Decorating the bride

The latest issue of Folk London (254, Aug-Sept 2011) contains this interesting little comment from the editor, Peter Crabb-Wyke:

'When I first started work in The City in the late 1960s it was customary for girls who were about to marry to be decorated by their work mates. It was a regular sight at Liverpool Street to see some poor girl on her way home on a Friday night with streamers pinned to her clothes and usually an "L" plate on her back. When I returned to work in the Square Mile in the '80s the custom seemed to have died out and friends who worked in the West End in that era have never heard of it. Do any of our readers have memories of this custom, or better still photos?'

At around the same time Peter recalls seeing girls decorated, George Monger documented the practice in some Essex industrial centres. Monger recorded the practice from Harold Hill and Ongar, places accessible to the City for commuters. Some other comments around the same time suggest the practice was probably widespread. (1)

Peter's call for memories or photos is welcome, and I hope he gets some results, but it would also be interesting to know if there is any connection with the current practice of the costumed hen night trip. Many of the costumes are almost standardised (pink cowboy hats, wings): this may reflect commercial availability, but it would be interesting to know if there's any understood connection with older traditions. The L-plates certainly remain popular, and have also become part of the commercial repertoire.

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1) George Monger, 'A Note on Wedding Customs in Industry Today', Folklore, 82.4 (1971), 314-316.

Sharing the Harvest

I recently received an e-mail advising me that the National Library of Australia's bookstore is now online. I was on their mailing list having previously bought a quite wonderful CD from them. Hopefully the launch of the online store will enable them to get round some of the rather charming problems I'd had with their manual system - the CD was initially out of stock, and took about a year to arrive, by which time I'd forgotten having ordered it.

The CD, though, turned out to be a real treat, so I'm pleased to see the store lists it as still being available and in stock. (The Australian Dollar also seems to have strengthened since I bought my copy: the CD costs Aus$19.95 before postage, which today works out at about £14).

Sharing the Harvest is a 2-disc set of John Meredith's field recordings of folk songs and tunes made in the 1950s. There are some pieces generally familiar from Australian, Irish and British traditions (there's a strong selection of Irish/Australian bandit songs), but also some less well-known items.

As ever with field recordings, there are are variations of quality for several reasons. Some are technical, some relate to the age of the performers, some to the recording context, and none makes any difference to the value of the collection. There are some truly exceptional traditional performers represented here, like Sally Sloane. The dropping out of the odd word cannot detract from a performance like Sid Heather's great The Wonderful Crocodile, anymore than the unprompted accompaniment of Ron Manton's dog during what he could recollect of The Banks of the Condamine.

Revisiting the CDs, I'm struck again by Meredith himself. Born in New South Wales in 1920, Meredith had learned the button accordion from his bush worker father, and played for local dances. Moving to Sydney to work for a drug company, he became involved in a folk revivalist movement promoted by the Australian Communist Party. In part they were driven by a cultural nationalism, but this led to a renewed interest in bush songs. Meredith was introduced to a retired shearer, Jack 'Hoopiron' Lee (who can be heard here).

There's an interesting technical aspect to this amateur drive to research. In the 1950s, portable recording equipment was becoming more widely and cheaply available. Meredith, who did not have the technical ability to transcribe a tune, was still able to purchase a tape recorder and go out looking for songs. He was able to record tunes and songs long before he found a scholarly collaborator in Hugh Anderson who could help him prepare them for publication in book form.

Meredith was quite rightly recognised for his fieldwork. The NLA bought his tape collection in 1963, and encouraged further fieldwork to record the oral histories of performers. Meredith resumed fieldwork in the 1980s in collaboration with the Music Department at the University of New South Wales, further adding to the NLA's documentation of vernacular culture.

However, the availability of this technical wherewithal extended well beyond those like Meredith who dedicated themselves to the quest for traditional music. I have heard several stories of people in the 1950s recording domestic parties at which there was singing, in part simply because they now could. These less formal, less directed, recordings may still be lurking in attics and cellars. It's worth keeping an eye open for these things, as they may offer small but valuable contributions to our knowledge of vernacular singing.

John Meredith at the Holbrook Woolpack Museum, c.1990, playing the late 'Pop' Craythorn's accordion. (Photo by Rob Willis from the NLA Pictures Collection)

Songs of Love and Emigration

I'm not quite out of the thesis woods yet, but am beginning to start thinking about research/interests/life generally after I finally finish. One part of this has involved catching up on some recent CD releases. I've finally picked up a copy of Songs of Love and Emigration, a 2 CD set of songs recorded by London Irish pensioners.
I already knew something of the project, having had the privilege of hearing one of the singers, Andy Higgins, several times at Sharps Folk Club. The 21 singers here perform a wide range of songs and recitations from folk songs, popular theatre pieces, to a song from the repertoire of John McCormack. Gerry Diver has contributed an impressive and sensitive backing to all of the pieces.
I hope that someone also recorded these singers in the settings where they actually sang most of these pieces, but that's not a criticism of this project. It's interesting to hear songs that might not get an airing in the folk world, invested here with evident emotional significance. Anne Morrissey sings Galway Bay, for example, quite beautifully. It is a song that reminds her of leaving Galway for America at 19, and you can hear that in the performance.
What's also interesting is the evidence of a continued tradition of making songs and poems. There are poems here performed by their authors, but the song that caught my attention immediately was John Butler's The Gracie Blue. I knew nothing of this song, or the story attached to it.
It relates to an event in Schull Harbour in 1947, when local traders were passed dud cheques by a conman in an ornate naval uniform. The song sung by John Butler appears to have been just one of a number of local compositions on the subject. It isn't the song sung at the end of this lovely local oral history film, for example:

The Gracie Blue: A People's History from El Zorrero Films on Vimeo.

Here is folk poetry, commemorating an otherwise forgotten incident in local history, and it's got me very excited about getting onto another research project in due course.

Across the Forest review

Supernatural beliefs are a difficult area to write about. A lot of contradictory assumptions are made – they’re dying out or they’re flourishing, they reflect experience or discussing them indicates no experience, they are exactly the same as artistic representations or artistic representations have changed them forever etc etc etc. All too often comments on belief are based on these preconceptions or, just as bad, are based on the assumption that commentator and original source had a common understanding of the concepts and entities being described.

One step towards overcoming these assumptions is just to go and ask people about their beliefs and experiences. (This seems obvious, but it also seems to need repeating). Problems still arise with interpretations, but at least you then have a starting point of people’s own testimony. It’s a real pleasure, therefore, to see such testimonies documented on film, and publicly available.

Across the Forest, dir. Justin Blair & Matthew Vincent, 2009 (79 mins) contains footage of interviews conducted in Romania. The interviewees describe their experiences of, and beliefs in, various supernatural beings. Many of these are stunning (‘binding’ a corpse to the grave by stabbing a nail through its heart), and informants are allowed to give their own accounts of experiences and belief (the man who insists ‘The dead do come back’ also states categorically that ‘without experiences people don’t believe’).

Blair and Vincent deserve credit for retaining the native terms here (strigoi, varcolaci etc), although these are often compared with English equivalents (vampire, werewolf etc). Strigoi are often compared to vampires: they have a lot in common with ghosts of the uneasy dead, but it would be forcing the issue just to translate the term, not quite accurately, by either word. They are strigoi, and we see here what this actually means. This is particularly important given how far notions of ‘Transylvania’ have shaped popular representations of supernatural beings, including the vampire of film and literature.

The film’s greatest strength is its refreshingly unflashy presentation of the interviews in extended sections. This is welcome for two reasons.

Firstly, it gives due weight to the speaker’s own account and interpretation of their stories. These unfold more fully than if they were implied in more heavily edited soundbites. This is not to suggest an absence of editorial direction, as I will discuss below, but it does place the emphasis on the interviewees. All of the interviewees are identified, but their names are listed during the end credits, a device more suited to the soundbite editing style eschewed here. Given the construction of the film it might have been better to have identified them as they appeared, but that is a minor quibble.

Secondly, the longer interview clips also give the viewer some idea of the narrative context for the stories. While most of the interviews are individual discussions, we do see some group storytelling contexts, and we hear about others.

This is significant, because one of the driving motivations for the film is the idea that ‘These beliefs are quickly dying out as the world modernizes around the tiny villages’. The evidence may be slightly skewed here, as the interviewees are mostly older people, so we do not see transmission of the stories to younger generations. However, family narrative traditions are revealed, and interviewees themselves do engage in some way with changing patterns of belief. It takes nothing from the interviews as evidence of individual positions to think that further work needs doing on how they are transmitted.

A related question is my biggest concern here. Blair and Vincent refer throughout to Transylvania. This seems a little too imprecise for the social context. One informant simply talks about being Romanian. There is evidence of social context within the interviews, including evidence of fluidity of labour across the region (one informant discusses a Moldovan indentured servant).

This may not be a big deal here, beyond flagging further questions for consideration in interpreting and analysing the testimonies here. Transylvania may just be intended as a general geographical term, but it needs a little more caution given its popular literary uses.

Perhaps I became more sensitive to this given the film’s one big weakness. The interviews are intercut with other footage. Most of the slideshows of establishing shots are unexceptionable. However, I found some strident soundtracking and night-vision footage of the filmmakers en route redundant. This left a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. This footage has no narrative significance, and the sub-Blair Witch night vision seems to be pointing to a literary and cinematic culture of supernatural representation somewhat different to the rest of the film. (Some of the slides fall into the same category). This felt at best like a slight loss of nerve, at worst like a manipulation of the interviews.

But this caveat should not discourage anyone from getting hold of this film. It is distracting, and points to areas for future study and consideration, but it does not undermine the remarkable interviews in this film. There is much to enjoy, savour and contemplate here, and it is worth your time

More information, and details of how to order the DVD, are at the film's website.

Not cold reading but cold calling

Things here are busy and tense with work on my thesis, and blogging's had to take a backseat.
However, I was delighted to receive a pre-recorded junk advertising call a month ago, as it fell within the scope of my work. 'My name is Chris', declared the recorded voice. 'I am a clairvoyant and a parapsychologist ... I have already helped people with my parapsychological gift'.
This is the first time I've heard such an advertising cold call in this field. Also striking was that this was the first time I'd come across that vernacular use of 'parapsychology' to mean 'psychical'.
I'm delighted to have been able to include this in my thesis. If only Chris had told me how to get it written faster.

A Green Man

I've only just got round to picking up a copy of Jacqueline Simpson's recent book on the folklore of pub names (1). It is the kind of well-researched delight we have come to expect from her, and I'm enjoying it very much.
I'm also extremely chuffed to find myself mentioned in the acknowledgements there. When she was researching the changing iconography of Green Men in pub signs, Jacqueline had asked around for any images people might have. She was thus able to describe a number of signs, including 'The Green Man on the corner of Plashet Grove and Katherine Road (London E6) [that] shows a "wild man" figure carrying a tankard and standing next to a barrel' (p. 121).
Here's the photo on which she based that description. I'd taken it in part because the pub was closing down, and I felt there should be some record of the motif in use there before evidence of it disappeared. The building was subsequently demolished, and a block of flats is nearing completion on the site.
There had been quite a lot of local interest in the pub because it was one of the older buildings in the area. (Although it wasn't a great pub by the time I knew it). I'm pleased that such interest can also be used to inform other research.

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1: Jacqueline Simpson, Green Men and White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names (London: Random House, 2010).

A meme streak

Last night's Newsnight saw Paul Mason appealing to the notion of 'memes' for the circulation of radical ideas. (He'd already floated the idea on his BBC blog). I hadn't intended to get into the question of meme-theory here yet. It's quite a broad field, as I've found in my doctoral research.
I've not been convinced by memes thus far. To a great extent they seem like a judgemental short cut advanced by disapproving scientists to account for religion without viewing it in any broader social context. To quote an abstract by Susan Blackmore, 'Not only does the God meme satisfy minds that were not evolved to accurately assess the origins of the universe or the likelihood of life after death, but wraps itself up in religious memeplexes that use threats and promises to ensure their own propagation'.
There are a number of problems with this. For one, it doesn't really account for contrary theories held by minds presumably at exactly the same evolutionary disadvantage. As some critics have noted, there does not seem to be a tendency for bad memes to be countered by good ones. In the work of Richard Dawkins, for example, there is a tendency for bad memes to be countered by rational criticism, which doesn't seem to have memetic status. (1) Indeed, some scientists have pointed to this problem more generally. Lewis Wolpert has written 'Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult. Is the word "bird" a meme, and is the second law of thermodynamics also one?' (2)
This tendency of memetics reveals a lack of familiarity with the study of traditional narrative and its transmission. Schrempp has pointed out that folklorists have long dealt with the transmission of traditional narrative elements - 'less ideologically and more scientifically', he notes archly - in trait and motif studies. (3)
A related problem, with more serious implications, is the implication that these motifs are themselves responsible for their own transmission. (This is clearer in Blackmore's writings than in Dawkins's). Folklorists' examination of motifs and types does not proceed from the assumption that the stories are transmitting themselves. What sounds like the ultimate in materialism from the memeticists is a way of removing human agency from cultural artefacts. It gives the idea supremacy in its philosophical framework. If you tell a myth, or believe in a god, this is evidence of your human failings in the face of quasi-genetic elements, rather than any cultural expression.
Distasteful though I may find it intellectually, however, the 'meme' has acquired a certain folk life as a way of representing transmitted ideas. You do find it in popular discussion, and in that respect it must be taken seriously. It exists as a popular and vague definition. (I don't like the popular use of 'folklore' to mean something false, but I recognise it exists, and has to be factored into any appraisal of emic analysis).
What's interesting about Mason's appeal to memes is that you see that process at work. Although he pays lip service to the notion of self-replication, in practice he actually abandons much of the contentious baggage because he sees it in terms of agent-driven communication: 'ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory ... seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes'.
I still find it a vague and unhelpful concept, in origin profoundly ignorant of any study of traditional communication, but there does seem to be some attempt to use memes now to express something closer to the items that people transmit between themselves. There seems to be some attempt to restore human matter to the transmission of non-material artefacts between people. To restore the folk to the folklore, maybe?

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1: Gregory Schrempp, 'Taking the Dawkins Challenge, or, The Dark Side of the Meme', Journal of Folklore Research, 46.1 (2009), 91-100.
2: Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 30.
3: Schrempp, 'Dawkins', 98.

The legal historian of cannibalism at sea

I'm sorry to hear that the legal historian AW Brian Simpson has died. There's plenty of detail in Christopher McCrudden's obituary in The Guardian.
Simpson's probably best known to folklorists (and most general readers) for Cannibalism and the Common Law, his classic account of the Mignonette tragedy and its ensuing legal case. (This established the precedent in English law that you could not kill someone to eat them, even in the most extreme of circumstances). I've written on the case here before.
It's an excellent book, rich with ballad and customary evidence, and it's invaluable for anyone trying to understand the clash between folk culture and the law. I used it extensively when I was working on Thackeray's poem about cannibalism at sea 'Little Billee' for an article in the Folk Music Journal, 9.5 (2010).
I don't know whether Brian Simpson ever saw this article, but he was certainly uppermost in my mind when I came to illustrate it. He had quoted a broadside ballad about the Mignonette, 'Fearful Sufferings at Sea: Lad Killed and Eaten', but wrote that he had never seen a copy of the ballad. It was serendipity that, while looking for ballad illustrations in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, I came across that very ballad in Ralph Vaughan Williams' own collection. It now adorns the cover of that issue of the journal. Its inclusion was always intended as, and remains, a small tribute to Brian Simpson's sterling work.

Ratkings

Fiona-Jane Brown has a complaint about the last of the BBC's Aurelio Zen adaptations (which aired last night). At no point. she says, did anyone mention what the 'Ratking' of the title was. As a rattophilic folklorist, I'm happy to oblige. (F-J knows, by the way, she just thinks other people should too).
The rat king is a phenomenon whereby rats apparently become knotted at the tail while they are in the nest. The famous image here is of an example from Rucphen, but there are one or two other good examples in museums around the world. The Rucphen one has been x-rayed and, yes, the rats, really are knotted together at the tails. (It's been suggested that the tails were broken and had re-knitted, which might cast a doubt on the idea that this occurred naturally when they were young).
So, there's a question-mark over whether this really is naturally occurring or whether it's been 'arranged' at some point. Apart from the actual object, what's interesting from it folklorically is that it's attached to reports of intelligent social behaviour from the rats. The rat king supposedly occurs in the nest while the rats are young, which would be a problem for their future development. Rats, though, have a reputation for cleverness, and for looking out for each other, so other rats are supposed to bring food back to the nest for the afflicted animals.
This ties in with all sorts of other folklore about rats' social behaviour. There are contemporary legends reported from Germany of two rats, each holding the end of a straw in their mouths as they scuttle round a farmyard. On closer inspection the trailing rat is found to be blind, and is being led around by its colleague. As rats swarm, there are also tales of a dominant rat leading them in their flight, and their flight is also taken as prescient of impending danger. (There's a story about rats swarming down main roads away from the bombing during the Coventry Blitz).
Just before Christmas I had the chance to see some of Walter Potter's taxidermy tableaux. The theme of the intelligent rat recurs throughout his work, although it's perhaps less well known than his kittens. In 'The Friend in Need' (below) a rat is caught in a trap. There is a concerted and intelligent effort to free him by his friends. Potter seems to have broken the faces of his rats to make them seem less visually ratlike, but it's clear that he's still dealing with folkloric ideas about rats.
In another tableau Potter portrayed rats stealing eggs. As P.A. Morris puts it, 'This is an evergreen topic of folklore in the countryside, even today. Potter admitted that he never saw such a thing himself, but created the case based upon what a clergyman (presumed to be a reliable witness) had told him'.(1) Right there you have the folkloric idea, and its transmission.
There was also a tableau of rats attempting to steal wine. This was based on another story resting on similar ideas about their intelligence. Rats are reputed to dip their tails into wine or oil, and then lick the fluid off it. (This image, and the egg-stealing, can be found in reproduction in this article about Potter).
That was a new one on me, but it fits perfectly with the other folklore about them. I really never will stop finding them fascinating.

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1: P.A. Morris, Walter Potter and His Museum of Curious Taxidermy (Ascot: MPM, 2008), p. 63.

Shoes on telephone lines

The new year finds me beavering away, wrestling full-time with finishing the thesis. So, to remind myself of some other folkloric things I love, here are some shoes thrown over telephone lines. There are all sorts of reasons for it as behaviour. I don't know why these are here, and I don't claim to have any handle on all of the reasons why they might be. That's part of the attraction of studying folklore. These were photographed in Goodwood Road, London SE14, on 16th March 2010.