With apologies to Dr. Bluestein...

If you're not first... hell, you can even be fifth!

Before we begin our series looking at the lore of popular culture, I have a confession… I didn’t coin the term “poplore.”

Oh, I certainly thought that I did. One day in grad school it just popped on in there. “What an awesome word,” I thought to myself. It really rings! I went around all day feeling pretty good and telling people I was going to revolutionize the field when David Puglia — now a darn good folklorist in his own right — looks up from his computer and goes, “Oh, like Bluestein’s book?”

Record scratch.

That’s right, friends. Not only had the term been used before, it’s literally the name of the book: POPLORE. And! As if that wasn’t bad enough! The book was published in 1994! C’mon!

I was devastated. I had missed the boat by almost 20 years. So, I marched straight to the library… or, rather, I opened up the library’s online request form. It was cold outside, guys. Within a day or two I had it in my hands and guess what — it’s a pretty good book! Very detailed, very convincing, very well thought-out. There was one problem, though: my idea of “poplore” was very different from his…

At the risk of over-generalizing, Bluestein’s argument centers around music and its role as a kind of organic national culture — importantly — produced by the people. Through music, Americans were able to integrate and blend the varying ethnic and social divisions that existed or were imposed on them (eg, the African banjo becoming synonymous with Appalachian bluegrass).  Instead of, as Bluestein previously described, a country "with so little history and no significant 'primitive' groups" [an on-going concern for generations of folklorists], Bluestein saw a country that while "one of the most racially segregated societies," was in turn, "without a doubt the most integrated musically."

Bluestein saw a problem, though: the advent and domination of mass media had stripped music of its organic connection to the people. The music played across the country was not the genuine political reflection of the people (itself a romantic notion of idealized “folklore” that has lingered over folkloristics for too long), but was a commodified and sterilized corporate product, derisively known as “pop music.” To solve this dilemma, Bluestein suggested renaming American folk artists as poplorists. Musicians like Woodie Guthrie used traditional instruments, traditional forms of expression, and reflected the political and social views of the people, but they did so within the modern socio-economic structures of twentieth century America.

It’s an interesting and admirable argument, to be sure. Bluestein deserves credit for attempting to resolve the very real tension between folk and pop, and he finds a way to successfully detrivialize popular culture for academics more interested in a romanticized superiority of the past. And unlike “fakelore,” which Richard Dorson used to denote manufactured or corporatized folklore, Bluestein's poplore was not a tool of control or oppression but the people asserting their own cultural power and agency.

However, why Bluestein chose the term “poplore” remains a kind of mystery to me. He successfully demonstrates that would-be American folk expression is mediated through popular culture — I doubt anyone would disagree with that. But Bluestein still remains tied to this notion of an organically produced “national language” that defines the community, their values, their experiences, and their personality. Which, again, that’s all good. That’s what folklore does, we’re all in agreement. But why the term “poplore” for simply a reconstruction of how American folklore has developed?

Maybe I’m being pedantic or too focused on the rhetorical ebb and flow of it all, I don’t know. The socio-economic and technological changes of the twentieth century have caused significant hardship for folklorists, many of whom, for all of their positive intentions and motivations, continue to default back to the idea of folklore as this romantic primitivism, a kind of hippie-infused value system that sees life on the ranch as the natural state of American culture, only begrudgingly forced to interact with the outside world of modernism. That’s an exaggeration, of course, and increasingly the newer generations of folklorists are dealing with the effects of modernism and postmodernism on America and reimagining “the folk” accordingly.

Ray Browne, the credited founder of Popular Culture Studies, echoed Bluestein in his assessment of the role of popular culture, saying, "Popular culture is the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows."   He continued, "[popular culture] is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it."

If, then, popular culture is a source from which Americans self-identity, voice and create culture, and learn how to live… well… that’s precisely in our wheelhouse as folklorists. The only change needed is to recenter the relationship between producer, product, and audience. That’s where I come in.

To me, it’s paramount to understand that beginning with modernization in the twentieth century, a new cultural hearth was born: popular culture. From that hearth, lore has developed, been transmitted, and reinforced over time. This new genre of study recognizes that if folklore is the lore of the folk, then poplore is the lore of popular culture.

Seems to make sense to me, anyway.

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Bluestein’s book was and is an important contribution to the study of popular culture, especially for folklorists. It has gone largely ignored, however, and that’s a real shame. If you care about these questions and ideas, POPLORE is a must-read, full of insightful commentary and analysis. For my part, I will continue to use the term as I best understand it, but while always giving credit where credit is due: Bluestein was there first.