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Interesting article on Appa. folklorist
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Interesting article on Appa. folklorist |
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Subject: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: katlaughing Date: 18 Dec 01 - 10:46 AM From the NYTimes:
December 18, 2001
ELKINS JOURNAL Modern highways let him journey among the secrets of the mountain hollows far faster in the 27th year of his serendipitous mission. But so, too, do the roads speed the young generation away from their roots, endangering the chance to carry on the old, unwritten craft of Johnboat building down in Gauley Bridge, for example, or the art of backwoods witch doctoring still practiced hereabouts beyond the Interstate. "There's a 94-year-old witch doctor I've found who lives right up in that hollow," Mr. Milnes announces, speeding past an inviting dark turn of hexes and incantations on his way to a cemetery. "She's one of 12 active witches I've found in the central part of the state alone," he adds with a smile of satisfaction. He is a happy wanderer who knows that his work will never be done as time piles upon time here firmer than mine slag. Mr. Milnes, 55, is the folk art coordinator for the Augusta Heritage Center, a resource here at Davis & Elkins College that is becoming an Appalachian mecca for folk art specialists who gather for workshops. "I've got to get Tom Cole an apprentice," Mr. Milnes resolves in a message to himself. He worries that no one is currently learning firsthand from Mr. Cole, a fifth-generation — and potentially last-generation — builder of Johnboats, a special sort of wooden river flatboat for which there are no written plans. "Tom has it all in his head, even the wooden oarlocks," Mr. Milnes says. "He works out the precise angles to cut and fit just by looking at the wood before him." It is the heritage center's apprenticeship program, in which old masters of mountain arts are matched up for months of close study with talented neophytes, that comforts Mr. Milnes. He is a self-taught folklorist who branched out from his own love of fiddling to tap the masters of a world of other arts — from hoedown dancing to headstone carving. "It's the people in the hollows who make this happen," Mr. Milnes says of the Augusta program, which has trained more than 100 apprentices. Fifteen are currently at work, living near masters like Jimmy Dowdle, who arrived to work timber as an outsider from the Great Smoky Mountains 70 years ago and transplanted his unusual banjo style, a combination of up-picking and brush- stroking. In frequent field trips, the folklorist wanders by ear as much as by eye. He tracked down Charlie Wise after hearing of a man in Hampshire County who obsessively built 7-foot birdhouses encrusted with stone. Along the back roads, Mr. Milnes takes careful note of how fast the latest terms are artfully adjusted to the patois of the hollows. "Alzheimer's" becomes "old-timer's" and "cardiogram" comes out "heartigram." In searching the state, Mr. Milnes finds that the many new miles of highways (most of which seem to be named after Senator Robert C. Byrd, the state's Democratic patriarch) are a way to fast-forward to scores of rural flea markets that have sprung up in recent years. "That's where I find out what's happening," Mr. Milnes emphasizes. "You can find some old guy selling horse collars and hear the real stories. If you want to get to earth, go to the flea markets and you find the present and the past." Lately, Mr. Milnes, who documents folk arts on film and in books, has been deskbound, writing grant requests. The Augusta Center has a staff of seven directed by Margo Blevin. Its $875,000 budget is financed largely by master workshops for visitors, including Dulcimer Week in the spring and Fiddlers Reunion in the fall. Support also comes from the college, the National Endowment for the Arts and the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. "People still make rural headstones," Mr. Milnes gently notes as he takes a break from the grant writing and turns to the comfort of the past. He wanders the headstones of Israel Church, a handsome slant of old and new hilltop graves, a serene accounting of departed people. The folklorist savors a "tree- stump" headstone, perfectly named. It is one of the homemade markers crafted a century ago to mourn unionized lumberjacks, known as Woodsmen of the World, whose story Mr. Milnes is still searching out. "I'm always checking out the landscape, always chipping away at it," Mr. Milnes says, looking about him as if the past of Appalachia were ever closer. |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: Pinetop Slim Date: 18 Dec 01 - 10:56 AM I hear Milnes is an impressive fiddler as well. Has a CD of "crooked tunes" with dulcimer player Lorraine Hammond that has gotten good reviews. |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: Fortunato Date: 18 Dec 01 - 02:27 PM Chalk this up as one of the careers I'd rather have had. |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: catspaw49 Date: 18 Dec 01 - 02:30 PM So Chance, do you find there's way too many of those? Good article kat! Spaw |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: Fortunato Date: 18 Dec 01 - 02:52 PM Just a few, Pat. But they're so damned clear in hindsight. A few weeks after my wife met me she said, "Why didn't you become a folklorist?" I could only answer, "Because I had my head up my... well, you know. |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 19 Dec 01 - 01:10 AM Damn! I'm with you, Fortunato. P. S. Is it ever really too late? |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: katlaughing Date: 19 Dec 01 - 01:42 AM Thanks, everyone, but really I think you can say we are, all of us, a new kind of folklorist, using the Internet to its best ability. Of course some high-falutin' perfesser-type with grant money will folklore us, someday, collecting all of our collections and talk about that quaint and zany lot on the web!**BG** Good morrow, fellow folklorists! |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: GUEST,Leigha Date: 19 Dec 01 - 03:00 AM Might Mr. Milnes' "comfort of the past" engage in a bit of essentializing of the complexities of the modern Appalachian socio-political situation? |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 20 Dec 01 - 01:46 AM essentializing? Wha? |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: Dicho (Frank Staplin) Date: 20 Dec 01 - 04:38 PM Kat, I think you will find your "perfesser-type" folklorist is a man or woman who goes out and lives, as much as possible, with the people who have preserved the old arts and receipts, customs and crafts. The university-educated types working in the field (not lab) that I know about either originally came from the "back country" or developed an intimate knowledge of the people and their arts through close association for many years. There are many examples of these dedicated folklorists, but one of my favorites is a woman, now dead, who came to New Mexico and Arizona long ago and became interested in the Navajo, his healing ceremonies and his sandpaintings. Mrs. Wheelwright was a wealthy, full-blooded easterner, university-educated, who threw herself into her new pursuit. She developed close ties with the Navajo healers, and built a museum to house their sand-paintings and allied art. So closely did she become associated, that the Navajo healers came to the museum and constructed their sand-paintings, including those that were private to the Navajo, because she convinced them that they should be preserved, would be treated as sacred to their beliefs, and that the Navajo healers would help in the curation and display. Materials considered private to the Navajo would be re-created and blessed, but would not be publicly displayed. She was scorned at first by the anthropologists at the Laboratory of Anthropology, but her Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian is now justly famous and worth a visit to Santa Fé just to see that one (of many) collections and research facilities. As the name implies,, the goals have expanded to cover other Indian arts and crafts. Similarily dedicated people work in association with the gigantic Museum of International Folk Art, also in Santa Fé. Information found on the internet is helpful to all of us, but compilation of this information is not research in the true sense because it does not involve the assembling and assessing of new, unpublished material that will help us to re-evaluate information and artifacts already compiled. In the future, as suggested by katlaughing, the people and activities of the internet will be studied by the social anthropologist and social historian. Some researchers are already involved in that field. |
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Subject: RE: Interesting article on Appa. folklorist From: katlaughing Date: 20 Dec 01 - 04:44 PM Thanks, Dicho. In fact that brings to mind a Mudcatter who asked, this past year, for suggestions etc. in helping her fiddle teacher to preserve the hundreds of tunes he'd written over the years. It seemed a nice blend of "in the field" and cybervillage collaboration. And, know I've been caught out in a tongue in cheek assumption, as Leigha, who posted above, is none other than the one who asked for our help on songs about death for her paper at Columbia. Wonderful thread! |
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