Regional Folklife

Below is the text for a study guide designed to complement the traveling exhibit A Taste of Pine Hills Traditions (1996-1997).

What are Folklife and Folklore?

Everybody's got folklife!

All people have folklife, because folklife (or folklore, as some people say) is the shared customs and traditions that groups of people pass down from one generation to another that give them a sense of group identity. All people have traditions, customs, beliefs, stories, and sometimes work skills, crafts, or types of art that are handed down from generation to generation to new members of the family or group. Folklife is not learned from books. People don't study folklife like they memorize spelling lists. You learned your folklife -- how to be a member of your community, group, or family -- by living it.

How do you learn folklife?

Do you know any hand clapping games like "Miss Mary Mack," or jump-rope games like "Cinderella Dressed in Yellow" or "Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear"? Do you know how to play jacks or marbles? Who taught you those games and rhymes? Probably other children, either playing at home or at school. You see, children form a very large social group, which has its own games, stories, and sometimes rules of conduct. Older children teach younger children the words to the rhymes or younger children learn by watching the older children. Sometimes children invent new rhymes and then pass those down to other children.

Teenagers are their own cultural group. In fact, teenagers who attend the same high school can sometimes be thought of as members of a cultural group, who share traditions, legends, and customs. For example, at one high school every year the sophomore and juniors would tell the incoming freshmen that to pass ninth-grade PE, they would have to run a four-minute mile. The same joke is pulled on new freshmen year after year as students learn the joke from their classmates and friends. In academic circles, this is called an oral tradition.

It takes all kinds

Students also belong to other groups, like your family, your community, your church, an ethnic group, a regional group. In addition to those types of groups, adults can belong to occupational groups (people who share the same type of work) and civic groups. There are lots of other types of folk groups, but the idea is that in these groups people share some traditions, customs, and beliefs that are passed down. Folklife also includes arts, crafts, music, and even building houses -- all the traditions people learn in their families or communities. Below is a listing of some of the kinds of folklife you can find in Mississippi, especially in the southern part of the state. To give you a better idea of what these kinds of folklife area, here are some more detailed examples of customs, crafts, and stories and how those get passed on to others:

Spotting folklife

Although we all belong to groups that share history and culture, not all culture is folklife. For instance, almost all kids and teenagers know a lot about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. This, however, is not folklife. How can you tell when something is folklife? One way to think of folklife is to compare how we learn the things we know. In general, folklorists talk about three kinds of culture: elite, popular, and folk. Elite culture includes things you learn formally, through books and school, such as math and karate. Popular culture includes things you learn about through the media: television, radio, and comic books. Folk culture includes things you learn from your family or community. Look at the comparisons below:

Your traditions

With this information about folklife, you can explore the traditions, customs, and beliefs that belong to you, your family, friends, and neighbors.

Regional Folklife

You and Your Neighbors

Sometimes people who live in the same area have many things in common: what they do for a living, what kinds of foods they eat, or even what churches they go to. Some of these things are determined by the environment. For instance, people who don't live near marsh areas where palmetto grows won't learn to weave baskets from palmetto; they'll make baskets from cane, maybe, or split white oak. People who live on the prairies won't learn to cut and stack timber or how to build log cabins. Those skills, however, will be important in places where there are lots of trees. When people from a geographic area have enough shared culture, we say they have a regional folklife.

Mississippi Regions

Mississippi has several geographic regions that have similar but distinct histories. Although people disagree about just which regions exist in Mississippi, most people agree on the Delta, the Gulf Coast, the Hills, the Tennessee-Tombigbee region, and the Pine Hills (also called Piney Woods). Most of us in the state share in a general Mississippi folk culture that includes Civil War legends or stories about slavery days, or even such state traditions as the annual Miss Mississippi contest. Mississippians also share much with people throughout the South, especially in the kinds of foods we eat, gardening, religious beliefs, and valuing family ties. But even as we're alike in some ways, each region varies a little. For example, commercial fishing and steamboat stories are important along the Mississippi River, while commercial shrimping is important to people on the Gulf Coast. Here in the Pine Hills, however, fishing is mostly recreational, and people aren't likely to weave cast nets. Telling fishing lies (or whoppers), however, seems to be part of everyone's folklore!

The Pine Hills Region

The Pine Hills region of Mississippi is the area once dominated by longleaf pine trees. The Pine Hills lie south of Interstate 20, north of Interstate 10 and east of the Natchez Trace. The Pine Hills area of the U.S. South actually begins in Georgia and extends in a continuous line to south Louisiana. Another Pine Hills region goes from northern Louisiana into east Texas. People in Mississippi sometimes call this area the Pine Woods or the Pine Belt. Native Americans have lived in this region for more than 10,000 years. Not many people of European descent settled in this area until after the Civil War. There were few slaves in the region. Most African Americans came here to work for the railroads or in lumber camps. While people in the Delta had plantations and people in the Hills region had mid-sized farms, and people on the Gulf Coast fished, the early Pine Hills settlers were mostly herders (cattle, pigs, and even some sheep in the beginning). Other big industries were timber and the railroads. People who live here share this history of the region. Today the mostly rural region includes parts of 32 counties and roughly 800,000 residents. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, a majority of residents are Anglo- Americans, with a very large minority of African Americans and small numbers of other ethnic groups. The area has Greeks, Germans, Lebanese, Syrians, Jews, Vietnamese, and other immigrants who have settled in the region. Most of the region's residents, whatever their race or ethnic group, are Christian Protestants, with significant numbers of Catholics and some Jewish residents. A few towns are noteworthy for their minority religious faiths, including Islamic and Mennonite communities.

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