The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 14: Folklife

By Glenn Hinson and William Ferris

Southern folklife is the heart of southern culture. Looking at traditional practices still carried on today as well as at aspects of folklife that are dynamic and emergent, contributors to this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture examine a broad range of folk traditions.

Moving beyond the traditional view of folklore that situates it in historical practice and narrowly defined genres, entries in this volume demonstrate how folklife remains a vital part of communities' self-definitions. Fifty thematic entries address subjects such as car culture, funerals, hip-hop, and powwows. In 56 topical entries, contributors focus on more specific elements of folklife, such as roadside memorials, collegiate stepping, quinceanera celebrations, New Orleans marching bands, and hunting dogs. Together, the entries demonstrate that southern folklife is dynamically alive and everywhere around us, giving meaning to the everyday unfolding of community life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807898550

Book preview

FOLKLIFE

The spirit is high when Sister Lena Mae Perry strides to the front of the huge, gleaming church. Worshipers at the Western Assemblies Headquarters Building in rural Newton Grove, N.C., had already been offering praises for more than three hours. They had sung with the choirs, echoed the emcee’s exhortations, clapped to the quartets’ driving tempos, and shouted when the spirit led them to shout. Elegantly gowned grandmothers had leapt from the pews in the ecstatic steps of the holy dance; youthful fathers had rocked children to sleep to the sounds of passionate praise; and more than a few young boys—all dressed in sharp-looking suits, with silk ties slightly askew—had ably manned the drums while their parents sang at the church-front microphones. Now, as the electric guitar and bass played an understated riff, the churchgoers are ready to praise anew. It is Sister Perry’s turn to light the fires of exaltation.

Stately and commanding in her shimmering gold gown, the sixtysomething singer gazes over the congregation. These are her people, believers who know and share the ways of faith, worshipers who see themselves as part of the vast community of African American Christians who self-identify as saints. In the pews before her are teachers, computer programmers, restaurant owners, bricklayers, social workers, bulldozer operators, doctors, service workers, chefs, college students, and more. But occupation and life’s standing—as Sister Perry is quick to tell you—matter not in the community of faith. All are here to lift God’s praises, and that’s all that counts.

Cued by a glance from Sister Perry, the piano player gently steers the melody to the opening chords of the old hymn Remember Me. Sister Perry sings the opening words with a power that shakes the church, her low voice caressing each slowly voiced syllable. This is one of those way back hymns, a piece that Sister Perry remembers as being one of the first songs she ever heard. These memories seem to whisper across her face as she sings with eyes closed, fervently asking the Lord to remember her as she moves though life’s daily trials. When you sing a song slow like that, people will sit and listen, she later says. The thoughts get to rolling over and over in their mind, as they remember what the Lord has brought them through. Those old hymns will stir up a congregation.

And stir it does. Gentle cries of Thank you, Jesus and Praise God are soon floating through the church, buoyed by a chorus of quiet singing, hushed sobs, and soundlessly waved hands. This is clearly a song that means, a piece that draws its hearers together in a communion of feeling, spirit, and shared memory. Churchgoers speak of this experience as being in one accord, when the self finds sustenance in the sharing of the whole. Though Sister Perry certainly leads the moment, its many meanings find fullness not in her words, but in the spirits of those seated in the pews.

As the song ends, Sister Perry pauses to offer a few words of quiet testimony. Her voice quickens, however, as she introduces her second piece, the faster-paced If You Can’t Help Me. Instantly, churchgoers are clapping with the rhythm, enthusiastically pushing the tempo as they sing the song’s victorious refrain. If they knew the opening hymn from church, they know this piece from the radio; it was a gospel hit for the Philadelphia-based Angelic Gospel Singers in the 1980s and still gets frequent airplay on the area’s AM gospel stations. The song’s source, however, matters little to these believers. What is important is its message, a message of affirmation and persistence that clearly resonates with their lives. They too are running by faith, dodging earthbound obstacles to reach that heavenly finishing line.

That song just relates to me, asserts Sister Perry, reflecting on why she added this piece to her repertoire. I’ve had those experiences, of people talking about me and blocking my way. And so have others. But where I sing it for one purpose, for someone else it might mean something different. But it still serves a purpose, whatever their situation. That’s why people like that song so much.

This liking is everywhere evident in the church. The exuberant singing echoes off the building’s vaulted ceilings, while the rhapsodic clapping encourages the musicians to play with even more fervor. Once again, the congregation is on one accord. And Sister Perry—who clearly feels the shared spirit—smiles and sings on.

What does all this have to do with folklife? Why open an encyclopedia volume with a story about singing in church? And why open with this story, one that doesn’t particularly speak to popular understandings about the folk? The described scene, after all, is not exactly steeped in the old-time and traditional. And these certainly are the qualities that leap to mind when encountering the term folklife. Perhaps if the church were smaller and more intimate, with wood-framed walls and a humble sanctuary. Perhaps if the instruments were acoustic instead of electric. Perhaps if the congregation were a bit more working class, a bit more evidently folky. Perhaps if Sister Perry were wearing something plainer, something less sparkly. Perhaps if both of the songs were old, hearkening from an era that predated the taint of commercial production. And perhaps if Sister Perry had learned the second piece from other singers, rather than from the radio. Then this scene might more readily qualify as the common understanding of the term folk.

The passion of gospel singing, echoed by the congregation’s enthusiastic hand claps and calls of encouragement, in many ways exemplifies the communion of spirit, meaning, and community that lies at the heart of folklife. Southern churchgoers often speak of this communion as coming to accord, suggesting the particular moment when a singer’s intent and the audience’s appreciative understanding come together as one. North Carolina gospel singer Lena Mae Perry—like countless other singers in churches across the South—leads congregations toward this place of experienced unity virtually every weekend, reminding us that folklife is a vibrant, thriving, and fundamental feature of southern culture. (Photograph by Roland L. Freeman)

Of course, some aspects of the described scene do fit popular definitions of folkness. Perhaps foremost among these is the simple fact that these churchgoers clearly share a set of beliefs, a sense of style and taste, and a set of worship practices (from their clapped accompaniments and voiced praises to their silently waved hands). In this sharing, they constitute a community set apart from others who don’t occupy this same circle of aesthetics and faith. Is this enough to merit the mantle of folklife? Further, these features of set-apartness were likely learned through nonformal means; that is, they were probably conveyed through observation and conversation rather than through formal teaching. This too seems to be a favorite criteria of the popular definition. Taken together, do these qualities offer enough of a counterbalance to slide this performance under the rubric of folklife?

The best response to this question offers not a balancing tally as much as a refocusing of the query, a refocusing that leads away from issues of form and process and toward those of intent and meaning. We might well begin this process by listening again to Sister Perry’s descriptions of her songs. In both cases, she speaks of how the songs make her and her listeners feel. She foregrounds the emotions that the songs invoke, first pointing to passion and intensity and then grounding these experiences in deeper currents of felt significance. The passion is not an end in itself; Sister Perry says that she doesn’t sing merely to make people feel good. Instead, as she explains, the passion is a pathway to deeper meanings, an invitation to reflect, to remember, to connect.

Sister Perry sings with the knowledge that songs have this power. Her fellow churchgoers, in turn, share this understanding. Singing thus becomes an act of connection, a meeting of the singer’s intent and the listeners’ expectations. It is this coming together that yields the one accord of which churchgoers so often speak—an accord grounded in trust and mutual understanding, an accord that sizzles with significance. Those who experience this significance needn’t feel it as earthshakingly strong. The sizzle might be slight, felt only as the subtle comfort of familiarity or the passing flicker of cherished memory. Alternately, it might be intense, felt as a deep stirring of the spirit. (Such was clearly the case for the worshipers moved to tears during Sister Perry’s singing.) Whatever the experience—whether slight or strong—the sizzle of meaning is always profound, for it speaks to a connectedness that grounds the individual in the welcome embrace of community.

We might well describe folklife in terms of this accord, pointing to the countless ways of being and doing that craft the bonds of community. These ways need not be performed, as they were in Sister Perry’s case; they need not bear the stamp of artistry that one would expect when speaking about folk songs, folk dances, or folktales. More often than not, they are simply enacted, pursued as part of everyday life, engaged during work, worship, leisure, and play. Hence the focus on life in the term folklife. To speak of folklife is to speak of the ways that communities create, sustain, and celebrate their identities. And at the heart of this creating and sustaining—as is always the case when talk turns to matters of identity—is meaning.

This brings us full circle to the questions that opened this discussion, questions that challenged the suitability of Sister Perry’s story to open a volume on southern folklife. Those questions focused on the particularities of tradition and transmission, asking how Sister Perry learned the songs, why the setting was so patently modern, why the community encompassed so many social classes, even why the instruments were electric (and thus not sufficiently old-fashioned to warrant the designation folk). Notice that none of these questions speaks to measures of meaning foregrounded by the community in question. The churchgoers who sang and clapped and wept didn’t seem bothered by the newness of the building or the source of the songs; the communion they experienced did not seem to hinge on the nature of the instruments or the social status of the congregant sitting on the other end of the pew. The meanings that the churchgoers experienced transcended these matters, tacitly declaring their relative unimportance. What was truly important (as these churchgoers are quick to testify) was the feeling of shared community and the recognition that this sharing is grounded in a host of overlapping sharings, from beliefs, musical tastes, and ways of dressing to joint memories, forms of talking, familiar gestures, hairstyles, and so much more. Therein lie the meanings. And therein lies the best reason for including this moment under the rubric of folklife.

Of course, if you asked the congregation members about this designation, you would probably earn only blank stares. The term folklife is not a word in widespread use; indeed, other than those instances where it precedes the word festival, you will rarely hear it in everyday conversation. It is a word that lives largely in the rarefied world of academic study and in the productions and discussions of folklorists. This does not mean, however, that the term has little value beyond these narrow circles. As a broadly encompassing abstraction, folklife offers a way to recognize patterns of meaningful connectedness and similarity across widely divergent practices, performances, beliefs, and communities. The term folklife invites us to step back while stepping in, to discern broad patterns while exploring the particularities of expression in any given community. That community might be made up of the congregation of a sanctified church or the members of a synagogue; line workers in a textile mill or office workers in a high-tech pharmaceutical firm; friends who foxhunt together or knitters who gather for weekly meetings; an online chat group or the kids on a neighborhood playground; hip-hop emcees in freestyle competitions or participants in bluegrass picking sessions; Civil War reenactors or powwow drummers or matachines dancers; union members or masons; midwives or debutantes; even friends who get together in country stores, coffee shops, or fast-food joints to gossip, boast, tell stories, or simply pass the time. What matters is not the formality or informality of the ties that bind these folks together as groups, but rather the fact that they see themselves as group members. They recognize and enact their groupness. In so doing, they create and celebrate places of sharing and of shared meaning.

While these meanings rest with the group members, they are often opaque to those who are not members of these communities. This opaqueness, in turn, can all too easily invite misreading and misunderstandings on the part of outsiders. This process is an altogether familiar one. Not privy to the insider meanings, outsiders tend to read the external markers of a group’s identity—markers that often make themselves apparent in ways of dressing, talking, worshipping, playing, or eating—and then try to make sense of these differences. This sense making, in turn, typically entails coming up with explanations of these differences that fit within the outsiders’ way of understanding the world. Note that these explanations come not from group insiders but from the outsiders, who are the ones trying to understand the differences. This process might best be likened to fitting square pegs into round holes; sometimes the only way to make the pegs fit is to mangle them enough to force them into the unyielding circles. This mangling engenders the misunderstandings that so often characterize contact between communities of difference, misunderstandings that readily give rise to stereotypes. When contact between groups involves differences in power (as is frequently the case in the South), these misunderstandings all too often lead to mistreatment and exploitation.

The study of folklife has the potential to short-circuit this process of misunderstanding. It does so by drawing us into conversation with members of these disparate communities, inviting them to explain the meanings that are so often obscure to outsiders. Their words, their passions, their understandings thus become part of the dialogue. At the same time, folklife study offers us insights into shared patterns of creating identity, patterns that make themselves evident in realms as diverse as the layout of local cemeteries and the foods served at family gatherings. Such patterns often transcend community boundaries; understanding them allows us to read unfamiliar situations with greater sensitivity and to ask questions of community members that we might not have otherwise thought to ask. The goal, in the end, is to foster fuller understanding across what can initially seem like chasms of difference and become aware of the role that each of us plays in keeping these misunderstandings alive.

This volume pursues this goal of building understanding by exploring the diversity and differences that constitute life in the South and offering readers openings for conversation and further inquiry. The volume’s focus on folklife promises coverage of an impossibly broad range of practices, beliefs, and ways of being. Indeed, one could argue that folklife encompasses virtually every important dimension of what it means to be southern, for folklife speaks to all of those places where people in communities craft meaning. Though these places are clearly too plentiful to catalog in a single volume, we nonetheless offer a starting place, providing a selective set of glimpses that will hopefully invite readers to probe further and ask new kinds of questions when they encounter practices different from their own.

The Life in Folklife. Where does meaning happen? At first glance, the question seems too abstract, too vague, to even consider. Yet if we narrow the context and ask where meaning happens in communities, then it suddenly makes a bit more sense. When community becomes both the frame for and the agent of meaning making, we start to step into the realm of folklife. And as we so step, some of these places of meaning quickly offer themselves for consideration. This is certainly true for the South’s many performance traditions, which self-consciously meld significance and passion in the fires of artistry. These are traditions that speak both inward to the community that creates them and outward to the communities that encounter them; as such, they often serve as clear markers of group identity. One need only look to gospel, bluegrass, southern hip-hop, Cajun, country, alt-country, old-time string band, norteño, southern soul, or any of the South’s many other vibrant musics to recognize the power that performance traditions can hold. By the same token, one could look at dancing and its many exuberant analogues for telling examples of performed intensity. The intricacies of buckdancing, the drama of collegiate stepping, and the deep subtleties of dancing at the Cherokee Green Corn Ceremony, for instance, certainly testify to the range and performative power of dance in the South, while the strutting of second liners in New Orleans street processions, the acrobatics of high school cheerleaders, and the high-stepping glories of African American collegiate marching bands just as powerfully speak to the rich worlds of dance-related movement. Folklife also encompasses performances of the crafted word, whether voiced as tales, testimonies, stories of personal experience, sermons, poetry, or even the perfectly phrased pickup line. In addition to standing alone, these familiar performance realms—music, dance, movement, and artful talk—often come together in community-based dramas, which range from drive-through nativity spectacles to Halloween-time Hell House productions and womanless weddings.

Performances, of course, need not offer themselves with the public immediacy of a chitlin-circuit dancer or a tale-spinning raconteur. Many are far more subtle, imparting meaning not in the intensity of a sparkling moment but in the quietude of time’s passage. This is particularly true for those performances that yield crafted objects—artful things that hold and communicate the passion invested in them by their creators. Though perhaps quieter than their sung or danced counterparts, such objects are no less affecting. Some regularly inhabit popular images of the rural South; regional folkness has long been defined by baskets, quilts, turned and coiled pots, rag rugs, wood carvings, forged ironwork, and other handcrafted objects. Other creations less frequently earn the designation of craft but are products of the same process, emerging as impassioned embodiments of community aesthetics. Here we might include the exuberantly detailed, street-hugging lowriders; the gloriously hand-painted signs of many southern churches; the explosively colorful costumes of the Mardi Gras Indians; and the simple, plastic-egg-laden Easter egg trees that dot the southern landscape in the spring. All testify to the auspicious union of creativity and community taste.

Such taste, of course, expresses itself in ways that stretch well beyond the relatively small scale of an elegant basket or a roadside sign. Local aesthetics find a much larger canvas on the landscape, where houses and barns, fences and stone walls, gardens and landscaped yards, and even the layout of fields all testify to the shaping hand of human intention. These sites and structures not only reveal their crafted nature but also invite habitation. Here, too, rests evidence of creative decision making, in realms as diverse as the arrangement of a home’s rooms and the decorations therein. The peopling of such places also draws us to the activities that unfold there, from birthday parties and wakes to family games, front-porch talking, and the abundant mastery in the cook’s kitchen. Each domain—however taken for granted—garners unto itself subtle significances, holding in its quiet familiarity shadings of familial, cultural, and regional identity.

Stepping into the realm of communal activity further broadens the scope of folklife’s embrace, adding ceremony, celebration, and festival to our list. All represent moments of meaningful engagement, when communities gather to affirm their essential accord and, frequently, to guide members into new stages of individual and social personhood. Hence the calming rapture of a river baptism or the proud gaiety of a quinceañera, both of which exist alongside the rowdy exuberance of bluegrass festivals and the countrified bawdiness of southern drag shows. The events themselves proclaim the publicness of communion and the sharing of purpose.

Social connectedness, of course, need not rely on such explicitly heightened occasions. Far more common are the everyday practices that inject meaning into life’s unyielding dailiness, practices that lend comfort in their familiarity and sharedness. Some are simple, time-honored customs, such as harvesting vegetables by the signs of the moon or eating black-eyed peas and collards on New Year’s. Others are workplace traditions, such as welcome-to-the-job pranks played on new workers, skillfully ritualized resistances to the boss’s demands, or worker-claimed contests of occupational skill (in welding, oyster shucking, table bussing, etc.). Still others are leisure-time pursuits that shatter the mundane with moments of shared grace. Ask any coon hunter, for instance, about the joys of hearing hounds bay when they catch a scent and the connections between aesthetics, sociability, and shared meaning will become eminently clear.

To speak of these connections brings us full circle to the place at which we began, with Sister Perry’s impassioned singing before the assembled congregation. Here we encounter another important realm of folklife, not as much in the performances themselves as in the beliefs that fill them with meaning. The enacted worlds of faith—the myriad beliefs and practices that feed the spirit and sustain the soul—provide a metaphysical grounding for many of the already-mentioned traditions. They extend the web of emotional connectedness that links people to communities, places, animals, things, and the encompassing environment by including the supernatural and the divine. In so doing, they further open the circle of accord. The realm of faith embraces both the institutional and the individual, both the formally organized and the informally understood, both the logically reasoned and the simply known. The rituals of midnight mass and Rosh Hashanah and Eid ul-Fitr thus all fall within this domain, as do believers’ trust in the curative power of a weeping statue, their certainty of a luck charm’s efficacy, and their assurance that the ecstatic voicings of tongue speaking are indeed words of divine revelation. Belief also informs the many worlds of healing, lending a socially shared foundation of trust and knowledge to practices as diverse as talking out fire and using baking soda to cure acne.

This section began by suggesting that folklife encompasses every important dimension of what it means to be southern. Southernness, after all, is a claim to imagined connectedness, a declaration of identity that grounds itself in shared practice and shared understandings. Although this grounding frequently invokes the past (witness the region’s ongoing infatuation with heritage), this invocation itself is an act that unfolds in the present; like so many other shared practices, the foregrounding of memory is a choice and not some innate feature of the southern mind. As such, it is not unlike the South’s heralded preference for sweet tea or its insistence on good manners, all the products of shared decisions whose goal is to articulate and embody deeply held values. These too join the catalog of song, music, and dance; tales, preachings, and artful talk; drama, ceremony, celebration, and festival; crafted objects, spirited constructions, and meaning-filled places; foods, drinks, and the ways of the kitchen; games, hunting practices, and leisure activities; sayings and customs; occupational skills, workplace creativity and the lore of labor; healing beliefs and traditions; belief systems and the ways of worship; and many other ways of enacting local meaning. No part of this whole is merely a thing or an action. Instead, each represents a process—a coming together of intent, value, spirit, and sociability—that fills the everyday with meaning and presses to achieve the accord of shared community.

The Folk in Folklife. If folklife is about all the ways that communities make and share meaning, then where do the folk come into the picture? Don’t they somehow limit the notion of community, making it less inclusive by targeting particular southern folk groups? And we all presumably know who these groups are—mountain folk from the Appalachians and Ozarks; Cajuns; coal miners; rural, working-class African Americans, whites, and Latinos (particularly those connected with farming); Pentecostals (especially those who handle snakes in their services); Gullah people from the Carolina and Georgia coasts; American Indians (seemingly wherever they live); and perhaps factory workers. Such is the all-too-familiar portrayal. In this rather stereotyped reading of folkness, the folk are the classic others, groups that are somehow distant from those doing the defining.

The criteria of this folk otherness—the measures that chart the distance from a presumably shared norm—seem to be as diverse as the groups themselves. For some, the distance is measured by race and/or cultural heritage; for others, the difference rests in social class (the folk always seem to be working class); for still others, it is location (folkness seems to favor the mountains, though rural isolation locates it elsewhere as well). Religious belief (particularly when associated with unusual religious practices) also invites the folk designation, as do a select few occupations. What becomes clear in reviewing this list is that no single feature unites all of these groups, other than their shared otherness and the presumption that their ways of living are sufficiently different from mainstream norms to merit setting them apart. Or, perhaps (in a familiar extension of this logic), that these ways of living themselves cause the setting apart—that they create social boundaries around each community powerful enough both to isolate members from outsiders and foster a passing down of traditions that remains unaffected by goings-on in the outside world. The exact nature of these boundaries, however, is somewhat vague.

Note that all of this defining—whether declaring differences or asserting that the groups in question are setting themselves apart—is being done by outsiders. Somehow, the folk are always someone else. They are the people over there, the ones that are different. As a rule, they are not us (whoever that us may be). But if folklife is about process rather than people, if it is about the ways that communities create and sustain meaning, then we all would presumably fall under that rubric. To the extent that we all live within and identify with groups and share places of value and meaning with fellow group members, we all partake of folklife. Perhaps we express this collective partaking through our affinity for barbecue. Perhaps we show it through the accents that caress our words. Perhaps we reveal it through the music we play on our car stereos. Whatever the site of meaningful connectedness, that is a locus of folklife. Our collective folklife.

The folklife discussed in the pages that follow draws on this expansive, more inclusive definition. Although many of the domains typically associated with southern folklife make their appearance (for example, string band music, quilting, blues, coon dogs, storytelling), so too do many arenas that do not often get included in such listings (stepping, opries, powwows, line dancing, HBCU marching bands, etc.). The purpose is to honor the full breadth of creative connectivity in southern communities, recognizing that while many of the region’s time-honored traditions are still passionately vibrant, so too are many newer ones. These newer traditions speak to contemporary experience with the same kind of power that their counterparts did in years past. (Today’s young hip-hop emcees, for instance, play much the same role in their communities that youthful blues musicians did three generations earlier; both groups used their mastery of words, rhymes, and rhythms to address the issues that most tellingly affected their lives and those of their peers.) Although attempting to encompass both the old and the new, this volume makes no claim to comprehensive coverage. Instead, this work promises only to offer glimpses of folklife in the South, inviting readers to step into a handful of selected communities and places of meaning. Unfortunately, there’s little time to set a spell in each of these places (as southern tradition would demand); the stories that each entry is able to tell are necessarily short. Each such narrative, though, bids the reader to look further and to extrapolate from the story told the many more that remain unspoken. If the volume cannot contain the fullness of southern folklife, at least it can offer a guide to discovering where this fullness might lie and how one might learn to recognize it.

The Question of Tradition. One of the key features used to recognize folk-life, of course, has long been the presence of tradition. Popular understandings of all things folk invariably invoke tradition as a criterion every bit as important as community; while the latter speaks to the communion that holds meaning, the former speaks to the process of passing this meaning on. This framing inextricably links folkness to antiquity, suggesting that the things and practices designated as folk necessarily carry the patina of age. Hence the popular association of southern folkways with hand-stitched quilts, split-oak baskets, home-cooked foods, and banjo picking—all seen as old-timey traditions that have passed from one generation to another. The familiar image of knee learning—where a youngster sits at the knee of a teaching elder—is an essential part of this picture.

A definition of folklife that foregrounds emergence and community values would, at first glance, seem to undermine this widely accepted link between folklife and traditionality. How, for instance, could one call line dancing traditional, given that this practice only gained widespread currency in the 1990s? Yet line dancing certainly fits the folklife frame; it is, after all, an expressive form that countless southern country-music and rhythm-and-blues fans pursue with undeniable passion, in community-based settings that range from family reunions to country-music clubs. What happens to the centrality of tradition in cases such as this, when the form has no long-standing pedigree? The answer again rests in a refocusing of the question. If we view passed-down tradition not as a necessary condition of folklife but instead as an important component thereof, then its importance becomes clear. That is because tradition is a product of decisions—decisions to hold onto, decisions to pass on, decisions to accept the passing, decisions to sustain. Practices like music making or turning pots or cooking gumbo become traditional not because some abstract cultural force dictates that they be passed on; they become traditional because the communities that sustain them invest them with importance and then choose to keep them alive.

Consider, for example, Sid Luck, a fifth-generation potter from the Seagrove area of central North Carolina. Luck grew up in a potting family, with both his father and grandfather turning pots, primarily for utilitarian use. By the time Luck took to the wheel, however, the demand for utilitarian wares had largely died; inexpensive glassware and mass-produced ceramics had replaced plates and smaller pottery vessels, while refrigerators and freezers had erased the demand for large pickling and canning containers. Nonetheless, Luck learned to turn, and he spent his teenage summers and spare hours crafting pots for a large local pottery that marketed its colorful pots as household wares with artistic flair. But Luck knew that pottery held no future except long hours and hard work for little pay. So after finishing high school, he joined the Marines, fought in Vietnam, and then went to college, where he earned a degree in science education. Soon thereafter, Luck began teaching high school chemistry and math.

But Sid Luck never turned his back on pottery. Wherever he taught, he kept a wheel nearby, keeping his hands in the clay. And when the principal of his hometown high school invited him to return to Seagrove to teach chemistry, Luck moved back into the heart of a long-standing pottery-making community. But Luck was a teacher, and the pottery world had changed. Now most of the sales were to outsiders, to folks who visited Seagrove for a quick taste of the authentic. These weren’t Luck’s neighbors anymore. Furthermore, the community now included a host of young potters who were serving this outside clientele well with wares both innovatively beautiful and stolidly traditional. Seagrove did not seem to need another potter.

Yet Luck couldn’t resist the temptation. I was just always drawn to pottery, he recalls. It was like a passion with me; it had some kind of mysterious attraction. Even though I enjoyed teaching—and was actually pursuing a master’s degree in physics at the time—I kept thinking, ‘This is what I need to be doing.’ So Luck built a shop and began to fire pots, selling them on the weekends and in the summer months when he wasn’t teaching. After three years, he decided to leave school completely and dedicate himself full time to turning pots. My dad thought that I was completely wacky when I resigned my teaching position, he remembers. He said, ‘There you went and got that education—now you’re going to waste it.’ He figured that I was going to starve to death.

That was 18 years ago. Sid Luck is still turning pots full time and is not starving to death, as his father had warned. Instead, he has found that the local community actively supports his decision, regularly visiting his shop, purchasing pots, and ordering special pieces for weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. By the same token, the outside community—customers from afar who travel to Seagrove, share Luck’s taste, and clearly appreciate his artistry—also affirms the wisdom of his choice. The tradition continues because both Luck and the communities around him chose to make it so. Though the pots Luck now makes certainly do not fill the same functions as those turned by his grandfather and are now more likely to grace mantelpieces and bookshelves than spring houses and barns, they nonetheless continue to serve as artifacts of passion and vessels of meaning.

Sid Luck’s story is instructive not only for what it tells about the power of tradition, but also for what it suggests about the ways tradition is learned. Luck epitomizes the classic narrative of familial learning, now representing the fifth generation in his family who followed pottery as their principal pursuit. The same cannot be said, however, for most of the other potters in the Seagrove area, the scores of clay artists who serve much the same clientele as Luck. Their stories are far more diverse. Some of them grew up in the community and turned to pottery not because of family heritage but because pottery making had surrounded them all their lives and eventually intrigued them enough to draw their hands to the clay. A number of these took part-time jobs in local potteries as teenagers and gradually learned to turn by asking and watching. Many more began turning for other potteries or opened their own shops after taking formal pottery classes at one of the local community colleges. Other potters moved to the area from elsewhere, bringing with them studio training as ceramic artists or a back-to-the-land aesthetic that sent them in search of self-sufficiency and tradition. Some local potters learned through formal apprenticeships with established potters, while others took up pottery as a postretirement (or postunemployment) avocation—something to keep them creatively engaged after workplace demands had vanished. And at least one potter dreamed that the Lord had called him to this pursuit and thus began to shape clay. The paths of learning are clearly numerous. Yet all of these artists are contributing to the region’s long-standing tradition of pottery making, and all are sufficiently embraced by the community that they can make their living as potters. Though some might be less classically traditional than others, all are contributing players in the region’s folklife.

In the case of the Seagrove potters, all of the artists are pursuing a single (if broadly defined) path: transforming wet clay into artful objects. Though their choice of clays, glazes, modes of creation, surface treatments, and manners of firing vary widely, they all are creating pots. This shared pursuit inevitably fosters conversation among them, inviting talk about tastes and preferences, encouraging exchanges of glaze formulas and firing tips. Despite their differences, their places of sharing draw them together as a community. What, though, of artists who have no such community? Or, to carry the question one step further, what of those who don’t even partake of a recognizable tradition, practicing an artistry that is theirs alone, without evident precedent or analogue? Can they too be traditional? Do they too fall under the purview of folklife?

These questions are not meant to include the many tradition bearers who act alone in their communities but are clearly partaking of a broader regional practice. They wouldn’t, for instance, target a town’s lone walking-stick carver, even if this carver had taught himself to carve and was working in isolation from any other carvers. Some traditions typically blossom in the hands of solo practitioners, who draw upon a visual repertoire and aesthetic stream that they might not be able to identify but that nonetheless guides their creativity. (Such was the case, for instance, with George SerVance of Thomasville, North Carolina, one of whose sticks is pictured in the Walking Sticks entry.) Hence, even though this carver’s canes might be completely singular, the very fact of their creation—coupled with the fact that such sticks have a long history in southern communities, where they are embraced as potent markers of personal and cultural identity—draws them into the encompassing cradle of tradition.

What, though, of those who create outside of such overarching legacies, whose work is both gloriously idiosyncratic and altogether novel? Such is certainly the case for many of the South’s self-taught artists, whose creations frequently defy easy categorization and who often find themselves gathered together under the rubrics of folk, self-taught, or vernacular art. Some of these artists work with familiar materials (carved wood, sewed cloth, fired clay, paint on canvas, etc.) but push their creations well beyond the narrow precedents of community tradition. Others employ a far broader array of means (paint on tin, cast-off industrial metals, mud on plywood, bark and branches, etc.) to create works whose denial of precedent can seem positively exuberant. Questions about these artists’ traditionality, however, must look beyond the materials they use and the themes they convey to consider the communities of which they are a part and the aesthetic currents that inform their creativity. Works that might seem odd or outlandish to cultural outsiders might well resonate at deep levels with these artists’ fellow community members. Even though the artistry itself might have no overt analogue, its underlying logic can feel eminently familiar, thus lending it a welcome place within local fields of meaning. (Conversations with the neighbors of many such artists reveal that this is frequently the case; even artists whose works and personalities earn them the droll designation of characters are often embraced as vital contributors to the community.) Although their connectedness to the most evident forms of tradition might not be readily apparent, these artists are nonetheless often profoundly connected both to deeper, culturally grounded aesthetic streams and to their own home communities, connections that readily draw them into the embrace of both tradition and folklife.

Although most southern self-taught artistry would fall within the domain of this volume, little appears on the pages that follow—in part because the sheer breadth of southern folklife draws our attention elsewhere, and in part because such artistry is the focus of a separate Folk Art volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

The relationship between innovation and tradition takes us on another detour when we consider the experiential path that leads many southerners to their creativity. Across the full range of folklife practice—from song performance and material creation to garden layout and hands-on healing—southerners have long credited the divine as inspiring and, in many cases, providing the ideas and/or skills that guide their work. This notion of unmediated godly guidance finds ready grounding in Christian biblical teachings, which speak of the many gifts that the Holy Spirit imparts to believers. Among southern believers, these gifts can take many forms. Perhaps most common are those that unfold in communities of faith, where generations of believers have testified to receiving songs, prayers, testimonies, and sermons directly from the Spirit. Such spiritual guidance, however, far transcends the realms of religious performance. Many southern healers—from laypersons who talk out fire to rootworkers—attribute their knowledge to spiritual revelation; so too do many folk inventors—mechanics or backyard tinkerers who frequently credit their (often ingeniously) innovative designs, mechanical repairs, machinery, and creations to God-given dreams. The same is true for many traditional material artists—basketmakers, for instance, who dream altogether nontraditional designs, or quilters who receive wholly original patterns. This process is perhaps most evident, however, in the realms of self-taught art. Generations of untrained artists across the South have told of finding themselves graced with a sudden, newfound, and completely compelling creativity, a creativity that seems to demand expression and one that these artists often liken to a spiritual calling (much as preachers tell of being called by God to preach). Drawing on divine guidance rather than artistic precedent, these artists often ground their work in visions, spiritual inspirations, and dreams. In cases like these, tradition rests not as much in form or performance as in the means of transmission, with the divine granting of gifts itself standing as a place of familiarity and community embrace.

Questions of transmission draw us to one more dimension of tradition’s play in the South: revival. When communities self-consciously recreate practices from the past—practices that have vanished, or ones left only in trace form, enjoying little of their once-spirited vitality—do these revivals count as traditional? Do they also enter the realm of folklife? One could point, for instance, to the recent Cherokee revival of stamp-decorated, coiled pottery, a tradition that had largely disappeared by the close of the 1800s. Pottery making continued to flourish among the Eastern Band of Cherokee, but the forms and techniques that Cherokee potters mastered in the 20th century drew upon other Indian traditions and developed with an explicit eye to the tastes of visiting tourists. The earlier practice—which entailed making larger, utilitarian vessels and decorating their surfaces by pressing carved wooden paddles and other textured objects into the moist clay—vanished, a victim of the simple pragmatics of markets and need. At the turn of the 21st century, however, a group of Cherokee potters—working with archaeologists and museum curators—decided to revive the centuries-old tradition. No living potter remained to teach them the now-lost processes of large-scale construction, stamping, and firing; their only teachers were the remaining old pots and their broken pieces. Nonetheless, the patient dance of experimentation and creativity gradually led to a reemergence of the older tradition. Grand vessels of coiled clay once again graced Cherokee workshops.

Can we call these new pots traditional? Or has the broken chain of transmission and the self-consciousness of their revival somehow annulled this designation? If we were to ask the potters, we would find no hesitation. Potters speak with certainty and pride of the traditional nature of their work and testify to feeling a deep aesthetic connectedness with their artistic forebears when they create these pots. If we were to look at the process of creation, again we would have little doubt. The new pots are far more than rote recreations of older forms; instead, they are innovative extensions, new works that honor the old while bearing witness to the creative mastery of their makers. Finally, if we were to ask the community, the very question of traditionality would seem moot. In their eyes, these pots are vessels of meaning and passion, crafted reminders of the past that speak pointedly to a reclaimed and reasserted Cherokee identity. Though the chain of passage may have been broken, the potters’ impassioned intensity and the community’s enthusiastic embrace have certainly forged the links anew, easily drawing these pots into the domains of both tradition and folklife.

Much the same could be said for a host of other revived practices, from the African American practice of jumping the broom at weddings to the playing of old-time string band music by musicians whose training and heritage differ dramatically from those who first created this music. The inclusion of these practices as folklife rests not as much in their pedigree as in their ongoing vitality as sites of community meaning. They may well serve different needs now than they did in years past; ultimately, however, this tells us more about the resilience of tradition than it does about the roles these revived practices currently play in community life. Like the newly emergent traditions that are their counterparts (for example, line dancing) and the seemingly singular practices that stand alongside them (such as much self-taught artistry), they join the region’s many time-honored traditions in contributing to the fullness of folklife in the South.

Situating Southernness. If the essences of folklife rest in practice, process, and meaning, then how does region play into the equation? This volume, after all, falls within a series on southern culture, foregrounding the southernness of all things contained therein. Region clearly defines the encompassing frame. Does this suggest that the stories that follow—stories that range from bar mitzvahs and cockfights to hoodoo and womanless weddings—are all singularly southern? Yes—and no. Yes, in that each such story unfolds within the broader narrative of southern experience, thus referencing the subtle story lines of southern history and tradition. And no, in that the stories are not necessarily restricted to the South, finding voice nowhere else. Our goal in crafting this volume was not to address only practices particular to the South, but instead to discuss practices extant in the South. Pedigree and provenance are not as important as meaningful practice. Accordingly, we can freely speak about family reunions—for instance—as features of southern folklife, even though such gatherings happen across the country. The fact that reunions occur elsewhere does not make them any less important for southern families; nor does it somehow diminish their regional singularity. Reunions—like all of the practices addressed in the pages that follow—are grounded in the particular experiences of local communities; as such, they embody characteristics of the local and, necessarily, of the regional. Hence, an African American family reunion in the Mississippi Delta is not just another family reunion; instead, it is a gathering flavored with Delta tradition, spiced with African American style, and seasoned by southernness.

Local meanings clearly unfold from the immediacy of social engagement; the particular meanings of the aforementioned reunion, for instance, rest in the retellings of family stories, the replaying of family traditions, and the spirit of family communion. What, though, of the regional meanings? What constitutes the seasoning of southernness? The answer is one that southerners and others have debated for generations, yielding eloquence and explanations aplenty. For our purposes, though, a simpler answer will probably suffice. The folkways of the South owe their deepest debt to the confluence of two cultural streams, flowing from West Africa and Western Europe, both of which coursed into—and in many ways overwhelmed—the regional channels already cut by American Indian cultures. Each of these cultural streams carried the richly variegated sediments of local tradition. Some of these blended together, lending patterned currents to the cascading flow; others retained their singularity and apartness. The blended sediments—evidences of deep cultural sharing—encompassed understandings about the workings of reality; the unspoken logics of beauty, balance, and wonder; the framings of linguistic pattern; the subtle sensibilities of space (and its negotiation); and the quiet shapings of sociability. They lent coherence to each contributing stream, drawing its currents together in a deeply shared consciousness. Other sediments, in turn, held themselves apart, honoring the local firmaments that gave them rise. These represented traditions of a more specific nature, traditions that informed the immediacy of everyday experience, embracing particular ways of faith, dress, eating, birthing, humor, death. A preferred kind of song, a pattern for plaiting hair, a taste for spicy stews, an accepted set of proverbs, a ceremony to mark the passage into adulthood—all were markers of life in specific communities. If the blended sediments manifested cross-community sharing, these were evidences of community-based particularity.

Each of these broad cultural streams—laden with the sediments of both shared and singular sensibility—coursed with a sublime richness that sustained when its waters pitched, surged, and ultimately commingled with those of its forced consorts. The circumstances of this coming together—so different for each of the individual streams—channeled and challenged but did not fundamentally change the fullness of the discrete cultural currents. Each of the three—hailing from West Africa, Western Europe, and Native America—retained its fecund richness. And in time, each transformed, blending in moments of subtly intimate communion; sustaining the side-by-side, suspended sediments of particularity; and birthing altogether new streamings of tradition. The subsequent cultural flow—still filled with commingled currents and singular sediments—came to define the American South.

Of course, these same cultural streams came together elsewhere in the nation. But nowhere else were their currents so strong or their blendings so tumultuous, in large part because of simple numbers. The African presence in the South, in particular, dwarfed that in other regions. Furthermore, this presence sustained over generations, retaining in many areas a numerical dominance that kept West African worldviews and traditions very much alive, while simultaneously fostering the slow growth of a singularly creolized African American culture. As the southern frontier pushed westward, the Southeast’s mix of white, African American, and American Indian moved with it, carrying and sustaining its unique cultural profile. And as the North—and then Midwest, Southwest, and West—experienced the ongoing inflow of new cultural streams from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the South largely retained its singular blend, its waters significantly stirred only in Texas and parts of Louisiana. The longstanding persistence of this particular mix—stretching across the centuries, with little influx from outside—fostered a deep and fertile commingling. Its currents blended and reblended in ever-new combinations, both drawing the source sediments together in novel ways and mixing these older traditions with the already creolized waters of southern culture. Though cultural tributaries from outside were few, the South’s creative currents never stopped churning.

To say that these outside tributaries were few in number, however, is not to diminish their importance, or to deny their impact on select parts of the South. One need only look to the vibrant blend of Mexican and southern cultures in Texas to recognize the rich potential of such comings together. The accordion-driven joys of conjunto, the spectacular sizzle of customized lowriders, the sublime grace of santos carvings, the spicy delights of fajitas (a Tex-Mex invention), and the devotional intensity of Los matachines processions all point to the ever-emergent creativity of this cultural commingling.

By the same token, one could point to the arrival of the Acadians—exiled from French Canada in the mid-1750s—in south Louisiana, bringing a potent infusion of Francophone culture into a region populated by French Creoles, Spaniards, Germans, Anglo-based white southerners, African Americans, and American Indians. The Acadian exiles proved both resilient and dynamic, not only vigorously establishing themselves in their new home but also absorbing and transforming the traditions of their neighbors, yielding the singularly southern creole of Cajun culture. Like their counterparts in Texas, the Cajuns created a cultural profile all of their own, marked by the spirited zest of Cajun accordion, fiddle, and triangle playing (not to mention the sweet wail of Cajun electric steel guitar); the costumed revelry of le courrir de Mardi Gras (the house-to-house Mardi Gras run); the piquant savor of crawfish étouffée and jambalaya; the bluesy, honky-tonking grit of swamp pop; and, in more recent times, the locally invented brilliance of crawfish-gathering boats that travel both land and water.

If we were to identify a third major tributary to the streams of southern culture, we would find ourselves once again in Louisiana, though now in New Orleans. The city itself has long been a site of creolizing ferment, hosting vibrant French, Spanish, and African communities in its early years. This mix was forever transformed in the opening decades of the 19th century, when waves of immigrants fleeing the slave-led revolution in Saint-Domingue (soon to become Haiti) entered the port of New Orleans. In 1809 alone, almost 10,000 Haitian immigrants swept into the city, literally doubling New Orleans’s population. More than a third of these