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Chapter 3: Newfoundland’s Vernacular Radio Culture
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- 3.0 Folklore and Popular Culture
Chapter 3: Newfoundland’s Vernacular Radio Culture[Radio’s] closeness to popular culture is also implied in its technical characteristics: all you have to do is listen; its limitation to voice and music allowing it to develop a particular form of colloquial expression…These technical-discursive factors allowed radio to ‘mediate with the popular’ in a way no other medium could. They renewed radio as a privileged link between the modernizing, informative-instrumental rationality [associated with development] and the expressive-symbolic mentality of the popular world (Martin-Barbero 1993: 181, 234). 3.0 Folklore and Popular CultureFor a number of reasons which will become apparent during this introduction, this chapter on radio broadcasting in Newfoundland will begin with a discussion of the idea of a continuum between folklore (or vernacular culture) and popular culture (Laba and Narváez 1986). Firstly, as the practice of using sound recording equipment as a means of collecting oral evidence has, in many instances (in Great Britain, for example), been pioneered by folklorists (and linguists), no study of the uses of oral history in radio broadcasting would arguably be complete without an attempt to explore what a folkloric perspective might bring to bear on the subject. Folklorists are particularly well equipped to study radio representations or mediations of community, as their field specifically relates to “those expressions that emerge upward from the local, the specific, and the informal to permeate a community’s shared expressive meanings” (Howard 2008: 194). Secondly, the broadcasting of folklore features prominently in this thesis - the previous chapter concluded with an assessment of Sam Hanna Bell’s valuable contributions to both radio broadcasting and the collection of folklore, and in the following chapter I will discuss the collection of oral tradition and folklore by the BBC producers W. R. Rodgers and David Thomson. Newfoundland folklore and folk culture is likewise an essential component of this current chapter. The Avalon region of Newfoundland, which is predominantly Irish in its cultural and ethnic mix, was described as a ‘folklorist’s paradise’ in a CBN (CBC Newfoundland) documentary Did Your Mother Come from Ireland? (1981), and this has been (and most likely still is) true in many ways of the whole island of Newfoundland. Peter Narváez’ comments on this cultural characteristic of Newfoundland are worth quoting at length: Despite the historical presence of writing and print, the “orality” of culture in Newfoundland and Labrador has often been stressed. Many folkloristic and social science studies in this century have interpreted the average, small coastal “outport” community as approximating the model of what Robert Redfield called a “folk society”, an oral-aural, “nonliterate” community…where, “behaviour is traditional.” The remarkable amount of oral folklore, particularly folksong that has been collected in Newfoundland during this period supports the view of the vitality of “non-literate”, oral traditions in Newfoundland outport cultures. This expressive data reveals continuity in time through multi-generational memorized content (ancient British ballads, ballads from British broadside tradition, international folktales), an appreciation of local history (native historical ballads, place name legends), and the maintenance of traditional verbal skills (narration, recitation, rhyming, singing, satirical and other songmaking) (Narváez 1986: 129). Finally, Narváez has also highlighted the value of Harold Innis’ theories for the study of folklore (Laba and Narváez 1986; Narváez 1986), which facilitates the development of the theoretical methodology of the previous chapters, as the continuum between folklore and popular culture is in many ways a continuum between orality and literacy, or time and space. As Narváez has noted, “Cultural views of space and time are particularly relevant for an understanding of folklore because folklorists identify the subjects of their inquiries (oral folklore, customs, material culture) in terms of space (face-to-face, small group contexts) and time (traditional usage, customary example, repeatable forms)” (Narváez 1986: 128, emphasis in original). In an essay originally published in 1936 called The Storyteller, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote, “The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly…It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences…Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn” (Benjamin 1973). We can perhaps begin to diagnose the reasons for this decline when we consider the effects of the industrial revolution on traditional communities. Artistic and economic production and other social functions began to take place on a scale and level of abstraction far beyond the lived experience of the individual in modern society. Social processes were fragmented, workers prevented from involvement in work processes, and home and community became primarily sites of consumption (Lippert 2000: 282). These sites were then often governed by the dictates of outside forces rather than the intentional structures of the people who lived within them and invested them with their own meanings.85 The “penetration of localities and of the individual’s phenomenal world by distanciated influences” became accepted “as a routine part of social life”, “thus sustaining a maintenance of ontological security” (Giddens 1991). It was in this context that broadcasting emerged, at a time when learning became a commodity, and in which radio assumed a key pedagogical role in the marketing and delivery of this commodity. In a sense, people were induced to relinquish their native ability to do what they can do for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something ‘better’ that only a major institution could provide (Illich 1973: 54). According to this argument, the industrial institutionalization of values has restricted the ability of people to endow the world with their own personal meaning, and the growth of culture as ‘stories we tell about ourselves’: Under these conditions, the down-to-earth concreteness of oral forms of expression are ill-suited to empowering people whose lives are no longer grounded by direct participation in a local, organic culture. And not only has the production of narrative been taken out of people’s hands and industrialized itself; like another rust-belt industry, it seems to be withering away (Lippert 2000, ibid.). This is, in fact, a long-standing argument, as folk-song collectors and folklorists have long diagnosed the diminution of oral tradition as a result of the erosive impact of industrialization or mass media. As the folklorist, ethnomusicologist and broadcaster Alan Lomax observed in 1960, local vernacular culture is often crushed under what he termed “a system of cultural super-highways”: Now we of the jets, the wireless, and the atom-blast are on the verge of sweeping completely off the globe what unspoilt folklore is left. It is only a few sentimental folklorists like myself who seem to be disturbed by this prospect today. But tomorrow, when it will be too late, when the whole world is bored with automated mass-distributed video music, our descendants will despise us for having thrown away the best of our culture (Lomax 1960). This heartfelt and prophetic admonition is just as salutary now as when it was first published. Due to the rhetorical nature of such criticism, however, there is an attendant danger in assigning folklore or folk song a status as the very antithesis of modernity. This tends to be a spurious argument, as establishing an opposition between folklore and modernity depends upon ascribing stipulatively to folklore those features of social life that are perceived to be lacking from modernity (Cohen 1985: 11). This perspective also assumes that people are somehow passive in relation to (popular) culture: they receive it and transmit it, but do not create it (unlike folklore) (Cohen 1982: 37). We can therefore recognise that folklorists and communications theorists have often tended to oversimplify associations of folklore with conservatism, and popular culture with dynamism (Laba and Narváez 1986: 1).86 As Peter Narváez has observed, folklore is “a dynamic component of culture which functions adaptively in situations of rapid cultural change”, and the study of it “encompasses a vast array of old and modern expressive behaviours, texts and contexts” (Narváez 1986: 125). Narváez has deconstructed the folkloristic perspective that ascribes the mass media the role of ‘destroyer of folklore’: The destroyers argument is a deterministic value judgement whose tenets are: folklore is basically good; when popular culture, an inferior expressive form, and the technological media of its transmission are introduced into given cultural scenes, they either supplant or unfairly compete with folklore. It follows implicitly from such an argument that the responsibility of the folklorist is to save, nurture, and maintain folklore before it is entirely destroyed by pernicious forces (Narváez 1986, ibid.). Historically there has been widespread agreement on the idea of a valid correspondence between the producers and receptors of folklore; “since folklore came out of the community, scholars could use it to recover the common voice of those excluded from history” (Levine 1992: 1370). Yet consensus does not cohere in an equivalent fashion around popular culture: Popular culture is seen as the antithesis of folk culture: not as emanating from within the community but created – often artificially by people with pecuniary or ideological motives – for the community, or rather for the masses who no longer had an organic community capable of producing culture (Levine 1992, ibid.). It is seldom recognized that popular cultural forms (typically communicated in mass societal contexts) such as radio broadcasting can span a continuum in order to function in ways similar to folk or vernacular culture (typically communicated in small group encounters) (Laba and Narváez 1986; Levine 1992; Martin-Barbero 1993; Hiscock 1994). Consequently, folklore and popular culture can both be used to recover “the voices of the historically inarticulate” (Levine 1992: 1369-70), and an exploration of their convergence (or the convergence of oral history and radio) might also be used to provide evidence of the relation of forms of listening to radio broadcasting. Popular culture may in this way be used to unearth and reconstruct attitudes, values and reactions (i.e. of programme-makers and listeners); to discover for what purpose ‘texts’ were produced, what people ‘do’ with texts and what sort of discourse texts induce; and to discern how people might use texts to form identities or identify with their communities ( Feldman 2007). I will attempt to utilize such an approach in the rest of this chapter, through a discussion of some iconic Newfoundland radio programmes that have developed relationships of intimacy with audiences by incorporating elements of parasocial interaction and participation characteristic of small group communication, and by amplifying, shaping and circulating the oral traditions which traditionally took place within these small group encounters. The Barrelman, particularly during its first ‘incarnation’, as presented by Joseph Smallwood (1937-1943), was an extremely popular broadcast ‘clearing house’ of information on local history, folklore and anecdote, much of which was sent in by listeners. The Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin was another hugely successful Newfoundland programme that provided contact between geographically isolated listeners who had no access to telephones by relaying personal messages delivered to the radio station in person or by telegraph. The much-loved and long-running programme The Fisheries Broadcast, which is ostensibly a ‘current-affairs’ programme addressing the concerns of an occupational community, has upheld several ‘traditions’ in Newfoundland broadcasting - firstly, the interactive relationship between broadcasters and listeners, and secondly, the blurring of information and entertainment, of ‘hard facts’ and ‘folk talk’ (Narváez 1991), particularly through its dramatic feature The Chronicles of Uncle Mose (1953-1961). I will also discuss some uses of oral history in Newfoundland editions of the CBC series Between Ourselves (which ran between 1966 -1979). Finally I will give an account of the important and influential Newfoundland documentary initiative The Fogo Process, and its place in the national Challenge for Change project. In doing so I will introduce ethical issues surrounding co-production and editing which we will explore further in Chapter 4, and some basic tenets related to ‘participatory action research’ and community development which will prove germane to my discussion of community radio in Chapter 5. Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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