Deleted member 42
I'm curious. Do they also tend follow the three things you described earlier?
Yes. Those qualities are so universal, across times, languages, and geographies, that folklorists watch for them, and why modern oral history takers and folklorists are exceedingly careful about how tradition is recorded.
There are for instance, archives at UCLA that only particular classes of people may access, and that was part of the agreement when the tales/histories/songs/rituals were recorded.
Where I'm having trouble is: I'm sure there are oral traditions that originate from earlier cultures of origin, but did a specific oral tradition unique to the American South (across ethnic backgrounds) arise?
Humans form groups. In isolation (geographic, or caused by war, etc.) disparate groups may form new groups, hence the descendants of Scots, Irish, and Germans in rural Appalachia regard themselves as Appalachian first and their ethnicity second.
One might look, in terms of First Nations peoples, at the Comanche, and how their language has evolved from its original shared Shoshone roots to its own not mutually intelligible language.
Or Yiddish, which has been its own language, with written texts that go back to the twelfth century. Or Ladino, which may have an even older written history, I'm not sure.
Or to look at it another way, a Child Ballad called Matty Groves, among other names, migrated from the English and Scottish borders to St. Croix in the Virgin islands, probably via the rum/slave triangle.
I strongly suspect that the average person is not going to recognize the Matty Grue song that has been incorporated into local feasts for several generations as a descendent of Matty Groves, one that has been transformed to fit local traditions associated with the cultural indigenous festival and scratch bands.
The songs are kin. But Matty Grue is their song; it's not a Child Ballad.
Another musical instance are all the "who's gonna shoe" songs.
Farther back, there are songs where no longer living languages are preserved in songs—the ballad version of Sir Orfeo is one; there's a medieval text in several versions, as well as the ballad, but the ballad has a chorus in Norn.
People kept right on singing the ballad, in multiple versions, and eventually about 15 years ago someone found an authentic medieval fragment of it in ms., recognizably the same song.
So cultures adapt, they spread, they exchange, and they evolve.
This is why cultures with religious imperatives—Jews, for instance, or Hutterites in the U.S. West, deliberately maintain their own languages—languages preserve cultures.
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