Sacred Harp singing is a participatory American vernacular hymnody tradition with historical roots in New England and the rural South. This article addresses “memorial lessons,” ritualized lament speeches that play a key role in transmitting community values to new singers. Because of their reliance on oral tradition, their emphasis on memory and personal relationships, and their emotionally charged juxtaposition of speech and song, memorial lessons define, confirm, and perpetuate particular conceptions of “traditional singing.”

The 256 graphic inscriptions (odù), and the infinite number of illustrative narratives (ẹsẹ) that they generate, constitute the two main parts of Ifá divination protocols. However, the narratives do not adhere coherently to durable patterns that attach to specific inscriptions. This paper argues that the storytelling freedom exercised by diviners decouples interpretation from “writing” and creates room for individually authored therapeutic commentaries. “Writing” links the present to the past, but storytelling keeps them apart.

Taking two antiquarian texts as its central focus—Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares: Antiquities of the Common People (1725) and the revised and extended version compiled by John Brand as Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777)—this paper explores how orality, literacy, and popular culture were understood and represented by the literate and educated during the eighteenth century in order to shed light on the heritage of certain key terms that have become common in the modern critical lexicon. It examines the ways in which Anglican hostility towards the Catholic Church, anxiety about public order, and doubts about the state of the national character shaped attitudes toward traditional beliefs and oral practices. This complex scenario did not produce a clear opposition between the oral and the literate or between the popular and the elite, but instead created a series of conceptual uncertainties, at the heart of which was a different kind of question: who or what constitutes “the people,” and what about “the public”?

The purpose of this paper is to analyze a particular linguistic register of the Nahua (Aztec) people that has been classified as “magical-religious” because it was used for communication with the sacred realm. A hypothesis is developed that in the Mesoamerican pictographic calendar-religious manuscripts, which treat matters strictly linked to the supernatural world, a similar register should be evident. Far from considering the information presented in these resources as resulting from the direct transcription of oral language, the idea is that the graphic form represents elements emblematic of orality, although adapted to this particular context and mode for expression.

This article revolves around a project aimed at incorporating improvised song into primary school education. Among its objectives, this pilot scheme aimed to solve the problem of infantilization and the lack of functionality affecting the traditional school repertoire of songs in Catalonia by introducing a hitherto untested genre of traditional song into the official curriculum. The findings obtained in five centers suggest that this traditional form of oral expression through singing obtains positive results in the 10-12- year-old age group, and manages to break free of the clichés about traditional song pre-existing in the school environment.

The Gesar epic is a Tibetan heroic epic widely spread across the vast ethnic regions of China. It amounts to an encyclopedia that illustrates the life of ancient Tibetans. It has been in contact with other traditional ethnic cultures, and therefore has multiethnic characteristics. The Tuzu Gesar is a long epic, comprised of alternating prose and verse, that has been greatly influenced by the Tibetan Gesar. Tuzu (the minority group is called Tu) is a spoken language with no written system. The great performers of this epic have passed away, leaving only Wang Yongfu, 79 years old and now ill. Thus it is extremely urgent to study and to protect the Tuzu Gesar as performed by him. This paper offers a brief introduction to the content, distribution areas, and historical context of the epic.

Kalevala-metric oral poetry comprises various genres, from epic and lyric to ritual poetry, dancing songs, and lullabies. These poems were performed in diverse ways and applied to various social situations. The present article highlights the complexity of performance, referentiality, and local genres in Ingria. This complexity makes it crucial to take into account various analytical levels of the poem, from the content and meter to the melodies, refrains, and vocal style.

This paper poses questions regarding the implications of mainstream orality-literacy research on musicological perspectives and the relevance of musicological research for orality-literacy studies. First, why has musical scholarship been largely ignored in orality-literacy research? Second, what have been the casualties of lost connections with the academic mainstream? Finally, what are the possible unique contributions of musicological research to the overarching questions of the orality-literacy problematic, particularly in the electronic world?

The acceptance and understanding of the Asian origins of the “Cinderella” story should replace the widely held belief that the story is fundamentally Western or universal. The Zhuang, an ethnic group at the intersection of China and Vietnam, combined ideas from their own traditions and experiences with motifs from Hindu and Buddhist narratives circulating in their area during the Tang Dynasty, and should be credited with creating this subversive, virginal, talented, and compassionate heroine.

This bibliography was compiled by Morgan E. Grey, using the prior bibliography attached to J.M. Foley, “Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991): An Obituary,” Journal of American Folklore, 105 (1992): 57-65, together with subsequent annotations made by Mary Louise Lord.