The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #108389   Message #2586881
Posted By: Kent Davis
11-Mar-09 - 11:06 PM
Thread Name: Folklore: supernatural gone from american songs
Subject: RE: Folklore: supernatural gone from american songs
Other than the fact that I was blessed with unusually wonderfully parents, my childhood was, I believe, a fairly typical American fundamentalist childhood of the 1960s and 70s. Obviously I was raised on a steady diet of the Biblically supernatural. For what it's worth, here's a list of some non-Biblical supernatural folkloric elements from my childhood:

1. requesting, in writing and in person, toys from Santa Claus
2. believing that Santa knew whether our behavior was good or bad.
3. believing that some of the toys were made by elves and delivered via flying reindeer.
4. searching for baskets of candy and eggs that had been delivered by the Easter Bunny.
5. hiding our milk teeth under our pillows for the tooth fairy to exchange for money.
6. attempting (only half-seriously) to reach the end of the rainbow. in case there really were a pot of gold there
7. dressing up as monsters, ghosts, or witches on Halloween.
8. reading fairy tales based (loosely) on those collected by the brothers Grimm, Perrault, etc, and watching movies based (even more loosely) on those fairy tales.
9. hearing, but not really quite believing, what would later be called "urban legends", such as the vanishing hitchhiker.
10. learning (but not believing) superstitions like "Step on a crack, break your momma's back".
11. playing at witchcraft (using a Ouija board, for example).

Except perhaps for #11, these experiences were common among the children of American fundamentalists. My point is simply that American fundamentalism is compatible with non-religious supernatural elements of folklore.

Kent