City Folklore

...His personal interviews lack the spark of those Studs Terkel collected from the same groups...

...For many reasons it has been difficult to acknowledge the existence of a native tradition of folklore in the United States...

...His newest albums with The Bluestein Family are "Let the Dove Come In" from PhilolFretless and "A Horse Named Bill and Other Children's Folksongs" from Greenhay si Flying Fish...

...And it is hard to figure out why...

...A goodly company had preceded me in such pursuits of the folk, trekking to backcountry towns, mountain hollows, and the fringes of civilization to trap the elusive lore...

...The disappointment of Dorson's book is that there is so little of the folk speech and other vernacular virtuosities in evidence...

...is now regarded as the direct reflection of the central anxieties, aspirations, and concerns of the contemporary era...

...Folklore, instead of being considered a matter of survivals and antiquities...

...The question is whether steel mills, oil refineries, and the lives of people in the area generate folk traditions comparable to those of rural groups in the past both here and abroad...

...For thirty years," Dorson notes, "I followed the customary trails of the folklorist leading away from the centers of population to the hinterland...

...Working with graduate students, Dorson investigated the Calumet region of northwest Indiana, one of the most densely industrialized areas in the world, home to blue-collar workers in ethnic enclaves as well as large numbers of blacks, especially in the great foundry town of Gary...

...There are times when Dorson is so far out of his element that he misses important materials...

...At the same time, Dorson follows conventional lines of research in his new environments, and the results don't equal the older rural materials...

...That attitude also explains the neglect of American Indian traditions by scholars who regarded them as "primitive" rather than folk, the distinction being essentially that most conventional folklorists didn't know enough about tribal music and culture to catalogue the materials accurately...

...Similarly, from early times, investigators of black folklore placed it as African and predicted that it would not survive in the United States...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein is a folklorist and a folk singer...

...Although unevenly developed, the work shows a new emphasis in folklore research which matches social and cultural developments of the 1980s as well...

...That left the field mainly to investigators of Anglo-Celtic narrative traditions and collectors of the traditional ballad, as defined by the influential scholar, Francis James Child...

...Dorson's last study tries to show that "a turnabout in folkloric concepts has redirected field inquiries from the country to the city, and from the marginal to the mainstream culture...

...Until recently folklor-ists were in the habit of describing "folklore in the United States" rather than American folklore, asserting that while there is a folk tradition here it is largely what immigrant groups brought rather than the result of indigenous development...

...If Dorson didn't quite see this, his final word nevertheless amounts to a major re-evaluation of earlier positions and will lead to fuller investigation of contemporary folk materials...

...Hybridizations and the adaptations of new techniques are the hallmarks of American folklore, and it is no surprise that they show up in the city as well as in the country...

...As one of the most influential American folklorists, Dorson has well shown the tendency of folk scholars to steer clear of urban and immigrant materials...

...As Richard Dorson points out in the introduction of Land of the Millrats, published just before his death, folklorists also made it a point to ignore the folkways of large population centers and factory towns on the assumption that industrialism destroys folk tradition...

...Moreover, as other field workers in urban folklore are discovering, the most important developments involve new combinations of materials rather than duplication of older styles...

...Dorson is disappointed by the absence of a "corpus of oral stories," but he misses some rich opportunities, including an analysis of ethnic and black jokes, one of the main forms of urban folk expression...

...At a local festival he complains that all the ethnic groups look alike—and they do, to one less than expert in the distinctions between Hungarian and Serbian design...

...Land of the Millrats was Dorson's attempt to make up for the fact "that we have done very little to collect our own folklore, or even to recognize its forms...