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July 2nd, 2017 
Awake Goy By Carl Carmer (1950)
FOLKLORE:
People have always liked to tell stories and to sing songs. Even in the days before there were books to be published and bought, people made up tales and tunes with words to them. And their friends listened and sometimes tried to learn them by heart so that they could go away and give them to others to enjoy. As people repeated them they often changed these tales and songs so that they would sound a little better to the new hearers. And the new hearers went away looking for friends to hear them, and they in turn tried to make them better.
After they had been changed many times the first singer or teller had been forgotten and it could not be truly said that any of the stories and songs had come out of the mind of any one person. Nearly all the people who were folk of the neighborhood from which the stories came had contributed a part. These tales, songs, and sayings were known as the lore of the folk or more often as folklore.
The folk have a real joy in making up tales, painting pictures, carving statues from the ideas that they and their neighbors in the country, village, or town have had. It is as natural for them to do so as it is for bubbles to rise in the pure water of a mountain spring. Perhaps their grandfathers and grandmothers have given them these ideas and these old people perhaps got them as children from their fathers and mothers.
Some of the world’s best lullabies have come to us that way, changing a little as different fathers and mothers have sung them to their children at different times in the many years of the world’s history. Some good bedtime stories began in the same way. Sometimes instead of singing or telling an idea, a man or woman or child has painted it or carved it in wood or stone, usually without taking any lessons in how to do it. That is how folk pictures have been made, pictures that do not show the skill of a good artist but do tell a story or look like a person everybody in the neighborhood knows.
The men who worked at building the big European churches known as cathedrals made fun of neighbors whom they did not like, such as the village miser, the scolding wife, and the cruel schoolmaster. Though they had not studied sculpture, the builders carved ugly likenesses of these people and placed them high up on towers and roofs. Sometimes they carved in the stone their village’s idea of an evil spirit or an ugly devil. And now, hundreds of years later, they still look down on us, telling us what people of long ago thought and imagined. We call these grotesque carvings gargoyles. They are all part of what people now know as “folk art.”
HOW BALLADS CAME TO BE:
Often in the far past things happened that people found so exciting that they wanted to tell others about them. There were no ways then of printing in books, magazines, or newspapers the news of what had happened, and so men made songs which told it in verse and sang them. These story songs they called ballads, and many of them are sung even to this day, both in Europe and in America. The ballads tell of old battles, old and usually unhappy loves, of wicked crimes that took place when the world was younger than it is now.
In the very early days of England and other European countries there were singers who were appointed by the kings to make up songs of praise about the wars they fought, about the celebrations that followed when they had been won, about the wonderful gifts the rulers gave to the faithful warriors who fought for them. These men they called scops, and many of the people heard them sing the history of their time and learned the words. Sometimes these people changed the words to suit their wishes and sang the new versions to each other.
But people of those days in the old countries of Europe liked quite as well, if not better, the tales that were not true history but were made up from dreams and fancies and superstitions. These tales grew up through many year until men began to gather them together and print them so that anybody who could read could enjoy them.
THE BROTHERS GRIMM:
Among the people who gathered these stories were two brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, who lived in Germany and began their work at the beginning of the 19th century. They worked for years getting the stories together before they published them in books called ‘Nursery and Household Tales’.
When scholars studied these tales, many of which had been told the brothers by the wife of a cowherd, they found that the stories were very like those that had long been told in other countries. Some had been told in the days before Christ and in different countries and different languages. The story of Cinderella had been told in Iceland more than a thousand years ago, and men told stories like it in Bohemia, England, France, Russia, and other countries.
FOLKLORE COMES TO AMERICA:
When people from all these nations began to come to America they brought with them the tales and songs they had heard as children. Soon in the towns and cities of America, Swiss and Swede, Hungarian and Irish, Dutch and Turk, Finn and Dane were living side by side and telling each other the folklore of the countries from which they came. Some groups of people from across the seas stayed together in America and kept alive the ways and customs of the old countries.
That is why, to this day, in the bayou region of the state of Louisiana the Acadians, people of France who sailed first to Canada and were later exiled to the region near the mouth of the great Mississippi River, sing songs that were once sung in the French provinces in the early part of the 18th century.
That is why, in both North and South Dakota, people whose grandfathers came from Sweden and Norway and Denmark still dances to jigs that once sounded gaily over the fields of far away Scandinavia. That is why people whose families came, many years ago, from the highlands of Scotland still sing, in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina where those families have lived ever since they arrived, such ballads as ‘Barbara Ellen’ and ‘Lord Randal’. These songs began so far back in Scotland’s dim past that no historian or antiquary knows exactly when they were first sung or whether what they tell is true or made up from the fancies of the people.
FOLK TALES AMERICANIZED:
Since folklore goes usually from one person to another by word of mouth and not by the printed page, it changes as it goes. So Americans have often left out of old songs and stories those words and those lines which deal with things which they do not recognize. Because the Americans who sing it have never seen a Scottish nobleman, the ballad of ‘Lord Randal’ has been changed to simple ‘Johnnie Randal’. And Johnnie, when they sing it, is no longer in their minds a richly dressed young lord but just a lanky mountain boy whom they might meet on the way to town almost any day.
In just such manner the “nightingale” of an Italian song may become a “meadowlark” or “mockingbird” when the song is made over to fit the language and the experience of the Americans who sing it. The line “Sweet William came from the Western States” appearing in an old English ballad may mean to the mind of the American singer that Sweet William was born west of the Mississippi River. He is likely to think of him, therefore, as a cowboy in chaps, checked shirt, and sombrero. Actually at the time the song was written in England, such a costume had never been heard of.
Frequently and especially in folk tales, Americans have made use of events that were related in the folklore of Europe but have told them as having happened in places in the United States. More than one German folk tale, for example, has been about a man who slept for many years. Washington Irving, who knew these tales, wrote a similar one. It was not about a great red-bearded emperor like the one of the German stories. It told of Rip van Winkle, a kindly, lazy Dutchman who lived in a small village on the banks of the Hudson River. He went out one day with dog and gun into the Catskill Mountains and did not return until after he had taken a nap that lasted 20 years. In the same way Irving made use of German folk tales about ghostly riders of phantom steeds. He moved steed and rider from the banks of the Rhine to the banks of the Hudson in his tale of a headless horseman who haunted Sleepy Hollow.
More amusing than that have been the efforts of some Americans to make the folklore they know seem even more American than it is. In the first part of the 19th century an American, Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, rejoiced that Americans had driven out the forces of the English king and were now ruled not by kings but by the wishes of the people. He felt that kings should not be mentioned even in folklore. He found one of the verses of Mother Goose, folklore that all American children have loved, very bad indeed. So he changed it and instead of reading: “When the pie was open the birds began to sing, wasn’t that a pretty dish to set before the king?” He made it read: “When the pie was open the birds were songless, wasn’t that a pretty dish to set before the Congress?” Nobody paid much attention to the change, however, and we still sing the Mother Goose version.
In this manner Americans have accepted the songs and tales of other nations, filled them with American scenery and American characters and made them seem as American as if they had been born in one of the United States. But America already had a folklore when its first settlers arrived, and a new folklore grew up out of America after their arrival, a folklore that did not come from Europe but was purely and completely American. It sprang from the native soil and from people who made the land their own.
From “American Folklore and Its Old-World Backgrounds”
Source Article from http://www.renegadetribune.com/american-folklore-old-world-backgrounds/
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