Folklore generated or circulated within a particular region of the country and that reflects
peculiar features or aspects of life in that region. Regional folklore may be indigenous to
a particular place or it may be “regionalized” as people move from one part of the
country to another and adapt their folklore to their new home.
In the history of American folklore scholarship, regional folklore has been a constant,
if relatively minor, theme. Articles on folklore collected in various regional settings
appeared more or less regularly in the Journal of American Folklore from its initial issues
in 1888 through the 1940s. During that same period, the establishment of state and
regional folklore societies and their journals both reflected and stimulated interest in
regional folklore. The focus in these journals, and in the work of regional folklorists in
general, was almost exclusively on the collection and publication of texts. Some regional
folklore collectors concentrated on particular genres. Cecil Sharp, for instance, was
interested in English ballads in the Appalachians. But the first half of the 20th century
also saw multigenre collections within specific regions or states. Frank C. Brown, for
instance, gathered exhaustively in North Carolina, while Vance Randolph was doing the
same in the Ozarks. Underlying these collections of regional folklore seems to have been
a conception of folklore as items that remained relatively unchanged during their
transmission through generations of tradition bearers, rather than as the creative
expression of people as shaped to some degree by their experiences, of and in, a
particular place.
An exception to this view was promulgated by Benjamin A.Botkin, who was
interested in the indigenous folk products of regional experience. Botkin’s chief vehicle
for his ideas about regional folklore was his own periodical, Folk-Say, initiated in 1929.
Although Botkin’s views had little direct impact on other folklorists at the time, he was
part of a cadre of American historians, literary scholars, geographers, and sociologists
who evinced a growing interest in regionalism and regional culture during the 1930s—an
interest that culminated in the conference on “Regionalism in America” held at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1949.
Mid-century, in fact, seems to mark a turning point in folklorists’ conceptions of
regional folklore, as foreshadowed in Richard M.Dorson’s Bloodstoppers and
Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula (1952). When Dorson suggests in
this book that the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a “seedbed for folk culture,” he is
proffering, albeit implicitly, the notion that regional folklore can be understood as a
response to UPers’ (who sometimes call themselves “Yoopers”) local experiences.
Dorson’s ideas about regional folklore appear more fully in American Folklore (1959)
and Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States (1964), in which he samples
folk materials from several distinctive cuitural regions.
Where Dorson hinted at the possibilities of studying the folklore that is generated
within a region rather than merely collecting the folk materials that happen to circulate
within it, Américo Paredes presented a full-blown study of that very process in “With His
Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958). Paredes argued that the
corrido, the native ballad form of the border country on the Lower Rio Grande Valley,
was a product of historical and cultural forces in that region.
In the 1960s, folklorists’ fundamental conceptions of the nature of folklore underwent
a powerful transformation from the idea of folklore as static item to the notion of folklore
as dynamic process. In the wake of this revolution, Suzi Jones argued in a 1976 article in
the Journal of the Folklore Institute that the changes effected in folklore as people move
from one place to another reflect adaptations to local regional environments.
Regionalization, therefore, is the process by which folklore is transformed through
people’s response to place. Jones went on to suggest that regional folklore becomes a
mark of regional identity and sense of place, as a rhetorical strategy for demonstrating
familiarity with the local environment. According to this view, a regional folk group
exists where people share a body of folklore by virtue of living in a certain geographical
area that forms the basis for a shared identity as consciously expressed in their lore.
The relationship between regional folklore and local experience can be seen in three
ways. First, imported forms of cultural expression can be adapted to regional conditions.
Second, folklore can emerge from particular regional conditions and experiences. Third,
folklore can be used to express a sense of identity with a place.
Adaptation of folklore occurs when people move into a place, bringing with them the
traditional forms of expressions from their former homes, and alter those forms in
response to the new setting. The dogtrot house in the Southern United States, with its
characteristic breezeway, seems to have developed as a response to the summer heat and
humidity of the place. Similarly, the hymn “Beulah Land” was parodied by homesteaders
on the Great Plains in the 1870s, and in other parts of the arid and semiarid West after the
turn of the century, in response to the region’s harsh environmental conditions.
Regional folklore also emerges from specific local conditions and expresses the
critical elements of the regional experience from the resident’s point of view. In Mormon
Utah, for instance, an area marked by low rainfall, an elaborate body of custom, belief,
and narrative about water has developed. Often regional folklore evolves from particular
historical or economic factors, such as dominant ethnic or occupational groups. The
folklore of southern Louisiana is shaped nearly equally by the influence of the Cajuns and
by its characteristic waterways, which provide many of its residents with their livelihood.
Finally, as Jones suggested, regional folklore can be used as a means of expressing
identity. Within each American region, residents have devised ways of distinguishing
between insiders and outsiders, and they often tell stories detailing the differences. The
“Arkansaw Traveler” is perhaps the best-known example, “but is paralleled in a wide
variety of other stories from Maine Down Easters’ accounts of ‘summer folks’ to
westerners’ anecdotes of ‘dudes.’” Also declaring pride in regional identity are aphorisms
about drinking from a local water source or wearing out a pair of shoes in a place as a
warranty that one will be become a permanent resident.
At the end of the 20th century, regional folklore seems to be holding its own in the
face of mass-produced goods and the dominance of popular media. A number of
academic regional-studies centers have been established since the mid1970s, and public
interest in local and regional forms of cultural expression has been stimulated by the
activities of public-sector folklorists and other cultural conservationists who draw
attention to those forms through museum exhibits, festivals, and other forms of
programming.
Barbara Allen
References
Allen, Barbara. 1990. Regional Studies in American Folklore Scholarship. In Sense of Place:
American Regional Cultures, ed. Barbara Allen and Thomas J.Schlereth. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, pp. 1–13.
Jones, Suzi. 1976. Regionalization: A Rhetorical Strategy. Journal of the Folklore Institute 13:105–
120.
Paredes, Américo. 1958. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Whisnam, David. 1983. All That Is Nativeand Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.