SYMPOSIUM III

Making Folklore Available

FIRST SESSION

Chairman: Mr. Sean O’Suilleabhain

CHAIRMAN: In this third symposium we plan to discuss the problem of making folklore available (1) to the scholar and (2) to the general public. The first of these has been dealt with to a certain extent in Symposium II on archiving, and we can touch on it again at a later session. It will be well at this morning session for us to focus attention on making folklore available to the public.

The subject subdivides itself into various sections: making folklore available through museums, the radio, the schools, public singers and storytellers, folk-dance groups, folklore books for the general public, and through record albums. In addition Dean Thompson has added some other suggestions: through local folklore societies, folklore journals, and folk festivals. Mr. Alan Lomax has kindly offered to open up the discussion.

MR. ALAN LOMAX (New York City) : The question of making folklore available seems to me always raises uncomfortable points which we can avoid so long as we stick to strictly laboratory folklore. Because when we begin to make folklore available, we come into contact with all sorts of other fields, with other cultural workers. And these cultural workers begin to ask questions about us and about our material. They say, “Well, why concern yourself with folklore and why bother us with your material?” As long as we just collect and classify nobody bothers with us very much. The sociologist and anthropologist look in upon us, and feel that we are somehow their brothers, and they sometimes shrug in amazement at what we are doing and go on away about their business. But when folklorists appear as benefactors of the public and provers of public taste, etc., then folks ask why, and I think they are fair in raising that question.

First of all, in terms of the history of our craft, there is no question about why it has been supported, why national folklore institutes have been sponsored. One of the first acts of the submerged peoples of northeastern Europe, for instance, was to start a folklore movement, and as we all know many nationalities actually coalesced around the collection and the use of the folklore of the region and of the people concerned. Folklore then has been used to prove that a certain group of people formed a national entity, and it is quite understandable why in this area and in situations of this kind folklore has been encouraged, fostered, and used extensively.

We think of Sibelius in Finland, and we think of the tremendous work of the Swedes, and we think with a little less friendliness of the almost unbelievable researches of the Germans. Folklore has been national propaganda.

It is interesting to note that the great burst of interest in folklore in America came in World War II when for the first time America began to feel cut off from Western Europe and felt thrown back upon its own folks’ national cultural resources. And, it was at this time, and I think it’s no coincidence, that there began to be a great national interest in folklore for the first time in America.

I think we are all agreed that folklore in its nationalistic or even its regionalistic form is assuming its less pleasant, less scientific and really less valuable function. It is not our object to prove any longer that a nation is an entity because it sings a certain group of songs which we know have their kindred variants across the next national border. We know that the use of folklore in this fashion can be not only ugly but downright dangerous. All we have to do is think of the Hitler youth movement [in Germany] or the Solid South in America with its folk attitudes toward the Negro. So we have to look around for another set of values.

We must think about the value problem. Now, it seems to me, that the very act of preserving and presenting folklore is a way of saying that the material is valuable. We rush in ahead of, and sometimes way behind, the process of cultural and social change and rescue material from oblivion and at this point we can ask ourselves why. Why shouldn’t culture be allowed to cast off its skin in its own sweet way? Why do we interfere with the process and preserve all of the skins that culture is constantly casting aside? Is this only in order to understand texts? I doubt that.

Rather it seems to me that in one way or another we all feel, we folklorists, that we are making a better present and preparing for some sort of jiister future for all people. So, let us begin right where we are, where we folklorists stand with the simplest value notion. We are folklorists because we like folklore, or we like the people from whom it comes. We like the way folklore makes us feel and we like the way many people make us feel. I thought that the paper last night about the Lapps made this point very clearly and very frankly. Mr. Pehrson said that he liked the Lapps. They reminded him that there were certain values that were just missing from our present society. In some ways he felt more comfortable with the Lapps than he did in Chicago. And I think this is true, in one way or another, for all of us folklorists as we work in the field, or as we work in our libraries with our various kinds of folk literature or patterns of folk life. I think when we smile at the declaration of values that is as clear, naive, frank, and truthful as the one last night, we have forgotten our own motives in being folklorists.

Underneath we are all morally, emotionally, and esthetically involved with our material, and so all of us are artists and cultural workers, and there is no escape from that. You discover that very vividly when a radio executive says that Barbara Allen or some ballad that seems to you very beautiful “is just draggy. Please bring on a peppier tune,” he says. Or when a child psychologist attacks you for bringing traumatic, cannibalistic fantasies into the lives of her little charges.

Malinowski in his last, posthumously published monograph, speaking for the ethnologists, said that the role of the ethnologist is that of the advocate of primitive man. And it is my feeling that the role of the folklorists is that of the advocate of the folk. (I am going to skip definition here because I think that belongs to another session, but we may all assume for a moment, since we are having an international folklore symposium, that we agree who the folk are.) We have seen the profit-motivated society smashing and devouring and destroying complex cultural systems which have taken almost the entire effort of mankind over many thousands of years to create. We have watched the disappearance of languages, musical languages, the sign languages, and we’ve watched whole ways of thinking and feeling in relating to nature and relating to other people disappear. We’ve watched systems of cookery (and if you are a lover of food, it hurts you right where you live) disappear from the face of the earth, and I think we have all been revolted by this spectacle and in one way or another have taken up our cudgels in the defense of the weaker parties.

Whether we classify folk tales, or sing ballads, I think it is all pretty much the same. We have become in this way the champions of the ordinary people of the world who aren’t backed up by printing presses, radio chains, and B29’s. We believe in the oral tradition, we believe in the small cultural situation, we think that some of these folk of the world have something worth while culturally, morally, etc. I don’t propose to define a value system for folklorists because it seems to me that this set of values must emerge from actual work with material, but there are some general notions inherent in the whole process of collecting folklore and making it available which seem to me all one process in the end. So I’ll just give some very off-hand things that you find right in the folklore itself. We all have found them, it seems to me, in one way or another, there.

We find that folklore is international in its main implications rather than regional or national. On the other hand we see that culture produced and consumed in the neighborhood or village situation seems to be a very healthy way for culture to grow. Things, cultural material of this kind, seem to have vitality and strength, a lasting power, and a staying power, which is equivalent to the very greatest of “serious arts” produced by the very greatest artists. We find that in folklore—in the folk tales, in the proverbs, in the songs—you get a kind of general ethical tone, a kind of rudimentary humanistic approach to life. It is not the same from culture to culture of course, but in every culture you find a very deep sense of values expressed in folklore and something that deserves to have its place in the sun, deserves to have its hearing.

We sometimes find that people who are loaded with superstitions live more honorably than people who fly airplanes. We begin to speak of the intelligence and the creativity of everybody, of every people and of every human being. I think it is a common experience of folklorists to realize that a charcoal burner, as we heard yesterday, may have a tremendously rich vocabulary. And a farmer has eighty thousand words that he knows, when it is possible that we may pick him off for not knowing more than three thousand of our vocabulary. We find intelligence, honor, character, and so on with the people.

In this way I think that we will arrive at values in our quest, but it’s in working with the material itself. The values will grow as we work. Now, I propose that we should be two-way bridges and form a two-way inter-communication system. We, who speak for the folk in the market place here, have obligations to the people whom we represent. If our activity is solely to enrich a city, urban, middle-class culture, the suspicion that some of the folk have of us might actually be justified, that we are folklorists basically because we are enriching ourselves, either with prestige or actual money. So, I think, that we have to work in behalf of the folk, the people. We have to defend them, to interpret them, to interpret to them what is going on in the world which they do not make, but which begins to move in upon them and to crush their culture.

Now all of this, I feel, is a necessary introduction to any discussion of presenting folklore, and I am sure there will be many more emotions than rationalizations in these preliminary notes but these ideas have come from a long experience of presenting folklore here in America. Perhaps you would like to hear a little about that.

My main activity, although not the only one, has been in radio. As you know, we have four national radio chains, each with some hundreds of stations. Besides that there are hundreds of independent stations, unconnected. The reason for the existence of almost all of these stations is to present advertising and to make money. So any use by them of folklore has to be for that reason, or else to serve as their excuse to the Federal Communications Commission for owning the public air around them and using it for profit. They are required by law to present a certain number of public service programs. This is the sense in which folklore has been presented on networks, as educational radio. It was supposed to be good for school children to hear American ballads, to remind them of an American past and make them feel the quality of the people building and working and singing at the same time.

During the first years of these programs they attempted to put symphony music on right with the folk ballads. I was presented together with a Columbia Symphony Orchestra. I sang “Buffalo Skinners” and then the Columbia Symphony Orchestra played that. This was supposed to show that you could use folk music for symphony, and it was because of this natural nationalistic desire for us to have, at once, a symphonic music based on our folk music. Well, of course, it didn’t work. You can’t make that direct kind of jump. The people who write the symphonies have to live the folklore to a certain extent. And so we still don’t have folk symphonies and folk operas, although we have been wishing for nothing so hard at the upper levels of administration of our culture.

In the last ten years, however, the ballad has become part of the big entertainment industry in America. There are now usually one or two programs on the air where ballads are sung, and out of this has come one other thing which has been very, very important. A number of commercial record albums have been published and these have taken the songs to the people who really wanted them, and were active consumers and learners of ballads. This has been a much more slow, solid, and healthy sort of growth. Another kind of radio that has come along is local presentation of local, regional music. This has also been commercial. It had to be or it wouldn’t go, and so there has always been the advertising and then manipulating the programs and helping to decide what was going to be sung, and the taste has not been the very best. So it has been a mixed blessing. But, at least these local radio stations have been an outlet for the local boys who wanted to make music and who didn’t read, but just wanted to get up and start to sing, and they have come by the thousands. We have on that account an extremely lively, sometimes extremely annoying, a very much growing kind of local radio folk music, folkish music, or I don’t know what to call it—country music, come to town.

That is pretty much the picture in radio, so far. Of course, the ideal in radio is for the people to talk back to the city, because radio can be a two-way medium. We haven’t come to this yet in America. I think that will probably happen when television begins to take the commercial starch out of the radio boys. They are going to have to fall back for programming and for interest on their local audiences, and then the folk are going to have their innings in American radio. I gather that they have had that already in Sweden.

One other use of radio which I think you might think about is the other side of the folklorist’s job, which is to tell the folk, or to help the folk to tell themselves, things that they need to know and that they can’t find out through ordinary channels of communication. The department of health has been for the last five years carrying on a program, a campaign for blood tests for venereal disease. You can imagine the number and kinds of prejudices there are against getting blood tests and even opening up this subject in our puritan country, and radio has been the principal medium for reaching the carriers of syphilis. They started with the usual kind of American radio program involving Hollywood stars, and big bands, and big names, and so on, but they invited me to write one show for them. It was written for Roy Acuff who (as you probably don’t know) is, or was, the champion of all the hillbilly singers, that is the country boys come to town making commercial music. Well this program was really written by Roy Acuff, because I went to see him. I didn’t know what he thought about syphilis. First of all he told me that he couldn’t say the word on the air, because he would lose his entire audience forever. And we had a long talk about it. He told me how he felt about syphilis and in the process told me how his whole southern rural folk audience felt about the subject. So it was very easy for me to go back and write a little story using Roy’s principal hillbilly songs and when this program was broadcast, the people came into those southern syphilis centers by the hundreds. They were saying everything from, “Roy said it was all right, so I guess we should come in,” or—this program was called “Looking for Lester”; Roy was supposed to be looking for a friend who was lost with the disease germ and was going to die—they would come and say, “Wonder what’s happened to poor old Lester,” and offer their arm for a blood test. This was so successful in relation to the other types of program that they pretty much dropped the other techniques, and since then there have been about fifteen of these ballad approaches to the problem of syphilis. The last one that I did was a message directed to the midwives of Georgia, the Negro midwives of Georgia. Well, you can imagine that I could use many kinds of folklore in such a program: birth superstitions, and midwife lore, Negro spirituals, and work songs. They tell me that midwives approve it.

Well, this is one way it seems to me, in which the folklorist can know his function. I have felt for the last two years that I have really been a folklorist for the first time, a functioning folklorist, using folklore for the benefit of the people. Actually I have mostly let them do the talking because I am no great shakes as a writer, but I’m a good putter-together of ballads and folk sayings.

This same approach that is taking folklore for its own value and letting it do the work for you applies in other cultural situations about which I don’t go into detail but which I want to suggest. If you have a folk festival, and if the people really make the folk festival in their own place, deciding themselves what they want in the festival, it’s really going to have a dynamic growing. But if you split it up into little pieces and make your own potpourri in the city, or else if you go to your country people and tell them that they can’t play a guitar because the tunes are modal, you are taking upon yourself an interfering role that is going to kill your folk festival in one way or another. In the same sense in public schools, it’s not so important that every child in the nation sing “Skip-to-my-Lou” at nine o’clock in the morning. What is important is that the teachers in their own communities know that everywhere the children and th£ir families are carriers of important literature and music and ways of living. And it is the job of the school to bring this material into the open and permit it to express itself, let the chips fall where they will. If the people have a chance not to be ashamed of their own material, if we stand just a little between them and the big powerful onslaught of commercial, heavily weighted culture, they will do their own job. The culture will work its own problems out, and so the thing that’s important for the teacher is to let the children and their people come into the schools through the avenue of folk culture, whatever there is in the neighborhood. It doesn’t matter—doesn’t matter at all— what it is. And this is the way to international understanding, neighborhood understanding, and all these other values that I have briefly touched on that we all believe in. Now it seems to me that these are the important questions rather than the precise how. It is the way and the belief in the material and in its own content.

DR. ÅKE CAMPBELL (Landsmåls och Folkminnes Arkivet, Uppsala, Sweden) : As I have sat listening to Mr. Lomax with very great interest I have been thinking of the problem that always arises for someone who deals with folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Science is always trying to discover and to analyze what is there in reality, what is quite true, and a question about value is not its first problem. That is his second problem and many scholars will never come to it. There are scholars even in folklore who are doing-lifetime research work from a purely scientific point of view without any real interest in the value system. Each of us knows, of course, that true science cannot be built on anything other than the asking for truth, for reality, as the expression has it, “Even if it takes you to the gates of Hell.” When I listened to Mr. Lomax I could know that he had those two principles quite clearly in mind and I don’t think we have to talk much about that.

There is one more problem that I was thinking about. What to do with the scholar such as Mr. Pehrson, whom Mr. Lomax mentioned. He showed his pictures from the Lapps and he said he loved the Lapps. Well, there is a problem. There is Mr. Pehrson, or myself, coming among the Lapps and we both love the Lapps. There is something dangerous in that if we are to be real scholars. We have to wake up one morning in the courtyard and sit in the high bed and look around and look quite clearly, quite calmly, and quite coldly upon what we see. It is absolutely necessary that we do this now and then. But in so far as we are human beings we can never leave out our love for other people. It is very easy to love other people and, of course, we all do that in reality. Some of us don’t think much about it, but we do.

Now there is a technical problem in this question of how to deal with the love I feel for the people. I have to study them and at the same time I should study them from quite a scientific point of view. Now I think that is not so very hard if one just uses the method I mention, and will look around very calmly and coldly—that must be done. That is the critic’s point of view.

There is another point that Mr. Lomax took up for discussion. He called the folklorist an advocate of the people. Now he used another word too; he called a folklorist an interpreter. Well, I think when I first saw the word “advocate” I didn’t like it. When I heard “interpreter,” that was something that at the same time I could take. Of course, when a folklorist, devoted to pure scientific work, has to take over the role of being interpreter, then of course he has something to do with the question of values. We must think that what he is doing is a good thing to do. For to be a good interpreter is to build upon a quite clear scientific basis. So I would prefer to use the word “interpreter.”

MISS MAUD KARPELES (Honorary Secretary, International Folk Music Council, London, England) : Mr. Lomax has aroused such enthusiasm in us that I suppose like everybody else I feel that I should like to say a few words even though I don’t add anything to the discussion. There are many things that he said that appealed to me, and to which I would like to say ditto. The thing, perhaps, that impressed me most of all was his saying that the reason that we take up folklore—folk music or whatever branch —is that we like it, and I’m quite sure that that is really the only good reason. I think that any good folklorist, anybody who is concerned with the popularizing of folklore, must have that missionary spirit founded on an intense personal faith in the subject. And because you have that faith in it you believe that if it is presented in the right way others will ultimately also like it. There is a very good reason for that faith: folklore— I am speaking particularly of folk music, which is really the only thing I know about—has stood the test of time, and so is a real expression of the people who have made it. Another point he raised, which I think is certainly an important one, is about our being a bridge, an interpreter, or whatever you like to call it; that we have to have a self-conscious set of values. I think we are engaged in a really very difficult task and we ought not to minimize its difficulty. That is, we must take over this material which has grown up unself-consciously and plant it consciously in another medium. We are not trying to force upon people—the intelligentsia, the educated people—something which is alien to them, because I am quite sure that in everybody, even in the most intellectual person, there are still the remains of that unconscious self. To a certain extent I think we all have a sort of dual personality, that way of the conscious and the unconscious.

And then again that question of responsibility to the folk, I would like to emphasize that. I think one great failing, if you call it a failing, of the folk, or a characteristic of the folk, is lack of confidence in themselves. When they are brought in touch with urban life and with material progress and self-conscious barriers, I am quite sure that we by our appreciation of their art can enormously assist them to restore their belief and confidence in it.

I must take up that challenge which I am quite sure was meant for me about the guitar playing, that the teacher must not tell the children not to play the guitar with modal melodies. Well, I hope that if I were a teacher I should not do anything quite as silly as that, but all the same I do believe that a certain form of guitar accompaniment—the tonic-dominant type of thing— does destroy the modal melody and so I would at least give the impression that a melody sung in the old-fashioned way without any accompaniment could be just as good as one with the accompaniment. That leads me on to this question of ugly songs. Of course all folk songs have certain qualities, they have sincerity and so on, but not all folk songs are equally good, and so when we are endeavoring to popularize them, I think we must be honest with ourselves and we must take the folk songs which we think are the best and present them in a way which we feel is the best, because otherwise we are not being honest, and J believe that unless we are, our message or our mission won’t have the ring of truth in it and will not be successful. I don’t mean absolutely that one mustn’t compromise—one must to a certain extent—but I do think that one has to give the real stuff a chance. In the course of events it will be naturally overlayed with material that is spurious, that is inferior, so that we who know must, I think, take our stand upon this, that we do give the best and the most genuine stuff a chance.

As to this question of love. Unless our work springs from that, unless we do love the people and unless we do love their artistic expression we just get nowhere. At the same time I think well to quote Cecil Sharp, “More harm has been done to the cause of folk music by uninformed enthusiasm than by anything else.”

CHAIRMAN: Professor Walter Anderson?

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON (University of Kiel, Germany): Publication of folklore texts in cheap books can become dangerous to the genuine oral tradition itself. Good texts of a folk tale or of a folk song published in a cheap book, for instance in a school reader, can choke and kill the genuine oral tradition of the corresponding song or tale. School books are sometimes terrible things for folklore, and the better the text published in such a book is the more dangerous it can be, For some years I was collecting children’s songs in Estonia. I got my material from different schools, from very fine schools, and among the lines sent to me I found one that was interesting. The text was known only in northeastern Estonia. It was quite silly, but in Estonian it sounded very well. In English it goes: “We had at home a crocodile, the crocodile made much fun, it drove the children out of the room.” You will see here a very silly text, but nevertheless it was interesting, interesting also because it was found only in one part of Estonia, but there it was very popular. One morning the author of an Estonian grammar came to me and asked if he could have anything from my collection for the new edition for his school book. I asked him, “Do you know this text?” “No,” said he, “I don’t know it, but it is very nice. Let me have it.” And I gave him the text and also some other things in my collection. I regret to say he wrote a continuation of this song; he wrote some four or five more verses; he composed a melody to it; he published it with illustrations. And in the next years I got this song from all parts of Estonia, not only from northeastern Estonia but from all parts. And every time with the written continuations and in the same form as he had written it. Before I had given it to him I had found there were many redactions, many forms of this song. Now they have disappeared.^ Everywhere only the new text. And the same thing happened with another, a dance song I have given.

PROFESSOR ADNAN SAYGUN (Director, Conservatory of Music, Ankara, Turkey) : Let me come back to this word “advocate” again. I believe that the folk, the people whom we call the folk, do not ask us to defend them. We have to go to the folk and it is from them that we learn. We have, ourselves, to discover, from the folk what are these traditions, customs, and songs. It is only from them that we can get this. The folklorist must be objective; he must study all the material from a scientific point of view. As an artist he must not only be objective; if he wants to discover himself he must enter into the spirit of the folk material.

It seems to me that to use the folk material on the radio or in other ways has its elements of danger. Of course we must do it sometimes but there is always the question of how to get it done, how to do it. We must be extremely careful in this. I have in mind a book of folk tales, a Turkish book. A so-called folklorist in my country collected some folk tales and published them. But what he did is this, he gave none of the real material. He made changes in it. As he couldn’t have the real material or make an objective study of the material this turns out to be just some tales not from the people at all but actually written by this man. Afterward this book was translated into English and the English translator felt that he must do something in addition in editing the book, because it did not fit into the English understanding, so he changed it again. And now we have the English translation in our hand and I know the original text and there is no relation between them. In this way, of course, for instance in England, they hiave an idea of Turkish tales which is entirely wrong.

On the radio they are doing the same thing. There is a real danger in the radio and also in gramophone records. For instance, some so-called folklorists know that in the radio they can earn money by giving their material to the radio companies or the gramophone recorders. Of course they are not very careful with this material, and sometimes they create a folk style and they say this is a folk melody. This, of course, is not true. We have the propagation of new folklore, folk tunes, and records. When someone asks me if he can get an idea from our radio as to what is Turkish folk music, since we have folk hours on our radio in Turkey, I must say no, because all of these melodies are wrong. They are not real folk music. This I think is a very great danger.

MR. SAMUEL P. BAYARD (Pennsylvania State College, State College, Pennsylvania) : May I revert, for a moment, to the apparent dichotomy between the necessity (which Dr. Campbell mentioned with great force) of clear and complete objectivity in so far as is possible on the part of the scientific student of this traditional material, and the no less evident fact that all folklorists, when they work, are bound to be deeply and lovingly involved with the life of the people? I should like to propose the following for your criticism and at the same time to state that it comes as complete conviction on my part. In my observation of myself and my somewhat more objective observation of my colleagues I have come to the conclusion that the very thing which forces us to examine, which forces us to wish to know everything, without flinching about our people—the very thing which forces us to intensive and so far as possible objective studies, the very thing which makes us clear-headed at evaluating—is that deep, loving regard which we have. That is the thing that forces us to do it. And that is what I believe. Without that initial affection, we would not even take the trouble to try to know anything, and try to evaluate anything. So the two are only apparently incompatible, but in fact they are so deeply intertwined that nobody can separate them. Of course, we have to preserve distinction and recognize that those two forces exist and that one may come into play more prominently at one time and the other at another time. But I am quite sure that they cannot be separated.

MR. JASIM UDDIN (Dacca, East Pakistan) : Perhaps Mr. Lomax wanted to say that the folklorist should be more than a technician when he collects folk songs which are the artistic vision of the people. You may have your machines to record and package the folk songs but the task of the folklorist is more than that.

We must realize that new creations must happen. When people have got the materials in their hands they will use them, but it is wrong for them to use them in the name of the creation of the folk.

We did some work in the country and we helped with the education of the people in sanitation, in literacy, and in many other ways. Sometimes we find a song. The tune is European but the subject matter is our own. It is clear why this is so, because during our period of slavery we were not allowed to sing the songs which gave us enthusiasm and which strengthened the people. [Mr. Jasim Uddin sings the song in his own language.] Now you can hear that this is a song which gives enthusiasm and strength to the body. The meaning of the song is this: “Oh my beloved, how you play your flute. I cannot remain within doors. I will come and stand here outside.” Sometimes we go to a village and if we find a very nice song, a catchy tune, we use it for our own purposes. I go to a village and I tell the people, “Do you know that I am a composer of songs,” and then one man says, “Can you compose a song which can cure malarial fever and take it away from our country?” and I say, “Yes, I can. I have already composed a song which can cure malarial fever.” And I gave him the song and he was cured. I bring in a man with a dirty cloak and with a broken umbrella and he will sing the song accompanied by a dance. In this way we take down a very nice song, sometimes of two or three lines. It is not a complete song, and so we send it to our museum and archive it. But for the use of the people we add two or three more lines and use them on the gramophone.

There is one difficulty. In the village the singer actually sings better than any of our modern singers do. As you know it is difficult to bring one of these men from the farthest of the villages to a city. Once I brought a lame man who was a very good singer. This was done with great expense because he couldn’t walk; so I hired a cart and I brought him some three hundred miles. Then a little boy came and told him. “Do you know that if you cross, the bridge is a dangerous bridge and you can drop down in a moment?” This frightened him so he went home. I begged him to stay but he wasted all of my money and everything. Sometimes they come before the microphone and they are very nervous, They cannot think of the tune, so they are brought to the town and kept for a few days so that they can be habituated to it. But the gramophone or radio companies do not have funds to bring the man from the farthest corners and keep him for a few days and train him so that he can sing before the radio. They want persons like me or my friend Mr. Lomax. Our problem is, as my friend from Turkey said, that we want the real folk songs and we ought to distribute the real folk songs in some way. That is our problem.

DR. ALBERT B. LORD (Slavic Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) : I think we should make a clear distinction between the function of a folklorist as a scientist and the function of the folklorist as a man and an individual in the social setup and the international setup to which he belongs. As a folklorist he is dedicated to what he calls scientific principles, which he interprets as best he can. As a man he should take the obligations of the society in which he lives. He has these obligations not only to the folk who are the people from whom he comes and of whom he is a part, but also to everyone else. I think we should keep those two things separate. Mr. Lomax has indicated the function of the folklorist in interpreting urban society to the folk. I question whether that is the function of the folklorist as folklorist, but I do think it is a perfectly legitimate function of the individual in a given society, a debt which he owes to all the people in the society.

It is my very deep love for the Yugoslav people with whom I worked and the love for their culture which makes me as dubious as Mr. Campbell and Mr. Anderson and Mr. Saygun of the attempts which are made to popularize that culture. I have seen too frequently the use of folklore perverted for nationalistic reasons in Yugoslavia, first under the Serbian domination and at the present time for Communist reasons. I find that this is bad, first on esthetic grounds; and secondly, as Professor Anderson very graphically pointed out, this is the kind of thing which actually kills what we are trying to preserve. A set text of anything, once it is spread throughout the country, kills folklore because the living folklore which consists of variations from one singing to another, from one individual to another, and so on, is killed as soon as the set text becomes current throughout society.

MR. LOMAX : If you don’t mind I’d like to qualify a couple of points. It seems to me that what we have been hearing is that on the one hand it’s dangerous to function as a popularizer at all, and on the other hand if we don’t function as popularizers somebody else who knows and cares nothing at all about the material is going to. That is the dichotomy that we are actually faced with. Educational systems, etc., progressive, reactionary governments, radio stations, Hollywood, and the like—they are going to do the job for us.

I’ll give you a very notorious case. There is a great American movie called Battleground in which the musical theme was the counting out—the counting, marching rhythm of the Negro troops. Well this marching rhythm which was the backbone of the morale for the training of the Negro troops in the last war was given to an all-white unit and the music was recomposed into a really dreadful melody and it was orchestrated with a typical Hollywood orchestra of gigantic size and about a thousand voices. And it became a kind of a hit tune and just disappeared. I don’t think you could give that very fine Negro original tune to anybody again. This song was killed forever. The whole idea was killed forever. It seems to me that this pushes our face right into the problem about which Mr. Jasim IJddin talked so eloquently. We have to take a hand in this. There is no way that we can be entirely objective and apart from this process. As soon as we say we have folklore, somebody is going to say, “We want it.” On what basis are we going to give it to them? On what basis are we going to participate in the process? We shall participate in terms of letting the values come from the material itself. Here is what I mean: If we are scientists, and objective, and that is if we record the whole tradition, the way it is actually alive, and if we really present the whole tradition, including the people, and if we work as hard as we can to present the people through movies, through films, through festivals, through radio—the honest-to-God, authentic stuff—the way it lives and breathes, then we are not going to kill folklore through killing variations, because they present the whole variant idea as they sing. We are not going to destroy the style of the material, because the style lives as the story is told or a proverb recited. It lives in the very attitude of the people as they stand up and present their songs.

Now I have been watching this very process closely because when I began in radio, they hired me. They didn’t even listen to me sing. They just said, “Come on and start the program; here is a symphony orchestra.” They didn’t even know whether I could carry a tune or not. They should not, with all of the American school children as their audience every morning at 9:30, present somebody that they didn’t even audition just because he happened to have a job in folklore.

The whole thing was ridiculous so I took this job only on the basis that I could have guests on the program and could pay them. Well, here’s what happened. I presented a professional singer of folk songs and I presented real singers from the country. The city children said “Yeh!” for the professional but when they heard Aunt Molly Jackson from the Kentucky mountains they said, “Why did you have that cat yowling at us for half an hour?” But the children from Edin, Oklahoma, wrote us a collective letter and said this is the most beautiful music that has ever been broadcast on the radio. ,

Well, it seems to me that here lies the point, that if we are real scientists, if we believe that our job is to bring the people forward in their many diverse and rich aspects, in museums, movies, and radio programs, in schools, in scientific articles, everywhere—if we bring the whole thing there—we don’t have to worry about misled symphonic musicians recomposing the tunes. They will be taken care of because nowadays in New York, where we have the most sophisticated American audience for ballads, Our professional singer is a bore to most of the people who five years ago took up the call to ballads with him. They want to hear real oral musicians and it’s when those people now step out to sing that the roof goes off and the audience gets there almost at once. It takes them a little time, they fool around with the in-between stuff, but if the people, the real storytellers, the real folk singer, the person with the real oral flare gets his chance, he will win out, just as Beethoven and Bach won out in the realm of popularizing serious music.

It seems to me, then, that the term “advocate” isn’t so dangerous. We say that we believe that the people who don’t read and write also have a way of life, a way of expressing themselves that’s very important. They too should have their place in the sun. This way of expressing this oral tradition is just as important and just as necessary to the health of civilization as the literary way. We really believe that. We are going to have to fight passionately for that, whether we fight by classifying a million stories or whether we fight by knocking down the radio studio door, and bringing this Pakistani singer and holding him by the feet to get him to cross that bridge. This fight is all the same. By the way, Miss Karpeles, I didn’t mean you when I spoke of the guitar. I was thinking of that folk festival where they don’t allow a guitar player even on the grounds. There, again, they refuse to recognize what the whole picture is—that there are old singers who like to sing without accompaniment, and there are young people who want to pick the guitar.

MR. CHARLES SEEGER (Chief of’Music Division, Pan American Union, Washington, D. C.) : Might I in a manner perhaps not too dry attempt to bring together upon the basis of Mr. Campbell’s remarks, some of the slightly—I believe only slightly— divergent viewpoints we have heard this morning? As I see the subject of the conversation right now, there is still an unresolved dichotomy between the scientific viewpoint and the critical. Now in talking about these two approaches, we can either attempt to separate them, and handle them as two individual, almost mutually exclusive activities, or we may attempt to draw them together. Several people have expressed the view that they must be handled separately. We have also heard a couple of statements which involve a drawing together of these two attitudes. My first point would be, in the form of a question: “Are these not equally valid methodological proceedings—the connecting of things or the distinguishing of things?” In all our work, whether scientific or critical, we have to do both things. We can’t do them both together, because the art of speech is monotonic: It has only one line. It is unlike music, where you can have any number of lines going on at once, even apparently contradictory ones.

My second point would be that we should perhaps view the scientific method, which is well-defined among us and its nature well-known, as a kind of a complement to the critical method, which I am sorry to say we probably disagree upon very fundamentally. Let us take the scientific method, which we more or less agree upon first. Is it not a fact—of course I have to use a pseudo-scientific method even to make that little statement—that the truth of the scientific method is based upon oneness? There must be agreement upon one set of facts before you can have a science. Isn’t that so? And any group which considers itself as using a scientific method must agree upon that fact, or else get nowhere, except to confusion. Now in respect to the critical method, is it not also true that there we do not have any agreement upon a oneness or a truth? Rather, values are many, not one. If I interpret history correctly, mankind has struggled to find one value and never has been able to agree on it very long. Now suppose we see ourselves in these terms.

I believe that Mr. Lomax would feel, as he said, that values and the consideration of values come first. I believe that he feels that you cannot do anything about values but assert them, that you cannot help asserting values, no matter what you do about folk music. No matter what you do, even if you study, if you engage in the most recherché study, you cannot help its having not only one value, the value of high scholarship; it will have all the other values too. But right with your recherché, study you have begun the popularizing process and to a certain extent you are responsible for it in so far as you assert it. In other words, your critical determinations underlie or are implicit in your scientific work from the very beginning. On the other hand, turn to your assertion of values. What are you valuing? Well, if you try to make criticism have sense, as a scientific critic does—the impressionistic critic can afford not to—-you have to have something to value. What do you value? Well, what you can establish as scientifically a fact. So, you see, always the criticism underlies the science and the science underlies the criticism and if you want to struggle with the infinite progression you are welcome to. I almost went crazy trying to do it for one decade of my life until I finally decided that there were two horns of a dilemma presented to us as users of speech and we can follow one so far and then we find ourselves involved in the other; we can follow the other one so far and we find ourselves involved in the first.

We must realize that there are different views of what our science is and there will always be different views. We cannot produce perfect agreement among ourselves. There will be perhaps Miss Karpeles—and I don’t think I do her an injustice here —who will want to make our definition of folk song comparatively narrow. We will have people like Mr. Lomax who will want to make it comparatively wide. Let us have them both. Let us know that they are both valid. Let us say that beyond this we would be going too far, in either direction. But within these limits, let us recognize as each person gets on the floor to speak that he falls into a certain position here in this range of possibilities. And let us value that position with respect to the other potential positions rather than say “Oh, I don’t agree with that exactly. My viewpoints must be all, and all other viewpoints nothing.” Let us forget the “all or nothing” psychology and see each speaker who steps up as sombody who tips the balance this way or the other way. Whether we as serious students can tip this balance of popularization one way or another now that we have got it started is a question. We can discuss that. But we have got to see it as a balance in which our poor little actions take their proper place.

MISS KARPELES: I would like Mr. Seeger to know that my views are anathema to the real purist.

DR. CAMPBELL: I must say first of all that we are human, and we cannot forget that we are human beings, each with brain and a heart. And there would be nothing done if we had not both brain and heart. When we are using our heart we must avoid saying that we are actually using our brain. We have to be clear, how we are dealing with those two organs.

End of Session

SECOND SESSION

CHAIRMAN: The greater part of the discussion in our last session dealt with how to make folk music and songs available to the public. This morning Professor Sigurd Erixon of Stockholm has kindly offered to speak on the museum techniques and their function in making folk material available to people.

PROFESSOR SIGURD ERIXON (University of Stockholm, and the Northern Museum, Stockholm, Sweden) : Among the institutions for studying folk culture in Sweden the Northern Museum and Skansen in Stockholm are the oldest and most extensive. This museum was erected in 1873 and now has many departments with exhibitions and with more than a half-million objects. Among others it embraces an Institute for Folk-Life Research, large archives, a library, and a special department for teaching and instruction. I will later on at this conference speak a little of the museum and show you some pictures of it. It is a private institution but gets funds from the state. At this time I will tell you only a little of the popularizing work of this institution and of the many other smaller museums in the country.

The outdoor or open-air museum is a Swedish invention and Skansen the first one of them in the world. According to this pattern many others, and in many other places, have been formed in the country as a whole.

A rather important feature of Swedish culture and social life during the last hundred years, and particularly after 1900, has been a popular movement for the preservation of our old folk culture. A Swedish name for it may well be translated as “a home-region culture movement.” It is very widely spread and has been active in many ways. All over Sweden there have been formed more than seven hundred local societies which have as their main purpose the collecting, studying, demonstrating, and preserving of local monuments and other cultural remains and traditions in their respective regions. If we add the museums of Stockholm and smaller collections at some people’s high schools, some colleges, and other institutions, we arrive at the number of about eight hundred museums of all sizes. At the beginning of this century only a few of them existed. Only very few of these museums belong to the state, to municipalities, or to private persons. The majority of them are supported by the local cultural societies, the membership of which is probably more than 200,000.

The results arrived at by this movement for the preservation of old folk culture are most important. I cannot, however, tell exactly the number of buildings, objects, pictures, and manuscripts of all kinds that have been collected by the local societies. The buildings alone which have been taken care of and preserved are about 3,000.

Whether the organizations, their existence, and functions have any intrinsic value and whether they really represent substantial assets can be judged only by the way they function and by what they may be able to achieve in the future. Nevertheless they have left important traces in scientific, literary, and material forms; and the verdict of posterity will surely be favorable. Museum buildings, open-air exhibitions, culture and nature reservations, the preservation of many typical homes of historical interest, collections of objects in archives containing records of all kinds, reproductions, descriptions, and historical documents as well as valuable specialist libraries—all this must be counted in when calculating the final balance of the movement, whatever the attitude may be to all these questions. It has amassed an immense cultural capital, and thereby has saved it from destruction. This, it seems to me, is the main point.

Among the new ideas which were born during the twentieth century we also find the effort to preserve the home region, its scenery and its culture. In this case, the scope is much more comprehensive than the mere preservation of local culture or local art monuments. The word “home” indicates that we aim at something that has a personal relation to us. It presupposes a contact between living people and a certain environment, where they were born and have lived. If the preservation of natural scenery, historical landmarks as they are found in our communities, building types, homes, traditions and all kinds of monuments is to be possible by voluntary efforts without interference of law or compulsion, the mass of the people must cooperate. The motive power behind the movement that combines preservation of culture and educational activity is a rather complex feeling that people have of reverence and respect for old traditions and for what has been achieved by hard-won experience and knowledge acquired in the course of life.

There is naturally a very great difference between the situation where you display the special cultural forms in the same district in which they have lived and in that in which the culture of the whole country is displayed. We have no possibility of refraining from offering and serving the folk culture of all kinds to the public. All museums make it necessary that we should interest the public in the whole of our culture. If not, the work may-very well risk extinction.

During the 1930’s there came a reaction manifest above all at the appearance in Stockholm in 1930 of a functionalistic program which stood in sharp opposition to earlier tendencies toward imitation of traditional styles and constructions. Fortunately the “home-region movement” had been based only on a general esthetic program of conservation and therefore its development was not disturbed by these new tendencies. At many places a new kind of village museum was created at this time.

During the last few years the museums of Sweden have been more efficiently co-ordinated, thanks to the law concerning the care of ancient monuments which was promulgated in 1942. In connection with the provincial leagues and other provincial organizations there are now districts with province antiquarians as leaders, who are usually directors of the provincial museums as well. Their salary is largely paid by the State. Even if this institution gives better aid to antiquarian than to ethnological interests, it is nevertheless of great importance for the modernizing of exhibition technique in general and the “home-region movement.” The antiquarians usually have university degrees, chiefly in three subjects, one of them being ethnology or folk-life research. An altogether new class of officials has grown up, with the museums of cultural history as their field of work, to the great advantage both of scientific studies and the preservation of culture and traditions.

Recently it has been of no small importance that the working classes have begun to show a growing understanding of their rights and duties as an interested part of this movement. In many cases the folk life of the towns has been studied also in its more modern cultural manifestations. Partly owing to the influence of our specialists we also find a growing differentiation. The earlier point of view that each museum should illustrate as many aspects of cultural life as possible has been given up in many places, even if most people would still wish to have at least some sample collections for educational purposes.

The activities of a local society of today differ in many respects from those of earlier days. It is quite natural that during the first period they chiefly went in for collecting objects and putting up buildings. Their modern activities may be divided into different branches: scientific-professional and educational work, social intercourse, efforts to raise the level of recreation, and practical social work. To the first group belong collecting and other museum activities, demonstrations of techniques and models and patterns, etc., collecting information about the material belonging to the local museums, reproduction, and research work in general. Many local societies have brought together quite considerable archives of reproductions. Films of the various regions have been made and are shown on certain occasions. In 1933 the society of the parish of Ljusdal in North Sweden arranged a competition of folk costumes. This was a great success, and led to increased knowledge of local costume traditions. Inventories of the garments preserved in the museums have been made at several places, and with great eagerness people have tried to reconstruct local costumes and have made propaganda for their use in modern times too. This double-sided work is typical of all this local activity: on one side the investigation and collection of material, on the other side its utilization and re-introduction. In the same way folk music has been collected and musicians have been engaged to present it at festivals and on other social occasions. Old games have been unearthed and young people have been induced to play them again. The interest in textile work has been particularly great. Many of the local societies have arranged weaving courses or given those who wanted to weave an opportunity to do so in the rooms of the societies, sometimes on handlooms bought by the societies. The home craft movement is to a certain extent organized independently, with its own expositions and its own collecting and testing of old patterns, but the local societies have also cooperated in this field.

Among more scientific activities there is also the care of old buildings, which has been carried on in many ways. Many local societies have arranged building courses in order to teach better methods of building, in certain cases collaborating with professional schools and other institutions. Some societies have inserted in their statutes that they should work for the better preservation of the local scenery and the care of the region in general.

The educational trend of the local cultural work is expressed above all in exhibition and demonstration of the collections. Besides the courses already mentioned others of more special kinds have been arranged, often in cooperation with schools, such as courses in forestry and various handicrafts. The most common ways of teaching have been lectures, meetings, and expositions, combined with social gatherings, excursions and festivals. At some places the excursions have been extended to neighboring parishes. Sometimes the parish societies have arranged lectures and meetings in the different villages within the parish district.

If we turn to the work toward richer and more cultivated entertainments, we often find the local museums engaged in this work too, though, in most cases, they have only been able to supply the necessary rooms. Open-air festivals, meetings, etc., may be celebrated in the museum rooms, and often also in the old farmhouses, which have been arranged as parish museums. But the collections and the buildings have not seldom been damaged on those occasions, and the practice is in fact a double-edged sword. In the old farm museums light refreshments are often served at festivals and on Sundays and holidays. Real restaurants have been installed in the bigger local museums.

Theatrical performances are arranged on certain occasions. Complete open-air theaters exist, for instance, in a couple of such county museums. Games are demonstrated and special play-nights arranged for the young people. The local festivals are often combined with sports contests. In this respect Skansen has set an example; even as early as the eighteen nineties it was most active and played a leading part, for instance, in the propaganda for skiing.

The various festivals arranged by the local societies have played the most important part in their activity. They are of two kinds, first, general ones arranged in order to collect money and to entertain the villagers, and further, more special ones on memorial and old calendar days, celebrated in traditional forms, such as Walpurgis Night, Midsummer Eve, and various Christmas ceremonies. Very characteristic of this movement are working festivals. They are celebrated in connection with certain collecting activities and the removal and putting up of the old buildings. They have their origin in the old festivals which were connected with old collective works in the village communities. They still express some of the gay spirit of self-sacrifice which during the Middle Ages stimulated big groups of the population to undertake the building of cathedrals. As long as this spirit survives, the “home-region culture movement” will rest on a firm ground.

To the practical social activities belongs the supplying of rooms or houses for the Youth Hostels which have been arranged in many villages. Some of the societies have built steam-baths and stimulated their use; they have arranged bathing-places, built baths and laundries. These are new tasks, of a more social and economic nature, and most local societies have not engaged in such enterprises.

I think we need a clear statement of why we should make folklore available to the public. Certainly not all of it is suited for the public. In Sweden we have used daily and weekly papers, films and theaters for this purpose, beside what has already been mentioned in this talk. Especially in the outdoor museums of Sweden we have used outdoor theaters and demonstrations at certain folk festivals where members of the public can often play a role. Such folk festivals in connection with the village museums and other local museums have also been an important thing because the entrance receipts represent a valuable income for the institutions, and all kinds of demonstrations can be made at such occasions. Skansen, in Stockholm, has done a great deal in this respect through the observance of seasonal festivals, following old traditions. In consequence of this many old customs and artistic folk elements have been revived, such as all kinds of Christmas symbols, domestic crafts, artistic handicrafts, old folk costumes—indeed also many traditional dishes and drinks, as well as building forms and furniture.

I should like to mention also a long list of local and national organizations, which for a long time have worked on special traditions, such as the construction of houses, local handicraft, and above all textile work. Also, for instance, basket-making, wood carving and turning, painting, and ironwork. There are also many societies for the maintenance and revival of folk dances, folk music (with competitions), the traditions of our old craftsmen such as the dyers, the tanners, and the miners, as well as societies for the preservation of cultural monuments and of nature and the beauty of the countryside.

In this talk I have not been discussing popular literature which for the wider public has very great importance. As far as customs and beliefs are concerned it has often caused a good deal of trouble if knowledge of the material collected in the museums has spread too far. Often when we make our field researches we want to interview people and we sometimes find that they have been influenced by knowledge they have received from the museums. It is, on the whole, a danger nowadays that people in general should become highly influenced by folk customs that are still developing, and by the spread of the results of ethnological research. Also the number of genuine, honest, and sincere informants is diminishing in a very dangerous way. It is not easy nowadays to find a farmer in the more central parts of Sweden who is not more or less a learned man. I should like to tell you about a Hungarian professor who came to Sweden and wanted to photograph some implements which he believed to be old and genuine though they were actually rather new industrial products. As the professor turned around the farmer was standing behind him, filming his doings. I saw the whole incident myself.

Later I shall want to show to you some examples of the exhibitions of folk art. I have here with me some publications from the museums and you are invited to look them over.

CHAIRMAN: Now I am sure that we are very grateful to Professor Erixon for having given us the picture of the growth of the folk museum movement in Sweden and of the way that those who are engaged in that work are trying to give something back to the people. There are practical lessons to be learned from it. I remember in 1935 when I first went to Sweden, I was at Skansen one Sunday in July when the Crown Prince opened the folk festival there. About fifty thousand people were present and there were folk dances, and storytelling was going on. Sometime later I read some statistics in regard to Skansen. For the year 1937 the number of people who visited Skansen was almost three million. Now Skansen is not a public park in which you can wander at will. There are turnstile gates at which people pay—perhaps schools are allowed in free—but it is a delightful place where you will see school teachers taking their children around, where lectures are held and all that kind of thing. It is really a wonder place with cinemas, cafés, restaurants, and so on; and there is a church in the center of it in which marriages take place. This has been brought stick by stick from I don’t know what part of Sweden, but certainly a long distance, and been preserved and set up there.

Now in Ireland we have no folk museums whatsoever, though we have been lecturing and thundering and imploring the government ever since we made our contacts with Sweden to get something done in Ireland, because our civilization is broken across the back and the Ireland of the future will be completely different from that of the past. But up to now we haven’t been able to do anything. We have a folk section in our national museum, but it is only playing a Cinderella role. I have been talking to some people in the United States and have come to find out that there is quite a vigorous local museum movement here, and I hope during the morning we shall get some accounts from people who know about that.

I think Dr. Campbell might wish to say something at the beginning on this museum problem.

DR. CAMPBELL: Yes, I have been very much impressed by what I have seen and heard in Cooperstown. I had quite another point of view when I arrived in America, because so far as I know no book has been written on the folk culture museums of the United States. I think such a book would be very good to have, because there are, as I have found, a number of good museums here throughout the whole country, but they have no contact with each other.

Now in Cooperstown we saw the seminars on American culture of the kind I was especially asking for. I found that they had a very fine starting point for every kind of activity concerning folklore and folk material. There was their colonial period, I think that from the historical point of view that is a very good starting point. Then you have the background of the American Indian culture. Then there is the culture contact of the colonies as they take over the country from the Indians. You have a very interesting mingling of cultures.

I tried to make some studies on that line. I did it on only a single culture element, bread. I came across a woman of the Iroquois tribe and I got very good inf ormation about the old-time type of bread that she knew something about and that she had heard old Indians talk about. It was very interesting to see how the colonizers took up some of the American Indians’ ways of cultivating the land, and raising corn. You know the American Indian type of bread stands in contrast to the old-world type of bread. The American Indians have cooked bread in bowls. The old world in Europe has the dried or oven-baked bread. I find that there you could follow the taking over from the Indians of this interest in corn bread. Well, that is an example of culture contact which I can call a culture contact without compromise.

Of course we lived there in Cooperstown in the place where the legends of the Leatherstockings were springing up. So you had also, of course, to study the legends of the kind that made the Indians into types. Now that is just a beginning. There is continually coming over from Europe a great deal of folklore, a lot of other culture elements, spiritual and material. The Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown could thus study nearly every phase of culture. I was especially interested in the very fine display of tools and implements and, because of my particular interest, in all the material concerning cookery. There was a very large collection of recipes for very old-fashioned dishes. As you probably know, my own interest lately has been in the study of cakes and bread. They have kept types of bread from England, from Scotland, and from. Wales—types which you can hardly come across nowadays in Great Britain or Ireland. There are, therefore, many things in this museum which will interest the museum scholar who comes from Europe to America. Now I imagine that there may be many other museums that have materials of this kind in this country, but I have not had an opportunity to see them. There survives in all these museums a great deal of folk art. It is curious how much of the folk art, especially that in textiles, has survived over here. I saw a carpet that I thought could have been made nowhere else than in Scandinavia.

DEAN STITH THOMPSON (Indiana University) : In some ways I am glad that the discussion has come around to our own American situation. We have certainly made only a beginning in the way of folk museums, but it may be well to indicate what some of these beginnings are. Several years ago Dr. Liljeblad and I received an invitation to come to the University of Minnesota for an inauguration meeting of the American Folk Arts Association. We had an excellent conference there and although I don’t know just how much has happened, there was a kind of dream outlined which may some day come to pass in Minnesota. Some of the people present had visited the folk museum of Skansen and they knew the possibilities of such a great museum, and I think one or two others had visited at the similar museums in Helsingfors and in Oslo. As you know there is a considerable diversity of populations in Minnesota, not only the indigenous peoples but also Scandinavians of all kinds—Swedes, Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders. Now their dream was to get some large park, similar to one of our state parks, and have various areas of those parks devoted to the folk culture of a particular nationality group, having, for example, a Danish section, a Norwegian section, and so forth. I don’t think the dream was very clearly worked out in detail, but the idea was to carry on in somewhat the same way as the various provinces are represented in Skansen. I don’t know whether anything has been done there, since I have not heard about it since this visit.

One of our difficulties about museums, of course, is the question of support. Is the museum going to receive its funds from the state or from some state society? Certainly our state folklore societies can do nothing about this. They usually consist of a dozen enthusiasts and maybe a hundred hangers-on and with no funds at all and with a precarious publication of a very small journal. The state governments are quite in the habit of supporting historical societies and it happens that the Minnesota Historical Society is keenly interested in this project, so that if it works out it might well be a part of the general activity of the state historical society.

In our state, whatever we are doing in the way of museum work and in the way of preserving something of folk life is, I think, under the Department of Conservation. Those of you who visited Spring Mill Park the other day saw something of the beginning that this department has been making. As far as the American Indian is concerned, it seems to me that the museums of ethnology have pretty well taken care of that part of the folklore. I am not expert enough to know whether the standards for these ethnological museums which we have are entirely satisfactory but I have assumed that they are. Then the antiquarian museums are rather common. Just where pure antiquarianism ends and folk life begins is very hard to say. In such museums as that at Salem, Massachusetts, we find brought together examples of New England Colonial life. And there is hardly a state or even a large city that does not have a museum of this kind. Perhaps the very fine museum work at Santa Fe, which preserves various aspects of the Spanish culture of the southwest should be singled out for mention.

One kind of effort which I should like to know more about, and which I learned something of from a lecture last year at the Grand Canyon, is what the National Park Service is doing to preserve something of the folk life, at least in the areas where the National Parks are found.

As you see, all this I have been speaking of is very disorganized. There is no central authority. There is nothing for the folk life of the non-indigenous peoples of America corresponding, say, to the Bureau of American Ethnology, which could carry on museums. I think it inevitable that this museum activity will have to be worked out state by state. That is the way we do things in America largely. And in some places the museum movement may flourish and in other places it may be years and years before anything is done.

I have wanted very much to have this discussion of the Swedish museum system because it oifers a great deal to us. The organization is excellent, with the large central museum and the nearly eight hundred provincial museums. That is very remarkable. I have only visited one of these provincial museums, that at Varborg, but it seemed to me to be a very excellent museum full of fine collections and well-organized. If Sweden has eight hundred I have no idea how many we should have but I suppose it means we should have several thousand in a country of our size. Ideally, I suppose, we should have a museum for each of the nationality groups. We should certainly have museums for what we may call the old American group, to which I myself belong, with ancestors all here before the American Revolution. That is a different kind of culture in many ways from the recent immigrant group. Also it is a different kind of culture from the Pennsylvania Dutch, from the French, and so on. These probably should have a separate museum. This, of course, is all in the realm of dreams and probably belongs to the twenty-first century.

Before I stop I should like to say a word about South America. I spent the year 1947 in South America and noticed that the folk museum movement there is going along very well. Frequently when we would arrive at a hotel there would be a poster urging us to visit the folklore museum. There are six or eight of these—several in Argentina and Chile, good ones in Lima and Bogotá, and also in Rio and Natal in Brazil. These all are supported by the state. In contrast to us here who do not have an all-powerful Minister of Education, in South America the pattern is always that these museums and everything connected with folklore are part of the activity of the Minister of Education.

PROFESSOR HERBERT HALPERT (Murray State Teachers College, Murray, Kentucky) : Most of us could probably report a large number of local museums which have collected artifacts of various kinds. Billings, Montana, for example, has a cowboy museum and there is an even better one at the Silver Dollar, the best bar in town. In Wausaw, Wisconsin, is a lumberman’s museum which specializes in the tools of the lumbering industry. Most colleges have small local museums, even the one where I teach.

One thing that bothers me about the activities at Cooperstown where they demonstrate weaving and explain the use of the tools which are collected is this. I wonder just what is the attitude that develops from much of the museum work. It seems to me sometimes to be nothing more than the glorification of the good old days. In the south there are several folk festivals where tney are “re-creating” folklore, folk life. There is at least one of them where no guitar is allowed. I sometimes feel that many of these activities are not only antiquarian but a little worse than that. They are conservative in the worst sense. They seem to say, “We don’t want any changes here because the good old days were the best.” Now there were doubtless wonderful values in the old days, as far as I can tell from talking to informants, but I don’t know whether pure museum activity which preserves the artifact and the description of the old works and ways is going to do anything to preserve, let us say, the spirit of cooperation which was so definitely a part of the frontier spirit. I speak of course, as a non-museum person. I know nothing about museums. But I wonder if the question could not be raised. Except for its historical, descriptive, and informative ends, just what purposes are served by museum activities?

DR. MAURICE JAGENDORF (New York City) : I should like to clarify first of all something about the Cooperstown museum. I think you have hit upon the least important part of the work of the museum. These activities are carried on for the amusement of the visitor to show him how things were done. We have never said that these were the good old days and the way things should be done today. But visitors are interested in seeing how a smithy worked, how a store was conducted, and how weaving was done.

The Cooperstown museum seems to me to be very interesting from the historical point of view. We have, for example, a complete history of the development of the washing machine. We have washing machines which were used about 1820 which were marvels of ingenuity. We have a complete development of the stove used for heating which shows how the stove gradually changed. Similarly we have a complete history of the making of shoes and other things. Now that is as far as the Cooperstown museum is concerned.

In my work of looking for folk stories I have come into contact with many historical societies through the New England states and lately through the middle Atlantic and Great Lake states. I found that practically every town of any importance has some sort of museum. Among those that I would point out is the museum in Chillicothe, Ohio, one of the best I have ever seen. This museum is supported and arranged by three businessmen. Usually these museums which are scattered around the country are filled with all kinds of things; often they are Indian artifacts and fine heirloom furniture, all thrown together helter-skelter.

To revert to Cooperstown, don’t think for a minute that there we say that we want the good old days. That is just a little fun added to the museum and it attracts the people and shows them how things were done at the time. You would be amazed at the amount of interest displayed in the work we do, by the women as well as men. I have always been surprised at the amount of interest displayed by automobile mechanics when they happen to come into the smithy and see how welding was done and how the nails were manufactured before we had modernization and mechanization.

MR. SEEGER: Is it not true that among other reasons for the interest in the whole study of folk culture is a threat to the identity or continuity of a group, an area, or a nation? It seems to me as we look over the growth of folk museums, and indeed of the whole of folklore interests in Europe, it has thriven especially in those countries where there has been a threat to the national identity. I think especially of the Scandinavian countries which are small and weak from a political and military point of view and of Ireland. And in this country it seems to spring up where there is an impingement upon the rural life or the life of a particular area especially because of the encroachments of the city. Might we not as folklorists see this situation in a functional manner and perhaps do a little to offset what Mr. Halpert has so justly called the reactionary tendency. Should we not urge upon our museum people, and upon our students of folklore, the importance of seeing all kinds of activities of the people as continuing, existing things now and not to view them only in their antiquarian light? We should be able to see the connection between the old and the contemporary and the future.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Yes, I think Professor Erixon in his paper illustrated that point particularly well. Sweden has made use of the old in the present by the way of exhibitions.

MR. LOMAX: I should like to ask a question of Dr. Erixon and his colleagues from Scandinavia. You remarked that in one way or another gradually an attitude of reverence and respect for the past songs, artifacts, ways of cooking, ways of making things, ways of dancing, ways of dressing, even the landscape, was being induced in the working classes. Now I would like to know what effect this is having on the total culture of Sweden? Here in America we have a very different, completely opposite attitude about the past, I think. As Sandburg expresses it “The past is a bucket of ashes, a wind gone down.” As I listened to Professor Erixon’s address I confess I began to get very cold feet about folklore. And since I have never been to Scandinavia, and don’t read Swedish, and don’t know about contemporary Swedish music, architecture, literature, art, and so on, I can’t make my own estimate about the effect of this extremely powerful movement with its eight hundred museums, and its centers of activity, its influence on the radio, and so on. I should like to hear from Dr. Erixon and perhaps Dr. Campbell as to whether folklore is making for a rich, dynamic, growing Swedish culture.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: It is not possible to say how it will go in the future. In Sweden as well as in the United States there are opposite opinions about these matters and there is a fight against this folk-culture movement. Many are not interested and the development of this group is very rapid in Sweden as in the United States. There are also some peculiar misunderstandings about the whole thing. Two or three years ago I had a visiting professor with me from a country in southeast Europe and he wanted to study the old folk culture of Sweden. He had heard so much about our museums and collections that he thought that Sweden must be a paradise of old-fashioned culture. I hadn’t time to drive him out to the villages and the country. We went to a more centrally located farm and there he found two implements that he was sure belonged to the old peasant culture. It wasn’t so at all; these were merely factory things but he would have them. So he took up his camera and photographed them and when he was through he saw the farmer himself taking a photograph of him. This illustrates a foolish, romantic attitude about such things. I think we have to realize that there are two groups of people. One of these will use the material we have for attempting to renew and perhaps disseminate an old type of art, or an old custom. But the scholar is primarily interested in the material from a historical point of view and from the point of view of educating the public as to the history of our people.

DR. CAMPBELL: I should like to say this in reply to Mr. Lomax. We arrange the museum in order to give scope to the pure scientific study of the cultural development and the only reason for arranging the museum in this way is to know the truth and nothing further. But, of course, we are living people and we all have to do something more than merely use our intelligence in the search for truth. We are also doing something else with our studies and collections. Now I agree entirely with what Professor Erixon said when he started his reply. He said we don’t know anything about the future. We don’t know whether what I call the journalistic way of thinking is going to take over entirely in Scandinavia or not. By this journalistic way I mean the thinking that says there is nothing more out-of-date than what we had yesterday. You will see much in the way of furniture and houses that are modern today and will probably be out-of-date in ten years. Of course we all use these things, and I myself have such a house. But I am sure that if there are old and fine pieces of furniture in the family which relate to past generations this is a fine heritage which we like to keep. Perhaps this heritage may be an old song that is remembered, but it does give some stability to our culture.

Last night I went to a concert and heard a singer and every song I heard was a heritage from the past generation. [This refers to Mr. Lomax’s concert of the evening before]. None of us would say that we must take up all the old things today. We shall take up only the old things that are useful today. We found out last night how old songs can still have their vitality for our own time. These songs spoke to my heart as I am sure they spoke much more to yours, and although I could not always get the point of the songs, especially the humor, still they were alive and brought something valuable to our present generation. And I think the same kind of thing may be said when an old lady brings in griddle cakes such as her mother or her grandmother made, and tells you that you may taste them. There are many things in this old life that still do not deserve to be lost.

Mr. Lomax asked about how the common working man in Sweden reacts to this conservative cultural activity. Well, I don’t think that when the working man meets someone, say in Stockholm, and they sit and reminisce about the country where they came from, that they feel that they are being conservative just because they are talking about a past part of their life.

Here are one or two examples of old activities which have been taken up and have assumed a new life that is important for the present generation. Baseball is an old game that has been regularized and has been made a part of modern culture. And the modern vogue for skis and skiing, where did that come from? So far as I know, it came directly from the Northern museum in Stockholm and a place in Lapland where they were carrying on a forgotten competition of ski running. From that the quite modern sport has come.

What we use today is a chosen part of the heritage of the past. Perhaps we use it in a new way but we have built upon that. We could be called conservatives if we took up all past activities and if we said that you have to live in the old manner of living. We have to live in our own generation and we have to create, but you cannot create everything merely out of yourself. I am sure that much of what you create is based upon what has gone on in the past. I think, therefore, that in reality this is not such a hard problem. The present can choose from the past that which fits its needs.

CHAIRMAN: A number of people are anxious to speak on this museum problem, but we have just a half an hour left. Should we continue discussing museums all the morning or should we go on to some other aspect, perhaps the schools? Mrs. Seeger has been interested in the problem of making folklore available to the schools, and as far as we know, she won’t be here next week. Mrs. Seeger, would you like to say anything now on the problem of folklore in the schools?

MISS KARPELES: I just want to make a general remark and say-that I think we have had a great discussion on what I would sum up as antiquarianism versus folk life. I only want to repeat something that was said to me once by a famous English morris dancer, William Kimber. He said, “Our dances are now what they were and what they always will be.” And I think that expresses it very, very well. There is an abiding value, as Mr. Seeger says, and many of us have said it is a continuing value. In listening to all the discussion I keep returning to the thought that the most comforting sign of our present civilization is that here in America, the most modern and the most progressive of all countries, the folk tradition should be so alive. I want to suggest that we should go on to a perhaps more practical question as to how the revival and the increase of interest in folklore could be achieved.

CHAIRMAN: Now in regard to folklore through the schools, would you care to say something, Mrs. Seeger?

MRS. RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER (Washington, D. C.) : Well, whatever I say will be from the particular to the general, rather than from the general to the particular, because that seems to be the way I approach things.

In working with children, a basic feeling I have had is that we should give the children the real or the authentic or the old or the original, or whatever we want to call it, as we have heard it, but also give them the feeling that they can use it, because, after all, these songs have been used, and that is of course what I have done. Supposing we are going to sing a certain song or publish it, we can sing only one version; we can publish only one version. But my aim is to give the children a feeling that this can be done in various ways, if they can make it their own, if they can improvise it. They can sing about a red dress instead of a blue dress. They can sing:

When the train comes along, when the train comes along,

I’m gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along.

Well, instead they can sing about a plane perhaps. One child’s father was going to Mexico, so we sang about a plane instead. But that child knew the song as it was. He knew it in what we might call its original way, as I had heard it. We didn’t forget about the train. We didn’t, in other words, make something completely new, we didn’t dilute permanently. But we brought it to him when it needed to be brought to him.

I have worked mostly with small children, from two to four, and I think I could perhaps talk better if I had them around me here. Perhaps some people don’t know how little our American material has been known in our schools, by our teachers and by the parents. Not only have they not been known but people have looked down their noses upon them. Professional musicians are responsible for a lot of that looking down. I went into Schirmer’s in 1930—that, as you know, is about our biggest music company in New York—and asked for a book of American folk songs. The man said, “There aren’t any.” In our American textbooks, of course, the kind that go everywhere, there had been practically nothing. Of recent years there have been some. They will, however, sometimes include a song like “Old Molly Hair.” I was reminded by Dr. Anderson’s remarks the other day: they will not dare to publish that “Old Molly Hair sat on a butter plate, picking out her hair,” but they will make up some other words for that.

In 1935, as a professional musician, I became acquainted with folklore, partly through my husband’s work in the settlement. In 1937 a man named John Lomax, who has a son named Alan Lomax, asked me to act as music editor of a book of folk or traditional songs. We listened to thousands of songs, out of which we chose three hundred from which two hundred were published. I was impressed, as a professional musician, with certain values in this music which it seemed to both of us, and a lot more, should be got, somehow, to children. Here were things that weren’t just beautiful melodies—a sort of unfinishedness in the music, it kept on going. Professional music isn’t like that; it always tells you when it is going to end. Vigor is an over-used word, but it certainly is there—non-stop, rhythmic quality, and chiefly the thing I was talking about a while ago, improvisational qualities. If only you could play with this music, if you could bring it right home!

The second little episode occurred when our daughter joined a cooperative nursery school. While I had this strong feeling that this music should be brought to these children who were having these rather awful textbooks, I was put in charge of the music of this little cooperative nursery. We mothers decided that we would use only American folk music for that year.

We had many interesting meetings. A cooperative is a cooperative. We all got together and decided whether we should use idiomatic pronunciation in making copies of these songs. Was it condescending, was it citified, was it unnatural to try to use idiomatic pronunciation? We discussed matters of killing, which in American children’s books has been notably avoided excepting in fairy tales, where it is respectable. Many mothers felt that certainly we could not sing “Juba this, Juba that, Juba kill the yellow cat.” We thought perhaps Juba ought to chase the cat, that the child was more apt to chase the cat than kill it anyway. Then the matter of content came up. All these, I think, are rather vital things in the publishing of children’s material and that’s why I am taking them up, but from a particular standpoint.

Anybody making a book of children’s material is presented with things just like this when they present the book to the publisher. Is the child going to be given word material which is outside his experience?

Do, do pity my case
In some lady’s garden,
My clothes to wash when I get home,
In some lady’s garden.

One mother thought it was very bad to suggest that children would be pitied when they work. That song became her child’s favorite song. Well, we selected this material according to the needs of the nursery school. When we needed a song about rain, we didn’t make up one, we didn’t take a lovely folk tune and make up new words to it, which has been done with a great deal of children’s material. I ransacked my memory, so to speak, and searched records. Of course one of the nicest ones is:

It rained a mist, it rained a mist
It rained all over the town, town,
town It rained all over the town,

which, as I’m sure all of you know, is the first stanza of “Sir Hugh.”

We chose traditional materials to fill in the needs of the nursery school as they came up. Sometimes a child would be annoying another child and pulling his hair. I happened to remember the ballad:

Monday morning go to school, Friday evening home,

Brother combs my sweetheart’s hair as we go marching home.

In singing that I remembered one of the things I had felt about this music—that it keeps going—so I didn’t stop singing it. I didn’t look at the child and wait for him to stop pulling the other child’s hair. I simply kept on singing, and we sang that until the children knew it from singing it. I remember we sang it five or six times without stopping, without breaking the “post” of the song. Those eight children started combing each other’g hair with their hands. We had a new song for school.

That sort of thing came up a great deal. There was the matter of getting upstairs. There was a place in this particular school where we shouldn’t go upstairs. We sang about getting upstairs and about getting down stairs. So the children were allowed to go upstairs and then we got them down again. This, then, is the free use of the material, the giving to the children the feeling that this music could be made theirs, but this without losing the face of the original. In publishing books I have thought it extremely important that what we might call the authentic, as we heard it in traditional recordings or in the field, should be given to the public. They have a right to know it in its most vigorous form; they have a right to know the words as they are. Then if we want to suggest that things be done with it, that should be a separate thing. Somehow let them have a taste of the thing itself. In selecting material, we must also make it usable for the people who are going to use it. In other words, though we have love for the folk, we also have love for the people we are giving it to, and we must make it as usable by them as possible. And it often requires the hearing of twenty versions before you find the one which fits both these ideals. Also important, very important I think to the person using this material, is that he gets the feeling of the idiom and not just the feeling of the beauty of the song itself. These are a few of the objectives that I feel are important, in any use of folklore for children.

CHAIRMAN: You certainly have said A great deal and have said it very, very well. We are grateful to you for opening this second portion of our discussion.

MR. ARTHUR FIELD (New York City) : Though I have not worked in the schools, I have done a bit of work for the New York City Board of Education, and I am somewhat aware of the problem of the use of folk material for school children. I have found that in almost all cases the children are practically unaware of American folk material, except for the songs that are popularized on the radio and in the movies. I have not been able to make much progress with the use of traditional folk material. I’ll play a couple of square dance tunes, such as “Old Joe Clark,” which is pretty old, and the kids will dance for a while and then they will say, “How about that hot jazz?” Now, I have nothing against hot jazz, but it stands in the way of our getting the folk material across. At every turn we are confronted by the popular, modern culture, in the attempt to present this very desirable and very valuable older culture. Television and the movies, and especially comic books make our job almost impossible.

I have continually used folk material to make moral points simply because that is the best method that I have yet found. But I have been unable to make much progress in these lessons for treating one’s neighbors in the proper way or for being cooperative, because the media of communication nowadays are very popular and very widespread. We are not going to argue with comic books. It is like fighting Hopalong Cassidy. So you have to say, “Yes, Hopalong Cassidy is interesting, but let me tell you about Old Stormalong or Pecos Bill or somebody.” And you must show that there is a connection between the Hopalong Cassidy life which I find very dull, and these much more interesting people. But you have to use the connection, and so I have used it. I have said, “First we will tell a Hopalong Cassidy story and then we will tell a Jesse James story and then we will see who is more interesting.” And I have been able to use that technique with some success. Our worst enemy is the vast media of communication, which present the cheapest stuff in the most popular way and reduce it, grind it down until it is as dull as possible, so that it meets the lowest possible common denominator. You don’t have to think about this material, as you must about folk stories and the folk tunes.

MR. JAGENDORF: I am particularly interested in that subject. As some of you may know, I have run the gamut for many years working with children and trying to see how folklore can be brought into the schools and how it can be utilized. As the last speakers have pointed out, utilization of folklore is of enormous importance in the schools. It will not only teach children how to wash their faces and kindred things, it also brings out their cultural background in their future thought and the appreciation of what is really their heritage. I have experimented with one of the teachers in the school. My particular interest is in folk stories. I gave a small course on the use of folk stories in the classroom. Now the folk story can be utilized with subjects even like history and geography, mental hygiene, or physical education, to get the children more interested in these subjects. And it has worked out very very beautifully, particularly in the rural schools. I have never tried it in the public schools and I don’t know anything about how successful it would be there. We have a visitor here, Mrs. Aili Johnson, from Michigan. She has done an enormous amount of work in this field and then Miss Howard is here who has done much in the popularization of folklore among teachers.

I wish to give only one example of the utilization of folk stories in the classroom. That was tried by a teacher in Maryland who utilized folk stories to teach mental hygiene. Instead of telling the stories she got the pupils to engage in a competition. She was able to build up a great deal of interest in having them illustrate how we must be decent to each other, that we don’t have to hound each other as to whether we came from Lithuania or whether we came from Sweden, Norway, Russia, or Germany, that we are all here trying to live together and live decently. She succeeded wonderfully well with the illustrations of the stories. Now this was primarily through the machinery of competition between the various classes. She aroused interest in the whole school.

Another thing which is utilized in some schools is what we may call projects, such a thing as the celebration of Christmas. Thelma James was telling me that in Detroit they are having a national eating session where different nationalities come and cook their food. Then women of other nationalities come and eat the food and see that their food isn’t too much different. They use fire in just the same way, they use flour, and they have many things in common in thus working together. This is between groups where often there is a great deal of hatred.

At the beginning of school it is of great value to send our school children to gather folk stories. The parents are brought into this because the students must go to their parents for their stories. The result is a splendid home unity.

As to the publication of folklore, Mrs. Seeger has just told you about the difficulty of getting the publisher to print the right edition. I was called up not long ago by a writer for a magazine in which he is writing about the folk heroes of America. He hasn’t the slightest idea of folklore. He called me up to see whether I could give him some information. We have a great amount of spurious folklore disseminated in the schools in the form of stories. That is a great pity.

The American Folklore Society has just formed a committee to draw up some sort of syllabus, some sort of definition, above all a bibliography. That Miss Dorothy Howard and Mrs. Ramsey are doing. They are confining this to genuine, honest folklore, so that it may be utilized among teachers and librarians. We are now in the throes of forming a committee of educators in each state. There is an enormous amount of storytelling, some good and some bad, and some indifferent, in the libraries and in the schools. There is also an organization called the Story League of America, whose object is solely the telling of stories. Many of these stories aren’t worth much. Some of them are good and some indifferent. But such a league is so enormous that it is impossible to control it unless this committee of the American Folklore Society may be able to disseminate their findings among people who do that kind of work.

Most of the work of this committee is now in the experimental stage. We are practically ready with our report, but of course it will have to wait until the December meeting because there is no business meeting at the moment. When that takes place we hope to get the council of the American Folklore Society to send out circulars of booklets and the like, and to tell teachers and librarians the proper folklore that should be given to children.

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: For three or four hundred years we have had the major and minor scales and these are the modes used in art music. We have neglected the Dorian, the Aeolian, and other ecclesiastical and ancient Greek modes. But these still continue in our folk songs, and also some pentatonic scales. All of this makes for confusion in the minds of the children. They have the major and minor melodies in their books, and most of the methods used in the schools are based upon major and minor modes. The teacher will take a C and G and E, and then they will start from this and give the major scale. Then they will give the minor scale and they will teach folk songs of their country which are not in these scales but are in the Dorian, for instance, or in other modes. I think we must find a remedy for this situation. We must study what to do and we must try to influence our educational system from the primary schools up to inform the students more accurately about their folk music.

As to the music conservatories, there is quite another problem. One of the purposes of the conservatories is to make real music of a national character. For that purpose it seems to me it would be good to have classes in composition for the students much as we now have, and then to have another class which will study all the variety of folk music, not only in one country but also in comparison with folk music of other countries. This I think will help the composer who is seeking his own way. Just now he receives very little help and must learn what he does by himself. I think that the conservatories should make folklore and folk tunes available to their musicians.

PROFESSOR EVELYN WELLS (Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts) : I am not going to make the extended remarks that I would like to make but I am going to take up one point which aroused a very great feeling in my breast in the last few minutes. I have the greatest respect for the problems faced by public-school teachers and those people who work over the radio with large groups of young people and who are trying to fight against the cheapening aspects of music, dance, and song to which our young people I think are exposed rather more than they are in some other countries. But this business of using folklore to an end of teaching people—“This is the way we wash our face, this is the way we brush our teeth” and that kind of thing—is pretty appalling if not used with discretion; if it isn’t used, as Dr. Jagendorf has suggested, to take you immediately into the real thing—into the better thing. I wonder if Mr. Field would have got along better if, on top of his couple of square dance tunes, he had led them into perhaps better square dance tunes—because there are varieties of square dance tunes—or a different kind of folk music. This business of “moralizing” a folk song is the ancient concern of the purist for moral behavior right straight down through the ages. But I think that those of us who are worried about the trend toward using the folk song for moral and ethical purposes may take heart when we realize that if the folk song is any good—and we still have faith in the value, the quality of the material—it will in time slough off those moralizing interpretations.

End of Session

THIRD SESSION

CHAIRMAN: At our last session Alan Lomax started off by speaking of folklore on the radio. We discussed that for about an hour and a half and then went on to folklore in the schools. Miss Karpeles has kindly offered to speak this morning just by way of introducing the whole problem again.

MISS KARPELES: Those of us who are engaged in making folklore available to the public are performing a fascinating, interesting and very valuable task, but one that has a good many difficulties. The greatest of these, I think, is that in very many cases we are trying to take over a tradition that has developed unconsciously and graft it on to a conscious culture. And that raises many problems which we have an opportunity to discuss here in this meeting.

I’m going to concern myself entirely with folk music—that is dance and song—because I can then speak from first-hand experience, and leave it to others to discuss other branches of folklore. But I think that probably a great deal of what I say on the subject of folk song and folk dance can be applied to other forms of folklore.

I thought perhaps it would be interesting to tell you something of the revival of folk music in England. Of course the conditions are not the same in England as they are here, or as they would be in any other country. What we have done may not be the best way, and certainly is not the only way of doing things, but possibly it may serve as a point of departure for our discussion.

I have noticed here, since I’ve been at these conferences, that there appears to be a certain resistance to the old theories of thought in regard to folklore, a certain reaction against what one might call “antiquarianism.” I don’t know how it has been in this country, but for a long time in England folklore was regarded almost exclusively from the antiquarian point of view. I think it would be just to say that.

Now, as you know, the revival of folk music in England is mainly due to Cecil Sharp. He was not the first person to collect folk songs or perhaps even dances, though he was practically the first to collect the dances—but he was the first, or one of the first, to see the modern implications of folk music, to see that folk music was a living thing which had an appeal—as a form of artistic expression to the modern generation. The Folk Song Society had been existing a few years before Cecil Sharp started his work, but it was concerned almost entirely with the collecting of the songs and to a certain extent in their study, but not at all in the performance.

I think it interesting that Cecil Sharp approached the thing by means of education. He was a professional musician and for many years had been teaching music in a boys’ preparatory school near London, and he felt that the ordinary musical education in England at that time was founded on German music, as I suppose it was in other places. He felt it was wrong that English boys should be brought up entirely on a foreign musical culture, however good it might be. So he looked around for something which had an English flavor. He came across the many collections of so-called national songs, which are songs composed by British composers—mostly, I suppose, of the eighteenth century. In the course of looking in these collections he came across a few songs which seemed to him to have had a very distinctive flavor, and those were the folk songs that had been taken from living tradition.

I don’t think that the real character of folk songs was discernible to him until he himself went into the field and heard them being sung by the country people and started collecting them. But he was not, as you know, content just to collect, just to fill his notebooks, but he set about popularizing these songs, giving them back to the people. At the time he started to collect, it was always popularly supposed that England was the one country in Europe that had no folk songs of its own, or none to speak of. But they really had not died out. They had gone underground.

When I talk of popularization I mean only making them popular. There can be popularization in a bad sense and in a good sense. One of the chief agencies for making them popular was the schools. He tried to get them introduced into the schools, particularly by means of training colleges for teachers. If you once interest the teachers, then of course it is a very easy matter to reach the children. An interesting thing is that in those early days when folk song was just coming on to the horizon, the Board of Education, feeling that it should keep up with the times, thought that folk songs should be recommended to schools. They issued the famous pamphlet recommending this, and then proceeded to draw up a list of songs, of which I believe not one was a folk song. All were of the type of “Sally in our Alley,” “Rule Britannia,” “Hearts of Oak,” and the like. Cecil Sharp was one of the few members of the Folk Song Society—Vaughan Williams was another—who objected to this. He objected to it very violently because he said that unless the folk song, the real thing, was presented, this recommendation of the Board of Education would do more harm than good. He met with a good deal of opposition from his fellow members of the Folk Song Society who took the view that if you got these in, perhaps later the real folk songs would come. Well, that is a long story that I won’t go into now. Apart from the schools he popularized the songs by means of lectures and recitals, and above all by cheap publications. Now Cecil Sharp himself, of course, realized that the folk song is really best when it is not harmonized, because then you get the full modal flavor of the song; actually they were conceived without harmonization. But he felt that if they were presented in the first place in that way no one would take any notice of them. He therefore did arrange them with piano accompaniment, the only way of arranging a folk song that at that time had occurred to anybody. Later on, of course, broadcasting and gramophone records played a great part, but that came after his death in 1924.

So much for the song. Now I would like to say a few words about the dance. I am rather sorry that the dance has played so small a part in our discussions thus far. It is important in any discussion of folklore and.it has a very wide appeal. It is in many ways harder to publicize dance than it is songs. Once you have published a folk song anyone who can read music, even though he may not be able to get the full flavor and the distinctive style of the song, can at least get from the music what I would call the essentials. The dance, of course, is much more difficult. We have, for example, no system of notation and it does depend primarily upon living examples and precepts. It can only-be imparted satisfactorily by a living person. In England the interest in folk dance started by a very small group movement, just a small private club of about half a dozen, of which I and my sister actually formed the beginning. It was from this that the Folk Dance Society grew. In 1911 the English Folk Dance Society was formed and from that seed there gradually grew our present organization. The methods adopted were classes, country dance parties, festivals, demonstrations, lectures, and the like.

One thing which we found very useful in the early days, and I think that may be really an English institution, is the competitions which we have in England. A great number of competitive musical festivals are held. Into these various groups soloists come and compete. There is an adjudicator or board of adjudicators, and in addition to the actual placing and awarding of prizes which really is the least part of the adjudicator’s function, he gives criticisms on the various performances. We found in the early days that it was a rather helpful way of letting people know about the dances, about what we were after, and for setting the standard. I think, however, that in general that is a thing that you must not carry too far.

We were very active in introducing dances into the schools, but I think that particularly with the dances one has to be rather wary about putting them into the schools, because it seems to me that the movement has even suffered somewhat through the widespread teaching of the dances in the schools. The reason for this I think was that during the First World War it was really only the schools that were able to carry on folk dance activities. Another thing from which we suffered very badly during the early days was the superfluity of women. The women teachers took up the dances in a much more wholesale way than the men did and that made for the preponderance of women. All of this has, of course, been very much altered in the last years; and particularly in these later days, many of the youth groups, youth organizations, which have sprung up I suppose in every country of the world, have made folk dancing very popular. Eventually the English Folk Dance Society amalgamated with the Folk Song Society. After Cecil Sharp’s death we built a Cecil Sharp House in his memory. It is a very large building devoted entirely to our folk dances and folk songs. I hope that if any of you visit London you will pay a visit to the Cecil Sharp House. It was badly bombed during the war but it has now been rebuilt.

Thanks to Cecil Sharp’s activities and those of the society which he founded you can say that practically everybody in England has a nodding acquaintance with folk songs and folk dances. One thing which may be of particular interest to you is that during the First World War Cecil Sharp and I were in America. During the winter months, when we weren’t collecting songs in the Southern Appalachian mountains, we were both engaged in propagating English folk dances here and also folk songs. Now at that time, thirty years ago, the idea of popularizing folk songs and folk dances was a very new thing. Of the dances, the only one that was well known at that time was what we called the Kentucky running set, a form of square dance, which Cecil Sharp and I had collected. All the large and rich body of American dances which we know about today were at that time still unknown. Cecil Sharp then urged people to take up the English dance and the English songs. There was a certain amount of opposition to this, but he based his reason on the fact that it was important for a culture to be linked to the national language. There may be differences of opinion about that, but it seems to me very important for any nation or any ethnic group to start with its national traditions before taking on the folk music of other countries.

As a result of these activities a society was formed in America. At first it was a branch of the English Folk Dance Society, but later on it changed and became the Country Dance Society of America. And those of you who were here last week will remember May Gadd, who was here and is the director of that Society. I think perhaps it might be interesting to tell you just a bit about the activities of this Society. They provide directions for single evenings, for drop-in classes, and so on. They arrange festivals and seasonal gatherings, they give direction for teaching dances in classes in schools, for short courses by the director. Every year they have a camp at Long Pond, Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, for songs, dances, lectures, etc. This year they have a folk-music week I shall be attending. They also pay attention to the creative arts, and May Gadd herself has had a good deal to do with the dance in the Agnes DeMille productions in which she had, as you know, made use of the folk-dance idiom. In addition, the Country Dance Society has a clearinghouse for information.

I will now return for a moment to the situation in England. I think that it is interesting that in the early days Cecil Sharp was attacked on both sides. He was attacked on one side for popularizing the dances, since many scholars felt that these were the things to be put in books and to be studied, but the idea of handing them over to primary school children or anything of that sort was thought quite ridiculous, and it was urged that all the school children would do would be to spoil the songs and to make a mess generally. On the other side he was very much criticized as being pedantic, because of his insistance on the revival, or on remaining faithful to the tradition. Now that doesn’t mean that he tried to make the people to whom he was teaching the dancing imitate slavishly the peasant or the country person. I always think that we were extraordinarily fortunate that the revival of our English dances was through a man like Cecil Sharp, who had artistic perception. So many people who came along and saw the dances being danced by the people did not have these perceptions and were not able to get, as he did, right to the heart of the matter. So often they would mistake certain movements and gestures which came because of stiff joints or because of old age, and they would take these accidents to be the essentials of the dance. So you have people going about imitating these old men and thinking that that is the way the dance should be done.

This question of technique in a folk dance has always been rather a bone of contention. There are people who will say, “Yes, folk dance, that is the natural thing and because it’s natural no technique is required. They simply get up and do it by right of nature.” Of course you know that that is not the case. I suppose that nobody has a finer technique than the folk dancer or the folk singer, but the difference is that he doesn’t acquire it consciously as we do, but unconsciously through tradition. Of course, when that tradition has been broken, all sorts of problems arise, and to a certain extent it is probable that people had to acquire the art consciously, but of course until it has become unconscious again the technique is no good to us. I am sorry to be addressing you like this and telling things you know just as well as I, but I do want to stress the fact of the great importance that Cecil Sharp attached to standards of performance. That again was very much misunderstood, because it was always thought that he would not recognize anything unless it was absolutely exact in every respect. This was not true at all. All that he insisted on was that there should be a recognition of that standard, particularly in the society that existed for popularizing the dances; but naturally he did not expect everyone to conform to that standard. As in every other art there had to be good and bad, but the only thing that he did insist on was recognition of the standard. Because his great fear was that the thing might be just a passing fashion, just a craze, and people would adopt it and then drop it almost immediately, he felt that the only safe thing to do was to keep the traditional standards of performance.

Now only just two more points. People will, of course, use folklore for all kinds of purposes. We have heard that expressed here; there are sociologists who will use folklore, there are politicians, there are people who go into hygiene—all these people will use folklore for their own purpose. That is quite all right. I think it is a sign that the thing is alive, but I think that we who are concerned with the propagation of folklore—I am speaking now of folk music, folk song and folk dance—should realize that these things have as much right to be practiced and studied in their own right as a form of artistic expression, as a symphony of Beethoven. Now we have scholars and we have what we call popularizers. To my mind that is a most healthy situation, because I feel very strongly that if the two aspects of the thing are divorced you get into trouble. If the scholar just tries to go his own way studying the thing without reference to the practice, it is likely to become precious and academic. On the other hand if the people who practice the art have no connection, no relation with the scholars, they get on to wrong lines and the spurious creeps in, and then the thing is likely to become dissipated and disappear. I think that we must always bear in mind that in popularizing dances and songs practice always comes first and the study later.

CHAIRMAN: We are all very grateful to Miss Karpeles. Far from taking us too long, I think that we all have learned a great deal especially toward the end when she pointed out the necessity for those who are working on the material to keep in close touch with those who are interpreting it and using it for the public. For a short while we will have questions on what she has said, and then we will go on to discussions by other people on other aspects.

MR. LOMAX: To me the most important question which has been raised in Miss Karpeles’ very interesting talk is this, what effect does the more or less official and scholarly propagation of folk songs and folk dances have on the actual future of the tradition in a particular culture? I have an impression, which the remarks of Dr. Anderson yesterday seemed to confirm, that when a very good version of a song goes out through the school system all the other versions tend to die out. This is only my impression and I should like to know from various peoples in Europe, say England, France, some of the Scandinavian countries, perhaps in Germany, where there have been official adoptions, or a semiofficial adoption of folk songs by teaching them in schools so that the music has a tendency to become national music, if it does not become official and then no more of it is made, no more of it rolls out of the lives of the people? I don’t know the answer to this question, but that has not yet begun to happen with us. We are perhaps at a place where we can still decide whether we want things to go that way or whether we want them to go in some other way.

MISS KARPELES: I think that is a good point but it is an extremely difficult one. Really the thing does not arise very much with us, because it is certainly true that the tradition of song making is now a thing of the past.

MR. LOMAX: I wonder whether you all do not help make it a thing of the past. This is a rather cruel statement, but I wonder if it has not worked out that way. Of course I am not sure.

MISS KARPELES: I don’t think so. Because it was a question of that or nothing, and it is literally true that the singers that Cecil Sharp got—that the average age of these singers was somewhere near seventy. I mean that industrialism and various things have practically killed off folk songs. I say practically, instead of entirely, because you do go on finding versions of the songs.

In the schools it is necessary for practical purposes to select a particular version. It would be impractical to have many versions of the songs published, and so you tend to select certain of them which are considered by the collector to be the best, and that does tend to stereotype them. On the other hand there are a number of different versions floating around. Some of them are given by the radio, by singers—versions that have been picked up here and there. I think that these songs are therefore not altogether stereotyped.

I do think that you must remember, and it is a curious thing* that here in America thé tradition is far more alive than it is in England certainly and I should think than in most of the northwest European countries.

MRS. MARY DANIELLI (English Folk-lore Society, London, England) : In point of fact, isn’t it true that we are still collecting new songs? Aren’t the BBC collecting new ones still from time to time, or am I mistaken?

MISS KARPELES: Yes, there are a certain number—not very many.

MRS. DANIELLI: No, but it still does it though.

MISS KARPELES: It still does it ; they still do get stray versions.

MR. LOMAX: Miss Karpeles, I would like to know just how much actual singing of folk songs goes on in England apart from directed activity. That is, whether they are making new songs or not. Do you feel that the activities of the Folk Song Society have kept the practice of singing ballads really alive for a large number of people?

Miss KARPELES: It is very difficult to say, because unlike the dance, which is a community activity, we don’t really know quite how much folk song is practiced. Of course, there is a certain amount of choral singing, but after all, I feel personally that folk songs were definitely not made for chorus. Folk song is rather a personal thing. There is a widespread intimate singing just for singers themselves and for their friends and their immediate group. Now as to folk songs in concerts, that is a difficult question. More and more professional singers are introducing them into their programs. In most cases you wish they wouldn’t, because they have so little understanding of the real nature of the folk songs. There is not a very great deal in the way of organized singing of pure folk songs.

MR. JASIM UDDIN: May I ask you, are there any influences of the folk songs on your literature—your modern literature?

MISS KARPELES: Yes, I think there is to a certain extent. There was certainly influence on A. E. Housman, and a very considerable amount of influence on folk music and on composers; an outstanding example is, of course, Vaughn Williams. He has done a great deal, not only in the actual setting of folk songs, but also in his own creative activity. I should say, by the way, that just before I left England I heard some folk-song settings of his, a very wonderful work which he had done for women’s voices for a women’s institute. That, by the way, is one of the ways in which we get a certain amount of organized singing. I don’t believe you have such women’s institutes here. They are really women’s clubs in the village.

MR. JASIM UDDIN: Has your English folk literature, your folk songs, your folk dances received any influences from Scotland, Ireland, and other neighboring countries?

MISS KARPELES: I should say very little, at the present day. There has been a certain amount of influence but it is largely in the past.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. Seeger, you wanted to ask a question.

MR. SEEGER: I am reminded at this moment of Lincoln Steffens, one of our most brilliant journalists, who was walking down Fifth Avenue with the Devil and he said, “Your majesty, what would you do if you met a little piece of truth on this great thoroughfare?” The Devil said, “Why, I would organize it.” I was wondering if perhaps—as I think Dr. Anderson suggested at the previous meeting and Mr. Lumpkin a week ago inadvertently showed us—the interest of the government and of great institutions and agencies may not have a very dangerous effect upon the so-called popularization of folklore and might possibly even lead to killing it. I merely ask the question here because it seems to me something that we can’t leave out of our consideration.

PROFESSOR A. E. CHERBULIEZ (Zurich, Switzerland) : For my country the answer as to where folklore is mostly found and in the best way performed is rather easy to give. I am very much astonished that this junction between folklore and its performance in this country has not been mentioned before; perhaps it does not exist here. In Switzerland we have a very widespread organization of costume groups. Every part of our country, every canton, every region, every valley, very often every village and other political division, that which we call the parish, has a system of costume groups. Each one of these communities has its special costumes for the peasants. Of course not in the cities, but most of our towns are arranged in somewhat different ways from yours. At any rate wherever you find a costume group their folk song is automatically joined with it. For our country, then, the answer is very clear; we have organized folk singing in all these groups and I don’t know how many hundreds of them there are. We owe this especially to the Swiss Federation of Costumes. We have two very large societies, that is large for a country of our size. In Switzerland there is the Swiss Folklore Society in Basel and the Swiss Federation of Costume in Zurich. In these groups we automatically try to sing folk songs in the good way, that is with the original melodies and in simple settings.

MRS. SEEGER: One point in our recent discussion has always struck me very strongly. It has always seemed to me that one thing that might help to kill folk songs is that they should be thought of as printed material and not as things to listen to. At the beginning of Miss Karpeles’ talk she spoke of Cecil Sharp, of how when he began looking through books and found material, he did not really get the flavor of folk songs, but it was only when he went out to the people and heard them singing. In making these things available to the schools we do have a great advantage in having so many people listening to the songs. This keeps them alive. Miss Karpeles’ remarks struck very close to home, “He first felt the real flavor of the songs when he heard the people singing.”

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON (University of Åbo, Finland) : For forty-six years I have been working at the task of collecting and preserving folklore. I have also organized a society and have taken some part in the reviving of folk music. In Finland we have a society for folk music and folk dancing. I think in general this is a single program and with us it has a history of over a hundred years.

As I see it, we must collect, preserve, and index all forms of traditional folk culture which can elucidate the life of the people, their amusements, their imagination, their faith, and the like. The scholar must, of course, study this material without discrimination as to good and bad. Perhaps we can say that for a scholar all things are good in some ways.

Now if we are to make folklore material available to the public it is certain that we do have to make some choices. We have to select good materials and we must give only the best back to the people. I don’t think we need to discuss here the additions and alterations that are made by people who are only anxious to make money. We have heard a good deal about these things in the last few days. From my point of view such things are only weeds in the garden of folk culture and they ought to be plucked up from the flower beds and thrown away. I have had personal experience with that living power of real folk tradition which Miss Karpeles pointed out. From my experience with this matter it seems to me that in giving good folk music back to the people it can be done in two different ways. On the one hand we can give songs back in the original form, in unison, just as they are collected, and these can be used in the homes and the schools and societies as more and more voices turn up. On the other hand we may arrange these songs for choruses to be used by larger numbers at festivals and public entertainments. I think we have to experiment with all of these forms and as time goes on we learn what is the best way to hand back these patrimonial tunes to the people and thus make their life richer and brighter.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: In Estonia each parish has had its own traditional costumes. Most of these costumes have died out but they are all very well known through pictures. Also in Estonia there has been a great movement for reviving the parish costumes, but there is no special link between these traditional costumes and the general folk culture. The folk dances and folk songs are often performed in them, but they are not used in private life.

CHAIRMAN: Miss Gillmor has something to say on this matter.

MISS FRANCES GILLMOR (Dept. of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona) : The interesting use which is being made of folklore in our schools in Arizona relates to the point of superimposing a fixed form in a growing tradition. I think in this particular school this difficulty has been avoided. The school is in a small town called Patagonia, in the border county of Santa Cruz, just a few miles from the Mexican border. The teacher in that school is Miss Doris Seibold and this work is entirely her creation. It is related to the collections made by the University and was really started through it, but all the ideas were hers. Before the collecting work had been done she wrote a thesis on the dialect of the cattle industry in that particular area, and when she began her folklore collecting it was done through the classes in the very small high school. There are English and Spanish classes representing the two languages spoken in that area. At the end of the first year they already had a very considerable collection, and the subject was then introduced to that whole section of the county. The next year the thing proceeded in the same way and became very much better known. This popularization is what relates the subject to what we are talking about this morning. They sent out from the classes in the schools a letter to every family in the immediate community, the ranches in the area, and even to the school town of Santa Cruz, which was across the border but in the same area. They explained what the school was doing; they explained that the students in that high school would be asking for the old tales, songs, proverbs, all kinds of things. They gave examples. It was a two-page typewritten letter sent out to every family in the community. The typewriting classes in the high school did that kind of mechanical work, so that they also were involved in it. The response was immediate and tremendous. Material poured into the school on wrapping paper, on paper bags, on cardboard covers of shoe boxes. The students themselves also were collectors. As Miss Seibold said, people’s ears got attuned to what folklore was and they began to realize that they were hearing folklore when they did hear it. So the collections grew.

At the end of the year they decided that they would have a party for the people who had been so helpful in this whole collecting project which involved one whole section of the county. So they sent out personal invitations to three hundred people of native Spanish speech. It was to be an exclusive party, and that was socially important, because people at dude ranches had felt that they could crash any Mexican party that was taking place in town. But the Mexican people could never crash the dude ranch parties. So this was to be an exclusive affair, with invitations, and to be able to speak Spanish was the criterion for inviting people. About 250 of the three hundred invited came. Every Mexican family in the community had someone in it who could play an instrument, so that the orchestra problem was solved. They brought their instruments and when a man or woman got tired of playing and wanted to dance, he did. Someone else took his place, so that they had a constantly changing orchestra. They decorated the large place where the dances were held with banners containing proverbs which had been collected in the whole community. The children of high school age were told that if the floor got crowded they should get off and let the older people do the dancing, since this was their parents’ party. There were a number of program numbers, both songs and special dances. One couple danced the jarabe, a man and his wife. The wife had heart trouble, and she stayed in bed two days before the party so that she would be sure to feel well when doing the jarabe. There was one dance which takes place with music stopping at intervals, and when the music stops the partners have to recite quatrains or couplets to each other. There was a master of ceremonies who himself was a Mexican and who for many years had been traveling with a small tent show in that border area. He was, shall we say, a professional on a folk basis. In this little traveling tent show he had all kinds of presents and he also had the ability to keep a crowd going. He made announcements through a loud speaker in the corner.

At midnight things stopped for a supper of Mexican dishes which were brought from the homes of the community. I was invited down as a representative of the University and I was told by Miss Seibold that the fact that the State University sponsored all this collection gave it dignity in the eyes of the people in that part of the country. When we were considering the organizing of a folklore society that would run along fairly independently of the University, Miss Seibold found that many people objected and said that the University sponsorship was a very important aspect of it all. At any rate I was invited down as a representative of the University and was called on to say a few words to the audience. So I made my first speech in Spanish, feeling that I should not come down to English after a whole evening of Spanish. This all shows how the popularization of folklore has affected a whole community and has made it conscious of its own traditions. This has been going on now for two or three years and is increasing. It is affecting Boy Scout meetings and all other kinds of social gatherings. The important thing is that this material is a part of the community and has not been superimposed from outside.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I wonder if some rearrangement of the questions which have been asked would be possible. I am interested in the question of the “official” propagation of folklore. It can be official either by coming from school textbooks or by presentation through recreation groups or the like. In this country, at least, I am certain there will be no avoiding the fact that people of various kinds are going to use folklore; it is the popular thing now. You have various kinds of use. You have the straight charlatan type which picks up material in order to get out a quick-selling textbook to produce money for the author. The book may be adopted by the schools simply for lack of other material. I think we must recognize that if someone doesn’t do something about it who really knows, then someone else is going to do something about it. What are we going to do in the way of controlling this? I don’t think we can control it at all except by precept and suggestion.

The danger of anything getting into a school textbook has been mentioned ; if a particular version of a cowboy song gets into a song book used by the Boy Scouts or Campfire Girls, this then becomes the “right way” of singing the song, no matter what the local tradition is. The tendency of a leader or a teacher who doesn’t know any better will always be to say “This is the song; we must sing it this way.” The teacher doesn’t know better because if there is not presentation of the background material with the tale or the song there is no suggestion of how the local material can be used. I wonder if certain things could not be done that would not be too difficult or expensive, certain suggestions added whenever people publish folk materials. Songs are often published without any statement of what the original singing was like. Classes are taught to sing some of our solo ballads in unison or perhaps with harmony, depending upon the “taste” of the music teacher and the arrangement that is presented. Wouldn’t it be possible to suggest that when material is presented in textbooks there should be some supplementary notes? One kind of note would be on the background of the material : that is, how it is used ; e.g. “This song is usually sung unaccompanied and if it is sung otherwise you are simply adapting it to another condition.” Couldn’t there be notes to the teacher, such as the following, “This is one way this attractive song is sung. It is not necessarily the way that it is sung in your community”? Perhaps you could suggest to the teacher that a little local collecting could be done and could advise utilization of the kind of activity that Miss Gillmor has just shown us. If the students find a particular local version of their own which they enjoy more than the book version they should be encouraged to sing it.

A third thing which occurs to me is the use that should be made of records. It would be well to have the teacher play two or three authentic versions from the Library of Congress sets. But sometimes the teacher needs to have some notes on the singing style of these Library of Congress records because occasionally the raw material does nothing more than frighten them.

CHAIRMAN: I don’t know what the position is here in the United States, whether the textbooks are turned out by the Department of Education for each state or whether, as in Ireland, commercial companies submit textbooks to the Department of Education for use in the schools.

MR. SEEGER: We do have such textbooks, that’s our trouble. And these very large companies that make a great deal of money out of them have to sell them to the state superintendent of education on a business basis, with all kinds of fees thrown in. Once one of these series has been established in a state, it is there by an almost ironbound contract for a certain length of time, and so some states are virtually prisoners of some of these companies.

DR. JAGENDORF: I was very much interested in Mr. Halpert’s talk and I meant to say a few things from the publisher’s point of view about these books. I have had a few books published and I had endless difficulties in getting the publishers to include any notes in my text.

CHAIRMAN: These are books for the schools?

DR. JAGENDORF: NO, these are folk stories. Eventually some of them get into the school readers. The statement is that nobody is interested in notes, that books don’t sell on notes, but there has been a slow and a very interesting change. In my next book I have been given permission to use a certain number of pages to indicate where the stories come from and if they were of different kinds from different places. The time seems ripe for something to be done now by the American Folklore Society. At our next meeting it will be proposed that we have a committee which will take time and trouble to confer with publishers. I know that publishers want such information and advice. I am not quite certain that they will take it, of course, but at this minute they are very receptive to it. I think they will even go to the extent of letting us examine their manuscripts and judge whether these manuscripts are proper material or not. They always hand these manuscripts out to about half a dozen readers and would be delighted to get the angle of the Folklore Society as such. Therefore it is of great importance that our Society as an organization should take an active stand at this minute where there is a strong infiltration of spurious materials. We find that people are trying to force themselves into the work, whether they are capable of doing it or not. The final solution will have to come from us, I think. I am optimistic that some influence on the publishing of folklore can be exercised now if we are bold enough to undertake it.

MRS. AILI K. JOHNSON (Flint, Michigan) : I am very glad that Professor Halpert introduced this subject of folklore books used in the schools and I think no further words are needed on that. Like the publishers, the teachers are also asking for aid. It isn’t the question of whether we should help them or not, but the fact is that if we do not help them someone else will.

I want to speak about some material that has been prepared by Dr. Eloise Ramsey of Michigan. After Dr. Ramsey and I and in consultation with Professor Thelma James had talked with many teachers in the elementary grades and junior and senior-high schools around Michigan, Dr. Ramsey prepared some help for the teachers.

In our elementary grades we have for a long time included some education in the folk tale as a part of the children’s general literary background. But at present our teachers of children’s literature are very ill-informed unless they have had the benefit of Professor Thompson’s, Professor Thelma James’s, or Professor Halpert’s instructions. They constantly find themselves confused between authentic folklore and the creative use of folklore.. Therefore I think that in our first manual to teachers, which I hope will develop from a meeting such as this, there will be a clear distinction made between the authentic and the creative. There is nothing wrong with the creative use of folklore, but we should know it when we see it. Secondly, there are a great many gaps in the collecting of the folk tale. These can be filled in. I don’t like to speak of money but this is an opportunity for the folklorist to make his contribution to folk literature and perhaps get paid something for it. Here are some of the gaps. If you are able to fill these in I hope you will help us: Swedish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Jewish, Serbian, Gypsy.

One point which has bothered us somewhat is the matter of obscenities which we find in our folk tales. What shall we do with these? We already have a very valuable motif-index which we can always refer to. Now I would give you a concrete example of the difficulty. This is only slightly vulgar, but in a Finnish folk tale which Dr. Virginia Love has been working on and which I have collected recently in Northern Michigan the motif occurs of a woman who goes up to a cliff and passes water. She speaks to the streams and says “You go this way and you go that.” The robbers underneath in a cave hear her and flee. Now that incident of passing water is unfortunately tabu in American folk tales. The publishers simply would not accept it. Therefore I would suggest that it would be possible, since this is an important motif, and since the entire story hinges on it, that we be allowed to change it, divert it perhaps, to a woman speaking to ants on an ant hill, and at the end of the book say “Please refer to Thompson’s Motif-Index number so and so, and you will perceive the changes that have been made.” This diverting has been done by Joseph Jacobs, who wrote a great many books for their children but did not have the opportunity to have the Motif-Index so he could not use that as a reference to state what he was doing. This is a possibility for the handling of material of this kind.

A study is now being made of the regional folklore material available, but more help is needed here. We should know what is good and authentic in this regional folklore. We need more material for a teachers’ bibliography and for the children’s reading about folk traditions, about the changes of speech that take place in this country. There is very valuable material for the teacher of English or even for the elementary grades, if the teachers know how to get hold of it.

In the junior and senior high schools, teachers ask us the most amazing questions and want material on folk traditions. Now we have some excellent things to give them but it is not as complete as we would wish. First of all, they want to know what folklore really is and I do think that we must define the term in such a way that the teacher can add it to what he already knows. He usually has some courses in sociology, some in anthropology, and a general background that leads to the bachelor’s degree. In the light of that knowledge we ought to give him a definition of folklore that would really help him. He may also ask for materials on arts and crafts and whether there are any books on cooking, costumes, design, such simple things as making the traditional Christmas tree decorations, and so forth. They would like to know how to teach folklore in connection with history. We have a great many books coming out with a kind of cultural-historical background and some of these are very good. We ought to pick these out; weed out the worst, and let the teachers know what is really good from the point of view of the folklorists. A good bibliography is what we need there I think.

There is also a need to let people know about the use of folklore for our creative writers. Teachers, for example, are quite amazed at discovering that Stephen Vincent Benet used a folk tale in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Another group of teachers who want to know about folklore are the teachers of square dancing. This kind of dancing is becoming more and more popular—at least in our part of the country. My fourteen year old son comes home with square dancing definitely on his brain.

Something also needs to be done about the music. In Flint, Michigan, we have many people who come up from the south. The music teacher in one of the public schools came over to visit me and she said “I don’t know why the young people don’t like to sing any more.” I asked her what they were singing. They were being taught some of the very stilted little glee club songs of the past, many of them, of course, manufactured. They were something that was popular I should say about thirty years ago when I was a girl. I asked her if she knew anything about material prepared for use by chorus and glee club, pertaining to the Southern Highlands, for example. She had never known anything about it, so I got out some of my records and played some for her. She said “Are those available?” I hate to say that, but it shows the general ignorance of even music teachers on the subject of our American folk songs. I don’t see how this could happen, but it does, and I don’t think Michigan teachers are any more stupid than teachers anywhere else or any more badly trained.

Another interesting place where folklore is being asked for is this: Deans of women call me up and want to know something about the customs of foreign lands pertaining to courtship. In a place like Flint the courtship customs of the young people are sometimes a real problem to the dean. There is also a teacher for a course they call family living which is supposed to give the twelfth grade student some ideas that will prepare him for marriage and so on, and here folklore does come in also for its bit. These teachers say that they have to know how to adjust themselves to the different ethnic backgrounds of the students concerned—in the matter of cookery, for example, or in the matter of different habits that come from different religious faiths. Unless the teacher understands these things, there are likely to arise clashes where families sometimes break up. There you see that folklore has a very integral value to the public school system, and it doesn’t have to be brought down from the top. We don’t have to throw things at the schools, we have only to answer the questions as they come to us. Let us prepare manuals, bibliographical lists, let us try to help the people who want this help. When we know something about a certain subject let us turn out little essays. But whatever we do, let us be sure that this material becomes really available to the schools.

Just how this is to be done practically I am not quite clear. It seems to me that the American Folklore Society is the logical center for such work. It may be that material of this kind can be published in the Journal or it may be that we will have to have another journal especially for teachers. In Michigan we are following out a practical scheme which may be of value in other places. Dr. Stuart Gallacher of our Michigan Folklore Society is state clearinghouse man, and whenever anything is done in any school that a folklorist learns about we drop Dr. Gallacher a card and tell him about it. This, of course, is a very informal and unorganized way of handling it, but we have not been able to think of a better way at the present time. As for the nation as a whole the American Folklore Society has a committee on education and it is the business of this committee to bring together just such information as Miss Gillmor has presented to us today. There is also a committee on the utilization of folklore, the chairman of which is Professor Thelma James. One thing such a committee should undoubtedly do is to prepare a list of speakers so that when people want to know about folklore they can have really trained people to talk to them. The choices made have often been very unfortunate. We ought to be able to help societies and clubs as well as the schools. We are continually being asked what is folklore, what can we do about it, what kind of books can we read, who can speak to us? We must have speakers who can really answer questions that seem very naïve, can answer them so that their replies will be of real value.

There is one other kind of person who needs some help. I have been approached by persons who have the task of writing scripts for the radio. These scripts they want to be about folklore, but they have no real knowledge of the subject. One young lady of this kind has been studying all summer trying to read up on various kinds of material so as to make a more sensible use of her opportunities over the radio.

CHAIRMAN: This is a very helpful contribution and is especially applicable to the problems which you face here in the United States.

MR. M. MARUYAMA (Kumamoto City, Japan) : This morning Miss Karpeles mentioned the fact that some government officials are making use of folklore materials. I wanted to introduce some examples of that from my country. The first of these has to do with the youth organizations. Some years ago our government promulgated a new law about the establishment of youth organizations. After the law was published and headquarters were established, it was found that nothing really happened, that there were no new youth organizations. So the Ministry of Education approached our folklore society and asked us to investigate the traditional youth organizations which have existed for a long time in all the communities of our nation. About fifteen people were dispatched to thirty different small communities to look into the question of the traditional youth organizations which were working very well. The results of this investigation were collected and a report, which became a large volume of about five hundred pages, was published. The minister of education was very much surprised because almost all of these organizations, with different backgrounds and different histories, had been successful.

A second example concerns the community house. About seventy per cent of our villages have their own community houses. These are old, two or three hundred years. After the war, the occupation army planned establishing such houses—a kind of house in every community. This was the suggestion of some educational officer at headquarters, I think. Our education ministry published some suggestions about the establishment of these organizations. They wanted to establish new large-scale buildings in every community. Our folklore society approached the Minister of Education and advised him to make available the traditional community houses and in some cases merely build supplementary new buildings. We find that this scheme is working very well now. A third case in which the folklore society is actually helping the government is in connection with the making of roads out through the country so that the country districts will be accessible to the city. My special point in these remarks is to suggest that the folklorist should not be simply an antiquarian but that he can actually help with the promotion of socially useful things.

DEAN THOMPSON: On this subject I don’t know whether I have any right to speak at all, since I have done very little in the way of propagating folklore in the schools or otherwise. But I suppose that we always have to have a devil’s advocate, and so I want to throw out a few misgivings that I have about some of these matters.

Especially in my trips around South America and in my observations also in the European scene, I have noticed the propagation of folklore primarily for nationalistic purposes. The person who is collecting folklore is doing so not primarily as a scholar, not primarily as a person who has something which he wants to study. He is seeking that which will favor a particular party or a particular group. I think I need not call attention to the many places in the world where this is being done. It is, of course, one of the most effective methods of propaganda, and it has flourished particularly in the last twenty or thirty years. If one begins to study the journals of folklore in 1925 and comes down to 1941 or 1942 and notices the kind of folklore used, one can see that the collected material sent out to the public is heavily weighted by the regime in charge. And it seems to me that this is a bad thing—folklore as propaganda, whatever the propaganda is used for. I don’t know to what extent it is being used in this country, but it is certainly not unknown here—not real folklore, but only a kind of bogus folklore in the old patterns. This is an extremely deceptive thing to the public. A program of real folk songs will be given, and then after a bit you will hear some of the new concoctions making propaganda for this or that social nostrum. This seems to me a simple perversion. It is not making folklore available to the public. It is using folklore, but for purposes that folklore certainly was never made for. The propagandists may have their own problems, but they ought not to tamper with folklore if they have any liking for the real thing.

As a person primarily interested in studying folk tradition as a social phenomenon, rather than making use of it, there are many of the things under discussion here that I wonder about. I got into folklore more or less by accident. I became interested in it as an intellectual problem. Here was something that I wanted to study, just as a man may want to study stars. I never thought of it as something that was for the good of my soul or anybody else’s soul. The idea that there was something particularly virtuous about a song because it was old or because it was new—that didn’t occur to me at all. I was interested in folklore as a social phenomenon, especially in seeing the difference in material that was free and handed around by word of mouth and material that was bound by the printed page. Now, of course, having once got into that, having put my hands to the plow, I have met all kinds of interesting and delightful people, and have greatly enriched my life with their friendship. All of us have our own enthusiasms and I think often we may be blind to the other man’s enthusiasm. It is probably only a blind spot that makes it so, but I am wondering about many things we are discussing today. I should like to propose a few specific questions.

In the matter of the songs our people sing, do we wish to set the clock back to the eighteenth century? I don’t see why we should do that. I don’t see why if a song has died out we should replant it and start up a kind of botanical garden of rare songs. Of course if folk songs are actually more attractive to the current generation after it gets acquainted with them in competition with other songs, well and good. But I don’t see that there is any special virtue in songs because they are folk songs. When we talk about putting the songs in the schools it seems to me that the only criterion is that the song should be something that would be of use to the people in the schools. In this respect it seems to me folk songs must enter into direct competition with all other kinds of songs.

Now when we are talking about putting folklore back in the schools I wonder if we would do the same thing about old beliefs which have died out, old practices that have long ago been abandoned. I don’t believe you would do that. I think most of us consider that some progress has been made by the sloughing off of superstitions and old practices. If we are looking at the general progress of society I think we should be very glad on the whole that our farmers depend primarily on instruction from the Department of Agriculture or a good agricultural school rather than on the practices of their great-great-grandfathers. It is a very interesting thing from the antiquarian point of view to find out what they did, but the idea of putting that back into the schools seems to me, as it would seem to all of you, to be utterly false. So it is with a good many other aspects of folklore. I have my misgivings about some of it and about the replanting of something that has died out. There may well be times when even the putting back of a folk song will be just as futile.

CHAIRMAN: Now let us call on Professor Otto Andersson. There are four people who want to speak.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON: I was most interested to hear the opinions of Dean Thompson, but I can’t agree with all he says. In any case we must admit that folk music is of very great importance, not only in the national life but also for its influence on art music. We have in folk tunes, or old folk songs, something that in fact is very good and useful for the people. Why should we not give the people back that material? It is true, of course, that we ought not to revive all the older tunes. We have to select, as I have said many times, we have to select the good from the bad. It is a difficult thing to do, but I think we have certain possibilities in this direction. If we are preparing old folk songs for use in the present times, we can do this in many ways. We can select old folk tunes, for instance, very good folk tunes, which express the same feelings that we have and that give the people in schools and communities a feeling of what they are and of what they have been in the past. We can arrange them in two parts, three parts, and so on, and the public is very glad to have them. They sing these songs before full houses and they have a real popularity. I have with me a book here published in this year, 1950, which has in it 222 songs, among them nineteen folk songs. The folk songs are not only in their original form but they also have two and three parts and sometimes four parts. I shall leave the book here for you to see.

CHAIRMAN: We will now speak very shortly, because it is almost twelve o’clock.

MR. LOMAX: One of the answers, I think, to Dr. Thompson’s questions would lie in his own career. As a scholar of English literature he wouldn’t object to anybody being interested in the literature of the eighteenth century or the sixteenth century and in propagating the best of it to the schools. The same thing applies at least to certain parts of folklore. It seems to me that we are again all engaged in talking like teachers and educators rather than folklorists. What we are interested in seems to me not whether one tune or one version or one story continues, but whether this way of people’s expressing themselves continues. Now, folklore has for a very long time been a sort of unofficial way for a great number of people to express their feelings about their fathers and mothers, as Mr. Halpert told us the other day, a way of projecting their dreams and hopes and aspirations, sometimes in relation to political and economic events and sometimes merely in relation to the problems of living in a particular culture.

Our own American Negro spirituals are very fine examples of this. The slave songs existed at least in part because they were the only ways in which they could express their sorrow, their agony, and their protest against their way of living. Now what happened to those spirituals? Well, they were, as you know, our first American folk songs to be collected and studied. Perhaps if it had not been for the interest of the abolitionists in these spirituals and their significance, our American folklore movement would have been delayed twenty or thirty years. Well, they were taken up rather officially and propagated. And today you can’t get a Negro to sing one of those wonderful old tunes. They were perhaps the most beautiful songs that the American Negro had composed. They were arranged in the formal European tradition and they are no longer sung in the Negro churches. In fact two or three generations of religious songs have tried to push them out of the door—anything but “Go down, sweet Moses” and “Swing low, sweet Chariot”! Now I think that we have to face a couple of realities. First of all we are interested that an oral tradition continue to live wherever it is because it is a healthy thing, because it is another outlet for all sorts of expressive needs. On the other hand, in our world artistic matters are highly competitive. You can’t get in the door in America unless you have a great big strong fist, knocking on the door, because culture is owned and operated for a profit. But no publishing house gets any profit from folk songs and so they are not used.

With the use of tape machines and long-playing records, however, there has been some change. There are hundreds of little companies which now publish long-playing records that are bought by everybody. The fact relieves us of the responsibility of official versions, official arrangements, and the interference by the educator or the learned musician in the process and lets the people come in and speak on their own terms. Very shortly the television industry will allow the whole folk singer to walk right into the living room—the whole folk dance, the whole folk custom. It is our job to bring the whole thing, culturally speaking, and not any mere piece of it. It should not be chosen or fixed up by us but we should just let the impact of the people come into the room.

A final point. As the owners and operators of little cultural stands around the world we very often come into direct competition with the people themselves. Every singer, and especially in our culture every fiddler, wants to get up there and sing and fiddle. There is nothing so passionate as the storyteller waiting his turn to tell a story. Now, when we publish this material and when we broadcast it, we are substituting ourselves in the folk process. As folklorists, as teachers, as performers, we are taking advantage of somebody else’s creation to get up there and shine, whether it is in a book or a museum or in a classroom or in front of a microphone. But folklore lives in terms of ordinary people singing, dancing, telling stories. Now to consider only the literary side of it, the artistic side of it, it seems to me that if we want folklore to continue to live in the best way, what we should do is to find the best folk singers and storytellers that we can and get them heard everywhere. Let them carry the folklore for us. Whenever they get their chance, with an audience, whether it is through records, through films, in a classroom, on a public platform, in a movie, or in television, they win the day every time. They carry the whole folklore and its feeling inside themselves. Why, for instance, can’t we folklorists agree that there are a hundred or two hundred—not books, phonograph records or anything else, but ballad singers and storytellers whom we say we like? Have them come around and do the performing. Then it is alive, then it is people, then it is real folklore instead of something where we have interfered and taken our little cut. Unless we do this, the record companies and RCA and Hollywood are going to do it for us. If we really look around and say, “Well the folk ballad singer and the folk storyteller would also like to eat and would also like to shine,” then it’s not a very difficult or complicated problem. Everybody in the entertainment industry—and the educational industry, too—is waiting for us to come up and tell them how to do the thing, and if we just walk in surrounded by a big crowd of the real people, the job will be done the right way.

MR. JASIM UDDIN: I came to this land to learn from these scholars how you are receiving folk songs, and I have been much pleased to learn many things from you. But if I understood Dean Thompson, he doesn’t wish that these folk songs should be used in the schools; he believes that we are going back to the eighteenth century when we do so. But I should like you to notice that when a song is sung it represents the time when it was composed, just as when we stage a play of Shakespeare we actually represent it or reproduce it as it was before the public of the age of Shakespeare. But we do contribute something from our minds, we do add a certain criticism of our own and express ourselves through these characters. When I sing a folk song I enjoy old wine in new forms. I fill my heart with the tune and get from it enjoyment.

When we enjoy folk literature it is not because we believe all the things that are in the folk songs. We criticize them, we tell the people that there are portions that we do not believe and that there are other portions that we like.

In my land there is one of the reasons why folk songs are dying. If you look to the history of ancient times you will find that every incident is connected with a song. When they are making the harvest there is a song, but now in our land as in many lands there is no longer a harvest song because in the society there is no enjoyment of the harvest. The cultivator is not the owner of the harvest; it goes to the house of the landlord. There is no longer enjoyment in the harvest, and so the harvest has no song. Some of our professors and some of our laborers in industrial areas have been fortunate enough to get an education of the world, but this has been a most artificial thing. For this reason we have no songs, we have no festivals, and no enjoyment, and for this reason if we want to revive these folk songs we must change the society and we must give them the privilege, to the people, according to their own ways of life. Also the peoples in different professions must meet together as in a primitive society. One of these may be well educated, one may be a carpenter. The carpenter and the farmer would exchange their instruments and theirs be a give and take throughout the society. Now we have no give and take. Education has formed no connection with the other professions, and that is why folk song has died out.

I know that Dean Thompson is very much against folk songs used as propaganda or publicity and here in this room I have found many persons who have spoken against the use of folk songs for propaganda. But there is publicity and publicity, there is propaganda and propaganda, there are differences, but if you look at the history of literature in every country you will find that literature has also been used for propaganda purposes —some of the greatest literature. The great religions have been propagated by literature.

Why do I compose? Why do I sing? To speak something to the people I like, to impress on their minds something which is in my mind. Now, if you do not like to use these folk songs and this folklore, if you want to keep it in your libraries, then it will die. But these folk songs are the life of the people, the spirit of the people. If you kill them, the very life of the people will go out.

CHAIRMAN: Mrs. Johnson, did you have something to say?

MRS, JOHNSON: I wonder if Dean Thompson doesn’t feel that teaching the world heritage of our national background helps keep us from becoming too nationalistic, when, for example, you recognize that there are many things in common in the folk tales from many lands. Dr. Hathaway used that very thing successfully in teaching when she taught the Cinderella story in an art class, and they made pictures of the various kinds of Cinderella as expressed in I think twenty-eight different versions of the tale.

DEAN THOMPSON: I’m interested in that kind of thing, yes, but I am not interested in telling the Cinderella story in order to make people vote the Democratic or Republican ticket.

DR. JAGENDORF: One thing I wanted to say of this use of words by Alan Lomax. He speaks as if folklore were something sacred, and distant from us. Well, I am part of the people, and I consider this group right here as also part of the people. I think we have a right to tell the stories and sing and dance just the same as anybody else. Up to now I have on record about two hundred stories, and of the two hundred people who have told me stories I have yet to find a really good storyteller. I find that a good storyteller is a very rare thing. And I don’t see any reason why we should be excluded from the pleasure of telling folk tales.

CHAIRMAN : Miss Karpeles will now say just a word. Miss KARPELES: There is only one remark I would like to make. I should like to refer to Mr. Seeger’s story. Now for many years my main activity has been organizing, and I thank him for the compliment.

CHAIRMAN : On Thursday we will bring to a close this whole matter of making folklore available to the public and in the meantime perhaps you will think the matter over so that we can perhaps come to some conclusions. Especially in the later parts, the discussion today has been very lively and stimulating; and the old man is still walking along the road.

End of Session

FOURTH SESSION

CHAIRMAN : Dean Thompson spoke towards the end of the last session and brought on a very lively discussion. Miss Karpeles will now open the final session.

Miss KARPELES : At the last session when there was no time for further discussion Professor Cherbuliez raised the question of the link between costume and dance. As to that, one can’t lay down any hard and fast rule, but in England, and I imagine in a great many other countries, certainly in America, we haven’t any folk costumes and the ordinary social dances are not linked in any way with costume. But the ritual dances, such as the Morris and the Sword, have a certain costume with a ritual significance definitely associated with the dance. So it is our practice when we are performing those dances in public that this particular ritual costume is observed. But we feel that to wear what after all could only be a period costume would be an affectation. People in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries performed their social dances in the costume of that period, and so we feel we should perform these dances—the Country or the Square or whatever it may be—in the ordinary dress of the twentieth century. But of course in other countries, such as in Switzerland, the costume is a more living thing, and a beautiful thing in itself, and it may be good to revive it. In other countries, such as in the Balkans, of course, the regional costumes are still worn.

Well, that does now rather lead me on to a question which I feel is a very important one—the general question of revival, which Dean Thompson raised, I think intentionally, so as to provoke us. I should like to reply to that challenge. I think it is a question of what we revive, what particular branches of folklore should be revived. It is very important here that we should draw a distinction between the study of folklore and the practice of it. There are many things that it is important to record, to preserve, and to study, but which we shouldn’t wish to practice or encourage. Well, now obviously if you were a teacher in the schools you would not want to encourage the children to continue such superstitions as hanging up frog or toad legs in a chimney. But there are certain aspects of folklore, certain subjects which, in my opinion and I think in most opinions, should be revived, should be continued. And certainly the two outstanding ones are the dance and the song, and, though I’m not so well acquainted with the tales, for my part I should feel that they could very well be revived even when they have died out.

You may say “W-ell, on what ground are we going to make our selection?” Well, I come back to it. I think the only ground really is the esthetic, and if a thing is beautiful in itself, then it is worthy of revival. I don’t know whether I have told that story here about the woman in Kentucky who after she had been singing a certain song, the ballad of “Queen Jane,” and Cecil Sharp had explained—told her the historical incidents—turned to her friend and said, very triumphantly, “There now, I always said it must be true because it is so beautiful.” And I think that we could very well take that as our criterion, if a thing is beautiful it is worth preserving and worth practicing.

DR. CAMPBELL: When you said just now that if a thing is beautiful it is worth practicing I think you were quite right. Everything that has real beauty belongs to the treasure of mankind. And if it has real vitality in it after a hundred years or so, even though it has sunk out of notice, it will come up again. When we study the development of a culture from the scientific point of view we know quite well that as new things come on and old things go away, if they are really true and beautiful they will come to notice again. We see from history how the Renaissance started in ancient Egypt five thousand years ago and again in the Greek and Roman Empires and in the Medieval times and again the so-called Renaissance starting in Italy and still going on. Likewise the background of our studies in the late eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century was a kind of renaissance, a renaissance of beauty. Now we must not be too pessimistic about that point. A rebirth will always come. I think that even quite modern people who have no scholarly interest in traditional culture, that is in the so-called tradition of the people, also feel the same way about it. I have found that young people who are dancing jazz and so forth are often caught by a great interest in old songs. And when they have received this interest they will keep it during the whole of their lifetime. I am, therefore, not pessimistic about the survival of beauty.

But I do have some opposition to what you say about the practicing of beauty. This I think is something we should think very carefully about. We must not practice every beautiful tradition we have all the time. And I think it is not the duty of the scholar to decide when a renaissance of beauty shall come. It is for the people themselves and the artists who have a feeling for this, and who are interested in the performance. The scholar can look at the renaissance and say, “Yes, now a renaissance is coming.” He can also contribute through his knowledge to teach people what his cultural renaissance means. But the scholar must be the interpreter rather than the active propagator of the beauty that comes from the past.

A second point is that about the practice of the beautiful folklore from the past. This I think must not mean the practice shall go on everywhere. I found that the most dangerous thing about the beauty of our folk culture tradition is that people want to use it indiscriminately. They say, “This is a beautiful dance, come let us sing, let us dance.” No, that is not right, you must consider that beauty should not be used too much so that it becomes commonplace. You can practice it at the wrong time, in the wrong place. I have discussed this matter especially with the broadcasting people in Sweden and they have agreed with me when I said that you must have a culture calendar and you must keep to that calendar. We must not have our folk traditions spoiled the way some of our great musical classics have been spoiled. It is a shame the way the Moonlight Sonata, for example, has been spoiled by making it into a hit tune. The shops likewise have spoiled Santa Claus. They have not spoiled our celebration of Lucia, but this could happen if they began to celebrate the Lucia at all times. We can make our folklore too commonplace and I think it should not be spoiled in this way. If we have a cultural calendar, then at certain times of the year certain things are sung and danced. In the same way we have the bread which we use every day, but then we have special bread for Easter and we ought not to have that unless it actually is Easter. We have a real bread calendar in Sweden and of course we will follow that. It contains bread for every day but also bread for certain special days. If you leave the calendar out you lose the whole special taste of the bread that comes at the special seasons.

MR. LOMAX: I must say that I am a little surprised that Miss Karpeles comes back after two weeks of discussion of the complex character of folk tradition, to the nineteenth century idea of preserving and teaching beauty. One thing that we have discovered about folk song is that there are many kinds and characters of beauty. Dependent upon the culture of the period, the needs of the people, in particular regions and areas, and even the needs of particular individuals, folklore will vary. I doubt if even the wisest folklorists have the wisdom to legislate about what is beautiful and what is not beautiful. It seems to me that I would rather go along with Dean Thompson here and let the old thing die, if die it must, rather than have people who have their own personal needs in mind assume a kind of cultural control, the kind of thing that Dr. Campbell is talking about. One thing that we have learned about culture from folklore is that it is an unfolding thing. It has its own sources of energy, and our folk culture can expand and unfold in tens of thousands of hearts through long periods of time, changing in its own way, in its own strange way that I believe is very close to the needs of the individuals in whom it lives. Now we come along with college education and with training in Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, Shakespeare, and Selma Lagerlof and Dostoyevsky and so on, and we pick up the material that we can catch hold of in this stream and say, “Well we know more about this than the people who live it. And we must tell them how to live their own folk culture.”

But we do this in terms of cultural standards that may have absolutely nothing to do with the life of the culture itself. We may be doing a very great deal of harm. I have an example of this, of how this attempted revival of the Negro Spiritual has killed the thing off completely and what is left of it is so distorted that you are unable to recognize the art and the folk thing when they are played side by side. I can’t understand why people who have collected folklore, who have experienced the thing as it lives, can feel that they can set up a calendar for it. It seems to me that having seen the fact that it means a way to deal with life and death, work and birth and making love, courtship and marriage and children and so on, they must realize that people are not concerned about our standards of beauty in relation to the folklore but are concerned with living it. They are concerned with it more than anything else as an expressive tool. But what do we do when we make it a tool of our broadcasting systems and our educational systems? It is only to make it our own expressive tool, not theirs. And it seems to me that all we can do in relation to the use of folklore is to find out just as much about the expressive intention of the material as possible and aid in the process of having this material continue to express the broadest needs for the greatest number of people.

Herbert Halpert gave us some very amusing examples of how little children’s rhymes often express all kinds of “wickedness” on the part of these little children. Now suppose we approach the children of America with the very best and finest collection of children’s rhymes from all over the world, set to the very best and oldest and most beautiful tunes, and force these down the throats of every child of the country, we would tend to displace their own ability to make their own rhymes about their own problems—these children who use a lot of four-letter words for their own very strong psychological needs. To take another example, suppose the government of Peru were to freeze the folk calendar in its present state, a country where the folk population is practically in slavery. Suppose the people who operate the educational systems in the south were to freeze the folk calendar in its present state where half of the creative personalities are living a life of torment behind the Jim Crow line.

It seems to me that we have got to be very careful. We have to remember that fifty per cent or more of the content of folklore is the same as the content of all great art, that is a technique of expressing submerged desires for more freedom and more light, for more place to move, more food, more satisfaction in life. Some of these expressions are going to be ugly, very ugly, to us who have a comfortable position. Some of them are going to be harsh and bitter and strong, and all you have to do is to look at all the folklore, not just that part that fits into the Brahms tradition and the tradition of the Elizabethan poets.

DR. CAMPBELL: We shall certainly have to think over and discuss the points which Mr. Lomax has so well expressed.

Now I have said that the scholar who deals in a scholarly fashion with folklore should not start a renaissance, because I think then the renaissánce will not come in any natural way. But I am sure that there is a treasure of beauty from former times that will come up again in the cultural development, but it must stem out of the hearts of the people themselves without the pointing finger of the teacher or the scholar. Mr. Lomax’s discussion leads us a little bit into the dilemma that comes in the discussion of every kind of educational scheme. Rousseau felt that it was best not to come with the pointing finger, and he wrote his Emile just as an example of how to educate without conscious education. Mr. Lomax belongs to that school; he refuses any kind of education, perhaps. It will all come up from the young people, from every child, from every man. He is the creator, and that is quite right and we must never forget that. But still, as far as parents are concerned, schools and educators do exist and I think we will not put them entirely out of business. They must act and the folklore scholar should act as an adviser to them to see that what they are giving is real folklore. The folklorist need not be himself a storyteller, but he ought to know the real truth about the folk tale or the folk song and its history. He should be there to answer the questions if anybody asks about it and so far as he knows he should give the truth about the history of the folk culture.

MR. SEEGER: I am reminded of a session I had with our old friend, Robert Gordon. We were having a talk together one evening about the reality of folk song, how difficult it was to put your hand on the reality of, let’s say, some title, because of the variants and of the versions which are so exquisitely distributed and buried in different places and in different age levels and in different economic levels, etc. We were getting along beautifully when somehow or other I was put into the position of singing a variant of—I think it was—the little song “Cindy,” which bore upon the conversation. And as soon as I had finished singing it, he said, “That’s wrong.” I think we are in a little bit of that situation here in this discussion. We are exhibiting various versions and variants of traditional attitudes toward our materials. As usual I found myself saying, “Oh, what a beautiful expression Miss Karpeles gave to her variant that she likes very much. And what a beautiful expression of the tradition which Mr. Lomax is partial to was expressed, and in the same way with Dr. Campbell’s.” All of these attitudes are lovely, all of these traditional attitudes. I don’t know which I agree with most even though they seem to be so opposed to each other.

Now as I see it, we are not immediately, here in the United States or in any of the countries represented here, facing a cultural dictatorship in which there shall be only one attitude, one version of the traditional attitudes forced upon everyone at all times and all places. Can’t we let Miss Karpeles, so far as she has a chance, put into action her point of view and judge the things from her esthetic standards? Can’t we let Mr. Lomax use in his life his interpretation of the variant or the version which he adheres to mostly? And couldn’t we at the same time be rather impressed with Dr. Campbell’s suggestion, which I think at the same time some people misunderstand, or perhaps I misunderstood it.

As I understand it, Dr. Campbell, you are suggesting the rationing of material, perhaps scheduling of materials mostly on a public service basis, mostly through large radio stations. Now suppose that we can only listen to The Messiah the day before or on Christmas day. We have records. If anybody wants to hear it at another time he can put it on his machine, or he can get a friend to put it on his machine, or maybe an unrationed radio station around somewhere can use it. I can’t help having a good deal of sympathy with this point of view which is new to me; I never heard it expressed in this country before. How often do you turn on your radio and come upon the Third Symphony or the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. Can’t we sometimes have something else but that? Does every conductor have to play these two symphonies every year? I think there is something in what he says, and of course I am sure that he doesn’t imply that phonograph records in individual collections should be locked up until that day, the only day on which we could hear them. Well, we could go on, but certainly the variety of musical experiences, of all kinds of musical experiences which should be open to us under our system of living should be ours at all times. But the public services which are in a way our tyrants since we have to listen to them, sometimes because they are everywhere, perhaps that might very well be rationed.

DR. CAMPBELL: Well, you see the idea about this calendar is not really my own but my mother’s. I liked very much to have the food that we have at Easter and when Easter was over I asked mother to give me the same, but she said no, that would spoil my taste.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON: I must admit that in this discussion I agree with Miss Karpeles. Of course it is true that we must not revive all forms of ancient culture, but we can do so and we must do it in connection with certain forms. I should say with a good number of our traditions. I have for a long time held this opinion and I have also taken a great part in our program. From the time, almost fifty years ago, when I began to collect folk music and folk songs I have been doing this. The program is about as follows. All of the subjects created by the folk, the country people, the farmers, and others—all the subjects, tunes, songs, dances which have value, beauty, and something for the inner life of the modern people—all of that is to be revived and to live again among the people so that it becomes a living power among them. I have no fear that we will use the beauty of the songs and dances too much. I must say that I am very surprised to hear this discussion about the reviving of folk culture. I should like to tell you what has been done in my country and in other countries during the last hundred years or more. I think if that work had not been done during that time the country people would be poorer now, and their lives less rich than they are now. Forty years ago I started a movement for reviving folk music and folk dance among the Swedish population in Finland. I feel certain that I can state that the country people have in fact got a great deal out of this and that it has had a great effect upon their inner life. They have said this to me many times and I feel that it is the truth. We have seen such revivals every year in Skansen in Stockholm, for instance, and in many other parts of Sweden. And now to my friend Alan Lomax I would also have some words. I would like to ask him, are you not also a reviver? Perhaps you are right when you say we can’t revive the old Negro Spirituals, but you do have folk songs. You are reviving folk songs and I think if all the people who listen to you sing feel the beauty of these folk songs and value your singing, they take along with them the memory of your singing and the next day they come home and sing your songs and the next day and the next—why should you not let us sing them?

MR. LOMAX: We always seem to be talking in a vacuum here about the situation that actually faces us in terms of what we are trying to do. What we see is the kind of thing Sean was talking about last night. The Irish language is pushed to the very borders of his island where the folklorist is making a desperate stand to trace the writings on the sand before the tide washes them out entirely. I feel very sympathetic with all that. There are tremendous forces in operation, at least in our country, that say, “We are going to control all the cultural techniques for our benefit, and we are just not going to let anybody else in the door. They are going to sing, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,’ every single person is going to sing it, because every single time they sing it it means a penny in our pockets.” And the result is that the mountaineers and the Cajuns and the Negroes along the Mississippi Valley and everybody are more or less forced to sing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” And the Lithuanians who have their own fine songs, and the Polish settlers in Michigan all have to sing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” It’s just a matter of hitting them in the head with it every morning when they get up and turn on the radio, and every time they sit down in the afternoon they get “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” Now I resent that. I think there should be more cultural independence, and so actually when I sing my songs I try to sing at least fifty per cent of them that I know all the musicians in my audience will consider rather plain and maybe a, little harsh and ugly, because I know that these songs were very important for certain groups in our background. I know that I hit the young people correctly, because they have feelings that they want to express, feelings that are not so beautiful. No, I don’t consider myself a reviver so much as a stander-in-between, getting my shoulder just a little bit in between the powerful cultural instruments which want to have everything in their own hands so that they can use it for their own profits and the ordinary people who want to sing and express themselves in their own ways. Believe me, most of the vital things in our folk culture would scare most of the people in this room right out of their skins; for instance, the hillbillies, whose favorite instrument now is the electric guitar, and there is nothing which is so much an anathema to people who believe in modal tunes as an electric guitar. The favorite cultural instrument of the Negro at this moment is the Holiness Church, and the sounds of agony and torment that go on in the Holiness Church while new tunes are being born, as they are in nearly every service, would make most of us feel very uncomfortable. As I say, it is that kind of thing that excites me rather than writing my own favorite version of a cowboy song, which most of the little boys down in my block play while shooting with six-guns all the time. Do I make myself clear?

MRS, JOHNSON: I am going to go back a little and digress from the subject, but the fact that Mr. Lomax mentioned the emotional and subjective point of view toward folk music, particularly those songs which express the people’s feelings about existing social conditions—

MR. LOMAX: Not just that, please.

MRS. JOHNSON: Not just that, I know, but that is included in the whole body as you are perfectly aware of, and as I am aware of from collections of such material. Now this is a very interesting thing. I have a Finnish collection of such material made a hundred years ago. They were songs of protest. They were songs where the peasant was dissatisfied with his farm and his lot, and he cried about his daughter going into another province, and the poor land, and the plight of the wife, and the woman in the home, and the subject of the mother-in-law always was a source of agony and pain. So the world has known pain since it began, and people cried out against it. I think, therefore, that in this as in other things we should possibly take the objective point of view. Now this is the point of view of the scholar and not of the singer. We must sometimes take the objective viewpoint and see how other people at other times have felt about these things. It is sometimes wise to look around at people and have them realize when they are crying that sometimes other people have also cried.

DR. JAGENDORF: First of all, unless I am utterly misinformed, I can’t see that we are being regimented today in education. The universities are still teaching as they desire and there is a great deal of freedom of speech and expression. It is true that human beings are very similar in many ways and education will be expressed similarly in many colleges. It is true that listening continuously on the radio to the song “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,’’ or whatever the song is, might impress itself on the mind of the listener and might, repeated again and again, have a bad effect, but fundamentally I think these are just phases which we grow out of after a certain time. It is not fair to say that we are being regimented in schools or by the radio or by music. These influences simply come and go. The progress of human beings is altogether not too swift, and those who want to play “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” will play it, whether they hear it once or whether they hear it a hundred times, and those who rebel against it won’t play it.

Something we are hearing all the time and I do not like at all is the emphasis on the fact that since we have had the fortune or misfortune of having gone to college we are therefore ex-^ eluded from the folk. It is said that we dictate what should be listened to and what should be given to the folk. Now I am a part of the folk, notwithstanding the unfortunate accident of having been educated at college. And I think everyone here present has something to give to the mass of people. We are no different, we don’t have horns on our heads as a matter of fact. We have not ceased to be part and parcel of the mass of humanity. The sharp division between those who are the folk and those who are not the folk seems to me to be absolutely false. As for the very healthy “four letter life” of young chit, dren, I don’t think that is a healthy life at all. I think it is a part of the viciousness of all children, a thing which I went through myself and which gradually changes and is corrected by time and experience and knowledge and education and parents. But to hold up these particular things as a fine expression of children is I think altogether erroneous. To present this activity as any kind of ideal seems to me to be an entirely distorted picture.

MISS GILLMOR: I should like to give three examples of revivals that I think shed light upon this problem. The first one was in Mexico in the early 1930’s. I was not there for this, but I heard about it. In a very praiseworthy effort to make the Mexican people proud of their combined heritage from the Spanish and the Indian parts of their culture, the government made an effort to educate the people in relation to Aztec mythology. So under government encouragement, in the department stores on Christmas we had in place of Santa Claus an Aztec god. Perhaps you have seen the very horrible masks of this god in the Aztec picture writing. The children were scared into fits, and after one year the stores went back to Santa Claus—also, of course, a thing introduced into Mexico from outside. It seems to me, however, that that was a revival that was false in its whole folklore aspects, though perhaps in its social intentions it was all right. Here the tide has come in and the Aztec runic writing has long since been washed out and to try to put it again into effect was fundamentally false, false folkloristically and false artistically.

Now for another Christmas revival. In Tucson in southern Arizona, where there are many Mexican people, there was a custom which used to be celebrated during the school-age period of the grandmothers of the present school generation, but it is no longer celebrated in private homes. It is, however, celebrated all over Mexico. This is the very beautiful procession of “Los Posados.” A group goes to the house singing in representation of Mary and Joseph coming to Bethlehem. They ask for shelter, another singing group inside the house refuses them shelter. The singing goes back and forth and this happens for nine nights before Christmas. Finally on Christmas Eve they enter and are led to the stable.

Well, now, this is something that one of the teachers in a school in which the enrollment is almost entirely Mexican has revived. The custom is practiced in their families. It is something that their parents know. For them the accompanying songs have a very great meaning, a very great dignity. The runic writings on the sand have not yet been washed out, and people go from all over the town to watch the children in that school, circle the school and sing these songs. In this celebration of “Los Posados” everyone is very happy and it all seems very natural. It seemed right that that particular custom should still be carried on at Christmas in Tucson among the Mexican people.

A third type of revival: I mentioned a few days ago the discovery of the complete text of “Los Pastores,” a Christmas play, in the little mining town of Clifton in Arizona. That has not been played for some years. The maestro of the group who used to teach them and rehearse them in putting on this play is, however, still living and many of his players are still living. He says that nowadays he finds it difficult to get people together for a month of rehearsals, and that he doesn’t want to put it on on Christmas Eve unless it is properly rehearsed. Now for a festival that we are planning to put on next April there is some talk of having that play. I disapprove of this particular type of revival on account of the basis. It seems to me a false thing, for the sake of reviving the play, to put it on in April. But I am entirely in favor of this particular maestro rehearsing his own group in Clifton on Christmas and having that play go on again in Clifton every Christmas. There it is a continuing thing, there it is a continuing tradition, there it is calendrically right.

Another thing, we have a folk dramatic expression going on right at the edge of Tucson in the Yaqui village, where a passion play is put on during Holy Week, combining Yaqui Indian dancing with a Christian ceremonial before a Christian altar. It is a most interesting combination of these two traditions. This I think belongs to the festival, but it is not a revival, it is a root thing, it is there anyway, it is there regardless of whether there is a festival or not, it is right calendrically and it is something that has not been washed out by the incoming tide. Whether a revival is false or whether it is right perhaps depends upon a matter of feeling—not of the Rousseau type which I disapprove of as much as Mr. Jagendorf, but I conclude with this sentence from Dr. Campbell’s first statement, which it seems to me is the perfect compromise for the whole problem. He says, “It is the people and the artists who are feeling beauty and dealing with its performance who must decide whether or not a revival is right, whether it is well rooted, or whether it is false.”

PROFESSOR HAL-PERT: Any of us who have had any contact with field work in folklore develop a missionary spirit of one kind or another. Something about the material we find makes us want to sing, if we can sing, or tell the stories, if we can. We want to communicate something that we have found rather wonderful.

I think that on the question of revivals we have to remember what has often happened in the history of literature and art-music : that what today is considered a classic to be treated with reverence may have been treated cavalierly or even forgotten in the past. There was a period when Shakespeare could be rewritten by a particular actor to suit himself—as he thought Shakespeare would have written it if he had only known eighteenth century style. There was a long period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which all music before the time of Palestrina was considered valueless, primitive. Enthusiasts, scholars, and musicians brought pre-Bach music back into favor.

I feel that it is a dangerous thing to say to the schools, “Now let us stop having all this stuff that you have been teaching here, and substitute folklore.” Sometimes schools have a way of taking a good thing and presenting it badly, or at least in such a way that it seems silly. Let me illustrate with one of my childhood experiences. In kindergarten we learned to sing:

Farmer, Farmer, milk the cow;
Good sweet milk she gives us now
Milk to drink,” etc.......

Many of you will recognize the theme of Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony.” It was a terrific surprise to me some years later to realize that with this inane little jingle they were attempting to teach me to appreciate “good” music.

The folklorist, because of his field experience, feels the responsibility for allowing a tradition to be heard again. For my old-timers in New Jersey, for instance, I found myself in the role of a son; a younger person who appreciated what the old people had. Their own children, who would normally have continued some, not necessarily all, of their parents’ tradition, had been cut off from it because of the schools, the radio—all the outside forces that imposed themselves on these people who used to live a moderately self-sufficient life. (I say moderately because I don’t think even the Kentucky mountains were quite as isolated as Miss Karpeles has implied; there has always been some influence from the city, even though, as has been pointed out, it was much slower and less frequent than it has been recently.)

So—we feel we ought to allow people at least a chance to hear this material again. But we shouldn’t say “This is the only thing that you should love and cherish.” Now I happen to like a lot of contemporary popular songs. I have also seen that popular songs now serve many of the functions that folk songs used to serve. When boys and girls are courting, it is to the popular songs of the day; they are getting expressive values out of them that older people got out of the folk love songs. Now it might be more or less charming to have modern youth use the love songs of the past when they are courting—but I don’t know that it would be any more effective.

To get back to a consideration of how folk song should be presented, I don’t see that there is any harm in a selective presentation. I see no reason why you can’t choose, and offer to the schools, the version of a song that you like. When I publish a book, I am going to publish my favorite versions of songs. As it happens, in choosing versions I am going to consider other things besides beauty alone. And I would not offer the songs without comment.

I don’t think you can offer these folk songs “straight.” When I talk about songs I do try to tell people-—and this is what Mr. Lomax is trying to do—-something of what these songs mean. I’m not saying you can’t present them just as art songs; if you are going to do it that way you will say, “This is a lovely song; learn it and love it.” But I would rather say, “Here is a song; see if you like it. Here is something about that song.”

I once had an experience with reviving folk song which still strikes me as extremely significant. Once, on a government WPA project, I was sent to a bunch of forty Sea Scouts in a very tough neighborhood in New York City, where kids grow up tough because they have to. They start young. I was to teach them sea shanties. They looked me over; I had eyeglasses and books under my arm ; I was obviously a pantywaist. They joined in the first couple of songs with some contempt, harmonizing (or not) intentionally. When we got to “Way, hey, and up she rises!” a few of them made a folk gesture that has a definite and fairly universal vulgar connotation. They all roared with laughter and waited to see what I was going to do about it. I stopped them and said, “Do you know any songs where that sort of stuff is mentioned?” “Boy, oh, boy, do we! Let’s sing them:⁹ I said, “I have a job to do; tell you what—you sing half a dozen of these and just take it straight; then we’ll go outside where the scoutmaster won’t hear and we’ll match songs. You give me the worst ones you know and I’ll see if I can’t beat you.”

So we did. Their repertory was better than mine; there was no doubt about it. But from that time on I was in their good graces, and every now and then they sang me another song privately. Much of my collection of unprintable songs comes from this bunch of Sea Scouts. Once they found I wasn’t going to say, “You mustn’t sing that sort of stuff,” they were willing to give the other stuff—the sea shanties—a chance. As far as revival goes, they enjoyed the shanties. We made them rough and tough. It didn’t sound pretty, but they roared them out. They had a wonderful time—learned lots of shanties and used to sing them on the streets instead of the obscene songs which had been deplored by scout headquarters.

To get back to the main point I’m trying to make, if you just give the songs straight and say, “This is another form of art music you must love because it is great,” I think you are often going to miss the boat. I think that in a teaching situation you have to add information about the songs and their meaning for the people who sang them. If you help the students to understand the songs better so that the songs have significance for them, they may be willing to accept the songs as of value and give them a chance.

MR. MARUYAMA : I should like to say a word about the field of folklore and the means of getting folklore as we see it in Japan. We think of folklore as the science of daily life. We want to find what the present and the past have to tell us about these matters. We begin our study of folklore with the present-day life of the common people. We have found that the daily life has many aspects, and particularly that the city life and the country life are very different. We have been giving our special attention to the past life of our common people in the country and so have been sending our investigators to live in the provinces and find out from the present generation in the country what they can. This is a most fruitful field for folklore study in our country.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON: I think it may be of interest here if I speak to you here in the United States about the revival of the dance, since that movement began in Scandinavia. Thousands and thousands have joined in the dance societies so that just now in Helsinki this summer we have a dancing festival with one thousand five hundred dancers from all of the northern parts of the country.

I think I should say in connection with this whole discussion that there are some forms of folk culture which I do not like. Some of them I have been active in my opposition to. As early as 1907 I wrote an article entitled “Burn, the Accordions” because I found that the accordions in use at that time tended to destroy the old folk music. What happened was that the fiddlers began again, and now for next year we have a report from Finland that we will have an orchestra of five hundred strings, not only for folk music but also for classical music. Of course it is true that the accordion is still playing, for it survived.

MRS. SEEGER: This word “beauty” has rather bothered me for quite a while; it has become misused. I recently read a book written for music teachers on how to introduce music to other teachers, and I could not have counted the number of times the word beauty was used on the very first page. Beauty of tone was the main basis of the argument. But to many people this means merely something that has had all the corners rounded off so that it is very smooth. I know that here we do not mean that, but I think we should remember that ugliness is also a very beautiful thing, that is things that many other people might consider ugly. I like what some people call ugliness of tone quality in some singers. I had an example from my own teaching. A little boy of seven liked folk songs very much, but he had a mother who taught singing in opera style. I sang “John Henry” to him with plenty of vim and vigor and I do not have a beautiful voice. She told me over the phone later that he wanted her to sing rough, the way Mrs. Seeger does.

MR. JASXM UDDIN: Among our people we have many folk songs which refer to modern life, such as the wife grieving for the dead husband. These modern songs come in a particular month and are a part of the regular life of the people.

We must be very humble in reciting the folk literature, because it is not our literature. We are sophisticated and we cannot say that this is good or this is bad in the same way that we can say it about our written literature. We can’t say that a great piece of literature is great because it has lasted the longest time or for the largest number of people and has the greatest beauty for the multitude—the criticism of folk literature is not like this. To be sure we have had beautiful stories from the Ocean of Story and the Arabian Nights that have lasted in the same way that great literature does, but folk literature is much more personal. It has entered into the lives of the people too much to be thought of in terms of beautiful and ugly.

MR. LOMAX: I have been stepped on pretty hard this morning and probably deserve to be. What I have been trying to say, put very simply again, is that folklore is a way of expressing people’s feelings and difficulties, their hopes and aspirations. It seems to me that instead of regarding it in a static way, as something we have picked up and used, what we folklorists ought to be after is to find out how the process works and to keep it going because we don’t know what new values it can turn up at any time. As Mr. Halpert pointed out, we give folklore new meaning all the time; that is the meaning that the folk give it. We must keep it unrolling, unfolding, and then we can be sure that a healthy thing is continuing for all the people in all its many ways, also for Dr. Jagendorf and for his folk group too. But if we get on top and pick and choose too much, then we are likely to say, “These hillbillies shouldn’t play accordions in Finland, shouldn’t play steel guitars in the mountains.” Maybe they are after something. Maybe they are after something that we don’t quite understand yet. I agree with Mr. Jassim Uddin that we must be very humble in regard to the folk traditions and let them flow in their own channels and fight to keep them going.

DEAN THOMPSON: I must say that I did not realize that I was starting anything the other day when I made my remarks about misgivings concerning folklore revivals. We seem to have found other people here who also have misgivings about revivals. My own point, of course, was that the misgivings were in the detail of revivals and not in the whole idea, though sometimes the whole general fact of reviving the thing that is dead may be a very doubtful procedure. Of course I wasn’t talking about the revival of something that is still alive; I should make that very clear.

DR. RUTH ANN MUSICK (Fairmont State College, Fairmont, West Virginia) : Like many of us I have been interested in folk festivals and I have attended several. There are two, however, that I did not because I think they were handled in the wrong way. I have heard from people who did attend them some things that make me feel that they were not properly conducted. In one of these the commercial element is very strong. The people are charged for admission, and only a very small part of the festival is concerned with folklore from the folk themselves. They put on shows by professional singers and you have very little folklore left. There is too much commercialism in this. The other festival that I did not attend was connected with one of the colleges. This was the material they sent out: “All of these people have appeared on air the bigger networks in the United States and they really know what they are doing.” We did attempt to put on a folklore festival at Fairmont and I am not at all proud of it. I got it up myself and found that in order to make it go I had to bring in a good many professional people and only about half of the program was really folklore at all. I am not sure that the time was entirely wasted, because some of the people said that they had been living there all their lives and didn’t know that they had any folklore at all; so maybe something was accomplished.

MRS. JOHNSON: I would like to add a word on the value that folk festivals sometimes have. This is in the pride which the children suddenly acquire in their background. I mean the healthy kind of pride, the appreciation of grandmother and grandfather and of old Uncle Jeb.

CHAIRMAN: Has anyone else anything to say about folk festivals?

DR. JAGENDORF: Professor Shoemaker has just gone to a splendid folk festival and is sitting here like a shrinking violet. He ought to tell us what he did down there.

PROFESSOR ALFRED SHOEMAKER (Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania) : I have felt all along here that the problems which I face are very much different from those of ai good many of the folklorists present. As far as our folk festival is concerned, we had it July 4-8 in Kutztown. We used the fairgrounds and had all the exhibition halls that were available at previous times for use of the fair. We had an enormous exhibition station and we put the arts and crafts of the community on display, both those of the past and those of the present. We had about four hundred feet of one of the buildings devoted to folk art exclusively. The thing that I was most interested in doing was presenting the culinary culture. What is more traditional in life than the cuisine? So I got four church groups in Cookstown to become interested. Each one of the four church groups made four or five distinctive dishes and so we actually- had sixteen different traditional dishes of the Dutch country presented as a part of the folk festival. Of course that was what the people were particularly interested in.

As far as folk are concerned, I have never seen why we should limit ourselves exclusively to the oral tradition. To my mind that is only a very small segment of folklore and in the life of the people may not get as much attention as folk art, games, gambling, and so forth. That, by the way, has not been brought out here and it is an important aspect of culture. What are the traditional gambling games in a certain area? We put them on the stage, got people in the area to show how the gambling was carried on in the various taverns. In other words we tried to put the folk culture on parade. That is my definition of a folk festival.

DR. MUSICK: I failed to say about one of the festivals that they do have a day-long display of their crafts, old quilts, new quilts, things that are still being done. One quilt was thirteen yards long and there was weaving and all that sort of thing going on for about three hours.

MRS. JOHNSON: The display of the various artists in the group and their artistic work has been tried out also in Flint, Michigan, in the two international institutes which have presented festivals. The first one of these was in 1947 in which thirty-six nationalities were participating. There were many very interesting things. There were about twenty-six exhibits in the large auditorium. In the exhibits of perhaps about twelve of the nationalities concerned the women prepared food. Throughout the day there were various groups coming on and giving their folk songs. The only thing the institute had to do was watch and see that they didn’t get any “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” into the program. That was about the only direction that we could give, because we didn’t know enough about the individual countries to know just what the participants were likely to bring in. The valuable part was the swapping of the recipes by the various women. They discovered without any preaching that all of them were a good deal alike in their foods. All of them, for example, liked sour milk in one way or another, but they called it by different names and didn’t realize they were talking about the same things. The only trouble about this festival is that it is getting to be so large that now people are saying, “Let us begin over again in a small way so that it will be simpler.” This, I think, is one of the few dangers that there are about a genuine folk festival.

CHAIRMAN: This now brings our discussion to a close. We have covered a great deal of ground and I am sure that we have answered very few questions in a final form. Maybe this means that some day we shall have to have another folklore conference like this and see if we can come any nearer to answering the many questions that have been proposed here.

End of Symposium