A Small Corner of American Culture

Folklife specialist David Taylor was in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress sorting through photographs he had taken of Italian-Americans in San Pedro, Calif.

“This one shows a statue of the Virgin Mary cradling a fishing boat in Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, the parish of many Italian-American families,” Taylor told Alan Jabbour, Folklife Center director.

“San Pedro residents call Mary Star of the Sea the church fishermen-built,” said Taylor. “It was largely through donations of money from fishermen in the Southern California seaport that the church was erected.”

Taylor described other photographs he had taken during a three-week visit to San Pedro with a team of Library of Congress Folklife specialists. There were photos of Italian-American fishermen aboard the Sea Scout and the St. George II and other purse seiners.

In one photo, Frankie Briguglio, 8, displays the first pizza baked in the family’s new back yard forno, a traditional outdoor oven built by his father, Andrea, who sells fish from a truck in San Pedro.

There were pictures of the wedding and reception of Annalisa Vottolo and Edward Ogle and of Joe Calise, the San Pedro sausage maker at A-1 Imported Groceries on 8th Street.

American Folklife Center researchers are spending two years photographing and tape-recording Italian-Americans in preparation for the Library of Congress’ major Columbus Quincentenary 1492-1992 Project called “Italian-Americans in the West.”

They are documenting lifestyles--past and present--of Italian-Americans throughout the West: cowboys in Nevada, farmers and winery owners and workers in California’s Santa Clara Valley, miners in Pueblo, Colo., and Carbon County, Utah.

“Most Americans associate Italian-American life, history and culture with the urban East, “ said Jabbour. “But an important and much-less-understood aspect of Italian-American history is to be found in the American West.

“In the mid-19th Century, large numbers of Italian immigrants settled in California and other Western states. They brought with them cultural skills and arts, agriculture techniques, wine culture, stone masonry and much more.”

Public buildings, homes, stores and barns, products of folk architectural techniques of Northern Italy and erected by 19th-Century Italian stonemasons, are found today in small towns and rural areas throughout the West, said Jabbour. “More than most people realize,” he said, “all these Italian-Americans helped shape the cultural landscape of the Modern West.

“We decided on ‘Italian-Americans in the West’ as our Columbus Quincentenary Project because Italian-Americans have a special affinity with Columbus. He is a cultural hero for Italian-Americans far more than for Italians in Italy.”

The project will culminate in an exhibition and a book to help inaugurate Catholic University’s Italian-American Heritage Center in Washington in 1992. The exhibit will be shown later in museums throughout the nation.

Congress created the American Folklife Center 14 years ago. The 47-year-old Jabbour is its first director. The center’s roots go back to 1890 when Jesse Walter Fewkes, a Harvard ethnologist, recorded the lore and music of the Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine.

It was the first time anywhere in the world that Thomas Edison’s new invention, the phonograph, was used as a scientific instrument to document culture in the field. Fewkes’ wax cylinders and thousands of other wax cylinders documenting the oral history, music and rituals of 50 Indian tribes in the late 19th Century are part of the Folklife Center’s archives.

Jabbour showed a 1985 Library of Congress long-play record transcribed from Francis La Flesche’s 1895 wax cylinders of the Omaha Tribe. La Flesche, an Omaha Indian trained in ethnology phonographic documentation, recorded the cultural history of his people on the cylinders.

“Because of the 1985 record, some of the old songs of the Omahas have been revised and are once again in the repertoire of young singers of the tribe,” said Jabbour. “These old songs, sung by great-, great-grandparents of present-day tribe members, were forgotten over the years. Now, thanks to the preservation of La Flesche’s wax cylinders, the songs have become an agent in the contemporary process of cultural transmission within the tribe.”

Throughout the 1930s, the father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress Archives of American Folk Songs traveled around the country recording folk songs and oral history. Their recordings of Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter and Ferdinand (Jelly Roll) Morton are considered national treasures.

During the last 52 years, the Library of Congress has published a series of phonograph records and audio cassettes that highlight the Folklife Center’s holdings. Some recent releases include:

“Possum Up a Gum Stump” recordings made from 1924 to 1949 of Alabama old-time fiddlers; “James P. Johnson: Carolina Shout,” a collection of piano rolls which was recorded by James P. Johnson in 1916 and includes many of his own rags.

Skip James, Blind Willie McTell, and Bukka White: “Three Shades of Blues,” recordings of three influential early blues artists and Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Quartet’s “You can Feel it in Your Soul,” a collection of gospel performances by the most popular blue-grass band of the 1950s.

Alan Jabbour has been playing the violin since he was 7 years old and in his grammar school orchestra in Jacksonville, Fla. By high school, he was playing professionally. He was an English major at the University of Miami and did his graduate work in medieval literature at Duke.

As an avocation, he collected instrumental folk music and was a founding member of the Hollow Rock String Band whose repertoire was that of old-time fiddlers. Today, he performs with a music group composed of Washington news reporters.

Jabbour documented traditional folk fiddling in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia and “The Hammons Family” a study of a West Virginia family’s traditions. He taught a folk music course at UCLA in 1968. The next year he became head of the Library of Congress’ Archives of Folk Songs.

As director of the American Folklife Center, he oversees one of the largest collections of folk material in the world. It documents folk culture, publishes books, tapes and recordings, sponsors folklife conferences and exhibits and works with states in setting up folklife repositories.

“The purpose of the center is the accumulation of cultural material that enables us as Americans to know ourselves better,” mused the lanky, bespectacled Jabbour. “It helps us reflect on who we are as a country.”