Story and Other Narrative Forms

Although the American Folklife Center’s collections of folksong and other musical forms have received the most attention from scholars, the media, and the general public, the Folk Archive contains extensive collections of narrative materials as well, both in the form of sound recordings and as manuscripts.

Story is a principal conduit for folklore, as it is for culture in general. Stories range from ancient myths and legends, to personal-experience narratives, to the latest urban legends and e-mail hoaxes. The parables of the New Testament convey the moral and religious teachings of Jesus. Aesop’s fables are didactic animal tales offering a clever illustration of a political or ethical point. Medieval romances, such as those of King Arthur, Parsifal, or Tristan and Isolde, provide narrative instruction on morals and manners. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected German folktales that project the deepest values of the German people. And in Finland, Elias Lönnrot collected the stories that make up the Kalevala (1835), the Finnish national epic.

Likewise, in the making of the American nation, stories helped create both national and regional identities. Hero tales, such as those told of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Davy Crockett killing the bear, and John Henry battling the steam drill, encapsulate national mores and values. America has its “Jack Tales” from Appalachia, tales of Brer Rabbit from the American South, and coyote tales of Native American tribes. All three of these concern the trickster, a folk character who appears in different forms in different cultures, using clever tricks to outsmart his rivals or “beat the system.” America has its ghost stories and other tales of the supernatural, creation stories, and animal fables.

In addition to examples of story genres mentioned here, there are in the Archive of Folk Culture many other forms of verbal lore. Poems, jokes, and riddles tell of our delight in language, and sometimes of our feelings toward outsiders. Folk drama enacts a community’s values and often parodies its foibles. Children’s games often include rhymes and chants. Jokes, including ethnic and racial jokes, are also part of folklore, and may be found in the Folk Archive as well.

One special field project was launched during the 1930s, largely under the aegis of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project. Interviews were conducted and transcriptions made of former slaves telling their stories of life under slavery. These well-known written materials are located in the Library’s Manuscript Division. About the same time, a number of folklorists, including Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Henry Faulk, made sound recordings of former slaves, and over six hours of these moving narrative accounts are located in the Folk Archive, capturing the voices of those who lived through one of the darkest periods of American history.

Not to be overlooked in the Folk Archive collections are written forms of narrative. There are many thousands of pages of manuscript materials, from researchers’ field notes created during virtually every center-sponsored field project to letters written by collectors, performers, and others. One collection includes written stories, jokes, anecdotes, and rumors compiled during World War II to survey people’s thoughts and feelings about the war. The government-sponsored program was designed for internal-security reasons, to find out what rumors were being spread. There is also a small but interesting collection of autograph albums from the nineteenth century and a very large collection of Brazilian chapbooks (grassroots “newspapers” containing songs, poems, and stories on a variety of topics) that continues to grow through the good auspices of the Library’s Hispanic Division and the Rio de Janeiro field office.

Between 1977 and 1997, the American Folklife Center conducted fifteen field projects and cultural surveys. As a result, the archive collections are rich in narrative accounts (and other documentation) of everyday life along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina and cowboy life and occupational culture in Montana and Paradise Valley, Nevada. Traditional agricultural practices in the Pinelands National Reserve in New Jersey are documented in narrative, as is Acadian culture in northern Maine. Ethnic and occupational traditions in Chicago, Illinois, Paterson, New Jersey, and Lowell, Massachusetts are described, and so is life in the Appalachian forests of West Virginia. Housewives in the Pine Barrens share their recipes for cranberries and others in western Virginia tell how to piece a quilt; a rancher in Nevada tells how cowboy life has changed over the years; a woman in Paterson tells how she came to join a union as a young girl working in the mills.

The addition of two very large collections to the Archive of Folk Culture — the International Storytelling Foundation Collection and the Veterans History Project Collection — substantially increased the representation of narrative and oral history.

The International Storytelling Foundation, located in Jonesborough, Tennessee, donated one of the largest and most important archival collections of modern storytelling in the world. The collection includes eight thousand hours of audio and video recordings, as well as photographs, manuscripts, and publications, that document every National Storytelling Festival since its founding in 1973. Performers represented in this collection include traditional storytellers, with stories that have been passed along in their families for many generations, and “professional” storytellers, with newly minted tales of their own families, experiences, and observations. Unlike the audiences of bygone days, gathered around a hearth to pass the time on a long winter night, audiences at Jonesborough and other such venues have found themselves under a tent on a bright autumn day. But the artful storyteller still has the power to entertain, delight, and, occasionally, instruct.

In October 2000, Congress unanimously passed the Veterans Oral History Act (Public Law 106-380) in order to create a collection of documentary materials at the Library of Congress honoring the nation’s war veterans and those who served in support of them. “It is in the nation’s best interest to collect and catalog oral histories of America’s war veterans so that future generations will have original sources of information . . . and may learn of the heroics, tediousness, horrors, and triumphs of war,” states the legislation. This enormous and important task was given to the American Folklife Center, which has come to be known for its expertise in collecting and preserving the cultural heritage of the American people. [See the Veterans History Project website for more information.]