Lee Haring

Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (review)

ing activity by world war II and various industry disputes. More to the point, when recording resumed a few years later, there were significant stylistic changes that had occurred almost simultaneously among blues, gospel, country, jazz, and ethnic music. The terminus a quo will surprise some readers who learned on mother’s knee that the first recorded country music artist was fiddler eck Robertson, immortalized in June 1922; Russell, however, includes sacred material by the vaughan Quartet recorded a year earlier. In his excellent introduction, Russell discusses carefully and judiciously what recordings fall into the category of “country music” (earlier “old time music,” “hillbilly music,” etc.). seeking to avoid the pitfalls of prior blues and gospel discographers, who through several editions excluded such ensembles as the Fisk Jubilee singers because their material was not sufficiently “negroid” in content, Russell includes many artists at the fringes of most definitions of country music: “city billies” such as Al Bernard and Arthur Fields (but not Arthur Collins or wendell Hall), gospel groups such as the vaughans (but not Homer Rodeheaver), northeastern musicians such as Mellie Dunham (but not Henry Ford’s old Time Dance orchestra), and Cajun groups. Russell excludes the early “folksong interpreters” (Bentley Ball and Carl sandburg), the rural monologuists (Cal stewart, a.k.a. “Uncle Josh”), and studio violinists (Don Richardson). He has included all the commercial products made for sale to the public within the years indicated; this omits ethnographic field recordings (such as those by the Lomaxes) and electrical transcriptions made for radio play and generally not for sale. These are criteria that are being argued over (and will be argued over) at length among aficionados; Russell has considered them all carefully and discussed his rationales, and I believe his decisions were sound ones. The main listing is supplemented by title and supporting artist indexes. The former is particularly important, and earlier discographical references published without one have accumulated heaps of disparagement. Does the book have any errors or omissions? It certainly does, but they are unavoidable in a work of this scope—nearly one thousand pages of artist entries, including approximately thirty thousand recordings and many more releases. Publication has a magical way of unsealing the lips of secretive record collectors who had previously declined to contribute information to the record-collecting fraternity, and subsequent editions will necessarily be improvements. The introductory material also includes an admirable essay on the nature of the early country music recording industry, as well as on the record companies that marketed this type of material. Russell has been collecting and writing about country, blues, and folk music for over three decades, and his knowledge is extensive. Another publication that must be mentioned in the context of country music discography is Country Music Resources by Guthrie Meade, with Richard spottswood and Douglas s. Meade (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, 2002). This work is a discography of commercial (country music) recordings of songs and tunes that have been recovered from oral tradition. As such, it is itemrather performer-oriented. Many country recordings have no apparent traditional analogues, so they are absent from Meade’s work; on the other hand, Meade does include LP/CD reissues and references to published collections for the items included. Thus, these two essential works overlap, but neither subsumes the other.

Suggestions Towards a Theory of Folklore (review)

In Hungary, the long, honorable tradition of scholarly folkloristics marks folklore and its study as perfectly distinct. No scholar understands that distinctiveness better than Vilmos Voigt, longtime chair of the folklore department at Loránd Eötvös University, in Budapest. Ceaselessly active in international conferences, he deserves still more recognition. The twentyfive articles (originally published from 1969 to 1992) in this book are addressed to fellow folklorists and chosen from a prolific output; they all point to directions for future folklorists. Most are very short: they condense huge amounts of reading and always lead toward terse remarks on what has been and could be done. With its enormous range of reference, the book is well titled. It suggests a systematic theory of folklore, or at least of folk literature, that has not yet come into being. That theory proposes, with Bogatyrev and Jakobson, that folklore is “a special form of creative art” (p. 27) made by admirable creators (pp. 193–200). Folk literature must be distinguished from literary art and from simple oral communication (though how the separation is to be made remains problematic; p. 70). At some periods in the author’s thinking, at least, folklore is “the whole social consciousness of the subjected classes in a class-society” (p. 221, with references to other occurrences of this formulation). Genre in folklore, which requires accurate definition, is prior to the item: it “incorporates the traditions, the frames indispensable to the creation, performing, reception and transmission of the works of folklore, and is the most important means also of social ‘control’” (p. 73). The hierarchy of genres is determined by social factors (p. 74). For folktale, the most important research is to reconstruct the history of the genre (pp. 135–41, a prodigious survey of research). Interpretation of folklore up to now has followed behind literary interpretation (p. 298). A receiver’s spontaneous interpretation of a tale is its “meaning”; the scholar’s interpretation moves into semantics or semiotic. A reader should begin with the twentieth paper in the collection, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” on heart-stealing, which connects with the work of David Hufford and Gábor Klaniczay and brilliantly illustrates the sweep of comparative folkloristics. Another paper shows Vilmos Voigt to have been a pioneer in studying “folklorism,” which he systematically presents on the basis of his clear separation between folklore and nonfolklore (pp. 185–92). His work on structuralism discusses all the challenges: the segmentation of the material, transformational rules within a genre, accounting for variability, and the multiplicity of levels. It even speculates about the correlation between structural analysis and the existence of narrative universals (pp. 76–91). In short, the number and variety of this author’s topics and references reflects a formidably ambitious idea of folklore, which we could well embrace.