Few topics summon images of southern life as easily as folklife. The American South’s long rural history and the traditionalism that seemed to dominate the region encouraged Americans to see it as an unchanging repository of folk-ways in a nation characterized by sometimes-frenetic change. Tourism agencies today use images of banjo players on rural porches and bluesmen at the crossroads to market the region’s heritage. This volume offers factual and analytical detail on such iconic regional images as old-time string bands, quilting, barbecue, coon dogs, and dinner on the grounds. The South is a dynamic region as well, and the editors show a changing South of internal diversity and complex interactions between tradition and innovation.
Folklorists were among the earliest professional scholars to document the South’s oral and material lore, resulting in a rich body of interpretive and primary-source scholarship. William Ferris has long been one of the most acclaimed American folklorists, and as coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture he designed an extensive and thorough section on folklife that gave a structured introduction to the field. Glenn Hinson, longtime director of the Curriculum-in-Folklore program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, worked with Ferris in creating the design for this new view of southern folklife, one that conveys the energy and vitality of contemporary scholars studying a rapidly changing region. The overview essay suggests a refocusing of the study of southern folklife toward issues of cultural intent and meaning. At the heart of folklife is the community, and this volume documents specific ways that southern social groups have nurtured the bonds of community. Readers will come to understand how southerners have performed regional identities through ritual performances and the enactment of everyday customs, celebrating the places of shared meanings. The volume explores as well the beliefs that give meaning to the people of the region. It moves away from an overreliance on unchanging tradition as the defining element of folklife, showing that customs are always emergent and never a given. The perpetuation of custom is the result of people in communities deciding to retain inherited ways, but usually with innovations that make them of continuing relevance.
The essays in this volume comprise a good argument for the continuing centrality of folklife to southern culture in general. Contemporary scholarship engages issues of cultural diversity, and this volume shows the complex configurations of folklife among different groups and in different parts of the South. The region’s historically defining groups—Native Americans, whites, and African Americans—receive considerable attention for their roles in creating a creole culture that has helped give character to the South. Latinos have long been a significant part of the culture of some southern states, but the recent arrival of large numbers of immigrants from south of the U.S. border has injected new ways into the South, and this volume gives due attention to their contributions. Folklife emerges not only from specific groups but also out of specific places in the South. The broad cultures of the Upland South and the Lowland South grew out of differing environmental, geographical, and social factors, all of which provided particular contexts for the expression of folklife. Basketmakers in the Appalachian Mountains and Lowland South Carolina and potters in Alabama and North Carolina use different materials and have differing styles, but all express the significance of material culture forms in southern folklife. The creativity of the Deep South, the hill country, south Louisiana, and other southern regions is apparent in the volume’s extensive entries on cultural expression.
This volume contains more than 60 new topics not included in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and many of the earlier articles have been rewritten by new authors. Bibliographies and statistical information have been updated. The South is justly famous for its musical contributions, and this volume has a generous helping of entries from the folklife perspective on such genres as blues, bluegrass, Cajun music, country music, gospel music, hip-hop, and zydeco. A particular strength herein is the attention to dancing, whether country line dancing, mountain buckdancing, African American stepping, or Native American powwow dancing. Traditions of body movement perform folk culture for engaged communities who celebrate their dance cultures. Oral lore, material culture, ritual, and belief all emerge in these pages as signifiers of southern identity, not just as conceived intellectually by writers but as enacted by a wide range of southerners in their everyday lives and on special occasions.