A brilliant testament to the ethnographer's art, the deeply rooted wisdom of an "ordinary" person, and the complex ways in which folklore figures in everyday life along the Irish border.

Offers practical illustrations from different disciplines and perspectives, showing how researchers from various backgrounds deal with narrative data.

A folklorist explores the storytelling traditions of a small Irish town where local character anecdotes build community across sectarian divides. More than quaint local color, folklore is a crucial part of life in Aghyaran, a mixed Catholic-Protestant border community in Northern Ireland. Neighbors socialize during wakes and ceilis—informal nighttime gatherings—without regard to religious, ethnic, or political affiliation. The witty, sometimes raucous stories swapped on these occasions offer a window into Aghyaran residents’ views of self and other in the wake of decades of violent conflict. Through anecdotes about local characters, participants explore the nature of community and identity in ways that transcend Catholic or Protestant sectarian histories. Ray Cashman analyzes local character anecdotes in detail and argues that while politicians may take credit for the peace process in Northern Ireland, no political progress would be possible without ordinary people using shared resources of storytelling and socializing to imagine and maintain community.

Profiles of artists and performers from around the world form the basis of this innovative volume that explores the many ways individuals engage with, carry on, revive, and create tradition. Leading scholars in folklore studies consider how the field has addressed the connections between performer and tradition and examine theoretical issues involved in fieldwork and the analysis and dissemination of scholarship in the context of relationships with the performers. Honoring Henry Glassie and his remarkable contributions to the field of folklore, these vivid case studies exemplify the best of performer-centered ethnography.

In the time of the Troubles, when bombs blew through the night and soldiers prowled down the roads, Henry Glassie came to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure through history. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh, and listened to the old people. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world. In their view, their world was one of love, defeat, and uncertainty, demanding the virtues of endurance: faith, bravery, and wit. Glassie's task in this book is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale, which explains their conditions and converts them into a tragedy of conflict and a comedy of the absurd. It gathers the saints and warriors, and celebrates the stars whose wit enabled endurance in days of violence and deprivation. With patience and respect, Glassie describes life in a time and a place exactly like no other, and yet Ballymenone is like a thousand other places where people work on the land during the day and tell their own tales at night, forgotten, while the men of power fill the newspapers and history books by sending poor boys out to be killed. The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete repertory of verbal art from a rural community where storytelling and singing of quality remained a part of daily life.

Walk the halls of the famous studio that produced hits for Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, and Booker T. and the MGs. Soulsville, U.S.A. provides the first history of the groundbreaking label along with compelling biographies of the promoters, producers, and performers who made and sold the music. Over 45 photos. Winner of the 1998 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award Winner of the ARSC Award for Best Research in Record Labels

When itinerant singers from China’s countryside become iconic artists, worlds collide. The lives and performances of these representative singers become sites for conversations between the rural and urban, local and national, folk and elite, and traditional and modern. In Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China, Levi S. Gibbs examines the life and performances of “Folksong King of Western China” Wang Xiangrong (b. 1952) and explores how itinerant performers come to serve as representative symbols straddling different groups, connecting diverse audiences, and shifting between amorphous, place-based local, regional, and national identities. Moving from place to place, these border walkers embody connections between a range of localities, presenting audiences with traditional, modern, rural, and urban identities among which to continually reposition themselves in an evolving world. Born in a small mountain village near the intersection of the Great Wall and the Yellow River in a border region with a rich history of migration, Wang Xiangrong was exposed to a wide range of songs as a child. The songs of Wang’s youth prepared him to create a repertoire of region-representing pieces and mediate between regions, nations, and multinational corporations in national and international performances. During the course of a career that included meeting Deng Xiaoping in 1980 and running with the Olympic torch in 2008, Wang’s life, songs, and performances have come to highlight various facets of social identity in contemporary China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with Wang and other professional folksingers from northern Shaanxi province at weddings, Chinese New Year galas, business openings, and Christmas concerts, Song King argues that songs act as public conversations people can join in on. As song kings and queens fuse personal and collective narratives in performances of iconic songs, they provide audiences with compelling models for socializing personal experience, negotiating a sense of self and group in an ever-changing world.