From VOICES: Janis Benincasa

Volume 34
Spring-Summer
2008

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As a teacher and scholar she has explored the relationship between folklore and popular culture, most recently in an honors course on Tolkien and in research on J. K. Rowling’s use of English boarding school folklore in the Harry Potter books.

Selected Publications

Fish, Lydia. 1982. Ethnicity and Catholicism. New York Folklore 8.3-4:83-92.

——. 1984. Father Baker: Legends of a Saint in Buffalo. New York Folklore 10.3-4:23-33.

——. 1989. General Edward G. Lansdale and the Folksongs of Americans in the Vietnam War. Journal of American Folklore 102:390-411.

——. 2000. Pilgrimage as Performance: Ste. Anne de Beaupré. New Directions in Folklore 4.2. Online at www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/ beaupre.html.

——. 2003. Informal Communication Systems in the Vietnam War: A Case Study in Folklore, Technology, and Popular Culture. New Directions in Folklore 7.

——. 2004. The Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 30.3-4:6-7.

Eileen Condon is project director at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York City. To nominate a colleague for “In Praise of Women,” contact her at
econdon@ctmd.org.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Buffalo State College professor Lydia Fish has been teaching, researching, writing, preserving, and presenting folklore in New York State and beyond for more than forty years. When nominating her friend and mentor for this column, Binghamton University professor Libby Tucker explained how her first encounter with Lydia changed her life forever:

I got to know Lydia Fish in the fall of 1970. I was at Buffalo State after finishing a Fulbright in Germany. I came to study children’s literature and didn’t know folklore existed as a field at that point. I happened to hear a lecture Lydia gave on Child ballads. She sang—she accompanied herself on guitar and sang some ballads without accompaniment, as well. I was so enchanted by that presentation and I liked her so much that I decided to find out what folklore was all about.

Lydia offered Libby an independent study course in folklore. At Lydia’s encouragement and despite her parents’ alarm, Libby then joined the Peace Corps and headed off to Africa. With her mentor’s support during and after fieldwork, Libby eventually published her research on Ivory Coast girls’ excision ceremonies. Upon her return, Libby entered graduate school at Indiana University at Bloomington— her mentor’s alma mater.

Lydia holds bachelor and master degrees in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana. When she began teaching there were more than half a dozen full-time academic folklorists around the state, but today Lydia is one of just a few remaining tenured folklorists teaching traditional folklore courses full-time in New York. “Unless you have an academic base for a discipline, it’s going to be like the Shakers—it’ll die out because no one’s reproducing,” she declared. “I think this is a worthy field. We need to get everybody teaching folklore in New York to start talking to each other and to those in the public sector. We need to get all their addresses into a database so we can communicate.”

Lydia recalled being set on the path toward a degree in folklore in the spring of 1964. The great British folklorist A. L. “Bert” Lloyd visited her at her parents’ home in North Carolina after an American Folklore Society meeting. There, sipping bourbon in the moonlight, Lloyd told her frankly that she didn’t have the talent to make a living as a singer. (Lydia had sung professionally in London and was then singing and teaching guitar in North Carolina.) He advised her to pursue a Ph.D. in folklore instead and teach. Lloyd wrote letters of reference, which helped her get into three programs. She chose Indiana University. “Lydia is a really fine teacher,” Libby observed. Lydia’s specialties include the occupational folklore of the military, especially during the Vietnam War, and folk Catholicism, specifically the relationship between liturgy and ethnicity. “She’s very active,” Libby added. “She has made [documentary] CDs, gathered performers together, produced major concerts. . . . I use some of her CDs of Vietnam war songs in my Intro to Folklore classes.” In her forty-one years at Buffalo State, Lydia and her students have built a Niagara Frontier Folklore Archive containing over five thousand fieldwork projects, housed at Buffalo State College Library. She also directs the Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project, with an archive that contains over four hundred hours of songs recorded in Southeast Asia and a substantial manuscript collection. The veterans project generated concerts at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Archives; a Rounder recording; and a Veteran’s Day special broadcast of PBS’s Austin City Limits, hosted by Kris Kristofferson.

Lydia encourages collaborative learning in her classroom by helping students to develop online folklore resources (www.folklorewiki. lydiafish.us). As a teacher and scholar she has explored the relationship between folklore and popular culture, most recently in an honors course on Tolkien and in research on J. K. Rowling’s use of English boarding school folklore in the Harry Potter books. Lydia has become fascinated with the enthusiastic, highly literate culture of young fandom, from honors students who speak and write Elvish to packed audiences at the peer-reviewed paper presentations at Harry Potter conventions.

On the occasion of the New York Folklore Society’s fiftieth anniversary, folklorist Dan Ward graciously referred to Lydia as the “second founder of the society.” Lydia remembers nominating herself as the New York Folklore Society’s next president at a 1984 breakfast board meeting in Ithaca, when some downstate officers did not show up. She enjoyed her term as president from 1985 to 1987 and appreciated the “magnificent support” of Phil Stevens, editor of New York Folklore. Looking to the future, Lydia reiterated her hope that academic and public sector folklorists will work together to preserve the discipline’s academic base and expressed her desire to see back issues of New York Folklore Quarterly and New York Folklore—“one of the finest folklore journals ever”—made fully available online.

The “In Praise of Women” column recognized Lydia Fish in Voices Vol. 34, Spring Summer 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.