The History of the Virginia Folklore Society

The Virginia Folklore Society was founded on April 17, 1913, by C. Alphonso Smith, Edgar Allen Poe Professor of English Literature in the English Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. The Society is thus one of the oldest state folklore societies in the country. The broad outlines of change and growth in the study of folklore/folklife, however, are reflected on a small scale in the history of the Virginia Folklore Society and its three successive, but overlapping periods of development and achievement. These can be defined as: “The Quest for the Ballad,” “The Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Years,” and “Folklore/Folklife: Professionalization of the Discipline.”

The Quest for the Ballad

This era began with the founding of the Society by C. Alphonso Smith and is identified with his efforts and those of notable collectors, such as John Stone, Alfreda Peel, Martha Davis, and Juliet Fauntleroy, as well as other teachers and members of the Virginia State Educational Association. In the first Bulletin of the Society in 1913, Smith made the pursuit of the ballad explicit and primary. Although he expressed interest in other types of folklore and acknowledged that “[t]he ballad is not the whole of folklore,” still, this and all subsequent volumes of the Bulletin were devoted almost entirely to considerations of the ballad and its collection in Virginia (pp. 1-5).

Under C. Alphonso Smith’s guidance as its first President and later as Vice-President and Archivist, early members of the Society concentrated on collecting oral versions of the classic English and Scottish ballads as defined by Francis James Child in his five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1882 and 1898. In the Bulletin for the third annual meeting held November 26, 1915, at the John Marshall High School in Richmond, Smith reported on progress toward the Society’s goal of obtaining at least 50 Child ballads in the State. He thanked “all those who have co-operated with us in the effort made to restore our lyric past, and to make it a part of our lyric present.”

Smith also included an excerpt from a letter written to him by John Stone of Palls, King William County [who appears here in the records for the first time, but was elected President of the Society the following year]. “A few days ago”, Smith wrote, “I received a letter from a Virginia teacher that contained these words:

“I enjoy the excitement of running down the ballad. In Culpeper county one day I walked fourteen miles, raised four blisters on my feet, and walked lame for a month. The next day, in spite of blisters, I walked seven more, but finished with versions of Lord Lovel, Barbara Allen, more news of The Hangman, and found the trail of Robin Hood. If we ever select a flag or standard for our Society, l propose for its heraldic device a hurrying heel or a fleeting foot glorified with four large blisters and underneath it these inspiriting words: ‘In hoc signo vinces.’ [“In this sign, we conquer”].” (Bulletin, Vol. 2, 1915, No. 4, pp. 4-10)

At the Society’s 5th annual meeting held at the First Presbyterian Church in Roanoke on November 30, 1917, John Stone, by then formally referred to as “the Knight of the Blistered Heel,” spoke in his President’s remarks of “the fascinating experiences in collecting ballads, and announced a plan for getting into every county in the state in an organized effort among the teachers to save these priceless ballads from becoming lost in the obscuring rush of busy days.” Although he continued to serve as the Society’s Archivist, C. Alphonso Smith had become Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Edgar Allen Poe Professorship of English Literature at the University of Virginia had passed to VFS member and vice-President, John C. Metcalf, formerly of Richmond. The meeting closed with Miss Alfreda M. Peel of Salem, Virginia, singing several ballads, followed by several, including The Hangman’s Tree sung by Mr. John Stone. Bulletin, Vol. 4, 1917, No. 6, p. 3-4).

By 1920, Stone’s expansive program had suffered from membership and revenue loss in the wake of World War I. In the Secretary-Treasurer’s report for the “Year Ending November 25, 1920,” J. B. Ferneyhough noted that after paying $16.80 for paper and printing of the Bulletin, $.65 on envelopes for the same, and $1.13 on postage to send them, the Society’s balance in the Treasury was $.52. (Report for 1920, Bulletin, No. 8, p. 10). However, the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Virginia took an interest in the Society the following year and supported John Stone’s “ballad tours” by donating $500 “for the recapture of these priceless relics of colonial literature scattered through the State.” The typescript of instructions written by C. Alphonso Smith to John Stone regarding the field work to be carried out with that support, as well as excerpts from Stone’s meticulous accounts of expenditures, including his final $.25 charge for shoe polish, are of some historic interest in the annals of supported folklore research. Needless to say, the Society’s Bulletin for 1921 was gratefully dedicated to the Colonial Dames of America.

Two figures, who were important in the later periods of the Society’s history, appeared on the scene for the first time at the 10th annual meeting on November 30, 1923, again held at the John Marshall High School in Richmond. One of these persons was Benjamin C. Moomaw, Jr. of Barber, Virginia, who was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the Society. He, along with Miss Alfreda M. Peel, “delighted the audience by singing many of the ballads that the Society [had] collected.”

The second individual was Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. who was, at that time, an Instructor of English at the University of Virginia, where he remained throughout his lifetime. C. Alphonso Smith introduced Davis as the person who will “publish our findings” and wrote in the Bulletin that “I shall turn over all of our ballads to him and he will select, reject, and edit as he thinks best.” Davis was elected Archivist of the Society at that meeting. (Report for 1923, No. II). In June of 1924, Dr. C. Alphonso Smith died in Annapolis, Maryland. With his passing, the Virginia Folklore Society entered the second and longest phase of its history.

The Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Years

Meetings of the Society were held intermittently between 1924 and 1967, with both the purpose and organization of the Society becoming less clearly defined and apparent. There were periods of intensive collecting, recording, and publishing, alternating with intervals of relative inactivity with regard to folklore.

In 1929, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. completed his initial work as editor and published 51 ballads collected under the auspices of the Society in Traditional Ballads in Virginia. (For citations from reviews of this volume, see Publications). Later, Davis wrote a series of articles for The University of Virginia News Letter (April 1, 1931; February 1, 1932; November 15, 1934; and March 1, 1935) describing the ongoing efforts of the Society and urging the further collection of ballads and folksongs. And many Society members did continue through time to actively collect folksongs or other folklore materials and to deposit the results in the Society’s archive.

Juliet Fauntleroy’s response to a questionnaire sent out by Davis in 1936 as part of the Modern Language Association’s survey of folk-song collectors and collections is revealing in this regard. The text of her reply is as follows:

Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Papers, Accession #9829, Box 2, Manuscripts Division of the Special Collections Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

The First Recording Years

Beginning in 1932, Davis recorded 325 aluminum disks of folksongs and ballads, many of which, as Fauntleroy’s comments suggest, had previously been collected from informants identified earlier in the Society’s history. These recordings, which were made possible by a $1,000 grant to Davis and the Society from the American Council of Learned Societies, are among the earliest field recordings of Anglo-American folksong extant in this country. Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Papers, Accession #9829, Box 4, Manuscripts Division of the Special Collections Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

In March of 1934, Davis was able to obtain some funding from the Civil Works Administration, one of the Depression-generated New Deal programs. With that assistance, he hired John Stone to collect folksongs and Winston Wilkinson to transcribe music. The project only lasted three weeks, but in that short time, Stone managed to add another 89 songs to the Society’s archive. Davis was also able to employ University of Virginia student and Crozet native, Fred F. Knobloch, in the spring of 1935 through the student-aid provision of another New Deal agency, the Federal Emergency Relief program.

In addition, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. served at least one term as President of the Southeastern Folklore Society, founded by Reed Smith. Its annual program held at the University of Virginia in April 1941 included Virginia ballads and folksongs sung by one of Alfreda Peel’s informants, Mrs. Texas Gladden of Roanoke County. The meeting featured a variety of other presentations including the following sampling: The Virginia Players presented a performance of “‘Virginia Overture’ (A One-Act Play Based on Some Folk Elements)”; a Quartet from the University of Virginia Glee Club sang “Two Folksongs, harmonized for men’s voices”; Winston Wilkinson illustrated “Virginia Fiddle Tunes”; Richard Chase presented “The Jack Tales in the Southeast”; Folk Dancing was “illustrated by Dancers and Musicians of Albemarle County, Virginia”; and Alan Lomax of the Archive of American Folksong, Library of Congress, sang with banjo accompaniment, a program of “American Ballads and Folksongs”.

Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Papers, Accession #9829, Box 5, Manuscript Division of the Special Collections Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

Post WWII Period

In 1949, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. edited and published Folk-Songs of Virginia: A Descriptive Index and Classification. Otherwise, Society activities appear to have been at their lowest ebb during World War II and for a number of years following. By the mid-1950s, however, Davis, with the help of students George Walton Williams, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, and Paul Clayton Worthington, pursued further collecting possibilities and began efforts to make taped copies of the earlier aluminum disk recordings.

With the assistance of the aforementioned students, Davis also published More Traditional Ballads of Virginia in 1960. In dedicating the book “To the Memory of C. Alphonso Smith, Martha M. Davis, Juliet Fauntleroy, Alfreda M. Peel, and John Stone”, Davis gave symbolic recognition–even though belated in some cases–to the passage of an age and a generation in the history of both the Society and of ballad collecting in the old style and tradition.

On March 15, 1963, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. wrote another article for The University of Virginia News Letter titled, “Folklore in Virginia: Its Collection and Study.” Perhaps stimulated by the urban folksong revival that was underway nationwide, he stated, “the time seems ripe to revive the Society and to set its course toward the assembling of the State’s miscellaneous folklore.” This article prompted a considerable response and receipt of folklore collectanea (for one such item, see Puzzle Rhyme in the VFS Collectanea section following). With that renewed interest, the Society began again to have regular annual meetings in 1967, and folklore materials began coming into the Society’s archive in greater volume. Davis had plans to expand Society activities, including the publication of a journal, and he had made preliminary steps in those directions. Those projects were left unrealized when Professor Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. died in September 1972.

Folklore/Folklife: Professionalization of the Discipline

The third phase of the Virginia Folklore Society’s history actually began prior to Davis’s death, when the media influence from the urban folksong revival and the development of scholarly programs in Folklore at several universities combined to attract and create a demand for persons trained in such a discipline. In part in response to those particular circumstances and in part due simply to serendipity, several such newly trained Folklore specialists came to work in Virginia and, not unexpectedly, soon became involved with the Virginia Folklore Society. With a Ph.D. from the Folklore Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Charles L. Perdue, Jr. came to teach Folklore courses in the University of Virginia’s English Department in 1971 and later became jointly affiliated with both the English & Anthropology Departments there. Shortly thereafter, J. Roderick Moore, with an M.A. in Folklore Studies from the Cooperstown Program in New York State, began working and teaching first at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, then at the Blue Ridge Institute of Ferrum College in Ferrum, Virginia.

The contact between Perdue, specifically, and Davis at the University with regard to the Society was obviously short-lived. Nevertheless, a collaborative effort to revitalize the Society shortly after Davis’s death involved long-time members, Ben C. Moomaw, Jr., President; C. Alphonso Smith, Jr. and Virginia F. Jordan, Vice-Presidents; and Fred F. Knobloch, Secretary-Treasurer; along with Perdue and Moore, their wives Nancy J. Martin-Perdue and Elizabeth Moore, Thomas E. Barden, a former student of Davis’s, and many others.

The Perdue Years and Virginia Folklife

The Society was incorporated as a non-profit, educational organization in the Commonwealth of Virginia, with tax-exempt status and bulk-rate mailing privileges by 1974. A newsletter began publication in April of that same year, and by October, 1974, the Society’s logo and heading were designed by member/artist, Elizabeth Moore. The design was printed for the first time on Volume 1, Numbers 2 & 3 of the newsletter, with the following explanation accompanying it:

The decision was made to separate the Society from its former association with the Virginia Educational Association and to hold regular, annual meetings, independently, each Fall in Charlottesville, Virginia. These were begun in November, 1974, with occasional Spring meetings held in various regions of the State. In 1979, the Society began publication of an occasional journal, with this being the fourth volume in the series of Folklore and Folklife in Virginia.

Despite its new face, the reorganized Society retained the stamp of an earlier era, which was manifested to a large degree through the personalities and interests of Ben C. Moomaw, Jr., who continued as president of the Society until his death in 1978, and Fred F. Knobloch, who retired as the Society’s secretary-treasurer shortly before his death in 1981.

Mr. Moomaw was a fine storyteller and singer, who insisted that the program for the meetings should be a mix of scholarly presentations alternating with ballad singing and tale-telling. He also determined that Barbara Allen should be the Society’s emblematic ballad and should be sung at the beginning of each meeting. The front-page obituary for Moomaw in the Covington Virginian of March 13, 1978, noted that “His hobby for Virginia Folklore brought him in contact with the Virginia Folklore Society and after serving as the state secretary for several years, he assumed the office of president of that group.” The lengthy memorial dwelt mostly on Moomaw’s Chamber of Commerce work, and it clearly held his greatest contribution to have been the effort to secure the construction of Gathright Dam, which created the lake named for him, Lake Moomaw. For those who heard his virtuoso recitations from memory of examples from Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation at Society meetings, however, he will be remembered differently.

As with the dedication of More Traditional Ballads in Virginia in 1960, the Society meeting in November 1982 marked another passage of sorts. It did not begin with the singing of Barbara Allen. Six of the seven individuals in the program had some background in folklore study. Two of these persons had graduated from the University of Virginia and done graduate work in Folklore, one obtaining an M.A. degree in Folklore from Western Kentucky University, the other enrolled at that time in the graduate program in Folklore at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of the program participants had just obtained a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Three others were graduate students in Education at UVA and were working with Dr. John Bunch, then the Society’s Treasurer. In turn, Bunch had formerly been a student of Richard Dorson’s in the Folklore Program at Indiana University. The remaining speaker on that particular program was a Professor of American Studies, Dr. David E. Whisnant, whose topic was “The White Top Folk Festival and the Politics of Culture in Appalachia in the 1930’s.” In significant ways, the Society was symbolically moving away from earlier views that equated folklore with “popular antiquities.”

As stated at the beginning of this retrospective, the changes that have taken place in the Virginia Folklore Society reflect changes that have occurred in the field of Folklore generally, and also in other similar disciplines nationally, since 1913. The expansion of definitions of folklore to include material culture; the establishment of graduate programs in Folklore at Indiana University, the Universities of Pennsylvania, Texas, and California at Los Angeles, and elsewhere; and the movement of folklorists, who were trained in those settings and who thus have a broader view of the discipline, into a wide range of public sector positions have led to a gradual professionalization of the field.

Consistent with those directions, the Society was, in recent years, directly involved in the creation of the position of Virginia Folklife Coordinator. A proposal to create such a position was submitted by VFS Executive Board members to the National Endowment for the Arts, Folks Arts Program, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts (VCA) in 1988. This venture, which was subsequently funded, was a cooperative one between NEA, VCA, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFHPP). The Folklife Coordinator, Garry W. Barrow, was interviewed and hired in 1989 to develop and administer a statewide Virginia Folklife Program, working under the heading of the VFHPP in Charlottesville. Initially, the Virginia Folklore Society Executive Board acted in an advisory capacity to that program, along with representatives from VCA and VFHPP. The fact that the position was called the Virginia Folklife Coordinator was, in itself, a reflection of the changes already suggested that had been occurring in the field of folklore/folklore in the late 1960s to 1970s.

External Links:

Encyclopedia Virginia VFS History

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