shirt that was worn during a previous exam that was successful), carrying amulets, dolls, or special pens, hoping the exam falls on a lucky day (including the seventh, fourteenth, or twenty-first of the month), avoiding normal personal grooming (not combing hair, not shaving, or wearing “grubbies”), abstaining from sex (to conserve brain energy), and knocking loudly on the desk before starting the exam. While these observances may seem superficially to be either naive or simple matters of haste, they all fall into quite ancient categories of psychological tradition. In addition to the student’s own talents in the class, which are affected by a number of variables, and in response to the professor’s power in the class, which is believed to be wielded inconsistently, the anxious student can obtain confldence or magical help by utilizing a belief system that has been in existence for hundreds of years. In a similar way, members of hazardous occupations (like deep-sea fishermen and firefighters) adopt the beliefs and customs passed on by several generations of coworkers, thus availing themselves of an accumulation of experience, know-how, and psychological aids that they do not have time to discover on their own before being in danger. Student customs extend far beyond the issues of academic anxiety, however. Collectors of student folklore have noted extensive drinking games (“Cardinal Puff,” “Fuzz-Buzz”), theme parties, engagement and marriage rituals (passing a candle around a group of sorority women to announce an engagement), clothing and personal-decoration variations (especially at sports events and at graduation), and the use of obscene songs as unofficial expressions of membership in clubs, fraternities, sororities, and sports teams (especially rugby). At Utah State University (formerly an agricultural college), a student becomes a True Aggie by standing on a small concrete monument formed in the shape of an A and being kissed by someone who is already a True Aggie, at midnight, while the bell in nearby Old Main tolls the hour, preferably on a full moon, and preferably on Homecoming Saturday. It is rumored that another more complex and private ritual produces a “True Blue Aggie,” but its details have remained in the dark. At other universities, gates, statues, and fountains are the focal points of similar rituals and observances.
The folk speech of university students abounds with terms that mark the users as insiders: “cutting” or “sluffing” for intentionally missing a class, “cramming” for earnest studying, “Mickey” or “Mickey Mouse” to describe an easy course, “ballbuster” for a difficult course, “brown-nose” for a teacher’s pet. Terms like “comps,” “finals,” “defense,” “How much of a load are you carrying?” “What’s your GPA?” and the like are readily understood on campus but are usually unintelligible to anyone not a part of the academic group.
Academic legends (stories told as true, but not by someone who was an eyewitness) recall prudish deans of the 1950s who prohibited red dresses and patent leather shoes (responding to overzealous interpretations of in loco parentis), obscene or crazy comments by professors in their classes, epic pranks (like the dead horse in the fraternity cellar), and spectacular feats of cheating on final examinations. Professorial arrogance is parodied in the legend of the lecturer who notices most of his students using tape recorders so they won’t have to take notes; he responds by sending a graduate assistant to play tapes to them so he will not have to lecture. An absentminded biology professor, getting ready to dissect a frog, pulls out of his backpack the sandwich he thought he ate at lunch. Students playing recordings backward discover satanic messages or hypnotic orders that lead them to suicide (in joking response, other students claim to have played a record of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir backward, obtaining twenty new recipes for Jello salad).
Pranks are another important genre of academic folklore, though it is not always clear whether the pranks actually are carried out, or if they are simply parts of the oral traditions of campus groups. One hears about well-fed cows being left overnight in the offices of unpopular professors and about the dean’s car being taken apart and reassembled on the roof of the administration building, but it is easier to flnd avid narrators than eyewitnesses to these events. Modern legends of student hackers gaining access to academic records and changing friends’ grades are matched by newspaper accounts of people who have been caught doing it.
Faculty folklore focuses more on the humor, irony, and occasional disappointments in the life behind the lectern than it does on anxiety and fun. Although there are some jokes about students—like the young woman who says she will “do anything” for a grade and is then told by the professor to try studying, or the joke about the student who almost chokes to death trying to swallow his “crib notes” at an examination—professorial traditions complain about the devices used for cheating on exams, the range of excuses given for being absent (it is noted cynically that final examination week is extremely dangerous for the elderly, since so many grandmothers die then), and the unwillingness of students to learn (teaching is characterized as “casting fake pearls before real swine”). As much as anything, faculty members both instigate and utilize much of the folklore circulating among their students, very likely because they were also students in a previous life. When a professor is late for class, she can be sure that the students will wait for at least ten minutes before daring to leave. If a professor wants to intimidate or astound the students, he can quote from tradition, as when a University of Oregon English professor asked the women in his Milton class to cross their legs so that the gates of Hell would be closed when they discussed Paradise Lost, using a legend he had heard at his own alma mater when he was a student. A music professor at the University of Utah waited until the critical moment (was it twenty minutes?) when his students were about to leave the room, then ceremoniously stepped out of the grand piano while beginning his initial lecture.
Folklore is not found only among the backward, illiterate, and uninformed; it is a vital expressive component in the lives of all ongoing human groups. Academic folklore is a dynamic illustration of the ways in which folklore functions for modern, well-educated, upwardly mobile people whose occupational context places them under particular strains and concerns that are well articulated on the vernacular level.