This is the best of the Society's papers over the past three yearsfrom lynchings to "el ""pato" boat building; from sunbonnets to hammered dulcimers; from jokes about droughts and lawyers to tales of folk, gospel and blues music; from gravemarkers to bottle trees, and more."

The second volume to the Texas Folklore Society history covers from the McCarthy era to the end of the wild and woolly sixties. Includes the publishing history of the TFS books, anecdotes about the gatherings of the Society (including Hermes Nye starting the tradition of the hootenanny at Texas Folklore Society meetings in 1956), and the emphasis on singing beginning at Society gatherings.
The Texas Folklore Society was thirty-five years old in 1944, having come into existence under the hands of John Avery Lomax and Leonidas Warren Payne in 1909. J. Frank Dobie held the reins of the...

Juneteenth Texas, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society #LIV, received a San Antonio Conservation Society award for the preservation of historic buildings, objects and places relating to the history of Texas and its natural beauty and all that is admirably distinctive of our state, and to educate the public with knowledge of our inherited regional values.

In this Texas Folklore Society publication there are essays on teaching folklore for students How I Define Folklore for My Students, Toward a Definition of Folk Culture, Beginning Within: Teaching Folklore the Easy Way, Folklore Fieldwork on the Internet, and others. Essays illustrating folklore are also included, such as The Honored Dead: The Ritual of Police Burial, Gang Graffiti, Rail Tales: Some Are True, Dance Halls of East Texas, The Oil Field Camp, Tex-Mex Dialect or Gidget Goes to Acuna, and more."

In the 1860s and 1870s, luxury river boats brought U. S. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes; financier Jay Gould; writers Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman; and actor Maurice Barrymore, the father of John, Ethel, and Lionel, to "Queen City of the Cypress"--Jefferson, Texas. Among lesser known visitors was Abe Rothschild and his apparent bride, Bessie, dressed in fashionable clothes and wearing many diamonds. The couple went to an unusual midwinter picnic in the woods, and two weeks later the body of Bessie was found in the woods shot through the head. From the three trials that...

This collection of essays from the 1970s describes the customs, traditions, songs, and stories by which future anthropologists will analyze that decade. The rodeos and chain letters and bumper stickers, Neiman Marcus, and fat stock shows, gospel conventions, and underground newspapers, CB radios and university ghosts, backwoods beer busts and the folklore of marijuana, Jack Ruby and the Kennedy assassination. This publication also looks at zydeco, Western Swing, gospel music, Texas country music, and the rise of redneck rock by such writers as Joseph Lomax, Guy Logsdon, Bill Malone, and Jan...

The paisano, or roadrunner, is the emblem of the Texas Folklore Society. However, "Paisanos" is not a bird bookit is a folklore miscellany, a collection of essays on folklore generally, but mainly on Texas folklore. "Paisanos" covers a wide field of folklore, from the academic to the popular, from the scientific to the mystical, and from studies of uses of the past to practices in folklore that are still very much a part of our lives.
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The title of this collection denotes a span from the horse-drawn vehicles with steel tires that had to be shrunk down occasionally, to the cars that accelerate to unbelievable speeds on a drag strip. Society members like to look back at old customs and beliefs but they are quite willing to take into account that urbanization and engineering do not destroy folklife but rather bring about new formations. From tire shrinkers to the folksay of the drag strip; from silver ingots in East Texas to early Irish storytelling; from folklore and the Finnish sauna to mock bidding in Jamaica; from folkways...

Without the footnote and bibliography baggage of academic writings, these newspaper articles and stories detail the traditions, customs and practices of Texans from El Paso to Longview, from Amarillo to Houston. This is a book about the folk as journalists write about them. Folklorist Jim Harris discovered through writing his own column that newspaper readers were hungry for articles about their past, but they did not want dry historical facts. They wanted lively and personal stories about such topics as the Native Americans who once roamed the plains, settlers who came from the east, the...

The Texas Folklore Society has collected, presented, and preserved more folklore than any other similar society in the United States. It has brought to Texas and sent out from Texas some of the leading folklorists of the nation. The third volume of the Society s history begins with the move from Wilson Hudson s editorship at the University of Texas to F. E. Abernethy s editorship at Stephen F. Austin State University.
The three volumes of the Texas Folklore Society s history were the result of Jack Duncan and John West requesting that all the Society s programs be published in a volume....