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The introduction details an alternative genealogy through which to approach both African American folklore studies and African American literary engagements with black folklore in the post-reconstruction period, centering African Americans as active participants, rather than merely passive repositories, in the study and representation of black folklore. It proposes a corrective to both the discipline of folklore studies and a new lens through which to read representation of folklore in African American literature. In particular, the introduction shows how developments in folklore studies were inseparable from turn-of-the-century constructions of race.

In 1953, forced out of business by postal authorities, Legman moved to Paris. There he turned his attention to a long-planned series, Advanced Studies in Folklore, which he hoped would eventually cover songs, stories, jokes, rhymes, and vocabulary, as well as nonverbal forms like gestures and graffiti. His first volume in the series was anonymous, The Limerick (1954), which garnered him fans in the United States and provided a modest income. Legman moved on to research folk songs in English that had been censored or ignored because of their erotic or obscene content. His “Ballad” project would occupy Legman for decades. As he worked on it, Legman corresponded extensively with folklorists such as Roger Abrahams, Vance Randolph, and Kenneth Goldstein and with archivists at the Library of Congress. His letters reveal his romantic, textual orientation toward folk song and show his efforts to open folklore study to consideration of obscenity and erotica. Legman’s persistent research led to such important discoveries as an unpublished song manuscript by Robert Burns and to a deep understanding of the history of folk song collecting. It also gave him productive friendships with the British folklorists and folk song revival singers Ewan MacColl and Hamish Henderson.

This chapter examines the role of folklore in the life and work of writer Shirley Jackson and her husband, literary critic and folklorist Stanley Edgar Hyman. It focuses particularly on their differing relationships with folklore and folklore studies and argues that reading Jackson and Hyman both and together gives us new understandings of her fictions and new insights into his particular brand of myth-ritual criticism.

As folklorists know, one way to gain understanding of a group is through the folklore they produce. In this essay, folklorists are the group, and the hoaxes perpetrated by and on them, or the lack of such hoaxes, offer some insight into the culture of folklore studies. Looking at a series of alleged hoaxes, including the Tasaday tribe, MacPhearson's Ossian, and Leland's Aradia, the essay probes folklorists' desire to believe and disbelieve. Folklorists have historically proven difficult to hoax, to intentionally deceive, but that disciplinary skepticism may come with a cost.

This chapter sets out Henderson’s conception of the folk tradition, and its manifestations in his work as a folk revivalist and as a folklore scholar. In collecting songs and redistributing them, Henderson analysed this tradition whilst also contributing to it. His work can therefore be approached as an interrogation of the limits of the individual’s own cultural ‘mediation’. This dynamic both liberated Henderson’s political imagination and plagued it with doubts over the manipulation and affectations of folk ‘voices’. Henderson’s own contributions to the field of folklore studies are placed in the context of on-going scholarly discourse, but also in relation to his own work as one who sought to operationalize a culture he was convinced belonged to the ages and was immune to interference. Federico García Lorca’s comments on the duende, and the vital folk culture of Scotland’s travelling people helped Henderson to glimpse the unbounded reach of the folk tradition and, consequently, the limited scope of the folklorist-revivalist. Through each of these chapters, Henderson’s struggle with the endless distance between himself – the poet, songwriter, folk revivalist, and folklorist – and the political and cultural lives of ‘the people’, is a constant feature.