Folklorist’s College Archive Collects Clues to Who We Are

Thirty years ago, students at Cal State Northridge discovered that folklore was more than tales of Paul Bunyan and traditional songs like “John Henry.”

They learned that it included the creepy stories they swapped at Canoga Park pajama parties about a killer with a hook who terrorized couples on Mulholland Drive. They learned that the dirty jokes they told at fraternity parties were folklore, and so were the lines guys used to pick up girls.

They discovered that stories told in the Latino community about a weeping woman who haunted the San Fernando Mission were folklore. So were singing games played by African American children in Pacoima, the way various Valley families handed out their Christmas gifts, Yemenite songs and rumors of local caves populated by mysterious albinos.

In 1996, student papers on these subjects became the Bess Lomax Hawes Student Folklore Archive. Stored in 24 cardboard boxes in the college’s Oviatt Library, the archive was donated by Hawes, a distinguished folklorist, musician and professor emerita, who is credited with pioneering the study of community-based folklore.

“A lot of it is not on a very high level in a literary way,” Hawes said of the jump-rope rhymes, urban legends, recipes for kugel and other material that make up the archive, most of it collected when she taught at the university during the 1960s and ‘70s.

But however simple the language, local folklore is of enduring value, Hawes believes.

“To me, it’s another way of getting to the human mystery: Why people behave the way they do,” said Hawes, now 79 and living in Northridge.

The archive provides a unique window on the San Fernando Valley of 30 years ago, a catalog of local culture at a time when many residents didn’t even realize they had one.

Much of the material in the collection has both a universal and a local dimension. Take the famous story of the “the hook” that circulated throughout the country during the 20th century’s middle decades.

Wherever in the United States teenage couples did things in cars that their parents wouldn’t approve of, teenagers told the story of a couple who heard a noise outside, panicked and drove off, only to find a bloody hook hanging from the car door or window when they got home. It was understood that the fortunate couple had barely escaped death--or worse, in the young woman’s case.

In 1971, student Christine E. Hold received an A for her collection of legends about such mythical bad guys as the Hook Man--stories that Hawes believes may reflect normal teenage fears.

Hold heard from a 15-year-old Birmingham High School student--who had heard the story at a slumber party when she was in junior high--about the time the Hook Man “put on a woman’s clothes and knocked on someone’s door in those houses up by Mulholland in Encino. He pretended that he was a Fuller brush saleslady and had a wig on and a dress and high heels. He asked if he could use her bathroom for a minute. Just as he was getting his hook ready to slash the lady, a neighbor came over. He heard the other woman in the house and fled.”

His identity was revealed when the bag he left behind was found to be full of hooks, not brushes.

The woman who taught her university students that their own communities were worthy of careful study is a towering figure in American folklore, said Daniel Sheehy, who succeeded Hawes as director of the folk and traditional arts program at the National Endowment for the Humanities. He describes Hawes as the visionary and inspirational matriarch of American folklore.

Hawes is the daughter of John Lomax and the sister of Alan Lomax, whose taste and vision transformed the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress from a musty repository of traditional songs into a robust collection of every kind of American music, from cowboy ballads to the songs of Southern prisoners and striking miners.

Hers is “pretty much the premier folklore family of the 20th century,” Sheehy said.

As a member of the Almanac Singers in the 1940s, Hawes sang and played the guitar alongside Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and her now late husband, Butch Hawes. She also co-wrote “M.T.A.,” the song about Charlie’s eternal ride on the Boston subway that was a hit for the Kingston Trio during the 1950s folk revival she helped create.

“At the NEA, she was the architect of what we call public folklore today,” said Sheehy, who worked with Hawes at the Smithsonian Institution. “Like her brother Alan, she was a pioneer in letting the voices of America’s folk genius be heard, in all its diverse glory.”

She was awarded a National Medal of the Arts by President Clinton in 1993.

Both before and after she became a national force in folklore, Hawes was at Cal State Northridge, encouraging her students to collect the rituals and stories of their own families and neighbors.

She couldn’t bear to throw out the papers describing their collections. So for a long time she kept them under her bed, as certain of their value as she and the other Lomaxes had been of the work of Leadbelly and Guthrie.

Hawes expressed her conviction that folklore is essentially community-based in a 1997 speech.

“Any good folkloric collecting project requires some degree of closeness and some degree of reciprocity,” she said. “A good CSUN student whose collection of--I don’t remember anymore (baby games? wart cures?)--came to me and said, ‘Mrs. Hawes, you taught me how to collect, but you didn’t teach me how to stop collecting.’ ”

The student complained that one of her informants continued to pester her with additional wart cures long after she had finished her paper. Too bad, Hawes told the student. The persistent informant had helped her get an A and now it was time for the student to give back.

“No collector ever, ever stops,” said Hawes, who still carries a little notebook and jots down what she observes on the bus and elsewhere.

When Hawes talks about her work, she seems most proud of helping the United States develop a policy--unique, she believes--of encouraging new immigrants, such as the Hmong of Laos, both to assimilate and to keep “the beautiful things they bring along” from their original homes.

“You don’t have to give up anything,” she said.