[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]
On the
difficulty of remembering the past and preserving traditions, and how the
intertubes can help.
As much
time as I spend thinking, talking, and writing about history—and that is a very
significant percentage of my time, natch—I have to admit that it remains
difficult to truly imagine what it was like to live in distant past periods.
For example, I grew up in the pre-internet and even pre-cell phone era (yes,
children, there was such a thing), so I do have memories of what communication
was like prior to all the instantaneous methods we now possess—but nonetheless,
telephones were ubiquitous in my childhood, as they had been in America since
at least the
early 20th century, and so communicating with distant contacts
was relatively straightforward and easy. But of course that wasn’t always the
case, and so in the more genuinely distant past communities communicated in
quite different ways—as illustrated by “hollering,”
the method by which residents of rural communities in places like North
Carolina communicated both everyday greeting and urgent news with each other
across long distances.
For much
of the second half of the 20th century, one such extremely rural
North Carolina community, Spivey’s
Corner (population 49 according to that article), sought to preserve that
tradition of hollering through the National Hollerin’ Contest.
Beginning with the first such contest in June 1969, for
the next half-century or so this annual event brought thousands of visitors
and a good bit of media attention to Spivey’s Corner, to witness masters of
this traditional form of communication demonstrating their craft and to support
this community in a variety of ways. By the 2010s the event was having
difficulty sustaining interest, however, and the Spivey’s
Corner Volunteer Fire Department announced that the June 2016 contest would
be the last one. In November of that year a pair of former contest winners (Iris
Turner and Robby Goodman) sought to revitalize things by organizing a World
Wide Hollerin’ Festival in nearby Hope Mills. Yet that festival took place
only once, and from what I can tell the annual hollerin’ contest is no more.
And yet here
we are, me writing about the contest and hollering, you (hopefully) reading and
learning about them. A main
point of the contest was that technology (like telephones) had made
traditions like hollering obsolete and risked doing away with them, and I
sympathize with that perspective and agree that things have to be done purposefully
and consistently if we are to keep the past alive in an ever-changing present. But
I also believe—perhaps obviously enough, as I share these thoughts, like I do
so much of my work these days, in an online writing setting, but it still needs
saying clearly—that technology has the ability to contribute to that work of preservation
and memory, and indeed can do so for much broader audiences than even the most
well-attended in-person event. To cite just one example, check out the many YouTube
videos of both the contest and hollering in general, a veritable database
of the practice, the tradition, and this now-concluded yet still fortunately
available quirky festival of celebration.
Next
quirky tradition tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?
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