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American Folk Culture: An Analysis ofthe Folklife Center News, 1984–2011Marit Bakke aa University of Bergen , Bergen , NorwayPublished online: 07 Mar 2014.

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THE JOURNAL OF ARTS MANAGEMENT, LAW, AND SOCIETY, 44: 4–20, 2014Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1063-2921 print / 1930-7799 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10632921.2013.841115

American Folk Culture: An Analysis of the Folklife CenterNews, 1984–2011

Marit BakkeUniversity of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Folk culture has often been regarded as a niche within the cultural field, implying that it is not the realthing, not “quality” culture. In order to get a better understanding of this part of American culture,the article presents an analysis of the Folklife Center News from 1984 to 2011. It documents a richheritage of material and immaterial culture within different communities and groups. A major shareof the articles is about folk music. The 1976 Public Law 94-201 greatly facilitated the preservationand dissemination of America’s folk art and cultural heritage. Equally important are all the individualswho for decades created it.

Keywords American Folklife Center, culture heritage, culture policy, folk culture, Folklife CenterNews

INTRODUCTION

One major distinction among the many definitions of the term “culture” is between culture as asocietal sector and culture as everyday life in the anthropological sense.

Throughout the world, people have played music, danced, decorated houses with artistichandcraft, and made songs. People did these things to celebrate special events such as marriage,funerals, or just a Saturday night party. In many countries, such activities partly formed thebasis from which a national cultural policy emerged; e.g., in Denmark (Duelund 2001), Nepal(Amatya 1983), and Norway (Bakke 2001). However, cultural critics often put such traditionalactivities into a niche called “folk culture,” thereby implying that this secondary culture was notthe real thing, not “quality” culture. To what degree this distinction is a significant one dependson which society or social context we look at. It also depends on the culture policy perspectivewe apply.

This article is about the niche part of cultural life in the United States. Being a foreigner,it is difficult for me to study American folk culture hands on. There is, however, an excellentsecond-hand source—The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and its FolklifeCenter News. In 1988, I almost by accident discovered the existence of the American FolklifeCenter. I left its offices with back issues of the newsletter, and have ever since received it in themail.

Address correspondence to Marit Bakke, Konglefaret 23 A, N-1359 Eiksmarka, Norway. E-mail: marit.bakke@media.uib.no

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This article presents a summary of the Folklife Center News’ portrayal of folk culture from1984 to 2011. The next section gives a brief history of the American Folklife Center. Thenfollows a presentation of the results of my qualitative analysis of the Folklife Center News.Finally, I comment on a few aspects that are interesting from a culture policy perspective and thatdeserve further research.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FOLKLIFE CENTER

The expressions and manifestations of folk culture described in the Folklife Center News haveexisted for centuries in the United States, particularly when those of Native Americans areincluded. They have been part of people’s everyday life, regardless of public recognition. Suchcultural expressions have also existed for a long time in other parts of the world, as documented,for instance, in the series Studies and Documents on Cultural Policies, published by UNESCOduring the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1928, the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, asked Robert W. Gordon to become“specialist and consultant in the field of Folk Song and Literature” (Hardin 2003, 3). It sohappened that Gordon already had launched “his life-long mission to collect the entire bodyof American folk music” (Ibid.). After leaving Harvard University in 1917, Gordon traveledthroughout the United States recording folk music with a wax-cylinder machine that ThomasEdison had invented in 1877. Another Harvard graduate, the anthropologist Walter Fewkes, hadalready used such a machine in 1890 to record songs and stories of Passamaquoddy Indians inMaine.

Eventually, Gordon asked Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress,for institutional support to continue his recording and preserve his collections. Gordon’s requestcoincided with Engel’s expressed concern that popular music on radio and phonograph recordswas threatening “poems and melodies that have sprung from our soil or have been transportedhere” (Ibid., 3). In 1928, Engel created a separate Archive of American Folk Song within theMusic Division. Gordon’s collection formed a solid basis for that archive. Until 1932, the Archiveof American Folk Song was funded with private money. With the end of private funding, Gordon’sposition at the Archive also came to an end.

On the stage came John A. Lomax and his son, Alan Lomax. In 1936, Alan Lomax becamethe first federally funded staff member at the Archive of American Folk Song. Together with anumber of private collectors, Alan Lomax recorded folk music with equipment loaned by theLibrary of Congress on condition that the material should be given to the Library. This type ofcollaboration with private collectors, not only regarding music, has been practiced for decadesafterwards, often by collectors who have been trained by American Folklife Center staff (moreabout this later).

From 1936, the Archive received federal funding. By the 1940s, the Archive’s collectionhad expanded beyond music to also include folklore, verbal arts, and oral history. In 1963,Congress held hearings about the proposed creation of a National Endowment for the Arts(NEA). S. Melville Hussey, executive vice president of the National Folk Festival Association,and in particular Sarah Gertrude Knott, the Association’s founder and national director, stronglyadvocated for including folk art in the NEA legislation. Former NEA chairman LivingstonBiddle (1988, 30) wrote of Gertrude Knott: “In her the folk arts had a passionate advocate.”

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Biddle agreed that including folk arts made sense because “many of the arts indigenous to theAmerican heritage—the arts of the American Indian, of the Louisiana Cajun, of the dwellersin the Appalachian wilderness—were then at risk of oblivion” (Ibid.). The fear that indigenousculture was at risk was the very same concern Carl Engel had expressed in the 1920s.

The fact that Folk Arts indeed became one of NEA’s Programs in 1964 was one step inthe process of government recognition of American folk culture. Twelve years later, in 1976,Congress passed Public Law 94-201 (94th Congress, H. R. 6673, January 2, 1976, confirmedby Public Law 105-275, October 21, 1998, and permanent authorization in 1999), establishingthe American Folklife Center. Folk Arts continued to be one of the Programs in the NationalEndowment for the Arts.

When passing the Public Law in 1976, Congress declared:

(1) That the diversity inherent in American folklife has contributed greatly to the cultural richness ofthe Nation and has fostered a sense of individuality and identity among the American people;

(2) that the history of the United States effectively demonstrates that building a strong nation doesnot require the sacrifice of cultural differences;

(3) that American folklife has a fundamental influence on the desire, beliefs, values, and character ofthe American people;

(4) that it is appropriate and necessary for the Federal Government to support research and scholarshipin American folklife in order to contribute to an understanding of the complex problems of the basicdesires, beliefs, and values of the American people in both rural and urban areas;

(5) that the encouragement and support of American folklife, while primarily a matter for private andlocal initiative, is also an appropriate matter of concern to the Federal Government; and

(6) that it is in the interest of the general welfare of the Nation to preserve, support, revitalize, anddisseminate American folklife traditions and arts.

(b) It is therefore the purpose of of this Act to establish in the Library of Congress an American FolklifeCenter to preserve and present American folklife” (http://www.loc.gov/folklife/public law.html).

Since 1928, the task to preserve had been the responsibility of the Archive of Folk Song, whichbecame, in 1979, the Archive of Folk Culture. Most of the Archive’s materials are unpublished, butmaintained in their original form. Parsons (1995) writes that the materials “are representations. . . of human behavior,” documented on paper (e.g., by interviewers) as sound recordings orphotographs. The following description of the Folklife Center News articles will show that therepresentations, or performances as Parsons also calls them, often have been documented in allthree formats—writings, recordings, photographs—and that this is essential to fully understandtheir meaning in a particular social context.

THE FOLKLIFE CENTER NEWS

The very first issue of the Folklife Center News was published in January 1978 (Vol. 1, no. 1).In it, Wayland D. Hand, Chairman of the American Folklife Center’s Board of Trustees, wrotethat the signing of Public Law 94-201 (Hand 1978, 1) “ . . . marked the beginning of a clearlyarticulated public policy with regard to American folk culture.” Administratively, the Center could

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enhance a national policy by coordinating “indirect support to folk cultural activities over manyyears in various governmental agencies, as well as measures taken in various states of the unionthrough arts councils, parks and recreation departments, and the like . . . .” In a cultural policyperspective, folk culture, although characterized by diversity, was seen as a means to foster asense of American identity, and to strengthen America as a nation. I will return to this perspectivein the article’s last section.

The Folklife Center News reports are drawn from the activities of the American FolklifeCenter. What does The American Folklife Center perceive as folk culture? In 2012, its website(www.loc.gov/folklife/whatisfolklife.html) listed:

• Traditional songs we sing, listen and dance to;• Fairy tales, stories, ghost tales, and personal histories;• Riddles, proverbs, figures of speech, jokes, and special ways of speaking;• Our childhood games and rhymes;• The way we celebrate life—from birthing our babies to honoring our dead;• The entire range of our personal and collective beliefs (religious, medical, magical, and

social);• Our handed-down recipes and everyday mealtime traditions;• The way we decorate our world—from patchwork patterns on our quilts to plastic flamingoes

in our yards, to tattoos on our bodies;• The crafts we create by hand—crocheted afghans, wooden spoons, cane bottomed chairs;• Patterns and traditions of work—from factory to office cubicle;• The many creative ways we express ourselves as members of our family, our community,

our geographical region, our ethnic group, our religious congregation, or our occupationalgroup;

• Folklife is part of everyone’s life. It is as constant as a ballad, as changeable as fashiontrends. It is as intimate as a lullaby, and as public as a parade.

IN THE END . . . WE ARE ALL FOLK

I am tempted to ask: Is there anything that is not folk culture? The Center’s perception of folkculture invites researchers to a fascinating but challenging task. During a symposium in 2000, aproducer for National Public Radio voiced a concern of many people working in the field (Hardin2001): “My nightmare is universal preservation. . . . What to save is a tougher question than howto save.”

In addition to Public Law 94-201 and the Folklife Center’s formal statements, we havethe Folklife Center News’ (in the following referred to as FCN) presentation of actual folklife manifestations in various forms. The following sections describe the results of a thematicqualitative analysis of all FCN issues between 1984 and 2011. The analysis covers only articles,not announcements of upcoming events and short notes about recent acquisitions to the Archive(collections, books, and records). I have organized the description into three parts to answer thefollowing questions: what, how and who, and why. In the last section, these questions are brieflydiscussed in broader culture policy perspectives.

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What: The Whole Range of Lived Life

The Library of Congress Collections Policy Statements regarding Folklore and Folklife provideda tool for my search for the WHAT aspect (www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/folklore.pdf): AmericanFolk Music; Native American Music and Narrative; African American Folk Music and Nar-rative; Ethnic and Immigrant Traditions; American English Regional Dialect; W.P.A. FolkloreProjects; Traditional Stories, Oral Histories, and Other Narrative Material From the UnitedStates; Documentation of Community Life in the United States; International Folklore Col-lected by American Ethnographers; British and American Folk Music and Drama; BrazilianChapbooks; Music of Ukrainian Minstrels; Visual Documentation of Traditional Culture; Occu-pational Lore; Urban and Industrial Lore; War Veterans’ Oral Histories; Printed Ephemera; andAFC Symposia and Botkin Lecture Series. During the 1940s, Benjamin A. Botkin contributed tobroaden folklore research to include ethnic studies and cultural traditions found in urban settings(Hardin 2003, 6).

Apart from Visual Documentation and Printed Ephemera, these classifications cover differenttypes of content and have been grouped into five main categories: Music, Documentation ofCommunity Life, Ethnic and Immigrant Traditions, War Veterans Oral Histories, and TraditionalStories/Oral Histories/Other Narrative Material. In addition, a preliminary reading convinced methat the biographies of people who had been, or still were, active as producers/performers or ascollectors said a great deal about the FCN’s perception of American folk culture. The same wastrue of articles about material culture. Consequently, I decided to add two categories: Biographiesand Material Culture.

Table 1 shows the distribution of Folklife Center News articles during the 28-year period underconsideration. The articles offer fascinating reading and include materials and information thatindeed deserve preservation as well as more detailed research.

Music

Given the history of the American Folklife Center, it is no surprise that music is the mostfrequently covered topic in its newsletter: 31% of the articles. Most of these articles describe

TABLE 1Distribution of Articles in the Folklife Center News, 1984–2011

Content Category Percent

Music (American, Native American, African American) 31Biography 17Documentation of Community Life 16Ethnic and Immigrant Traditions 12War Veterans 10Traditional Stories, Oral Histories, Other Narrative Material 9Material Culture 5Total (N) 100% (185)

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the history of either a particular type of music and instrument or a special recording collec-tion. For instance, several articles deal with the music of Native Americans (in some articlesalso called American Indians). The search for an American culture dates back to the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries when immigrants wanted to be part of a uniquely “New World” cul-ture, distinct from the European culture they had left behind. Given the treatment of NativeAmericans and the suppression of their traditions, it is ironic that, by the end of the nine-teenth century, people in general had become fascinated by the tribes’ crafts, dance, and music.Indeed, composers “ . . . were choosing and adapting elements of Indian song for their ownwork, precisely in order to establish a uniquely American content, if not style” (Gray 1992,5). Struble (1995, 11) argues that many of these efforts came close to being a parody of theoriginal, orally transferred music that belonged to the tribes’ everyday life (e.g., in religiousrituals).

However, it is fortunate that some of the original Native American music has been preserved.According to Struble (1995), Natalie Curtis Burlin was among the pioneers who rescued orig-inal Amerindian (Struble’s own term) music. She transcribed the music, and also documentedmythology, folklore, and graphic art of several major and minor tribal groups. Curtis collectedher findings in The Indians’ Book, published in 1907. Jesse Walter Fewkes was another pioneerin preserving Native American music; I have already mentioned his impressive work among thePassamaquoddy Indians in Maine (Hardin 2003, 4). Gray (1992, 8) offers one example of thismusic still being alive: In a 1977 recording, a Native American musical group integrated thetraditional drums of Indian social dance with rock music.

Bluegrass, Alabama gospel, and Wisconsin polka are three other music genres that have beencovered. Lecturing at the American Folklife Center in 2002, Neil V. Rosenberg, professor offolklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, described the collection of bluegrass thathe, at this occasion, donated to the Center (Taylor 2002). Over 43 years, he had made soundrecordings, interviewed musicians, and collected photographs, correspondence, songbooks, andacademic research materials. Cantonese Opera and Bengali folksong have been discussed in FCNarticles. We can also read quite detailed descriptions of particular songs. For instance, most of theSummer/Fall 2008 issue was devoted to the background and recording of the song “The Leavingof Liverpool” (Winick 2008), and the song “Kumbaya” was given a similar presentation in a2010 FCN issue (Winick 2010). The Folklife Center has also presented a concert series that datesback to the 1970s (FCN 1985, 11), confirming a long tradition of bringing cultural heritage to awider audience. In 2002, for example, the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Karl and the CountryDutchman band played Alabama gospel and Wisconsin polka, respectively, at the Library ofCongress (FCN 2002, 17).

FCN articles have described African-American culture, but reported very little about themusic. In a letter to the Folklife Center, Sidney Robertson Cowell (1989, 11) mentioned thatmost of the Alan Lomax collection of African-American music was recorded in prisons androad camps. An FCN article by Fleming and Taylor (2004) presents the content of the Lomaxcollection donated to the American Folklife Center. Together with his father, John AveryLomax, Alan visited farms, prisons, and rural communities in Texas, recording work songs,reels, ballads, and blues (Ibid, 4). Struble (1995, 13) writes that “ . . . black African culturegenerally was more prone to what we might term “folksong” than was the Indian, or at leastwe have more of a record of African folksong not necessarily connected with religious rites andpractices.”

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Biographies

The prominence of music in the Folklife Center’s activities is also reflected in the rather largeproportion of biographies of musicians. Among them are Pete Seeger, Burl Ives (Hardin 1990;Cutting and Winick 2005), Woody Guthrie (Jackson 2001; Leighton and Harvey 2006), BobDylan (Harvey 2001), and Paul Simon (Taft and Winick 2007).

Pete Seeger deserves extra comments. He is generally known for his songs, but several FCNarticles reveal that he and his wife, Toshi, also had a career as filmmakers (Harvey 2004; Harveyand Winick 2006). It began, however, with music, when Pete Seeger in 1939 worked for AlanLomax at the Archive of Folk Song for “fifteen dollars a week” (Harvey 2004, 9). This marked thebeginning of a long association between the Library of Congress and Pete Seeger, and eventuallywith the Seeger family. As a musician, Pete Seeger donated numerous sound recordings to theLibrary of Congress, and his many tours throughout the United States and abroad are documentedin the films donated to the Folklife Center in 2003 (Ibid). The Seeger family’s importance forAmerican folk music was honored at a concert at the Library of Congress in March 2007, withseveral members of the Seeger family performing (Hardin 2006; Rosenberg 2007).

Authors also have been presented in FCN; the playwright Arthur Miller is one example (Barton2005). Even more frequent are biographies of people who did impressive fieldwork and eventuallydonated their own collections of music recordings, oral histories, and pictures; among them areHelen Heffron Roberts (FCN 1988) and Francis O’Neill (Harlow and Winick 2007). Receivingthese donations made the Folklife Center an important place for researchers in American as wellas foreign folk culture.

Community Life

The purpose of many projects was to document how people lived and worked in communities.Often the description focused on a traditional industry or occupation that either had vanishedor was at risk. Some of the projects were quite large and lasted several years, being covered inseveral FCN articles.

The Lowell Project and the Pinelands Project are two examples. From the early part of thenineteenth century to the early 1900s, Lowell, Massachusetts, was one of the leading textilemanufacturing centers in the world. Decline came with increased competition from firms inthe South. When the Lowell study was launched in June 1987, the purpose was to “ . . . strengthenthe links between its historical past and its present-day cultural communities” (Bartis 1988, 5). Theproject documented over 50 ethnic groups, presenting both cultural resources and challenges forthe community. The project collaborated with local historical associations that since the 1960s hadworked to counter ethnic stereotyping, particularly among the older population of Portuguese,Hispanics, and Southeast Asians. The dream was to develop Lowell as an “educative city”where “ . . . cultural contrasts could act as community resources rather than limiting stereotypes”(DeNatale 1988, 2).

The Pinelands Folklife Project looked at the “interplay of cultural and natural resources inthe region” in the southern part of New Jersey to identify means to sustain a living communityand enhance a “sense of place” (Hufford 1985). Another article pointed out that sustaining theAtlantic White Cedar and selling the timber to boat builders could be a way for people to earn

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money (Hufford 1984). During the study, the fieldworkers became aware of how independentfamily enterprises contributed to an active community (Ibid., 7).

Ethnic groups within communities were mentioned above. Studying occupations is anotherway of understanding traditional life in communities. For instance, in 1994, Folklife Centerspecialist David A.Taylor and a team of researchers interviewed retired textile and garment-industry workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Through this study, they gained knowledge about“tools and processes used . . . occupational terminology, organization of work, strikes and othermajor events, and workers’ values and traditions.” (Taylor 1995, 4). Several years later, the resultsfrom this study were made accessible online.

Community projects have also been linked to broader perspectives including “environmentalprotection, historic preservation, and the conservation of living cultures” (Hufford 1990, 3). Twoexamples were described at the American Folklife Center’s conference “Cultural Conservation:Reconfiguring the Cultural Mission” held in May 1990. The first was a community in Pennsylvaniathat developed a “culturally based strategy for reclaiming and revitalizing spoiled landscapesin the wake of industrial decline” (Ibid.). The second was a community in South Carolinawhere coastal development threatened to destroy sweetgrass meadows and end a 300-year-oldtradition of sweetgrass basketry, a craft originally brought by African slaves. The basket makersasked folklorists and others for help and at a conference, “basket makers, humanists, botanists,policy-makers, community leaders, and developers gathered to resolve the problem of access tosweetgrass” (Ibid., 4). Such projects aimed at countering “unfortunate dichotomies in the worldof heritage protection: nature and culture, tangible and intangible, built and natural, historic andcontemporary, and even arts and humanities” (Ibid.).

Ethnic and Immigrant Traditions

The preceding sections have alluded to studies and collections pertaining to ethnic groups. Thissection considers FCN articles also about immigrants.

John Alexander Williams wrote a series of articles to provide “historical background andtheoretical considerations” for fieldwork among Italian-Americans (Williams 1989a; 1989b).One article was about “foodways” of Italian immigrants. It described the crops introduced andthe foods grown, distributed, and consumed by California Italians, and noted that women’scultivation of fruit and vegetables in urban and small-town backyards helped to sustain ethnicidentity (Williams 1989a, 4). In another article, Williams (1989b, 4) wrote that Italian-Americansin the 1920s were popularly associated with crime and fashion. An ethnic revival during the1970s brought “an impulse toward “neo-ethnicity” that parallels the scholarly interest in ethnicstudies” (Ibid.) The same type of renewed ethnic identity was found among American Indians(Gray 1992), partly facilitated by artists’ search for the genuine American, as already mentioned.

Being from Norway, I was amused to find an article in an American newsletter titled “GoodYule: The Pagan Roots of Nordic Christmas Customs” (Hulan 1989). There I found informationpreviously unknown to me about this mid-winter traditional celebration. I learned, for instance,that a geometrical construction of straw is called himmeli in Finnish, and that Norwegians inPoulsbo, Washington, every year import a new Yule log from Norway (Ibid., 7). And I found evenmore FCN articles about Nordic folk culture. A day-long symposium at the Folklife Center in1985 celebrated the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Finnish epic Kalevala and focused

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on its importance for Finnish identity (Topping 1985). According to an article by Hardin (1990),the 1985 symposium had inspired scholars to pursue this topic, and to study the position of mythand symbolism among people in a Siberian community.

War Veterans

In October 2000, President Bill Clinton signed Public Law 106-380 that launched the VeteransOral History Project. The American Folklife Center was given the responsibility to conduct thisnationwide documentation project (Bartis 2001). The series of articles published in FCN showthat the project comprised not only interviews, but also pictures and printed material.

In addition to the Oral History Project, the FCN has reported about other materials linkedto wars and the life of soldiers. The Archive of Folk Culture has collections of songs from theAmerican Revolution, the Civil War, and from World Wars I and II. Among more recent materialsare the recordings of songs that General Lansdale made during the war in Vietnam and donatedto the Archive in 1975 and 1977 (Hardin 1989, 1).

Traditional Stories and Narrative Material

A major part of the American Folklife Center’s activities has been interviewing people withknowledge of a special field, such as those who have particular occupational experience, or whohave much to tell about life in a town or community. Such interviews were done as part of thewar veterans project mentioned above. Some would argue that meeting people and talking withthem is the most direct and genuine way of studying folk life. I mentioned the stories told byretired workers in New Jersey (Taylor 1995), and through other FCN articles we learn aboutslave narratives (Hardin 1999) and the life of migrant workers in the California “Dust Bowl”in the 1940s (Fanslow 1998). We can even read about cowboy poetry (Hardin 1994), illustratedwith drawings and pictures. The interviews of former slaves and migrant workers were doneduring the 1930s and 1940s for the Federal Writers’ Project under the New Deal Works ProgressAdministration (WPA), partly assisted by John Lomax (Hardin 1999; Hoog 1999, 9).

Material Culture

What fun and interesting things to read about: Hot Texas Wieners (Lloyd 1995), ginseng growing(Hufford 1997), barns (Carter 1994; Vlach 2003), baseball (Winick 2009), the guitar (Wilson1990), and quilts (Hardin 1989). The making of quilts developed according to needs. Originallymade to keep the family warm (“just something that you would need to keep the bed warm”),they were often made for pleasure in a social context, and today they are also produced for amarket (Hardin 1989, 7–8).

Articles of this type commonly describe objects used or made within a social context, be it acommunity, an ethnic group, or just a group of people who enjoy being together. For instance, thearticle about ginseng is, at the same time, a description of the “commons” as a way of organizingagricultural production, and the Texas Wiener is said to be “ . . . the most locally distinctive

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foodway in the Paterson [New Jersey] area, recognized, remembered, and argued about in lovingand educated detail by present and former Patersonians” (Lloyd 1995, 8).

HOW AND WHO: METHODS OF GATHERING AND BY WHOM

The issues of how and who cannot be separated, and I will, therefore, treat them together.Throughout this article I have mentioned several musicologists, ethnographers, and folkloristswho have assembled large collections that they eventually donated to the American FolklifeCenter. Among them were Robert W. Gordon and Walter Fewkes, but they were actually not thefirst ones to do so. Documentation of American Indian music and culture in general dates back tothe late eighteenth century. According to Gray (1990, 4), Samuel Stanhope Smith, a clergymanand later president of Princeton University, in 1784, “articulated the idea of ethnological fieldresearch, of students living among remote tribes in order to examine their cultures.”

Many ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and musicologists followed the example ofSmith, Gordon, and Fewkes. Among them are Helen Heffron Roberts, Juan Bautista Rael, andArchie Green. Roberts was one of the pioneers of ethnographic field documentation. A graduateof Chicago Music College and the American Conservatory of Music, she studied, during the1920s and 1930s, the music of North American Indians, Hawaiians, Polynesians, and SouthAfricans. She recorded music on wax cylinders and, in 1936, she donated aluminum disc copiesof the cylinders to the Archive of Folk Culture; the actual cylinders were given to the Archivemany years later (FCN 1988, no 3). In 1979, Folklife Center staff interviewed Roberts. She was91, but recalled a recording session in Jamaica (Ibid., 10):

Well, he [one of the singers] was a little dubious, it [the phonograph] looked kind of funny to him,you know, and he didn’t know whether it was going to jump at him or not. But anyway, he got downand he sang in and I said, “now would you like to hear this?” “Oh, yes,” he wanted to hear it. [ . . . ]he looked at me. “Missy, you sure am God! You am the Lord himself!” he said, and with that he gotdown on the porch and did somersaults all the way to one end of the porch and back again as fast ashe could!

The New Deal was very important for the Library of Congress collections. Groce and Winick(2008, 5) describe how a series of Works Projects Administration (WPA) programs made itpossible to document oral histories, photographs, and stories; they included the Federal Writers’Project (FWP), the Federal Theater Project (FTP), the National Youth Administration (NYA), andthe Joint Committee on Folk Arts. In addition to preserving a rich, sometimes dramatic, culturalheritage, these programs provided an income for artists and people involved in fieldwork. Theex-slave narratives (Hardin 1999), stories from the California Dust Bowl (Fanslow 1998), andstudies in Appalachia (Mitchell 2001) are three examples of such WPA projects.

Staff from the Folklife Center travelled throughout the country to record music and oralhistories and take pictures. However, in order to train community members in field documentationtechniques, the Center started to run field schools for training amateurs, some of them local people.Involving local people had a twofold purpose. It provided first-hand knowledge of the communityor the particular types of material culture being studied. It also narrowed the distance between theprofessionals and the people who actually lived in the culture. The title of one FCN article, “TheFolklorist Becomes the Folk,” indicates that those who did fieldwork, be they Folklife Center

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professionals or amateurs participating in field schools, established good contact with people theymet, talked with, and observed (McLena 1992). Funding for some of these projects came fromthe National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk Arts Program (Jabbour 1985, 2).

For several decades, the Folk Archive had received thousands of wax-cylinder recordings ofethnographic materials, primarily of American Indian music. For many years, representatives ofthe tribes had asked the Folklife Center to make these collections available to them for their ownprograms of cultural preservation and revitalization. To meet this demand, the Folklife Center,in 1979, launched the Federal Cylinder Project to transfer this immense collection of material totapes, thus making it available to people it originally belonged to as well as to researchers (Hardin2003, 11).

WHY: IDENTITY AS A CULTURE POLICY ISSUE

The preceding pages have documented that the Folklife Center News indeed presented the wholerange of lived life. Now it is time to put this coverage into a culture policy perspective.

We get closer to an understanding of folk culture as a public policy issue when we returnto the points mentioned in Public Law 94-201 that Congress passed in 1967 (http://www.loc.gov/folklife/public law.html). Every point in the law includes terms such as American people,American folklife, the Nation, the United States, or strong nation, indicating that Congress envi-sioned the purpose of the American Folklife Center to be to find, preserve, and make people awareof something truly American. The points also present cherished aspects of this American collec-tive: individuality; identity; desire, beliefs, values; general welfare; preserve, support, revitalizeand disseminate. Section 3 in the 1976 Public Law adds another element in the government’sperception of American folklife (Ibid.):

. . . the term “American folklife” means the traditional expressive culture shared within the variousgroups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive cultureincludes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language,literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressionsare mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained withoutbenefit of formal instruction or institutional direction.

We are faced with a collective consisting of various groups that share traditional cultureexpressed in many symbolic forms and learned without any formal instruction. The quotationfrom the Public Law emphasizes the creative part of folk culture, but Congress also looked at awider purpose, as expressed in point 5 (Ibid.): “That it is in the interest of the general welfare ofthe Nation to preserve, support, revitalize, and disseminate American folklife traditions and arts.”

The analysis of the Folklife Center News through 28 years has convinced me that it is impossibleto speak of a single American folk culture. Instead I will argue, as others have done before, that thiscultural heritage is characterized by diversity, making the vision for the American Folklife Centerexpressed in Public Law 94-201 unrealistic. At the same time, all of the Law’s bullet points refer todiversity, cultural differences, complexity. Diversity is said to be “inherent in American folklife,”an acknowledgment that a phenomenon called American is the sum of cultural expressions withina variety of homogeneous communities such as cities, regions, or ethnic groups. The Law evenstates that the differences do not prevent the “building of a strong nation.”

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The FCN articles reporting from meetings, symposia, and conferences reveal an ongoingdiscussion about the meaning of folk culture and what ought to be studied. Conflicts betweenacademic and public sector wings in the folklife profession seem to have surfaced regularly. Onesuch conflict occurred at a meeting held in 1977 at the Henry Francis du Point Winterthur Museum(Quimby and Swank 1980). In an FCN article (1984, 4), we can read: “At that conference arthistorians, folklorists, collectors, and anthropologists voiced disparate, often contentious opinionsin an atmosphere that became ‘electrically charged.”’ Indeed, so charged that in December 1983the Museum of American Folk Art and the American Folklife Center called 400 people to ameeting in New York City for “conciliation” (Ibid.). Among the issues discussed—which Iassume had been the basis for previous conflicts—were the definition of folk culture, the historyof folk art collecting, the nature of creativity in relationship to folk artists, and the beneficial anddestructive features of the marketplace (Ibid.).

One year later, American Folklife Center director, Alan Jabbour (1985, 3), acknowledgingoccasional tensions between academic and public sector wings in the profession, neverthelessdeclared that the academic contributions had “provided an additional critical ingredient, givingus readier access to the public eye and lending the resources required for major efforts in publiceducation such as films, festivals, and exhibits.” He also found it puzzling to hear (Ibid., 2) “agood many thoughtful people talk about community and the classics [of Western civilization] asif they are mutually exclusive opposites.”

Finally, we may indeed ask whose culture has been gathered, documented, and deposited inmuseum collections and at the American Folklife Center? Are the items provided by collectorsand put on display in museums and at tourist sites or on sale in the market place the propertyof people in a community, or of the public? At the 1983 conciliation meeting referred to above,folklorist John Vlach mentioned a series of folk art items, including quilts from Alabama, cast-iron stove panels from Philadelphia, and furniture made by Shakers in New York, and thensaid: “The anything-goes, free-for-all approach that engenders this kind of lumping cannot beallowed to persist” (FCN 1984, 5). Collectors opposed this view and thought it a waste of time to“backtrack into semantics while the art can disappear, undocumented and unappreciated” (Ibid.).No one would disagree with the need to document folk art and prevent its disappearance, but bywhom was it to be appreciated? Eugene Metcalf from Miami University complained that “theearly collectors distorted the public’s view of folk art by applying the aesthetic criteria derivedfrom high art to its collection and appreciation” (Ibid).

The core of the dispute is quite clear: folk art, on the one hand, as created and experienced bypeople in a community and, on the other hand, as objects to be enjoyed by a public outside itsoriginal social context. Folklorist Suzi Jones argued that collecting could have negative effectson traditional communities, for instance by reducing Native American ritual objects to the statusof valuable art (Ibid., 13). There are also examples of community residents opposing outsiders’involvement, for instance as described by Hufford (1990, 6): “citizens in a Pennsylvania miningcommunity resist ‘official’ efforts to recover and interpret their heritage.”

This conflict, at least dilemma, has existed, and still exists, in many countries where tradi-tional cultural objects have been “discovered” by conservationists and collectors who often havebeen foreigners. It often arose in former colonies during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies and also in countries with a cultural heritage that was at risk falling apart. For instance,when Nepal opened its doors to foreigners in 1950, anthropologists were amazed to see wonderful

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temples, but worried about their dismal condition. Experts and money came in from other coun-tries. Foreign experts engaged Nepalese masters of traditional handcraft methods in restorationprojects to work on the sites themselves and also train Nepalese personnel in their craft. Conser-vation was indeed important and put several sites on the UNESCO cultural heritage list. Equallyimportant for the preservation efforts was the value of this cultural heritage for the tourist industry(Bakke 2010b).

Tourism has also been present in discussions about conservation in the United States. Forinstance, at the 1990 Cultural Conservation conference, several recommendations and resolutionswere passed, including one about cultural tourism. The recommendation read (Hufford 1990, 19):“Cultural tourism arises from a situation in which people seek cultural experiences outside theirown, as well as a return to their own roots. In this process, local cultural resources are recognizedas having exchange value. . . . Those with closest association with the resources should receive thegreatest benefit [and] the development of cultural tourism should take into account the interests ofpeople and place.” In addition, the 1990 Folklife Center annual book featured “Tourism, FrontierConcepts, and Folk Art” (FCN 1990).

In an article about the uses of the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Culture, Parsons(1995, 8) suggested three characters “who rule the way we disseminate the content of the FolkArchive.” The informant or performer is: “the individual whose skills, recollections, or artistryis documented in a particular collection.” According to Parsons, any use of such documentationrequires the acceptance of the performer, Native Americans in particular. The second characterwith an interest in using the Archive’s collections is the collector. The collector usually donatesmaterials to the Archive without restrictions for others to use it, but is free to set a fixed timeperiod in case the collector wants to write a book (Ibid., 10). The Archive of Folk Culture beinga public archive, Parsons argues that the third character is the people of the United States (Ibid).This means that the collections are open to anyone, and also to commercial publishers.

On the one hand, academics such as folklorists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and musicolo-gists have been working to document, collect, and preserve a cultural heritage. On the other hand,collectors apparently have been more interested in the market value of objects. The discovery ofNative American culture in New Mexico offers one illustration. In 1913, Elizabeth White trav-eled to New Mexico to visit friends from New York and Philadelphia. In Santa Fe, she met F. W.Hodge and other anthropologists who “immediately inspired her interest in their research on theSouthwest and Central America” (Mullin 2001, 63). Back at Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth White studiedSpanish and corresponded regularly with Hodge. When Elizabeth and her sister Martha inheritedconsiderable wealth after their father’s death in 1916, they were free to get more involved in Indianaffairs in the Southwest, spending much time in Santa Fe, even buying a house in the outskirtsof the city. Their Bryn Mawr training in public service could now be combined with working forPueblo land rights (Ibid., 64). Elizabeth White also started looking for “objects that could serveas emblem of regional identity” (Ibid., 66) and, in 1931, she organized the Exposition of IndianTribal Arts. New Mexico, Santa Fe in particular, became a center for artists and intellectualswho “had long struggled to resolve the question of how the nation could develop an independentnational artistic tradition, and Indian art promised connection to a distinctly ‘American’ time”(Ibid., 93). An artificial American identity was created in a public sphere, more for commercialreasons than in order to serve the interests of the culture within which the art originated: the NativeAmericans of the Southwest. A similar search took place when Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John

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Adams, and others attempted to compose genuine American music as opposed to the Europeanclassical music heritage (Bakke 2010a, 110).

CONCLUSION

The 1976 Public Law 94-201 is one among many government regulations facilitating the preser-vation and dissemination of America’s folk art and cultural heritage: the National Foundationfor the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, theNational Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Archeological and Historic Preservation Act of1974, the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976, and the National Heritage ConservationAct of 1990. At the May 1990 American Folklife Center’s conference mentioned earlier, severalparticipants pointed out that these regulations were worthless without advocacy and participationby activists at various levels, the community level probably being the most important.

It is important to note, however, that the 1976 Public Law articulated the federal government’sresponsibility to understand the complexity of American society. It also acknowledged thatAmerican folklife has “a fundamental influence on the desire, beliefs, values, and character of theAmerican people” (http://www.loc.gov/folklife/public law.html, point 3). Throughout 28 years,the Folklife Center News has documented a rich heritage of material and immaterial culture withinmany different communities and groups. The sum of these diverse folklife cultures can be seenas expressing an American identity. Therefore, it was indeed a realistic vision when Congressin 1976 declared (Ibid., point 6) “that it is in the interest of the general welfare of the Nation topreserve, support, revitalize, and disseminate American folklife traditions and arts.”

Stephen Winick, editor of FCN since 2005, is comfortable with the American Folklife Center’smandate given by Congress. They “really [do] not think about the legislation per se when makingeditorial decisions” (e-mail May 29, 2013) . Keeping the law in the back of their minds, they alwaysask: “Is it about American folklife? Is it about the collections or activities of the AFC?” Winickis a professional folklorist and was trained by people who advised Congress during the processleading to the Center’s enabling legislation. Therefore, he and his editorial team confidently decidewhich past and current folklife activities are appropriate to write about. Previously unreportedactivities may have no direct connection to the Center’s activities, but are worth writing aboutbecause they add knowledge about American folklife.

The Folklife Center News coverage is in itself valuable documentation of the fact that thisculture heritage would not exist today without all the individuals who for decades have createdand presented expressions representing values of a particular ethnic group or community withoutregard for their potential external value. The question is whether local communities will facilitatesuch activities in the future. Government agencies at local, regional, and national levels canprovide good framework to insure that they do, as recommended in the 1980s (Loomis 1983,71–78).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wants to thank Ann Jones, US Fulbright Scholar to Norway 2011–12, for goodsuggestions and language improvements, and Ann Hoog and Stephen Winick at the AmericanFolklife Center for useful comments and fact checking.

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