2.4 Influence on the American folklore

The United States was formed on land that was, for centuries, home to a number of Native American tribes Subsequently, after a long history of both conflict and peace, the United States formed as a union influenced both by European cultures and Native American culture. The result was a unique shared history and culture that is still evolving today. From language to structures within society, Native American culture has played a major role in influencing historic and day to day development of American culture [ http://www.wisegeek.com/how-has-america-been-influenced-by-native-american-culture.htm ].

Of course, European influences on African American folklore are incontestable. English is the first language of African Americans and, like their African ancestors, African Americans enjoy and value imitation. By the same token, the folklore traditions of Americans of European descent reflect borrowings from Black traditions. Most folklorists agree that African American folk traditions are syncretized. Blacks have retained many West African aesthetic principles and wedded them to those from other cultures to which they have been exposed. The songs, narratives, jokes, rituals, beliefs, and so forth that result are intrinsically African American [Folklore: http://american-folklore-guide.blogspot.ru ].

Throughout the late 19th century and well into the 20th, African Americans migrated from rural Southern roads to urban Northern streets. Folklore continued to function as an essential expression of everyday Black life. Older genres were modified to fit city environments. Bluesmen frequently replaced acoustic instruments with electric ones, and lyrics focused on the challenges posed by urban industrial life. Quilters modified their techniques to include sewing machines. Worship services took place in storefront churches rather than in pine-board ones. Thus, urban life altered but did not diminish the importance of folklore [3, p.390].

African Americans celebrate verbal versatility and have employed a variety of modes of verbal communication to express themselves. Children are urged to hone their oratorical abilities. Girls often begin by chanting the intricate rhymes that accompany “Double-Dutch” jump-roping sessions. Boys and many girls develop their skills by participating in ritual insult-swapping sessions known as “playing the dozens.” In some circles, sophisticated verbal artistry is conveyed in toasts—lengthy epic poems featuring the escapades of unlikely Black heroes. Other familiar genres of African American folk speech include signifyin’, capping, rapping, loud-talking, and marking. Friendly competition is often the hallmark of these forms as individuals vie for respect by showing off their verbal prowess.

Contemporary legends and rumors are as common among African Americans as they are within the dominant culture. Some cycles, like the Kentucky Fried Rat and the mouse in the Coke bottle, are well known by both Blacks and Whites. But cycles specific to the concerns of African Americans have evolved and are well contained within the group. Businesses that have unorthodox advertising practices and symbolically charged products are often identified in these legends. The notion that “the government” constructs elaborate anti-Black conspiracies is often promoted [6, p.211].

Not all scrutiny of African American folklore has been on verbal forms. In the past several decades, many folklorists have turned their attention to material culture, in particular house types and quilts. Throughout African American rural communities, shotgun houses have been cataloged. The floor plans for these houses line up a back exit behind a front entrance with no wall or structural interference between the two doors. Thus, it is said that if a shot was fired from either the front or rear of the house, the bullet would go straight through, without lodging in the home. These houses are noteworthily similar to structures found in many West African communities. There the folk explanation for the floor plan maintains that if the spirit of an ancestor wanders into the home, it will wander out the other side without getting trapped within. Many quilts made by African American women and men vary a great deal from other American quilts. Like many kinds of West African textiles, long, rectangular strips dominate many of the quilts. Conventional symmetry in which a shape or a color is balanced on one side by the same shape or color on the other seems to be less important to African American quilters than to other quilters. Many Black quilters prefer to fool the eye by knowingly constructing asymmetrical arrangements. Synthetic fabrics are used more often in African American quilts than in mainstream quilts, and red is the most frequently used color. Academic attention to African American material culture has triggered interest in the art world [12, p.72].

African American quilts, sculpture, baskets, and other artifacts are found and sold in the finest museums and galleries. African American spiritual life has always been a rich source of folklore. During the slavery era, African Americans combined West African and Caribbean folk-belief practices with Christian beliefs. A system of folk belief known as conjure or hoodoo developed in many Southern locales. Believers supposed that conjure doctors understood how to use powers contained in nature, and some conjure doctors were accorded the same respect as preachers. Conjure or hoodoo are sometimes confused with voodoo, which is akin to vaudou in Haiti. These belief systems stem from Dahomean (present-day Nigeria) sacred practices. Dahomeans traded into slavery were transported to Haiti. Some of these slaves were then traded to New Orleans. Voodoo is an enormously complex system centered on root work and snake worship. In voodoo as well as santeria (Cuba and the United States), candomble (Brazil and the United States), and shango (Trinidad and the United States), African religious principles are syncretized with Christian principles [Folklore: http://american-folklore-guide.blogspot.ru ].

More conventional Christian worship is also common in African American communities. Folklorists have been particularly interested in the delivery styles of African American preachers and the status afforded the congregation. African American congregations actively participate in all aspects of the worship service. Preachers frequently chant their sermons, all the while soliciting affirmation and testimony from their listeners. A lively, vocal congregation is the sign of a successful preacher. Young African Americans often complain about the speed at which the population at large appropriates appealing Black folk expression. Music, clothing, dance styles, and art forms shaped by African Americans are soon adopted by the dominant culture. However, the impulse to transform and invent folk expression is a strong one, and African Americans, like all folk groups, will continue to enjoy an exciting folk culture.

Folk legends and folk beliefs did germinate in North America and they did reflect American energies and experi­ences, yet they prove to be for the most part carbon copies of the folklore in Tudor and Stuart England. Religious issues preoccupied colonial Americans, and in affairs of the church they stayed close to English and Continental models. Perry Miller has traced the hardening of the first generation of New England Puritan dissenters from the Anglican Church into a resbyterian orthodoxy of their own, and Daniel Boorstin has sketched the slippage of Virginian Anglicans into loose Congregational forms as a result of frontier conditions. But the colonies produced no new churches. Innovative American faiths such as Mormonism and Christian Science grew out of the nineteenth century [9, p. 288]. On theological matters the settlers remained on the whole conservative. Dissenting Protestant sects like the Puritans, the Quakers, and the Anabaptists crossed to America, not to evolve new creeds and forms, but to protect and maintain those already conceived, while the established churches—Anglican, Roman Catholic, Dutch Reformed—kept a hold on their New World communicants tight enough to prevent schisms or defections.

What was true for institutional religion proved even truer for its underside, the folk supematuralism that helped order the universe for seventeenth-century man. American colonists faithfully retained the folk beliefs they had inherited from their English and Continental forebears. We may set colonial and Tudor-Stuart spectral narratives side by side and find virtual duplication. Divine judgments and providences, witches and witchcrafts, ghosts and poltergeists, a personalized Devil and his train of invisible demons, provided the themes of countless anecdotes, legends, and cautionary tales on both sides of the Atlantic. Puritans in England and America kept diaries laden with providential incidents. Court records of witchcraft cases in both countries contained similar accounts of maleficium. Clergy and common folk in the mother country and in the colonies feared the Devil in his shapes of a suave gentleman, a black man, a black dog, and other guises. Such excellent studies as Katharine Briggs’s Pale Hecate’s Team, Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, arid Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, which present in full detail the religious folk beliefs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, could readily extend their coverage to the North American colonies. George Lyman Kittredge did indeed title his older, classic work Witchcraft in Old and New England to indicate the transatlantic continuity of credence in witches [1, p.492].