Yesterday I had an e-mail from Linda Pershing, and though her article on Carlos Arredondo and his memorial to his son was published in Journal of American Folklore almost two years ago, I remembered the facts of the story central to her research so clearly.

Carlos Arredondo’s son, Alex, was a Marine who was killed while serving in Iraq in 2004. His father’s grief was immense, immediate, and shocking; his reaction made national headlines. Carlos found an outlet in creating a portable memorial to his son and in protesting the war.

Linda Pershing’s message yesterday brought news of Alex’s younger brother’s death this week. Brian Arredondo committed suicide. Peace activist Cindy Sheehan issued a statement with more information.

I’m grateful for Linda’s work, which brought this family’s sad but not uncommon plight to my attention. May peace be with them.

Linda Pershing’s article about Carlos Arredondo and his mobile memorial appeared in Journal of American Folklore vol. 123, no. 488 (Spring 2010) and is available in Project Muse and JSTOR. Carlos Arredondo has been profiled by various media, including New York Times, CNN, and Democracy Now!.

This week’s food column

“Steinberg and Prost dig deep into the archives to unearth the stories of early settlers struggling to keep kosher on the pioneer trail, rural and small-town Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike adapting old-world cuisines to the bounty of the corn belt…”

The authors have a busy spring planned with interviews scheduled on WGN-TV (May 31), WGN radio (June 8), a presentation at the Printers Row Lit Fest (June 4-5), and other dates TBA.

The University of Illinois Press, the University Press of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin Press, in cooperation with the American Folklore Society and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, invite proposals to participate in a workshop at the 2010 conference of the American Folklore Society for authors working on their first book. Up to six authors will be selected to participate in a full day of intensive activities devoted to critiquing and developing their individual projects.  Projects selected for the workshop will be candidates for publication in the Presses’ new collaborative series, Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World, which aims to publish exceptional first books that emphasize the interdisciplinary and/or international nature of the field of folklore.

For complete submission guidelines, please visit our website at www.folklorestudies.org. Please note that the proposal submission deadline has been extended to April 15, 2010.

Bess Lomax Hawes, folklorist, singer, and defender of the folk arts, died last week in Portland, Oregon. We are honored to have published Hawes’s 2008 memoir, Sing It Pretty, as part of our Music in American Life series. She is remembered in today’s New York Times:

As the youngest child of the song collector John A. Lomax, and a sister of the folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Ms. Hawes was part of the premier family of American folk scholarship. She assisted her father in his research and had a distinguished career of her own, teaching anthropology and directing the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1940s she performed alongside Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the Almanac Singers, and she later taught the rudiments of folk guitar to generations of musicians.

Here, too, is a tribute from Peter Dreier in The Huffington Post that demonstrates Hawes’s creative juggling of child rearing (of three very small children) and guitar teaching:

In the late 1940s, she and her husband Butch were living in the Boston area and sent their three children to a cooperative nursery school organized by graduate students at MIT and Harvard. She frequently brought her guitar to the school to perform for the students. Some of the parents, mostly the mothers, asked her to teach them how to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Bess agreed to charge them one dollar each for each lesson, which lasted several hours, what she called “a whole evening.” She would keep 50 cents for herself to pay for a babysitter and she’d donate the other 50 cents to the nursery school. Word soon spread, and others began to join her classes.

-Stephen Wade, performer, writer, and folk music scholar, “How Archie Taught Us to Learn from Music”
-Mike Munoz, Bay Area pile driver and union historian, “Archie as Trade Unionist”
-David Taylor, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, “Archie Green and the Founding of the American Folklife Center”
-David Roediger, Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Labor Music as History Lesson”

Green moved comfortably through the halls of Congress and the halls of ivy, but he preferred life on scaffolding or in a welder’s shed or machine shop. Work was where his heart was — doing it and convincing others to document what they did.