Author Archives: starsalmon

Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck

Text: “Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck”

Context: Informant is 79, white, female, living in North Idaho. To this day if she sees a penny she’ll pick it up and smile, thinking of the old phrase. She can’t remember where she learned this but thinks she was very young. 

Analysis: This is folk speech that invokes magic “supersition”, picking up the penny means good luck and the specific outcome is having that luck all day. Coins are often used in magic superstitions, tossing a coin in a well, a penny having a bad luck side. It’s especially interesting because coins operate in a weird state in our economics, they are our most tangible form of money but have little in the way of monetary value especially now to the point of becoming almost obsolete. I believe it’s this inbetween between worthlessness and value that makes it the perfect thing for superstition to focus on. It has value, thus is special, but not enough to covet or protect Thus we assign them superstitious values. But more than that it’s something that clearly brings my grandmother joy, it’s an event you can’t control and thus that superstition brings that joy almost randomly. The rhyme in the saying also makes it feel whimsical, which could be a reason it’s stuck around for my grandmother.

Fuck Around, Fuck Around Go Home Crying

Text: “Fuck around Fuck around go home crying”

Context: My dad, 60, white, living in Washington State, learned this in college, it was his set design teacher’s favorite saying. It’s about when you’re painting and it doesn’t look quite right so you try to fix it but it goes badly and you keep fixing it and fixing it but it gets so bad that you’ve gone completely away from what you wanted. You just spent way more time trying to fix something then you did just continuing to paint. So this saying means: Stop, just stop, leave it, go do something else, go find another area to paint. My dad brought it home and it became a part of the family vernacular. 

Analysis: This is an example of folk speech, a saying that is meant as a warning or advice.  It is unknown if my dad’s teacher created this saying or learned it from somewhere else, but since he learned it in this context that will be analyzed. Artists are known for being non-traditional, alternative, or off the beaten path. This saying reflects that, in its use of tabooist language, swear words. My father and his teacher might have been drawn to it because of this subversion. It is a saying meant to teach and my father learned it in an educational setting but it is not appropriate for kids. I think that is part of the fun, many sayings are all ages but this one ensures that the space is adult only, in the context my dad learned it in that these college kids are adults, and art is a serious business. The repetition also makes it fun to say, excluding the need for any rhymes and making it easier to remember.

Crystals

Context: I asked my grandmother, 75, white, lives in North Idaho, about crystals and her belief around them. All through my childhood they have been around, whether as gifts at Christmas or just around the house. I knew they were spiritual in some way but wanted to know the greater context. My grandmother works as a spiritual life coach, working to bring people’s lives into balance. She is in the herbalist community and learned a lot of what she knows through classes she took. She still operates in that community and shares knowledge with her friends. 

Grandma: “I believe there is, how do I say it? There’s an energy within them. And I don’t know if it’s a… conscious. So out there in the field, scientists are looking at what is conscious, consciousness, consciousness in animals, consciousness in plants, consciousness in rocks, in crystals. So they’re looking at it. So they’re just asking all these questions. So somehow, I believe, there is an energy that I can ask for and draw on. That’s pretty up here because I can’t, I can’t give you the right, the right words to come down for that. Um, But for example, there’s a, there’s a crystal and I’ve forgotten the name of it, and I may have even given your mom one. So it has 2 pointy ends on it. And the idea is that you can hold it and connect with it, and it’s the crystal doing the work, whether you’re channeling through something. It, you know, it’s it’s not me, but but I can take this crystal and I can take a pointy end and I can point that energy at my shoulder or at your shoulder. And with intent, So intention is coming through that. For those for healing, but healing is reminding the cells, what their job is.” 

Analysis: This is definitely non-traditional folk medicine that is going about healing in a different way than Western Medicine, removing all separation between body and soul. Instead relying on soul and on energy to heal people. It’s about a belief in a larger energy that connects us all and figuring out how to channel it. It makes sense that crystals are used for this purpose. Crystallization happens naturally, grows up from nature making it a perfect conduit back into that nature. They are also not as rare and expensive as other jewels are, allowing them to be accessible and cost effective, which might be why they are so commonly used as a conduit to the spiritual. It shows a belief in something bigger, but also doesn’t reject science (though I haven’t researched how true her claims are), just kinda collaborates with it which I think speaks a lot to non-traditional medicine.

Star Wars Game

Text: When my mom was a kid she says she and the neighbor kids would play a lot of Star Wars. They would use finger guns and run around and chase after each other and shout. “I mean, it wasn’t very sophisticated.” She said there were probably at max 5 or 6 kids. I asked if they would pretend to be storm troopers and her memory of it was that they all wanted to be all the heroes, and so nobody was really the storm troopers. It wasn’t like a show and picking roles, it was kinda just climbing the fences and being weirdos. “What I remember most is kind of like running up on the dirt hill and leaping off of it. you know, kind of making noises and throwing your finger guns in the air. You know, I mean, it was just very… ridiculous and innocuous and probably look stupid as could be.” My mom was always resistant because she wanted to be Luke, but since she was a girl everyone wanted her to be Leia. 

Context: My mom is 49, white, and when this story was taking place lived in North Idaho (she moved to Washington when she was 9). I asked if when they played they would reenact the movie? Her response was that they had only seen it once, not the 82,000 times we can today, so someone would go “I think this happens, then someone else goes, no, it was this way, and no one really knows because you’ve only seen it once.” 

Analysis: In this childhood memory we see the folk taking back canonized culture. They had probably only seen the film one but that didn’t really matter. They took this commercial media and made it their own, creating a game that was inspired by the original media but took off on its own from there. They are active consumers in the decoding of this media, as Stuart Hall would say, even if they didn’t know it. My mother even used it to start negotiating identity, not wanting to be boxed into playing the princess because she was the only girl, something she has mentioned multiple times. The Frankfurt school was worried about cultural hegemony, and while there is a point to be made that this might be an example of a way that mass media can be used to influence children at a young age I would argue this is actually people at a young age taking media and turning it into something of their own. Creating their own personal variations of something they love even when they only saw the movie once.

Making Whoopi

Text: My mom said they used to hold large family reunions, 30-40 people, every year at the family house. Each year her papa, uncle, and others would rewrite the lyrics to the song “Making Whoopi” to speak to each of the family members that had an age with a zero on the end. They would rewrite the verses then have the chorus. There were always multiple people so they’d rewrite multiple verses. Then they, in a small group, would sing it at the family reunion and the whole group would gather around to listen. 

Context: My mothers extended family lives in Idaho, which she moved away from when she was young but went back to visit every summer. According to my mom, everyone in her immediate extended family, grandparents to aunt and uncles, sang. They would stand around the piano and sing song after song so this tradition makes sense with who they were. My parents also mentioned that these family reunions don’t happen much anymore, since we can keep track of everyone through social media. 

Analysis: This is folk music, specifically parody, that is meant to build community among the family and honor people through performance. By picking only people with an age that ends in zero they get to honor people, make them feel seen, without having the song get repetitive and loose the fun it is trying to create. I believe the big part that makes this song meaningful is the work and care that goes into writing it, it’s not the same thing every reunion thus giving it more meaning but repetitive enough with the same tune that it feels traditional. They also performed this song as a group, meaning no one person is singled out for too long making a performance meant to build community and bond rather than one to show off one’s own talent.