Anglo-American Connections in Folklore and Folklife

Abstract

CONSIDERING that the settlement, language, and arts of the United States derived in great part from the British Isles, one would expect the links between folklore studies in the two places to be stronger.' This is not to say that great achievements have not been made. Every student of folklore knows of Harvard Professor Francis James Child's catalogue of British ballads, the Englishman Cecil Sharp's harvest of English folk songs in the southern Appalachians of the United States, Vance Randolph's vast collection of tales and customs derived from British inspiration in the American Ozarks, or Richard Dorson's encyclopedic narrative of the Victorian British folklorists.2 And it is possible to point to a flurry of research activity across the Atlantic before the turn of the century, and again after World War II; but until recently Americans, like their English cousins in folklore studies, mostly turned their lenses on peoples they considered more exoticAmerican Indians, east and south European immigrants, Africans, and Asians. This essay offers some possible explanations for this transatlantic rift and suggests a research agenda involving the analysis of the structure and aesthetics guiding traditions. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND American folklorists had the best intentions for Anglo-American study. After all, they organized the American Folklore Society in 1888 on the model of the English society formed ten years earlier, and in a nod to the mission of the Folklore Society they announced that their Society served to encourage the 'collection of the fast-vanishing remains of folklore in America.' Several examples of these remains were given, including the lore of French Canada, Indian tribes in North America, and negroes in the Southern States, but listed first were 'relics of old English folk-lore (ballads, tales, superstitions, etc.).3 The anthropological emphasis in the Society's early years, however, ensured the attitude that the workings of culture were revealed by attention to the primitive and exotic, rather than by the historical examination of the common and everyday centred on the immediate past. British precedent helped to establish this principle. Evolutionary doctrine reigned, and in folklore study it supported a search for a long-hidden past where the origins of modern institutions in pagan rituals could be unearthed. For the Victorians, the genre of custom and belief, and its symbolic ascent from superstition to science, from rude existence to genteel manners, became the standard topic for study. This anthropological study of folklore was particularly suited to English and American ideas of civilization. According to the predominant philosophy, civilizing was a moral and technological uplifting of peoples into nations and empires. In the best-selling works of the Englishman Herbert Spencer, who applied Darwin's precepts to the civilizing process, and of similarly minded scholars in America such as John Fiske, Lewis Henry Morgan, and William Graham Sumner (who all wrote on folkways), Victorians read of folklore as key evidence of the rise of civilization from savage and barbaric stages.4 This rise was tied to