Vampires of New England

In 1890, Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, came down with consumption (tuberculosis), the disease which had killed both her mother and her older sister. Her brother Edwin followed, falling ill less than a year after Mercy's death.

Certain members of the family and the town they live in decided that a paranormal cause was to blame for Edwin's death. It seemed a perfectly normal presumption to them, as the local superstition held that consumption was often caused by the intervention of dead relatives, mostly those who had themselves died of the same illness, sapping away the vitality of the living. To rural New Englanders of the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, this seemed the most likely cause of such a string of cases.

George Brown, the father of the three children, didn't believe in such things, but eventually agreed to exhume the bodies of several deceased relatives. When Mercy's corpse was found relatively free of rot, it was concluded that she was responsible for Edwin's illness, and so to keep her from similarly afflicting another member of the family, her heart was cut out of her body and burned. The ashes were also mixed with water and given to Edwin as a folk remedy against his illness. The remedy failed: Edwin Mercy died of tuberculosis in 1892.

The Perpetual Quest for Perpetual Motion

Before the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, there was no particular reason to doubt that a physical process could continue forever - no reason, that is, save the fact that it has never been observed.

Five Moments in Baseball Culture

Going into the bottom half of the eighth inning of the seventh game of the 1946 World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals were tied at three runs with the visiting Boston Red Sox. The first batter for the Cardinals was Enos Slaughter, who hit a single. This was followed by a pair of outs, and it looked like the game would be decided in its final inning - but the clean-up hitter, Harry Walker, hit a single. Slaughter, who had led off from first base substantially, rounded second and continued on to third. Then, knowing the game was down to the wire and the entire World Series was on the line, he kept going, narrowly sliding safely into home plate just before Boston's catcher had a chance to tag him out. Slaughter's "Mad Dash," as it has come to be known, would prove to be the winning run. There's now a cast bronze sculpture of Slaughter sliding into home in the North Carolina Baseball Museum, and he's been inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

Folklorists often look at the origins and development of games, and the customs of precisely how they are played, but in a world where the most important sports are those where the participants are vastly outnumbered by the spectators, the most important folklore spreads outside the field of play. Anthropologists who study ritual have likened sports fandom to religion so many times the observation is regarded as a cliche, and it's certainly true that the attachment to a single team and the powerful emotional bond a fan feels with the rest of the crowd, the players on the field, and the team colors can border on the mystical. When a film opens with Susan Sarandon's voice saying that "I believe in the Church of Baseball," the non-fan can take it as a wry moment at the start of what's going to be a comedy, while the die-hard sports fan will nod knowingly, and follow along with the entire monologue. And like any religion, baseball has its stories, its customs, and its expectations.

Development of American Safe-Haven Games

It's commonly related how baseball derives from the English sport of Rounders, or from some specific early American game such as Old Cat, but the truth is rather more complex. America has a long tradition of safe-haven games, and baseball as we know it today is not simply a product of a single branch of the family. These games, collectively, were our national pastime before we had standardized the rules in a single form, and even before we could call ourselves a nation.

The National Pastime that Might Have Been

Baseball was not, despite certain legends, invented de novo by Abner Doubleday (who never advanced any claim to being involved in its creation). Its rules instead come from a game played in the state of New York in the middle of the 19th century, which in turn derives from the same underdocumented medieval precursor as cricket. (There are in fact high medieval manuscript marginalia showing people swinging what appear to be modern baseball bats at round white balls.)

But the New York game was just what caught on beyond the region of its origin, because of the clout of New York City during the formalization of America's national sport. Other local variants existed at the time, the most prominent being one played in and around Boston. The Massachusetts version of base ball at that time (now usually known as the "Massachusetts game" but commonly called "town ball", "round ball", or "base" by its players), formalized by the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players under the name "town ball" in 1858, was different in several ways.

Rhododendron

Editor's note: the conventions of the modern American fireside ghost story tradition are under-studied by academic folklorists, so far as I can discern, but have been in place since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. In honor of Halloween, I figured I'd tell one.

"Of course you all know the rules on how to pee in the woods. We've all heard them, and they're important, so let's not be too embarrassed to review."

There are instructions for a lot of things about camping. I knew them already, because this was not my first year at camp, but the refresher was always helpful. We were getting ready for the annual overnight backpacking trip where we would spend a few nights sleeping under a tarp with our sister cabin, and there were many things we had to know. We had a brief refresher in leaving no trace, and we learned the essentials of camping skills - like how to use the bathroom when you're out on the trail.

The Michigan Dogman: a case study in myth-making

Where England has its Black Shuck and the pine barrens of New Jersey have the Jersey Devil, Michigan has the Dogman, a creature said to resemble a dog or a dog-human hybrid that is sighted in years ending in 7. Sometimes it is thought to change shape, like a werewolf. Like these other cases, it seems probable that cultural legends shape how people perceive the spooks of the darkness which the idle brain generates from misunderstood or imagined stimuli - but in the case of Michigan, we know precisely where the legend comes from, and so we can see the myth-making process in action.

There is no reality hiding behind the Dogman. The entire legend was created in 1987 as an April Fools' joke.

The Witch Craze and Modern Penis Panics

It's a well-known fact that Early Modern Europe, most especially Britain and Germany, saw a wave of panicked trial and execution of an unexpectedly high number of people, mostly women, thought to be witches. What's perhaps more surprising is that this first seems to manifest, not from an attempt to destroy some subterranean magical cult as imagined by Margaret Mead, nor from a generic McCarthy-like fear of infiltration by the enemy as in Miller's famous theatrical depiction of witch trials in colonial America, but from a highly specific sort of hysterical panic on the part of men. Witch trials in sixteenth-century Europe seem, based on the writings of those involved in them, to have been about an unusual male fear which has prompted similar outbreaks of judicial or extrajudicial violence around the world, including in the present day.

The central idea of the witch panic, in its earliest days, was the fear of having your penis stolen. From this bizarre beginning, Europeans launched themselves into a frenzy of torture and execution of alleged witches which lasted centuries.

And most wickedly I did as I sailed

My name is Captain Kidd, as I sailed, as I sailed
Oh my name is Captain Kid, as I sailed
My name is Captain Kidd, and God's laws I did forbid
And most wickedly I did, as I sailed

Inventiveness in Oral Music on the North Carolina Coast

Not long ago I acquired an album - I use the term slightly generously - from Smithsonian Folkways entitled Between the Sound and the Sea: Music of the North Carolina Outer Banks. It's a glimpse into the last generation of a lost oral tradition in coastal North Carolina, as captured by a modern folklorist without the prejudices that bedeviled the antiquarian tradition of prior decades of folklore studies, and so serves as a perfect case study for the role of authorship in at least some oral cultures.

Liar's Dice

Oral lore among those who play has it that the Hispano-American game of Dudo (Sp., lit. "doubt" or "I doubt [it]", but also the word used to call a bluff made by the previous player) is the oldest of the games in the family collectively known as "liar's dice." The game is also called Perudo, after its supposed origins in Peru. (It's certainly known there, as well as in Spain.) The story goes that the game was brought back to Spain by the conquistadores, and all other variants flow from there; many people say specifically that the rules were taught to Francisco Pizarro by his prisoner, the Sapa Inca Atahuallpa.

Dudo.

There's no evidence for this origin, and plenty of reason to find it highly improbable. But the traditional game family is well worth playing, and the diversity of customs surrounding its play is worth a look.

Special Characters in Folk Festivals

Around the world, across many centuries, traditional festivals feature the portrayal of traditional characters unique to the occasion. Many of these have ancient roots, though every one can be seen to have changed over time. Such characters are, in general, anonymous (or at least able to step out of their performers' everyday selves), tied to the context in which they are seen, and consistent from one instance of the event to the next (even if the performers change as years go by); most are associated with dance or other performance.

Pete Seeger and the Modern Folk Music Landscape

Pete Seeger broke folk music.

Born in 1919, Seeger was a communist, labor-rights activist, WWII veteran, folksong collector, singer, songwriter, banjo and guitar player whose best-known band, the Weavers, gave birth to the folk music boom of the mid 20th century. Were it not for Seeger, American traditional music would remain a niche interest, ever fading. Were it not for Seeger, American traditional music would not be politicized. Were it not for Seeger, the twelve-string guitar would be virtually unknown in America.

The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road
The Rock Island Line is the road to ride

Pete Seeger died yesterday at the age of 94. His legacy in American folk music will forever be complicated, for how he at once rescued it from perpetual obscurity and inadvertently distorted the entire tradition to match his own tastes and politics.

We Hope in a Short Time to See You Again

"Spanish Ladies" is one of the oldest known sea songs in the English language, with the first reference to it appearing in 1624 (and that on dry land, suggesting the song itself was likely older). We don't know what it sounded like until the 18th century. But at that time, it had a minor-key version of the melody that would become familiar from later versions, probably sounding something like in this video.

If that melody sounds oddly familiar, don't be too surprised - like "The Unfortunate Rake," versions of "Spanish Ladies" have been collected all across the globe, and indeed the melodies are closely related. (I would say they are precisely the same, but there are many small variations from one version of the tune to another; even within either family of lyrics, the precise tune is not constant.)

Now I'm a Young Man Cut Down in My Prime

"The Unfortunate Rake" is a song first known from the late 18th century which is notable in large measure for its truly massive number of derivatives. It may be one of the most widely-transmitted songs in the pre-revival Anglophone folk repertoire, and at least two well-known songs with completely different melodies appear to be derived from it also. Variants appear not only in English, Scottish, and American folk music, but in country, jazz, and punk versions as well. It is, in other words, one of the world's great folksong families.

The Devil's Nine Questions

If you don't answer my questions nine
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
I'll take you off to Hell alive
And sing I'm the weaver's bonny

Tell me, what is whiter than milk?
Sing ninety nine and ninety
And tell me, what is softer than silk?
And sing I'm the weaver's bonny

The Song of the Whippoorwill

How old are Coyote stories in North America? We don't know for certain - and, in fact, we can't know for certain, because they predate good written records of American Indian folklore. But stories in which a (sometimes semi-divine) Coyote functions as a trickster (and sometimes a fool) are spread over a vast area, including being shared among tribes with only limited contact in recent history, which suggests that a tradition of such stories is fairly old - most probably (but not certainly) pre-Columbian, as a lot of the decline in contact between different Indian tribes resulted from the precipitous population decline caused by European diseases that spread across the continent at a pace far exceeding that of the people who had brought them. Further, they don't seem to have been incorporated into the package of cultural ideas and images known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, which did not spread Coyote-related imagery, but their range overlaps it; this may mean nothing (they might have spread across that territory without being picked up and spread into the Southeast), but it may imply that they either spread into the upper Midwest before the period when that cultural exchange reached its zenith (so, prior to about 1200 CE), or that they spread across that space after the trading network which propagated the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (which was centered around the city of Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from the present-day city of St. Louis) was already in decline (which would put the spread of Coyote stories after about 1350 CE) - which, of course, is an annoyingly useless clue, but still a real enough one to be tantalizing.

No particular Coyote tale is especially widespread, which is consistent with a few centuries of each tribe separately developing its own particular Coyote mythos. Unfortunately, it also means we don't know which Coyote stories are of particularly great age; all we know is what ones are part of the oral tradition at the time various folklorists collected them. This one, collected by Mary Magoulick in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, seems to rely on the audience already being aware that Coyote is not to be trusted, so it's probably not the oldest, but it could still be very old. We wouldn't know - that's the difficulty of studying the history of peoples without written records.

Here, then, is a Coyote story, in the words of Ogimakwe, a woman of the Nishnaabe tribe. I've removed an aside or two and a couple of Magoulick's notes on Ogimakwe's precise pronunciation, but otherwise, the story is unedited, exactly as told.