Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1999 Children's Folklore Brian Sutton-Smith Jay Mechling Thomas W. Johnson Felicia R. McMahon Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Folklore Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Sutton-Smith, B. (1999). Children's folklore: A source book. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE A SOURCE BOOK EDITED BY BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH JAY MECHLING THOMAS W. JOHNSON FELICIA R. McMAHON UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Logan, Utah Copyright © 1999 by Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon. All rights reserved. Cover photograph: Children outside tenements in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1895, by Frances B. Johnston. Courtesy ofthe Library of Congress. Cover design by Michelle Sellers. Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Children's folklore: a source book I edited by Brian Sutton-Smith ... [et al.]. p. em. ISBN 0-87421-280-4 Originally published: New York: Garland, 1995, in series: Garland reference library ofsocial science; vol. 647. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children -- Folklore. 2. Children and folklore. 3. Folklore -­ Methodology. I. Sutton-Smith, Brian. GR475.C49 1999 11769490 CIP CONTENTS IX CONTRIBUTORS Xl PREFACE 3 INTRODUCTION: WHAT Is CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE? Brian Sutton-Smith Chapter I II WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD? Sylvia Ann Grider SECTION I 19 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE Brian Sutton-Smith Chapter 2 23TH E COM P LEXITY 0 F CHI LD REN' S F 0 LKLO RE Rosemary Levy Zumwalt Chapter 3 49 THE TRANSMISSION OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE John H. McDowell SECTION II 63 OVERVIEW: METHODS IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE Brian Sutton-Smith Chapter 4 75 DOUBLE DUTCH AND DOUBLE CAMERAS: STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD Ann Richman Beresin Chapter 5 93 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING Linda A. Hughes Chapter 6 121 METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF COLLECTING FOLKLORE FROM CHILDREN Gary Alan Fine SECTION III 141 OVERVIEW: CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE CONCERNS Brian Sutton-Smith Chapter 7 145 SONGS, POEMS, AND RHYMES c. W. Sullivan III Chapter 8 161 RIDDLES Danielle M. Roemer Chapter 9 193 TALES AND LEGENDS Elizabeth Tucker Chapter 10 213 TEASES AND PRANKS Marilyn Jorgensen SECTION IV 225 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES Brian Sutton-Smith VI CONTENTS Chapter II 229 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS Bernard Mergen Chapter 12 251 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN Simon J. Bronner Chapter 13 273 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS: SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES Jay Mechling CONCLUSION 293 TH E PAS TIN TH E PRE SENT: TH EORETI CA L D I RECTI ON S FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith 309 GLOSSARY: AN AID FOR SOURCE BOOK READERS 317 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE Thomas W. Johnson (and Felicia R. McMahon) 371 INDEX vii CONTRIBUTORS SIMON j. BRONNER JOHN H. McDoWELL American Studies and Folklore Institute Humanities Indiana University Pennsylvania State University, Bloomington Capitol Campus Middletown FELICIA R. McMAHON Anthropology GARY ALAN FINE Syracuse University Department of Sociology Syracuse, NY University of Georgia Athens JAY MECHLING American Studies Program SYLVIA ANN GRIDER University of California Graduate College Davis Texas A & M University College Station BERNARD MERGEN American Studies LINDA A. HUGHES George Washington Cochranville, PA University Washington, DC THOMAS W. JOHNSON Liberal Studies ANN RICHMAN BERESIN California State University Philadelphia, PA Chico MARILYN JORGENSEN Sacramento, CA DANIELLE M. ROEMER ELIZABETH TUCKER Department of Language and Department of English Literature State University of New York Northern Kentucky University Binghamton Highland Heights ROSEMARY LEVY ZUMWALT C.w. SULLIVAN III Department of Anthropology Department of English and Sociology East Carolina University Davidson College Greenville, NC Davidson, NC BRIAN SUTION-SMITH Sarasota, Florida X CONTRIBUTORS PREFACE This book began when the late Sue Samuelson, my first teaching assistant in 1977 for the children's folklore course at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that it would not be possible to do a thesis in children's folklore because there was absolutely no interest in children either at the American Folklore Society (AFS) or in the Folklore Department at the university. What­ ever the truth of her indictment, it led me to approach Barbara Kirshenblatt­ Gimblett and Tom Burns (also of that department) with the proposal that we begin a Children's Folklore Society within AFS. And we did just that. The society continues with admirable autonomy, now issuing its own jour­ nal, Children's Folklore Review, under the editorship of C.W. Sullivan III. The idea for the second phase, which became the present work, emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting. Jay Mechling, Tom Johnson, and I decided that the next step in assisting children's folklore to academic credibility would be the development of a handbook for course use. It took about five years to find the authors and get the first outlines of the present work on the table. For the next five years I used the outline as a text in my children's folklore course and benefited immeasur­ ably from the student critiques of it. During those ten years the manuscript wandered in and out of the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Smith­ sonian Press, finally coming to rest at Garland Publishing, owing to the zest of Garland editor Marie Ellen Larcada. From 1990 to the present, we all suffered the vicissitudes of trying to get all this material into the computer. Ultimately we were saved by Felicia R. McMahon of Syracuse Uni­ versity, who undertook the prodigious work of scholarly editorship to bring the work to fruition-as well as to add materials from her own research. Along the way it was decided that our work was not comprehensive enough to be a handbook, but that it was a step in that direction and a useful first sourcebook. Her efforts were aided greatly by the assistance of Dr. Nancy Shawcross of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Susan Wadley of Syracuse University. For my part, all of this was originally made possible because Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett had once suggested that a course I had taught for ten years at Teachers College, Columbia University, which I entitled "The Psy­ chology of Childlore," be called "Children's Folklore" and brought to the University of Pennsylvania. I did that for a year and then joined the Univer­ sity of Pennsylvania with appointments in both education and folklore, a move made possible by the support of Kenneth Goldstein and Henry Glassie of the Folklore Department and Dell Hymes and Erling Boe of the Educa­ tion School. lowe to all these people-and particularly to Barbara-a dis­ tinct debt of gratitude for the good life I've found and the interdisciplinary flavor that became possible in my scholarship after that career change. Brian Sutton-Smith Xll PRE F ACE CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE INTRODUCTION WHAT Is CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE? Brian Sutton-Smith Children's folklore is not easy to define. Folklore itself as a scholarly disci­ pline is in a process of transition. In earlier definitions, attention was given predominantly to traditional stories, dances, proverbs, riddles, poetry, ma­ terial culture, and customs, passed on orally from generation to generation. The emphasis was upon recording the "survivals" of an earlier way of life, believed to be fading away. Attention, therefore, was on the antique, the anonymous in origin, the collective in composition, and the simple in char­ acter (Ben-Amos 1971). Today's definitions, by contrast, place more emphasis on the living char­ acter of these customs in peoples, whether tribal, ancient, ethnic, or modern. Folklorists today are more concerned with the actual living performance of these traditional materials (dance, song, tale) in their particular settings, with their functional or aesthetic character in particular contexts. Unfortunately, such "live" studies are more difficult to carry out than studies of collected records or reports-and so we have very few of them. In the chapters that follow, contributions range from attempts to catch contemporary children's play and games (Zumwalt, McDowell, Beresin and Hughes) to surveys ofcol­ lected children's folklore (Sullivan, Roemer, Tucker, and Jorgensen). Most chap­ ters share some of both, the "contextual" and the "textual." THE RHETORICS OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE What these changes in the definition of folklore make clear is the relativity of definitions of folklore to the scholarly rhetorics of a particular time and place. Apparently, there is never going to be any final definition of children's folklore (or of any other human subject matter). At any given time folklore will be a cumulative subject, young scholars contending that their new per­ spectives are more valid than those of their predecessors. If we are lucky we will have, as a result, an increasing number of excellent records to argue about. What all children's folklorists seem to have in common, however, is their interest in expressive rather than instrumental culture; in celebration rather than work; and perhaps in humor rather than sobriety. There is also the recurrent note of empathy that these folklorists appear to share with those folk who are not in the mainstream of modern culture but who find them­ selves on its edge. Folklore is a "romantic" undertaking, still not divorced from its antiquarian origins in the early 1800s.