Volume 10, Number 6 · March 28, 1968
The Best Turnips on the Creek
By Albert B. Friedman
Folklore in America
selected and edited by Tristram P. Coffin, by Hennig Cohen
To many of its enthusiasts, folklore is a matter of survivals, an assortment of 'living fossils' out of which a quaint world of magic, primitive emotions, and pastoral simplicity can be reconstructed. This sentimental nostalgia is fairly innocuous when it merely stimulates a pleasing escapism or even when it encourages cultural infantilism. Unfortunately, however, the Arcadian America of the nostalgic folklorist betrays more disquieting symptoms. A Negro, for example, rarely appears as a cowboy on TV, though, as Philip Durham and E. L. Jones have shown, a quarter of the cow-punchers on the great trail drives of 1866-89 were Negroes. Even in somewhat more serious folk reconstructions, like those of Stephen Vincent Benét, the atmosphere imperceptibly becomes suffused with cozy feelings of racial and national superiority.
Review, 1993 words
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