Early Collecting
The VFS was founded in Richmond on April 17, 1913, by Charles Alphonso Smith, the Edgar Allen Poe Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia. The purpose of the society was “to discover, collect, publish, and thus preserve the Folk-Lore of Virginia.” The society was originally structured with one president, six vice presidents, and a secretary-treasurer.
The society’s first mission was to collect Virginia versions of English and Scottish folk songs identified by Harvard English professor Francis James Child, commonly known as the Child Ballads. This aligned with the academic interest in folk material at the time, which was focused on English ballads in an effort to classify them as classic literature. The Appalachian Mountain region was of particular interest to scholars, as it was believed to contain isolated pockets where English and Scottish traditions were uncompromised by modern interventions such as radio or printed collections of music. Folklore societies with similar aims were formed in North Carolina in 1913 and in West Virginia in 1915.
In 1914, Smith handed his presidency over to James M. Grainger, president of the Farmville Normal School, and assumed the role of the society’s permanent archivist. In 1916, the role of president passed to John Stone, a teacher from Montfair, who was known as “the knight of the blistered heel” for travelling great distances in search of folk songs. In 1916 and 1918, the English folklorists Cecil J. Sharp and Maud Karpeles visited Virginia to hunt for old English ballads and consulted Smith to plan their route. Sharp and Karpeles contributed the ballads they collected on their trip to the VFS.
From its inception, the VFS had a strong partnership with the Virginia State Educational Association and Virginia teachers in its ballad-collecting efforts. It disseminated information about ballads, encouraged teachers and teachers-in-training to become ballad collectors, and held its annual meetings during the sessions of the Virginia Educational Conference. Smith issued a circular via the Department of Public Instruction in Virginia with information about ballads and a plea for teachers to help in the collecting effort. The Virginia Journal of Education often devoted space to news about ballad-hunting. The VFS also sponsored ballad clubs in state normal schools, which provided teacher training to young white women, with the most active ballad clubs at the Farmville Normal School and the Radford Normal School. Teachers from the Farmville Normal School ballad club made up a significant portion of contributors to the early ballad collecting effort.
Ballad Collectors
In his 1930 essay “On the Collecting and Editing of Ballads,” Arthur Kyle Davis Jr., who took over as VFS archivist from Smith, wrote that teachers were “a corps of trained workers” because they were good communicators, knew how to transcribe words and music quickly and effectively, and were sometimes stationed in remote areas of the state. The VFS’s most prominent collectors were all teachers, including Stone, Alfreda Marion Peel of Salem, Juliet Fauntleroy of Altavista, and Martha Davis of Harrisonburg. In the VFS’s annual bulletin in 1918–1919, Smith praised the work of the teachers, writing, “that Virginia has found and rescued more of these old-world treasures than any other single state is due more to the interest and perseverance and intelligence of the teachers than to any or all other causes.”
Although early academic folklore study focused on ballad poetry, the teachers pushed the VFS to value the music of folk ballads as much as the poetry. On June 30, 1914, Fauntleroy wrote to Smith saying, “I do hope you will publish all the airs you can find. Ballads can never live without music.” Many of the teacher-collectors took down the tunes of the ballads they collected as a standard practice, often with the help of a musical friend, and offered the tunes to the society.
By 1920, the VFS had experienced a loss of membership and revenue due to the effects of World War I. In 1921, the society received a donation of $500 from the Colonial Dames of Virginia. This funding was used to send Stone into the forty counties that had not been explored so the VFS could meet its goal of finding a ballad in every county. By 1923, the society had achieved this objective, as well as its goal of finding Virginia versions of fifty distinct Child Ballads. At this point, VFS largely paused collecting efforts to focus on editing its ballad collection for publication.
Smith died on June 13, 1924. University of Virginia English professor James Metcalf hailed Smith’s contribution to folklore studies in the 1924 VFS Bulletin, writing that folklore scholars like Child “were looking backward in assembling and appraisal, while Smith was looking about him and harkening to the living voices.”
When Davis became VFS archivist in November 1923, his first task was to edit and publish the collection of VFS material. In 1929 the VFS published Traditional Ballads of Virginia through Harvard University Press. Traditional Ballads contains 440 variants of ballad texts (out of the 650 the society collected) and 148 distinct transcribed tunes of 51 of the Child Ballads collected in Virginia. In a review for the National Tennessean in 1930, sociologist Newbell Niles Puckett called Traditional Ballads “without question, the largest and righest [sic]” study “of authentic ancient ballads thus far brought together in America.”
The First Recording Years
In 1930, after the lull in collecting efforts to focus on publishing Traditional Ballads, Davis reached out to Stone and B.C. Moomaw Jr. to propose resuming collecting efforts beyond the Child Ballads to include “later ballads, folk-songs, and other folk-material.” Davis’s proposal was met favorably by Stone, who also voiced his desire for the society to become a “permanent, elastic organization . . . controlled by no one person,” whose profits from publications would be used to pay for its expenses.
Davis recognized that sound recording was becoming standard practice for academic folklorists, offering a more reliable way to capture a performance of a ballad’s tune for accurate transcription, as well as a way to capture the intangible elements of the mountaineers’ singing style. He received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for use of a Fairchild recording machine—a portable recording device that embossed sound onto blank aluminum discs via a thorn needle—from 1932 to 1936 under the condition that it would be shared with Lorenzo Dow Turner of Fisk University, another grant recipient who was studying the Gullah/Geechee language in Georgia and South Carolina. The two researchers passed the recording machine back and forth over the years, offering each other tips on how to transport and use the machine and lending each other extra discs or replacement needles.
For the recording effort, VFS largely relied on the connections it had made in its previous collecting project, often returning to performers whose songs had been documented in Traditional Ballads. The bulk of the society’s recordings were made in the Piedmont and mountain regions, including Albemarle, Amherst, Buchanan, Campbell, Carroll, Craig, Grayson, Greene, Halifax, Loudoun, Montgomery, Orange, Patrick, Roanoke, Russell, Smyth, Tazewell, and Washington counties.
The 325 aluminum-disc phonograph recordings that the VFS made during this period are among the earliest grooved-disc recordings of Anglo-American folk songs in the United States. The recorded material consists mainly of unaccompanied ballad singing, though fiddle tunes, spirituals, dulcimer, guitar, and interviews of performers were also collected. The collection includes one unique tune, “Far Fanil Town,” performed by Abner Keesee of Campbell County, that Davis could not locate in any other published collection or study. The recordings feature forty-three women and thirty-two men; many performers were born in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The earliest material of folk singers Texas Gladden and Horton Barker are documented in the recordings, along with many others who were never recorded commercially. The collection also features several African American performers, such as the Gospel Train Quartet and Carter Wicks, both of Charlottesville. These are some of the earliest known field recordings of African American folk music in Virginia.
In March 1934, the VFS received funding from the Civil Works Administration, a New Deal job-creation program, that it used to hire Stone to collect songs and Winston Wilkinson to transcribe music. University of Virginia student Fred Knobloch was hired through another New Deal agency, the Federal Emergency Relief Program, to assist in collection. As Davis had intended, the VFS’s collection expanded to include other types of folk songs beyond the Child Ballads, including Black folk songs, white religious songs, Civil War and American history songs, nursery rhymes and children’s songs, and some sea songs, which were published in the VFS’s second publication, Folk-Songs of Virginia: A Descriptive Index and Classification of Material Collected under the Auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society (1949). A considerable body of miscellaneous folklore material was added to the collection at this time, including folk tales, riddles, oral histories, proverbs, and signs and superstitions.
During this period, VFS members were engaged in a professional feud with John Powell and Annabel Morris Buchanan, the organizers of the White Top Folk Festival, a festival that ran annually in Grayson County from 1931 to 1939. White Top’s programming increasingly reflected the views of Powell, a classical composer and pianist who held strong eugenicist beliefs and was one of the promoters of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. White Top’s programming featured no Black performers and included English traditions, such as sword and Morris dances, that were not part of Virginia’s folk tradition but served Powell’s belief that America’s folk roots were grounded in the superior Anglo-Saxon culture. VFS members viewed the White Top organizers as interlopers with no scholarly interest in folk songs. They strategically advised singers like Gladden to only sing songs at White Top that the VFS had already recorded, so the “White Toppers” could not record and publish the songs themselves. On May 28, 1935, the VFS signed an agreement with the White Top organizers that stipulated if one party published a song before the other, that party must receive all publishing rights.
Post-WWII Period
In the period following World War II, VFS was in what Davis called “the desk-and-office phase.” His work was largely confined to duplicating, classifying, and indexing the society’s collected material for Folk Songs of Virginia: A Descriptive Index, which he published in 1949 through Duke University Press. A few recordings were added during the period, chiefly a small collection of songs sung by Edna Ethel McAlexander and Eunice Yeatts McAlexander and fiddle tunes played by Bill and Otto Shelor, recorded by Knobloch in 1948 on Wilcox-Gay Recordio discs—the most recent portable recording technology—that cut sound into blank acetate discs.
From 1955 to 1956, Davis taught an advanced graduate course, “Ballad, Folk-Song, Folklore,” in which he assigned students to prepare ballads that had been recently collected by VFS for publication. This resulted in the 1960 publication of More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, a collection of eleven Child Ballads not found by VFS collectors during the first collecting effort. Folk singer Paul Clayton, one of Davis’s students, conducted his own field recordings in the vicinity of his Browns Cove cabin in Albemarle County, making tape recordings of Gladden, Horton Barker, Eunice Yeatts McAlexander, Ruby Bowman Plemmons, and Mary Bird McAllister.
The folklore revival of the 1960s and the emergence of folklore as a university discipline brought renewed interest in the VFS. In 1963, Davis wrote a piece in The University of Virginia News Letter titled “Folklore in Virginia: Its Collection and Study” urging the society’s revival. By 1967, annual meetings were held regularly as new material—ballads, miscellaneous folklore material, and unpublished manuscripts—flowed in from community members, university students, professors, and longtime contributors. In March 1972, Davis published an article on “Far Fanil Town” in the Southern Folklore Quarterly. He died later that year and was buried in the University of Virginia cemetery.
The Perdue Years and Virginia Folklife
Shortly after Davis’s death, established VFS members and some newcomers began a concerted effort to revive the society. Moomaw became president, with Charles Perdue as archivist. In 1974, the VFS was incorporated as a non-profit educational organization in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Chief among the tasks of this revived organization was archiving and preserving the previous work of the VFS. The society arranged for the Library of Congress to transfer the aluminum disc recordings from the 1930s to preservation tapes and gave its archived material to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. In 2019, the library digitized all of the VFS recordings.
During this period, Perdue oversaw the editing and publishing of several collections of Virginia folk material, including Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (University of Virginia Press, 1976), Outwitting the Devil: Jack Tales from Wise County Virginia (Ancient City Press, 1987), Pigsfoot Jelly and Persimmon Beer: Foodways from the Virginia Writers Project (Ancient City Press, 1992), and Talk About Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). In 1979, the society began publication of an occasional journal, Folklore and Folklife in Virginia. Perdue, along with his wife, Nancy Martin-Perdue, took over leadership of the VFS after Moomaw’s death in 1978. The society held regular meetings for folklore scholars to gather and share their research. In a retrospective, Perdue wrote, “In significant ways, the Society was symbolically moving away from earlier views that equated folklore with ‘popular antiquities.’” After seeing Piedmont-style guitarist John Jackson of Woodville perform at a service station in the 1960s, Perdue introduced him to the folk music performing circuit and facilitated Jackson’s recordings with the roots record label Arhoolie Records.
In 1989, the VFS proposed the creation of a position of folklife coordinator at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (now Virginia Humanities) who would oversee a statewide Virginia Folklife Program (VFP). The initiative was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Gary F. Barrow was hired as the first folklife coordinator. In 1992 and 1993, the VFP brought together Virginia’s finest living Piedmont blues guitarists—John Cephas, Turner Foddrell and Lynn Foddrell, John Jackson, and Daniel Womack—to perform at ten sites across the state.
Barrow was followed in the role by Jon Lohman, who became state folklorist and director of the VFP in 2001. In 2002 Lohman launched the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program to document, sustain, present, and support cultural traditions across the commonwealth. The VFS held its last annual meeting in 2003 at the University of Virginia. VFP is now directed by state folklorist Katy Clune.
