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This chapter continues the examination of neglected stories and collectors of folk tales. It explores the significance of collections in Germany, France, Italy, and other European countries that led to a greater cultural interest in folklore. In England, after the foundation of the British Folklore Society, a great effort was also made by British and American folklorists to translate folk tales from other countries, such as India, China, Japan, and Africa. Yet their full impact has never been appreciated because the majority of the European folk-tale collections have not been translated or studied in English-speaking countries. For instance, until recently, one of the most exceptional of the great nineteenth-century European and American folklorists, Pitrè, was ignored. The chapter considers his life and works to demonstrate how he is an exemplary representative of those learned, dedicated folklorists who tried to make the past usable so that we might learn something about ourselves.

This chapter talks about the different case studies carried out to determine the age of the various customs involved. Were the ecclesiastical ceremonies those of the Anglo-Saxons? Were the secular customs equally old or indeed yet more ancient so that they represented relics of pagan religion? Were both part of an unchanging, immemorial culture? Excellent case-studies have been made of the origin of specific rites, and folklorists have collected material for further investigation, but this information needs to be rationalized and extended before an overall view can be obtained. Literary and legal records were the only evidence available until the later Middle ages. Then accounts, which featured so prominently in discussions of the 16th century, appear to provide a fairly precise guide to the inception of particular customs.

This chapter talks about the role the legendary singer, political activist, and folklorist Pete Seeger played as a steelband consultant to Admiral Gallery during the band's formative years. Seeger played an important but little-known role in fostering and encouraging steelband activity in the United States. The chapter demonstrates Seeger in action and offers a case study in which the folksinger employs his unique skills as a folklorist, political activist, musician, and steelband consultant. It also illustrates Admiral Gallery in action and highlights the admiral's wit, diplomatic skill, and passion in pursuit of something he thought was for the good of the American public. Both men were products of the time and their intersection aids in further understanding the social environment of the 1950s.

This chapter explores the methodology of history and the potential for cooperation between the fields of history and folklore by examining the arguments of folklorist Eli Yassif. In so doing, the chapter raises the question of how the methods of folklore can be used in the historiographical enterprise. The historian's work begins before methodology enters the picture: identifying sources, gathering data or information, formulating questions, and then choosing the appropriate methodology. It continues after methodology has done its work with interpretation in light of the assumptions, questions, knowledge, and methodological analysis that have been proffered. Yassif demands that historians become better folklorists; that does not mean that they need to stop being historians.

This chapter discusses the treatment of the Jewish identity of various composers by the Yiddish folklorist and music critic, Menachem Kipnis. It describes Kipnis as a small, energetic man with a soft but beautiful singing voice and considered one of the most popular Jewish folklorists of interwar Poland. It also looks into Kipnis' book World-Famous Jewish Musicians, a collection of biographies of nineteenth-century composers with a Jewish background. The chapter examines the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of World-Famous Jewish Musicians compared with Kipnis's other works. It seeks to understand the balance Kipnis struck between praise for Jewish composers and quasi-nationalist emphasis on their Jewishness on the one hand, and his work as a folklorist in Poland, collecting songs from traditional, Yiddish-speaking Jews on the other.

This chapter discusses the work of Elaine Lawless and Heather Carver in identifying the intersections of performance studies and folklore studies as they emerged in the twenty-first century. Elaine and Heather argue that ethnography informs performance through a careful focus on the real stories of women’s lives. Performance informs the ethnographic project by turning the traditional theatrical focus of the actor on stage into a multilayered dialogic performance involving performers, stories, and listeners.

This chapter places the Federal Writers’ Project’s mission to collect and document African American history and culture within the larger context of the 1930s. National interest in black folk culture and the “Negro question” along with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Civil War and competing forms of remembrance through film, Ex-Slave associations, and Old Slave Days, helped fuel debates over black citizenship. By hiring African American writers, such as Sterling Brown as the editor of Negro Affairs, to oversee projects related to black history, the FWP seemed to herald a new era in African Americans’ struggle for authority over cultural representations of black identity. But the increasing commodification of black folk culture through the recording industry, radio, and film, along with folklorists and southern whites’ emphasis on the “old-time Negro,” presented significant challenges to black authority despite invocations of authenticity, the social sciences, and the image of the New Negro.

This chapter looks at folk song collector John Lomax, who served as the FWP’s first folklore editor and directed the Ex-Slave Project. A master of self-promotion, Lomax popularized the image of white folklorists through his well-publicized relationship with folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) and his autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. Lomax frequently collected from black convicts in southern prisons. His representations of black folk informants relied heavily on “Negro dialect” and racial stereotypes. Analysis of field notes and correspondence he and his wife Ruby Terrill Lomax kept during their southern recording trips from 1937 to 1940 demonstrates how his interactions with black folk musicians and definition of what constituted “authentic” black folk culture shaped his direction of the Ex-Slave Project, affecting the ways ex-slaves and their narratives would be represented. Lomax was replaced as the FWP’s folklore editor by the appointment of the professional folklorist Benjamin Botkin.

This chapter is about the start of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries after WWII in 1945. The escape of folklorists, the censorship of folklore archives and the new rules and regulations that were to define the life and scholarship henceforth.

This chapter presents reflections on how folklorists can help people and institutions understand the cultural and social implications of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Folklorists must remind everyone that New Orleans was not alone in the Katrina tragedy. They must also listen to the stories, record them, and try to derive from a collection of them the story of these events in ways that may not otherwise be considered. There are many stories that need to be told and heard so that the world will know what really happened in New Orleans and in south Louisiana.

This chapter discusses the role of folklorists as writers of narrative and poetic texts born out of someone else’s imagination. They invariably mix their own words with those of the oral narrator, and create unprecedented texts. Yet, they are not the tellers of these stories, but merely the “collectors” of these texts. The history of folkloristics tells us that the motives of any folklore collector are closely related to the types of folklore collections they compile. The motives of colonial folklore collectors are also important because, out of hundreds of thousands of British residents across the Empire, not more than a hundred actually collected and published folklore of a colony.

This chapter begins by showing how folklore was used to theorize the pre-Hispanic unity of different peoples of the Philippines. At the same time, the nature of folklore’s data—the contemporary practices of people—lent it to social and political criticism, and so the chapter reads specific sections of folkloric writings for their critical qualities. It argues that the folklore writings of the Philippines followed relatively closely, and even could be considered part of, Spanish folklore, though this could signify a challenge to Spanish authority as much as recognition of it. Finally, the chapter considers the authorial voices of Filipino folklorists, and how they navigated between an intimate relationship with their subjects and the distant and objective voice of the scientist or documentarian.