Website of the Week

 

 

American culture is as broad as the continent and deep as the Pacific, and it's bursting with humanity in all its rich variety. Official culture, what gets hung in our art museums or formally presented at the Kennedy Center, is a minuscule fragment of what gets sung and said and danced and celebrated and painted and constructed and worn and handed down in this country. None of the handles applied to this riot of activities — folk art, folkways, popular culture, traditional culture, roots, Americana, etc. — does it justice. Better just to show it.

Folkstreams.net is an online archive of documentary films showing bits and pieces of this cultural mosaic. They're from the 1960s into the 90s, before the explosion of video and Youtube. A few got theatrical release and won awards in their day, but almost all would be hard to impossible to see today if it weren't for this website.

The films range from a few minutes to feature length. They're arranged by subject, like Music, Healing & Medicine, Foodways, Play, Women, Work and so on. There are docs on the Amish and the Shakers; one on a fraternity whose spring rites, which include swallowing salamanders, get them in trouble with animal rights groups; docs on graffiti taggers in New York City, kids' playground games in Los Angeles, kids telling ghost stories, Mexican rodeos, muleskinners, shipbuilders, Italian men dancing the Giglio in Brooklyn, Florida shrimpers, guys who catch giant catfish using their bare hands, quiltmakers, slaughterhouse workers, and lots and lots of music: Cajun and Irish fiddlers, singing cowboys, prison songs, Finnish singers, gospel singers, Serbian bands, the late Othar Turner's fife and drum band in Mississippi, medicine shows and blackface minstrels, and much more. (That's Peg Leg Sam, medicine show performer, in the photo above.)

The Internet can seem like a vast puddle of useless trivia. But there are spots where it gets wonderfully deep and marvelously rich. This is one of them.

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