Author Archives: ejrobins@usc.edu

Magical Properties of a Giant Confederate Flag

“So, my uncle moved to Tennessee, and he lives down the road from this guy who has a giant confederate flag in front of his house. It covers his whole front porch. And they believe that it—like, if you pray to it—it will bring back the confederate soldiers… like Jesus raising the dead. And when you walk past it, I swear you can see a pair of eyes watching you from under it, but this guy doesn’t have a dog or anything.”

This story came from a classmate with whom I exchanged lore. Although it is short, it contains two clear, separate pieces of folklore. The first is an observation of a folk belief and ritual. Although likely embellished slightly by every teller, it essentially describes a kind of worship. The religious analogy “like Jesus raising the dead” draws a clear connection to the religious nature of the flag-worshiping practice, although it would technically be sacrilegious, it being a “false idol” and all.

The second piece of folklore is a contemporary legend. The sightings of the eyes imply a haunted nature of the flag, furthering its folk power. I could not get my informant to say for certain whether she had seen anything herself, but they way she told the story, it certainly seemed like a memorate. She personally experienced some sort of unusual sighting, which was then shaped by her knowledge of the worshippers and other people’s stories of also seeing glowing eyes, into a scary story.

Both pieces of folklore here clearly reflect a my informant’s uncle—and thus her, too, when she visits him—feeling like an outsider in Tennessee. These stories are fantastic exaggerations of the otherness of the locals around whom he now dwells, likely created to cope with his own sense of unwelcomeness.

Filmmaking Runner Joke

INFORMANT: “Who is the only person on set to survive an earthquake?”
COLLECTOR: “I don’t know. Who?”
I: “The runner. You know why?”
C: “No. Why?”
I: “He’s always standing in doorways!”

This occupational joke was collected from a young man with whom I worked on a couple of film sets, who seemed to have an endless supply of quips to be used in the car, during lunch break, and even during the little down time there is in between takes. Like almost all filmmaking jokes I have heard, it is at the expense of a specific group of workers. Although these can be slightly cruel, there are plenty of jokes for every department of a film crew, so although they do most often focus on actual grievances people have with other departments, they are always told in good nature. The expectation is that everyone will get made fun of.

This particular joke operates on two levels. It makes fun of the runner, a position even lower down than the frequently belittled production assistant. Because they are frequently considered just an extra body on set, not serving a real important purpose, they are easy targets. The main joke, is that runners are always just standing around, getting in more significant people’s ways. The deeper level of the joke, is about the selfish excitement with which they do this; those low-level positions are frequently considered over-eager and just looking for advancement.

Filmmaking DP Joke

INFORMANT: “What’s the difference between a DP [Director of Photography] and God?”
COLLECTOR: “What?”
I: “God doesn’t think he’s a DP!”

This occupational joke was collected from a young man with whom I worked on a couple of film sets, who seemed to have an endless supply of quips to be used in the car, during lunch break, and even during the little down time there is in between takes. Like almost all filmmaking jokes I have heard, it is at the expense of a specific group of workers. Although these can be slightly cruel, there are plenty of jokes for every department of a film crew, so although they do most often focus on actual grievances people have with other departments, they are always told in good nature. The expectation is that everyone will get made fun of.

Because my informant aspires to eventually become a director of photography himself, this particular joke is very telling of non-serious attitude with which these jovial criticisms are issued. My informant can recognize the common flaws among those whose ranks he wishes to join—egocentrism and overconfidence—and self-deprecate in a way that can help a crew bond and work together better.

“That’s a lot of paint.”

“That was my father’s personal thing, but my husband says it too because he learned it from my father. It has to no just be a lot of paint, it has to be a lot of paint on a painting that is terrible, like you’re looking for something halfway okay to say about it.
“Well, and also, I think it is sort of like part of a larger tradition, which is when you go to someone’s exhibit, you have to say something, and you can’t say anything terrible, right? So, the other thing that you would say was that it was ‘interesting.’
“I think ‘that’s a lot of paint’ is pretty condescending.
“That was a tradition, right? The variety of—like, if you went to an exhibit and the artist was there, it was usually someone you knew, and you had to say something to them. And that was a totally different experience than when artists would invite each other to their studios—or invite gallery owners or critics to their studios—to view their work. And in that context, you would have to have a much more serious conversation. You couldn’t then get away with saying ‘that’s interesting’ or ‘that’s a lot of paint.’ So there were, like, rules for behavior in the art world, I would say. Those would definitely fit as rules for behavior in the art world.”

This informant was unable or unwilling to recognize any folklore of her own, but was ready to share when I asked about lore for the group of Jewish artists in New York City to which her parents belonged. This example contains not just a specific piece of folk speech, but this one piece carries with the context of a set of important customs that governed how these artists interacted with each other. It it, we see how certain aspects of folklife beget new folklore that works around its limitations.

The Tradition of the Yiddish Yodel

“The ‘Yiddish Yodel’ was held in Deer Isle, Maine in the summer, usually in august at my parents house or their friends’ house. And there would be twenty to thirty guests, all Jews from New York who spend their summers up in Maine, most of them artists of one kind or another. I think it started because one evening a smaller group just started singing Yiddish songs, and then they had the idea that they should make it a yearly event, and then it just grew and grew and grew with more and more guests, unit finally they started printing out lyric sheets and, um, what else? At one point, they really did buy an organ to keep up there—one of those little electric organs—and they bought it specifically for Renee to play at the Yiddish Yodel. And they often looked to Renee for knowledge and inspiration. I’m not exactly sure why she remembered more Yiddish songs than anyone else, but she did. And she was also a preschool teacher so she was very keen on teaching everyone how to sing the songs.

“I don’t think it started out as a reenactment of a tradition in a conscious way, although Renee recently told me that when she was a child, in the summers, she and many other Jewish families who lived in New York would go up to the Catskills  to these bungalow colonies, and the moms and the kids would be up there all week, and the dad would come up on the weekends. And she said that on Saturday nights, they would all gather in the—there was some gathering hall, entertainment room or something—and they would recite Yiddish poetry and sing Yiddish songs. So I think now that she’s making that connection in a conscious way, but i don’t ever remember anyone saying anything about that when this started, But clearly, as soon as it started, people were very keen on turning it into its own tradition, even if they weren’t consciously linking it to an older experience in a direct way. They didn’t start recording these until later, when I wasn’t there for them anymore, so I don’t know how they decided—how or why they decided to start recording.

“It was just, like, bring as many chairs as you possibly could from everywhere into the house, into the living room, in, like, a rough circle. But really there was no order to it, and the living room wasn’t really big enough—either living room it ever happened in—wasn’t really big enough for them to really forma circle, so some people were sitting behind each other. When it started out it was much less formal, like, people would just—someone would start singing a song—and they’d finish that one and just be like, ‘oh, who remembers another song?’ And they would just sing the songs that they remembered. As it went on and it got bigger and bigger, it got more organized with Renee really leading songs and Bernie becoming like a master of ceremonies. You can hear that on the tapes. But when it started it was much less formal, it was just people getting together and trying to remember the songs. So it guess in that way it was trying to revive, not a specific tradition, but I guess a more general aspect of their culture.

“I bet they hadn’t really sung these songs in any sort of consistent way for… forty years. You know, some of them might have sung some of them… but it was probably forty years… they learned them in their childhood… and then, they didn’t all know exactly the same songs, so then they would start teaching them to each other and maybe someone would remember that ‘oh yeah, I did know that song.’”

Going through my family attic, I came across a box of tapes hand-labelled “Yiddish Yodel 1992-95.” They were recordings of a large gathering of people singing in Yiddish and Hebrew. I asked around to find out more, and although it seems only a couple of the original participants are still alive, one of their daughters gave me this detailed account.

Although the specific tradition of the “Yiddish Yodel” was a new one—created by this small community of Jewish artists in the 1980s. It was clearly a way to preserve much older traditions of folk music and language they feared were dying out, and was not the first attempt at this. In 1948, Ben Stonehill collected over one thousand songs from holocaust survivors in New York.

In the instance of the “Yiddish Yodel,” we see folk, communal, spontaneous origins. However as it progressed, we can see formalization and the development of a separation between active bearers (Renee and Bernie) and passive bearers (their friends).