Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis

Author:Susan Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

OPENING UP FOLKLORE

In the United States, things were moving forward in the academic folklore field: Legman was astounded when Richard Dorson invited him to speak on erotic folk song at the 1960 American Folklore Society (AFS) annual meetings in Philadelphia. He could not afford to travel to the United States, so he had his friend Jan Kindler deliver “Misconceptions in Erotic Folksong” to a packed audience. Kindler reported that the two and a half hours of discussion that followed centered on Legman’s paper and ignored the other two speakers. According to Jan, when a “miserable fink” named Moritz Jagendorf denounced Gershon as a phony, he grabbed the microphone and defended his friend’s sacrifices for folk song, to great applause. Kenneth Goldstein got up to extol Legman as “the one man who was doing anything worthwhile in the field,” and Alan Lomax followed, “punching hard and accurately” with perceptive remarks on the censorship of folk song.76 Much of the legend of Gershon Legman was propagated that afternoon.

Under Dorson’s editorship, the staid Journal of American Folklore began to take a new approach to publishing impolite materials. After Dorson published the papers and discussion from the Philadelphia panel in 1962 as a symposium, Legman wrote to congratulate him on the publication of “Hair of the Dog,” an article on folk remedies for hangovers that prominently featured sex acts among the cures. While it had been unpublishable in an academic journal a few years earlier, it was now in print, “full, frank, fearless.” Besides, Legman wrote to Dorson, “what is there to fear?”77

Legman’s correspondence was expanding to include a younger generation of folklore scholars. Dorson called these men and women the “Young Turks.” Many of them were Jewish, and they set themselves in opposition to the tone and methods of the older Protestant folklorists. In contrast to their elders, who focused mainly on texts from the deep past and took pains to keep folklore respectable, the “Young Turks” were more interested in living cultures, and they even ventured into cities in search of the folk. They emphasized the careful observation and documentation of practices and performances, and they were not resistant to obscenity. The Turks looked up to Legman, who was now in his middle forties, and they tried to keep him up to date on changes in the academic discipline in the United States. One important contact was Kenneth Goldstein, who had been dazzled by The Limerick. Goldstein was a specialist in British and American folk song and blues and an influential record producer for Stinson, Riverside, Folkways, and Prestige.78 He began to send Legman ballad texts and recordings.

Goldstein’s small publishing business, Folklore Associates, specialized in books and monographs on folklore and folk song. For most of the 1960s, Folklore Associates would publish dissertations, bring back out-of-print twentieth-century folklore collections, and republish lost, suppressed, or prohibited song books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In several cases, Goldstein arranged for Legman to contribute annotations and introductions to reproductions of works like D’Urfey’s song and tune collection Pills to Purge Melancholy.

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