| Volume 32 Fall-Winter 2006 |
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PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK ISSUES | FOLKLORE IN ARCHIVES | FOLK ARTISTS SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH  Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns: Early Settlers and Their Traditions, by William J. O’Hern. Cleveland, New York: Forager Press, 2005. 256 pages, photographs, index, $19.95 paper. With the publication of his latest book, Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns, William J. “Jay” O’Hern has firmly established himself as this generation’s chronicler of the lives of ordinary folks in the early days of the southern Adirondacks. Like O’Hern’s earlier Adirondack Stories from Black River Country and Life with Noah—the region’s most famous hermit in the early twentieth century—this is a collection of fascinating stories about a time long gone, but well preserved in the writings and memories of others. As a dedicated researcher with a passion for storytelling and storytellers, O’Hern has brought into the light of day many of these narratives that we might otherwise never see. Adirondack Characters reminds me a lot of the works of several twentieth-century regional writers, like Howard Thomas (Tales from the Adirondack Foothills), Harvey Dunham (Adirondack French Louie), and the more scholarly Paul Jamieson (The Adirondack Reader). In particular, however, I think of Maitland DeSormo, who compiled and wrote seven significant books about life in the Adirondacks a century or more ago. Like O’Hern, DeSormo dug into all kinds of materials he found in libraries, private homes, and historical societies to come up with great stories. Among DeSormo’s best—now sadly out of print— were The Heydays of the Adirondacks, Joe Call, The Lewis Giant, Summers on the Saranacs, and Noah John Rondeau (the same character whom O’Hern has more recently explored). This collection tells of a time when, to use the artist Frederic Remington’s phrase, there were “men with the bark on.” It was a rugged existence, and one had to learn skills that we can hardly imagine today, just to survive. The characters captured in this book, mostly men, not only learned the skills but mastered them. Their exploits became the stuff of good tales, what O’Hern calls “campfire yarns.” As Neal Burdick, editor of Adirondac magazine, writes on the book’s dust jacket, “You’ll meet Slim Murdock, Dut Barber, French Louie, and Alvah Dunning, the legendary Conklin family, the Blueberry Girls, Mother Johnson, and Nat Foster; you’ll learn how to make a fishing spoon and run a trapline.” A quick glance through the table of contents gives you a better idea of the richness of material in the book: Great Adirondack Guides, Old Men of the Mountains, Frontier Occupations and Recreation, Sportsmen’s Camps and Backwoods Destinations, The Rural One- Room School, and A World of Beauty: A Land of Recreation. Each of these categories includes fascinating topics, only a few of which I’ll mention here. There are activities that are harder to find now than they once were, like sharpshooting, trapping, hunting whenever and wherever—within or without the law!—ice fishing, logging, wild berry picking, and spruce gum picking. There are itinerant peddlers, hermits, road monkeys, moonshiners, and all sorts of other characters (with lots of great names), whose tales—true and exaggerated—are recalled in this text. I was particularly drawn to the book because it contains a great deal of material from the important collections and writings of the late Lloyd Blankman of Clinton, New York, an outdoorsman and amateur historian who traveled widely throughout the Adirondacks and met many of the people in this book. Blankman wrote a column he called “Adirondack Characters” for his hometown newspaper and had dreamed of publishing his columns and other essays in a book. That never happened in his lifetime. I met Lloyd Blankman a number of times by way of his brother Ed, my favorite St. Lawrence University English professor and longtime mentor, with whom I spent many hours in Adirondack adventures myself. I recall seeing a little of Lloyd’s collection of photos and artifacts on a visit to his Clinton home and hearing him tell of some of his adventures with characters he had met. Lloyd and Ed were both fascinating men to be around, with catholic interests and insatiable curiosity about local history and folklore. I’m happy now to know that some of Lloyd’s work has finally made it into a book. Well-edited, handsomely designed and printed, and profusely illustrated with interesting photographs, many of which seem never to have been published before, Adirondack Characters is a valuable addition to the small library of books about Adirondack folklore and folk culture. There is little by way of interpretation or analysis, but plenty of insight into a time that will never come again to the Adirondack wilderness. —Varick A. Chittenden, Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach, translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 2006. 596 pages, introduction, note on translation, notes, bibliography, $37.50 cloth. Jack Zipes triumphs. It would have been enough if this great scholar—having anchored himself in critical theory and declared his philosophical credentials in Breaking the Magic Spell, revealed the mythic status of the fairy tale in modern times in Fairy Tale As Myth, and offered teachers and young people his handbook for performance in Creative Storytelling—had brought his career to a climax with the definitive history of the fairy tale in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, in which he offers conclusively the literary history that paved the way for folktale fieldwork. But we may be grateful. He hasn’t contented himself with these major works. In Beautiful Angiola he has given folklorists and all readers the major collection of European folktales published in the nineteenth century. Yes, the major collection: this book, almost unknown up to now, is more important for an understanding of the European folktale than the Grimm brothers’ Kinderund Hausmärchen, and a lot more fun to read. Laura Gonzenbach (1842–78), a Swiss born in Sicily, was already an accomplished performer and a reader of German folktales when she began collecting tales from the many peasant and middle-class women she knew in and around Messina. Their Sicilian (like Maltese, which it engendered) was a distinct language, not a mere dialect of Italian. Once she heard a performance, she immediately translated the words into German, thus initiating the strata of translation this book records. “One cannot say,” Jack Zipes writes, “that her tales are ‘authentic’ folk tales, especially because she made some stylistic changes” (xv). Later he rightly raises unanswerable questions: “Did she just listen and then return home and write them down from memory? . . . Did she make some slight changes to make the tales more emancipatory, or were most of the tales truly recorded as they were told? Did she delete details of a scatological or erotic nature?” (xxv). The book subsisted in German, almost unknown, until the Italian folklorist Luisa Rubini translated Gonzenbach’s tales into Italian; her careful comparative notes are translated and amplified in this English translation. The texts Jack Zipes has rearranged and translated convince me that I am reading something very like oral style, far closer to oral performance than anything published by the Grimms. The tales come from a cultural marketplace. Sicily was once the center of the world. In antiquity Messina, like several other cities, was a center of classical Greek civilization. Other parts of the island had connections to Carthage; it was a province of the Roman Empire, then taken over by the most diverse series of foreign powers. Sicilian people combine Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, and African heritages. All show in Gonzenbach’s tales. For instance, the favorite character of Giufà, “fool, rascal, or idiot” (570)—who now literally follows instructions, now steals by distracting attention, now is pitied by the fairies—is a descendant of Nasreddin Hodscha, the Islamic wise fool, and continues to inspire newly invented stories today. Any reader will recognize some of the plots and characters and marvel at their new guises. Beautiful Angiola comes at a good time for us to be reminded of what folktales truly are. One way that it’s pertinent is that it combines profuse internal variety with a multitude of versions and variants of the same plots and episodes. The abundance of tricksters, fairies, princes, abandoned babies, Christian saints as helpers, magic wands, stolen princesses, courageous young women, and marriages—marriages— marriages! demonstrate, in the microcosm of this cultural marketplace, the prodigious creativity and vitality of precapitalist oral tradition. A second bit of timeliness, for the scholar, is the overwhelming demonstration of how unstable the concept of “tale type” has become. The Gonzenbach collection confirms with texts what H. J. Uther shows with summaries in his 2004 revision of the Aarne-Thompson index: episodes and motifs are so mobile in the hands of narrators that no plot can be thought of as a conservative object that “corrects” itself. Finally, this collection bears out the contention of historians like Robert Darnton that European storytellers have never shrunk from portraying brutality, poverty, malnutrition, parental neglect, or want of food—that folktales are strongly anchored in the world people know. Read silently, aloud, afresh, or repeatedly, Beautiful Angiola should be on everybody’s coffee table. It’s a treasure-house. —Lee Haring, As a not-too-distant graduate of the Department of Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University, with my own interest in legends, I was excited to be given the opportunity to review Campus Legends: A Handbook, by Elizabeth Tucker. As I read I fondly remembered the first time I heard a campus legend (“The Roommate’s Death”), the first time I was given the assignment to collect a legend from a classmate, and the first time I was able to recognize a story as legend rather than as someone’s personal experience. Tucker’s knowledge of and love for legends is obvious to any reader of this book. Campus Legends: A Handbook is a product of many years of research and a true understanding of the materials contained within its binding. One can picture the author poring through countless archives to gather the many texts she offers her readers. While not an exhaustive text that represents all you need to know to become a legend scholar, it is certainly a wonderful place to start. I am sure it will bring many to the ah-ha moment, when they realize they have just spotted a campus legend. Tucker effectively synthesizes legend scholarship and situates it within the greater field of folk studies by pointing to all the great moments in folk studies scholarship that have a relationship to legend scholarship. Tucker’s second chapter, “Definitions and Classifications,” is packed with references that will tempt readers to continue to study both legend and other aspects of folklore. Tucker’s examination of legend scholarship does not forget its audience; she establishes a place for legends within the field without sacrificing the entertainment that these legends provide for those who enjoy hearing and passing them on. Tucker does not present Campus Legends: A Handbook as a one-stop shop for legend scholarship. She does not include a section on fieldwork, and her discussion of transcription conventions is limited to driving home the point that these conventions can impact the interpretation of the text and the text exchange. Instead she concentrates on the legends themselves and on what tools can be used to recognize and interpret them. She presents the legends in the words of the students who spread the legends around college campuses for decades. Readers new to campus legends as an area of study will recognize the stories they heard in their dorms, and with Tucker’s help, have no problem seeing them as part of the greater tradition of college legend lore. Campus Legends: A Handbook further aids the reader in the quest to recognize urban legends by demonstrating the many contexts in which legends can be found. Tucker encourages readers to find legends in literature, films, and television by providing examples that are both obvious and more obscure. There are some organizational aspects of this work that may give the reader moments of confusion. I could not help but wonder why Tucker and her editor chose to place the “Examples and Texts” chapter before the “Scholarship and Approaches,” which are so vital to her commentary accompanying each text example. I also wondered why she referred to herself in the third person in some parts of her text and in the first person in others. Despite this confusion—as well as some missing words—Campus Legends: A Handbook is a book I would hope to see used in any introductory course on legend scholarship. The book’s bibliographic references alone make it a must-have for all folklorists and general readers interested in campus legends. In the section on web resources, Tucker states that “the Internet offers the researcher a feast of information.” With this text, Tucker has established herself as a caterer of that feast. Elizabeth Tucker knows her audience and she knows her stuff, and it shows in Campus Legends: A Handbook. —Claire E. Aubrey, Senators Patrick Leahy and James Jeffords and Congressman Bernie Sanders may seem unlikely to have many books, let alone folkloristic studies, dedicated to them, but Wolfgang Mieder has done just that in his latest collection of articles on the politics of American proverbs. In recent years, Mieder has been amassing an impressive body of work on folklore and politics. This book, Proverbs are the Best Policy: Folk Wisdom and American Politics, is the latest in the series, which also includes studies of Abraham Lincoln (2000), Frederick Douglass (2001), proverbs and racial slurs, and other anthologies, including The Politics of Proverbs (1997). Mieder, a gentle humanist, has always been brilliant at topic selection, with an ingenious eye for selecting proverbs worthy not only of study, but of reflection. The advantage of this current work is that it brings together eight of his accessible articles, three of which have not been published before. At a time when most Americans would perhaps only recognize urban legends as the oral folklore currently in circulation, this book is a welcome study that introduces to students the timeless prevalence of proverbs in American discourse. Two types of studies make up this volume. Four of the chapters locate proverbs in the work of American (and in one case, British) writers and orators: Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass, the correspondence between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and the presidential inaugural addresses. In these sources, Mieder is trawling for proverbs, cataloging them, with commentary on their usage, as he goes. He makes no secret of his admiration for the wit and eloquence of Adams, Douglass, Roosevelt, and Churchill, while lamenting the lack of stimulating use of folk proverbs in most presidential inaugurals. Proverbs are particularly valuable in presidential addresses, he argues, because “the inaugural speeches do not only use ‘elegant, literary language,’ but rather to a noticeable extent proverbial expressions, including biblical and folk proverbs. As the new presidents wish to communicate with all the American people, the common language and wisdom of proverbs is perfectly suitable for effective rhetoric at these inaugural rites of passage” (148). In contrast, the two nominees in the 2004 election, “might well have scored some points or gained a few points just because of the expressiveness of this folk wisdom. Instead they talked and argued in platitudes and bureaucratic jargon that lacked any sign of proverbial insight into the seriousness and humor of the people” (148). In this passage Mieder puts forth his implicit argument with many scholars of written literature, in distinguishing between proverbs, which are inherently creative, subject to multiple variations of usage and nuanced meaning, and capable of being deployed insightfully, and clichés or platitudes, which are bland and repetitive. The masters of the form—Douglass, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill—had skills in the use and adaptation of proverbial wisdom and rhythm that increased their impact on the political thought of others. Mieder’s other chapters in the volume trace, with his characteristic scholarly thoroughness and ingenuity, the origins, most famous usage of, and variations upon three proverbs that have come to be identified strongly with the American nation, and the diffusion of American proverbs abroad. Of these, “a house divided” and “of the people, by the people, and for the people” were central to American history, particularly in the nineteenth century. But it is in his study of “good fences make good neighbors” that, for me, the book reaches its intellectual high point. He begins by outlining the development and evolution of the proverb, but the central section of the article concerns Robert Frost’s complex use of the proverb in his poem “Mending Wall.” The final section of the article discusses the proverb after Frost—with whom it has become overly identified—and the ways the proverb has been read, misread, reused, and perhaps misused. It is the fact, Mieder argues, that proverbs are a wellspring for creative use that gives them their rhetorical richness. Their meanings are not fixed or literal, and are dependent on context. But more than that, Mieder stresses, the power of proverbs lies in their potential for expression through the “‘art of indirection,’ albeit one based on the emotive and expressive power of folk speech” (271 n. 73). They are particularly valuable in this way in the political arena, because they can call up sentiments and allusions without having to reference them directly or literally. Mieder concludes by discussing the role of the proverb and the sentiments contained within in the relevant contexts of the Canadian–United States, United States–Mexican, and Israeli– Palestinian borders. This book has several uses, but is particularly valuable in raising awareness of one powerful technique in the repertoire of public political discourse. More than just wordplay, proverbs are building blocks of idea play, through metaphor, indirection, and rhythm. Having a heightened awareness of that fact makes us all more astute listeners, and thus better able to participate in the conversation of democracy. For that reason, Mieder’s dedication is to be commended and appreciated. —William Westerman, Dan Berggren’s latest CD, Minerva: Songs of Irishtown, Olmstedville, Leonardsville, and Minerva, gives a new and perhaps an even more authentic meaning to the currently popular term, “roots music.” All of this collection of twelve original and three traditional songs relates directly to Berggren’s roots—both musical and familial—and his growing-up years in the neighborhood of hamlets in the southern Adirondacks between North Creek and Schroon Lake. Created as a special tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Minerva Historical Society and the twentieth anniversary of Berggren’s own recording company, Sleeping Giant Records, the selections reveal the artist’s affection for the people and the places in this rural area and for commemorating their stories in ballad style. While the packaged CD is simple, with only a track list and very brief notes, one can find complete lyrics and conventional liner notes on Berggren’s web site at www.berggrenfolk.com. For every song, Berggren tells a story of local history and often of his own personal connections to it. The tracks include the traditional tunes for “Irishtown Breakdown” and “Irishtown Crew,” as well as the traditional lyrics for “The Dying Drummer’s Sweethearts” set to an original tune. For the first, he includes what he calls a “kitchen recording” of the late Cecil Butler, a longtime, well-known fiddler whom Berggren got to know early in life; for the last, there is the connection to Yankee John Galusha, the Minerva resident from whom Frank and Anne Warner collected this and many other old folk songs in the 1930s. In “Irishtown Crew,” the story of the drinking exploits of various men in a logging crew, Galusha had included the names of woodsmen far too numerous to mention. I suspect that many of those family names are still quite familiar to local residents. Berggren’s own composition “When Harry Carried the Mail”—a commemoration of his grandfather, Harry Wilson, who was one of the first rural free delivery (RFD) mail carriers in northern New York—evokes the same qualities. Since he was a mailman, the song is the perfect occasion to drop in the names and brief stories of several of his grandfather’s friends. The other original compositions have personal and community stories attached, as well. “Alice” tells of Alice Switzer, the founder and conductor of the Minerva Community Chorus. “Brannon’s Survey Crew” relates the simple experience of Bill Brannon, a land surveyor, who sees old land, long owned by one family, in a new way as the surveyor’s crew measures it off for modern uses. “Logging Roads” is an homage to the old roads Berggren traveled with his friends in his youth. Other songs were inspired by family members, teachers, and friends and the landscape of woods and water that Berggren recalls vividly and fondly today. A couple of the songs were actually written in response to requests. In the notes, Berggren says of “Settled in the Mountains”: “The Minerva Historical Society asked me to write a song about Francis Donnelly, Minerva’s town supervisor for forty-six years. I discovered quite a tradition while researching the family. The courage and determination of his great-grandmother Catherine, who emigrated from Ireland to the Adirondacks, laid the foundation for generations of her family’s public service.” Berggren’s song “House Call” was written for the local museum’s theme about old-time doctors. He chose to relate the story of Dr. Jacob Grunblatt, who once made a house call when the singer/songwriter had pneumonia as a child. Minerva is Dan Berggren’s very personal collection of stories in song that will mean the most to the people of the Adirondack communities that inspire it. But it also speaks to the common experience of life in rural America decades ago, with characters and incidents made even more colorful and memorable by Berggren’s able storytelling and musicianship. The CD is available from selected retail outlets and from Sleeping Giant Records, 99 Grove Street, Ballston Spa, New York 12020; dan@berggrenfolk.com; or (518) 490-1809. —Varick A. Chittenden, The subject of this wonderful new book is the Sicilian painted cart, il carretto. The book’s chapters explore the cart’s history, its makers, its users, and the varied ways in which it has been reconfigured as a cultural symbol both in Italy and the United States. While the book is written for the general reader, the authors Marcella Croce and Moira F. Harris do an excellent job of addressing themes and topics that are of concern to folklorists. The carretto’s various elements come together in the early nineteenth century— around the same time as the island’s opera dei pupi, or rod puppet theater—with the creation of a network of roads and the emergence of land-owning peasants interested in demonstrating their new wealth and status. The Sicilian carretto is a roofless, two-wheeled structure, with two extending parallel wood beams and square or trapezoid side panels, which is distinguished by use and by regional variations. A single donkey, mule, or horse pulls the cart. The chapter “Makers of the Cart” describes the five artisan groups associated with making and outfitting the carretto: the cartwright who builds the box frame, the beams, and wheels; the sculptor who carves the wheel spokes, panel dividers, and the all-but-hidden yet exquisite chiavi and pizzu sections that protect the axel; the metalworker responsible for the rabiscu, the wrought iron arabesque fantasy placed above the axle; the painters of the religious, cultural, and historic scenes, floral motifs, and geometric patterns; and, finally, the craftsman who outfits the draft animal with its collar and trappings festooned with feathers, mirrors, pompons, and ribbons. It is the narrative paintings that characterize the carretto. Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), who was responsible for the carretto’s early documentation, asserted that the cart’s painted scenes were directly linked to ex-voto paintings (tavolette), in both style and subject matter. In time, the cart’s panels also depicted the paladins from the chivalric repertoire popular on the island; scenes of famous operas; and battles from the Sicilian Vespers, the Risorgimento, the two world wars, and other conflicts. Historic representations were often adaptations from printed sources, such as the illustrated newspaper La Domenica del Corriere. The book’s third chapter is devoted to “The World of the Cart Drivers,” or i carrettieri. These men owned their vehicles and hired themselves out to transport goods, traveling on roads that were often attacked by bandits. The book could have developed the material on the carters’ improvised and dueling canzuna singing tradition, a fundamental folk music style. Croce and Moira describe how Pitrè not only researched the cart and other Sicilian folk arts, but also was responsible for promoting the cart at national and international venues to a new global audience, thus helping to transform the carretto into a symbol of Sicilian identity. By arranging to have a cart displayed in various national and world expositions, beginning in 1881 and including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Sicilian folklorist enhanced his scholarly standing on the global stage, while engendering a global market for carts and a wide range of souvenirs. Although the authors do an excellent job of describing this complex history within the book’s parameters, this historic affiliation between Sicilian folklore scholarship, folk art promotion, and international commerce nonetheless warrants further scholarly treatment. The authors state that the cart’s “golden age” was the 1920s. The cart’s functional importance diminished at the end of World War II, and subsequently the carretto was increasingly used ceremonially during festivals. The authors point out, “As the vehicle loses its status as an essential part of the working world, it becomes a collectible, and an iconic symbol of a culture, appreciated by both the rich and the poor” (101). The fifth chapter describes the Sicilian museums and festivals where one can find carretti on display. The final chapter, “The Cart as a Sicilian Symbol,” explores the adaptation of the carretto painting tradition to motorized vehicles and the trade in souvenirs, vintage cart parts, and newly created carretto-style painted panels. To their credit, Croce and Harris also examine the cart in Sicilian American cultural production. The book provides a substantial bibliography of works on the Sicilian carretto in English, Italian, and French. My only reservation about this informative book is that so many of the contemporary photographs are out of focus. This unfortunate flaw detracts from what is a handsomely produced publication. Ultimately, Croce and Harris have provided the English reader with an invaluable resource on this magnificent example of Sicilian craftsmanship and its associated folklife. —Joseph Sciorra, Brooklyn Inside the Classroom (and Out): How We Learn through Folklore, edited by Kenneth L. Untiedt. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 2005. 322 pages, photographs and illustrations, index, $29.95 cloth.Inside the Classroom (and Out): How We Learn through Folklore is a broad collection of articles loosely organized around the theme of education-related traditions. As the sixtysecond entry in the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society series, Inside the Classroom (and Out) continues a proud history established in 1923 of the society producing an annual book for its members. That helpful background is on the society’s web page, however, not in the book itself. Inside the Classroom (and Out) assumes a familiarity with this legacy, and the published book left this uninitiated reader seeking more contextualization. The society’s web site states, “The volumes published by the society contain many of the papers read at its meetings and other articles both volunteered and solicited.” This helps to explain the widely ranging tone of the articles in Inside the Classroom (and Out). Some are written in formal academic language and others with a conversational informality that reflects an oral presentation made to a familiar audience. A framing editorial introduction to the articles’ origins and content would have provided better orientation for the reader and helped make the articles more accessible. Folklore found in various learning environments is the organizing thread for this publication, and most of the twenty-five essays address it. Among the best are Sylvia Gann Mahoney’s tracing of the history and culture of college rodeo cowgirls in the American West and Jean Granberry Schnitz’s analysis of Texas high school yearbooks as “time capsules of Texas folklore.” One of the few articles that links folklore with pedagogy is Barbara Morgan-Fleming’s insightful ethnographic study of classroom rituals and linguistic patterns as enacted curriculum. Her analysis supports the position that “classrooms [are] complex oral environments in which the teacher must combine knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and management structures. The teacher must then orally improvise a means to meet the complementary and conflicting goals he or she may have, while other individuals in the classroom simultaneously attempt to meet goals that may be at odds with the goals of the teacher” (59). Other articles on the cultures of learning environments are primarily descriptive. Some of these topics include campus-related legends told by undergraduates at two Texas colleges, Boy Scout traditions, and training philosophies of Texas high school football coaches. Several personal reminiscences are included, such as Paw-Paw Pinkerton’s story crediting his college attendance to the smalltown wisdom of Mis’ Mattie, a shopkeeper for whom he worked as a youth. Other articles praise outstanding Texas educators. Lou Rodenberger pays homage to her parents’ creative resourcefulness as they taught in rural schools with few available materials, and three articles honor the life and teaching career of Texas folklorist Paul Patterson. Inside the Classroom (and Out) ends with a group of articles on language that departs from the volume’s core theme. These articles address such far-ranging topics as vernacular speech in Texas, mnemonic devices, and the history of folkloristic narrative scholarship over three centuries. This section especially could have used some editorial grounding to connect it with the rest of the book. Mary Jane Hurst’s article on verb usage in cowboy poetry is nevertheless especially enlightening. While not its stated goal, Inside the Classroom (and Out) provides a window into the Texas Folklore Society, presenting it as a warm, collegial body whose members hold each other in as high regard as they do the folklore of Texas. The society—founded in 1909—is to be commended for its longevity and its populist vision for the study of Texas folklore. This volume in the society’s continuing series will be of most value to readers interested in Texas cultural traditions and lore. Those more interested in folklore pedagogy should not be lured by the mention of the classroom in the title. —Anne Pryor, Wisconsin Arts Board Books-to-Note is a regular feature of Voices and was published in Voices Vol. 32, Fall-Winter 2006. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now. HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP |
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