Artist Freeman Vines on the guitars he creates and the wood he makes them with:
“The wood, actually everything, is involved spiritually. A little spirit rubs off on everything.”
Read more — and you should, you should click through and read the whole thing — at Atlas Obscura, “A North Carolina Artist’s Search for a Lost Sound Uncovered a Dark History,” by Winnie Lee.
“Lowcountry Root Doctors” in South Magazine covers, among other things, the delightful (and epic) tale of the battle between the High Sherrif vs. Dr. Buzzard.
Here’s journalist Aaron Millar on his 2017 trip to Louisiana, featuring some jazz, some swamp hunting, and a visit to a traiteur, from his Nat Geo UK story “Louisiana: Hoodoo and Voodoo, Ghosts and Graves.”
“Becca Begnaud is a sassy, sweet-looking older woman with warm hugs, gentle eyes and a mouth like a trailer park — surely the only faith healer on the planet to say the words ‘holy shit’ every other sentence. I like her instantly.”
He gets a treatment – for what he doesn’t say, none of our business I guess.
“And then, the strangest thing; for just a moment, it’s as if the river is real, the world disappears and I’m in a kind of peaceful, lucid dream. Afterwards, I open my eyes, but Becca’s already smiling: ‘See, I told you,’ she says. ‘This shit is real.'”
I think I’ll be quoting Becca the traiteur all the damn time.
For a more academic but still quite accessible look at traiteurs, see Julia Swett’s article “French Louisiana Traiteurs” in Folklife in Louisiana. Once I finally get this ship floating on its own again, so to speak, I’m gonna start doing interviews, and Julia’s gonna be one of my first ones.
Did you know there was a very active St. Expedite Society in Independence, Louisiana up until very recently? I didn’t. Read more at Folklife in Louisiana: “St. Expedito’s Role in South Louisiana Catholicism, in New Orleans and in the Italian-American Community near Independence, Louisiana,” by Karen Williams.
Hindu deities on vodun altars: Rush, Dana. “Eternal Potential: Chromolithographs in Vodunland,”African Arts vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 60-75+94-96. Also helpful more broadly, imo, for any student of folklore/popular religion who’s ever encountered an argument about whether Abre Camino is “real hoodoo” or not, wondered what to think about the development of the seven-colors school of approach to Santisima Muerte, or pondered the relationships between figures like Legba vs. Ellegua.
Giffords, Gloria Fraser. The Iconography of Mexican Folk Retablos. Thesis. University of Arizona, 1969. I tend to assume everybody immediately sees why stuff like this is so interesting. I tend to be wrong. But basically the iconography had never been studied before this, so this was a big deal, this work. And if you like to understand what you’re looking at when you see a candle in a botanica or grocery store, you’ll encounter plenty of stuff that had its origins here whether you personally work with that imagery/tradition or not.
I read Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South years ago, and even then, before I’d really started *studying* this stuff in any consistent and applied way, I felt like everybody I knew ought to read it. I knew they wouldn’t – people think this stuff doesn’t have anything to do with them if their families weren’t the ones being described in these stories – but they’d be wrong, ’cause this is part of how we got here. And the impact of it doesn’t just disappear suddenly when it’s no longer fashionable or feasible or *whatever* to have domestic employees. This is part of Southern culture, y’all, and it’s part of how your role in it, as whatever sex, race, class, gender, family role stratum you occupy, got constructed and defined.
I still feel the same way in 2020. I think Southern folks should read this book — especially white folks. Especially white women. Here’s a review with a useful summary at the Washington Post.
Seraphin Station 