Virginia Folklore
Document Type
Book Contribution
Publication Date
1-1-2015
Description
Geographically varied and socially diverse, Virginia boasts a broad range of cultural traditions distributed rather evenly across the state’s three major regions. The Tidewater, settled by English colonists in the early seventeenth century, is culturally linked to the Piedmont, as colonial settlement had extended westward beyond the western edge of the Tidewater or the “fall line,” by the late seventeenth century. To support a largely agricultural economy, colonial planters in the Tidewater and the Piedmont brought enslaved Africans to both regions in significant numbers, a situation that yielded hybridized folk cultures combining primarily British and African influences. A markedly different pattern of settlement occurred in Appalachian Virginia, or the “Valley and Ridge” region as geographers have termed it. That section of the state, encompassing Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley, and the southwest Virginia coalfields, was explored in the late seventeenth century by English land speculators but settled in the eighteenth by a mix of ethnicities, including Germans, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, Welsh, and Swiss. While sharing many aspects of folklore with adjacent regions, each of Virginia’s regions could claim its own folklife. An often misunderstood term, “folklore” holds different meanings and connotations, depending on how it is used. Contemporary vernacular definitions might interpret the term folklore as referring to something old, quaint, fanciful, or untrue. In its scholarly sense, one interpretation of the term refers to an individualized use of some tradition, whether a particular element of traditional knowledge utilized by one person to conduct an everyday task, a particular type of traditional communication employed by people interacting with others in a specific social situation, or a particular action performed in a traditional manner for a traditional purpose and not for money or status. Some scholars have employed the term “folklore” to refer specifically to traditions of a verbal nature, one of the three broad categories of traditional culture, the other two being customary folklife and material culture. “Folklife” is a composite term encompassing all the folklore practiced in a given region, whether thought, communicated verbally, acted out, or built.
Citation Information
Olson, Ted. 2015. Virginia Folklore. A History of Virginia Literature. 266-279. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415164.020 ISBN: 9781107415164,9781107057777