Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Boat Launch, Pete Mcfarland

Maine Song and Story Sampler

Maine has a long and broad tradition of boat building, and in many coastal towns boat launches were a social event.

Maine Folklife, Vol. 3, Iss. 2, Maine Folklife Center

Maine Folklife Center Newsletter

It's nice to be able to report good news — very good news, indeed — to all of you who have supported the Maine Folklife Center in recent years, and to those of you who have supported us even longer when we were just the Northeast Archives. We learned late in the Spring that a new budget had been appropriated by the University Administration that would provide support for staff salaries and a modest operating budget.

With this kind of support, Sandy and I are very excited about the prospects for the coming year, and for what this kind of …

Maine Folklife, Vol. 3, Iss. 1, Maine Folklife Center

Maine Folklife Center Newsletter

As you are undoubtedly aware, Sandy has operated the Archives on a shoe-string (sometimes almost no-string) budget for nearly forty years. Howevever, with the help of some well-thought-out grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, some smaller grants from foundations, and donations from our members, he and his staff have been able to turn out some pretty good projects (some of them award-winning) including videos: "An Oral Historian's Work," "Woodsmen and River Drivers," thirty-two volumes of Northeast Folklore, and four cassettes of the Maine Traditional Music Radio Program series.

Francis James Child: Some Thoughts While Shaving, Edward D. Ives

Dr. Edward D. Ives Papers

What can I possibly say that can add to the huge body of commentary on this man, the hochgecelebrated Francis James Child? Not much, I'm afraid. He has all but been canonized by some, demonized by others. H singlehandedly saved the ballad from oblivion; he is the source of our major ballad-study problems. He had an instinct that told him what was a ballad, what was not; he had no theoretical underpinning for his choices. His great collection is lhe beginning of all our wisdom; his great collection rides us like the Old Man of the Mountains, weighing us down, …

"How Got The Apples In?" Individual Creativity And Ballad Tradition, Edward D. Ives

Dr. Edward D. Ives Papers

Way back in the beginning of things, almost a hundred years ago, Francis Barton Gummere not only wrote as good a description of the ballad as we've got, he also asked a crucial if rather enigmatic question, and that question-probably partly because it was enigmatic to the point of being gnomic-caught my attention when I first read it almost half a century after it had been written: "How got the apples in?" It turns out he was quoting a humorous poem by John Wolcott (aka "Peter Pindar") in which King James, looking at an old woman's dumplings, wondered "How the …