Folkstreams Blog

One our strengths at Folkstreams is that we can present full length films on video. This sometimes means sitting the computer and watching for a half hour to an hour, which can become uncomfortable. With a little work and the right hardware, software and a few cables, you can sit back, relax and watch our films from the sofa.

Even if you lack the latest “Internet TV” gadgets, with a little technical knowledge and the ability to plug some cables in, you can get started watching Folkstreams on your television right now.

Most televisions sets offer several video inputs. Nearly all feature a “composite video” input, which is the simplest, most widely available and lowest quality (however on most standard definition televisions have one). I could try to explain here what the input looks like and what kind of cable you will need, but the folks at Wikipedia have done such a good job, I will send you to their page on Composite Video. The advantage of composite is that hooking up both audio and video is easy, since the same cable carries both.

Connect the cable ends to your television and then consult your computer manual or sound/video card manual to find out what you will need to hook up to the computer. You may need an adapter to convert the large RCA connectors to the smaller 1/8″ connectors found on many sound cards.

A step up from composite is “S-Video” which just carries the video signal. You can identify the connector and read about S-Video. This gives much greater image quality than composite, but you will need a separate cable to carry the audio from the computer to your television. Most televisions offer an input for S-Video and nearly all digital video recorders do, so you should be able to make the connection work one way or another.

The best quality video and audio is obtained through a “component video” input. Most newer flat panel televisions come with at least one component input. You can read about Component Video on Wikipedia to identify the connectors and cables necessary to connect your computer to the television.
I chose to watch Folkstreams through a S-Video cable since both my televisions set (a 20″ CRT) and my video card (ATI 9600XT) both offer S-Video connectors. I connect the audio from the 1/8″ jack on the sound card to the RCA jacks on the television using a special cable with the small connector on one end and the left and right stereo connectors on the other. When I get a flat panel HDTV, I will switch to component video, although the improvement may be minor given the quality of streaming video.

Once connections are made, you should be able to start the media player right from the Folkstreams website and start watching video on your television. You may need to check your media player and video playback settings in your operating system to ensure the video plays on the television and not just on the desktop. When setup correctly, starting a video should playback automatically to the television set in filling the full screen (with respect to the original dimensions of the film).

For my own setup, I chose to purchase a remote control for my PC, so that I could control the volume of audio and the media player from anywhere in the room. The remote allows me to pause the video and start again where I left off should I be interrupted. I can operate most of the media player controls and assign functions to buttons. With the Opera web browser, through the Streamzap remote, I can browse Folkstreams and play any video I want from the comfort of my easy chair.

With the upcoming “Internet TV” systems from Apple, Slingbox and others, watching Folkstreams video on your television set will become increasingly simple. It is expected that HDTV makers will add connections to their television sets making it easy to watch online video. The popularity of video sharing sites almost ensures this.

As in most fields in the humanities, definitions in folklore never win a unanimous vote. This is in part because the fields of study continuously evolve and drag along all their older history, interests, and disputes behind them. In their definition of the term folklore some people in the field stress the central role of oral transmission and imitation of observed actions. This was one of the first characteristics of folklore that people became aware of, and this orientation led them to focus on the aesthetic forms, performance styles, origins and history of change of songs and instrumental music, tales, rituals, arts, handicrafts, and games, as well as beliefs and customs.

Other people stress in their definition of folklore the kinds of cultures in which oral transmission normally plays a important role. In ancient times this included everyone, then everyone except priests and scribes who could read and write. With the spread of literacy it came to be narrowed to pre-literate tribes, or illiterates within a mainly literate society, or people who live their lives without much reliance on writing-that is, cultural enclaves like the rural village, the rural peasant or urban working class, the regional or ethnic or religious or occupational or gender or age-group subculture in a larger society.

Increasingly folklorists have come to realize that these are interrelated issues and very complex. Even in a highly literate society everyone is a member of some
groups in which oral communication flourishes-gossiping fellow workers and neighbors, for example-and many of us in daily life move frequently from roles that demand highly technical literacy or are a part of a very rapidly evolving pop culture spread across the entire country to other roles that are more oral, more local, more slow to change, perhaps even hostile to the influence of the dominant society around them, which they may see as an exploiter.

Some of the oral culture is rather trivial-jokes told around the office coffee pot; some is absolutely essential for physical or psychic survival (like the wood-chopping songs of men in the Texas prison) or importantly symbolic of one’s identity and relationships (like music within some small protestant church congregations or a saint’s-day ceremony in an Italian American community). I myself like to think about all of these ways of looking at folklore as involving many variables, each variable actually encompassing many degrees from “little” to “much.”

The questions therefore become, “In what ways is this folklore and not folklore? And to what degree in each of the ways?” For an example that may clarify this, see the piece I wrote on Shaker song for Tom Davenport’s film “The Shakers.” In that you’ll find a list of variables one can use to distinguish the mainly oral tradition in early Shaker song from the mainly literate tradition in Shaker music after 1870.

This said, what we look for in choosing films for the Folkstreams site are the films that usually focus on both of these things-the oral traditions, especially those with historical depth, and also the subcultures that generate and sustain and find value in these traditions. We especially like the films that give strong performances of these traditions (whether music, narrative, craft, ceremony, work, worship, etc.) and explore their meanings and uses. We like ones in which outstanding and knowledgeable community performers and leaders (”community scholars,” some call them) demonstrate and explain the traditions.

This background also guides the preparation of the background material. We try to foresee what in the important content of the film will be unfamiliar or puzzling to the average person or even unnoticed by the outsider. And we try to get several short but informative essays written about these by someone who is from the culture and can interpret it to outsiders or who has studied the culture and its lore or has at least studied folklore and is interested in exploring the traditions in the film.

In some cases we are fortunate in that the writer has actually participated in the making of the film, as a folklorist working as a consultant to the filmmaker. I worked, for example, with Tom Davenport on a number of his films and (with other participants) helped prepare background materials for them. I was writing my book The Shaker Spiritual when Tom made “The Shakers,” and my book A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver when he was making “The Ballad of Frankie Silver.”

It was Tom’s film project, in fact, that stimulated me to write this book. Folklorist Bruce Jackson worked with the Seegers on “Afro-American Worksongs in a
Texas Prison” and was writing a book on the same prison songs, later published under the title Wake Up Dead Man; he wrote the background materials for this film on Folkstreams. And so on. A sizeable number of films on the website are paralleled by books and articles written by folklorists involved in the films, and these
materials are routinely drawn upon for the background materials. Probably the most delicate problem posed by the writing of the background materials is that the perspective of the writer may differ from that of the community shown in the film. The writer needs to find a way to write respectfully and tactfully about the
material and at the same time honestly. The background materials offer not just praise but also analysis and insight.

The diversity of the films is so great that there is no set list of things to include in the packet of background materials. We do, however, try to have as many as possible of the following:

1. One or more essays on traditions presented in the film and the culture with which the film deals.

2. Biographical notes on persons appearing in the films as major performers, practitioners, or consultants.

3. An account of the making of the film-usually written by or in collaboration with the filmmaker.

4. A biographical note on the filmmaker, linked where available to the filmmaker’s internet homepage.

5. Notes on persons appearing in the films as major performers or consultants, including biographical facts, information about books
and articles written about them, other films about them, recordings they have made, honors received.

6. Suggested readings and links. These include books, articles, and websites bearing on the film and the traditions in it. See for
example “Almeda Riddle: Now Let’s Talk about Singing,” where we link to a site in Arkansas where a library streams the “John Quincy
Wolfe Collection” of field recording and the viewer can listen to many performances by Almeda Riddle and other Ozark ballad singers,
recorded fifty years ago. Another such link is set into “Final Marks: The Art of the Stone Cutter,” where the user can click and
go to an archival site that streams a huge collection of photographs of 18th-century New England gravestones, including
markers by the stone carving family whose shop in Providence, R.I., has had an unbroken history down to carvers who currently practice
there.

7. A study guide for middle- and high-school teachers-this needs to be prepared by someone who has had teaching experience at these
levels.

8. A transcript of the sound track-in some cases this will be crucial for the future use of the film; some dialects now comprehensible will grow very hard for people to understand as the years pass by and the current speakers die.
Email correspondence by Daniel Patterson, 2007.