Folklore, American

Folklore, American .America is, and has been for a long time, a geographically huge and culturally diverse nation. Thus it is risky to assume that a single American folklore exists. To be sure, there are certain songs (such as The Cowboy’s Lament and Frankie and Johnnie), certain tales (The Ghostly Hitchhiker and The Deck of Cards), and a host of jokes, superstitions, proverbs, customs, and the like that can be collected from informants (sources of folklore material) in most of the nation. But, on the whole, it is far safer to think of folklore in America as being fostered by groups that are insulated from one another and from the main culture by regional, ethnic, and occupational factors. American folklore is actually a mosaic of lores: the folklore of the Appalachian mountain chain, of upper New York state and northern New England; the folklore of the black ghettos, of the Bayou French; the folklore of the miner, of the cowboy, of the Indian, and so on. See Indians, American: North America—Arts, Religion, and Folklore.

Such divisions, however, are only preliminary ones. When a group of distinct racial and linguistic stock lives in a prolonged state of isolation, it may well develop regional characteristics that are more pronounced than its ethnic ones. In the same way, many occupations are from time to time dominated by certain ethnic groups or flourish in particular areas. And many regional groups are a fusion of what were once two or three distinct racial strains. As a result, though most of the collections and discussions of American folklore have been published under some such title as the lore of the Maine lumberjacks, or black folklore, or songs from the Southwest, these descriptions are more convenient or commercially package able than accurate.

Students of American folklore recognize that the Maine lumberjacks were almost always of French or British stock, that many of them participated in sailing as well as lumbering, and that as the occupation moved west the Slavs and Scandinavians took over. Similarly, the ghetto blacks of New York, Los Angeles, or Detroit are very close in culture to the Southern farmers, either having migrated north themselves during and after the two World Wars or being children of parents who did. And Southwestern folksingers, if white, are almost certainly from the Scotch-Irish stock that migrated down the Appalachian chain and went west after the Civil War, although many have Mexican, Indian, black, and even Yankee blood in their veins. The description of any folk group in a many-faceted land is bound to be lengthy and complex.