Missouri Folklore Society Journal

Emerging Folklorists showcases outstanding work done by Missouri college students from 2010-19. These projects came primarily from folklore courses and capstones; most were presented at Missouri Folklore Society conferences. These papers represent a range of topics and approaches, from rigorously quantitative analyses to humanistic studies that ask to be validated by the reader's recognition of sound insight and empathetic understanding. They include oral history, family history, structural linguistics, archival study and a great deal of fieldwork. Though the disciplines here range widely, we had in mind something comparable to The Apprentice Historian, a model which the discipline of history provides to showcase exceptional learners. So Emerging Folklorists opens with a pre-med student contextualizing lore from her Girl Scout camp. Next, an avid video gamer analyzes gamer language. The volume's seventeen essays include a linguistics student tackling the linguistic structures of "Yo Momma" jokes, and a student of A.I. using computer analysis to explore patterns of sounds and grammar in "Knock Knock" jokes. Another student uses brain- imaging data to analyze the way subjects processed the humor of memes. An extraordinarily gifted gay student collects, categorizes, and offers insight into "coming out" stories. Another researcher focuses on 1990s updates of the Bluebeard motif. A rural student (now a PhD in Literature) explores her county's history, including oral accounts of farms and a factory, a Civil War skirmish, the cultural artifacts of enslaved people. Another from southern Missouri collects stories from people of her grandparents' generation about racial confrontations in her home town. Many of the essays include appendices--data collected, transcriptions of interviews, etc., valuable in their own right. Some of these inquiries are in spots "naïve" in the sense art historians use the term--work that shows the marks of the newcomer, or that may not have the range of historical reference of more senior practitioners, but work which rides on a freshness and a freedom from the preconceptions which can mark professionals. These researchers are people still learning how to imagine their audience - they do not always know what needs to be explained and what does not. But in folklore they have found one of the places where an undergraduate can make genuine contributions to knowledge.

This is a collection of articles on recording, studying, and teaching folklore in and near Missouri. The works here fall into three broad categories: project overviews and retrospectives; case studies and preliminary fieldwork; and personal narratives

Volumes 27-28 (2005-2006) of the Missouri Folklore Society Journal devoted to songs and ballads, collected in Missouri and sung by Missouri singers.

A poor farmer buys medical care for his wife by secretly promising his cadaver to doctors for medical research; he then lives in constant fear of death. Musick's study of George and his small community is empathetic and richly folkloric.

Play Me Something Quick and Devilish explores the heritage of traditional fiddle music in Missouri. Howard Wight Marshall considers the place of homemade music in people’s lives across social and ethnic communities from the late 1700s to the World War I years and into the early 1920s. This exceptionally important and complex period provided the foundations in history and settlement for the evolution of today’s old-time fiddling. Beginning with the French villages on the Mississippi River, Marshall leads us chronologically through the settlement of the state and how these communities established our cultural heritage. Other core populations include the “Old Stock Americans” (primarily Scotch-Irish from Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia), African Americans, German-speaking immigrants, people with American Indian ancestry (focusing on Cherokee families dating from the Trail of Tears in the 1830s), and Irish railroad workers in the post–Civil War period. These are the primary communities whose fiddle and dance traditions came together on the Missouri frontier to cultivate the bounty of old-time fiddling enjoyed today. Marshall also investigates themes in the continuing evolution of fiddle traditions. These themes include the use of the violin in Westward migration, in the Civil War years, and in the railroad boom that changed history. Of course, musical tastes shift over time, and the rise of music literacy in the late Victorian period, as evidenced by the brass band movement and immigrant music teachers in small towns, affected fiddling. The contributions of music publishing as well as the surprising importance of ragtime and early jazz also had profound effects. Much of the old-time fiddlers’ repertory arises not from the inherited reels, jigs, and hornpipes from the British Isles, nor from the waltzes, schottisches, and polkas from the Continent, but from the prolific pens of Tin Pan Alley. Marshall also examines regional styles in Missouri fiddling and comments on the future of this time-honored, and changing, tradition. Documentary in nature, this social history draws on various academic disciplines and oral histories recorded in Marshall’s forty-some years of research and field experience. Historians, music aficionados, and lay people interested in Missouri folk heritage—as well as fiddlers, of course—will find Play Me Something Quick and Devilish an entertaining and enlightening read. With 39 tunes, the enclosed Voyager Records companion CD includes a historic sampler of Missouri fiddlers and styles from 1955 to 2012. A media kit is available here: press.umsystem.edu/pages/PlayMeSomethingQuickandDevilish.aspx