Hardcover, 320 pages
English language
Published Jan. 1, 1990 by Duke University Press.
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Arts in Earnest asserts the importance of the long standing, informally learned folk culture of the Tarheel State. Too often the materials of folklife are relegated to a sanitized rural past; but as the old forms disappear, new traditions constantly evolve to help North Carolinians negotiate their rapidly changing social and economic environment. The fifteen sketches in Arts in Earnest are based on personal interviews. Laura Lee, from Chatham County, describes the quilts she made from funeral flower ribbons; witnesses and friends each remember varying details of the Duke University football player who single-handedly vanquished a gang of would-be muggers; Clyde Jones leads a safari through his backyard, which is filled with animals made of wood and cement that represent nontraditional folk art; the songs and sermon of a Primitive Baptist service flow together as one——“ it fills you up all over"; Durham bluesman Willie Trice, one of a handful …
Arts in Earnest asserts the importance of the long standing, informally learned folk culture of the Tarheel State. Too often the materials of folklife are relegated to a sanitized rural past; but as the old forms disappear, new traditions constantly evolve to help North Carolinians negotiate their rapidly changing social and economic environment. The fifteen sketches in Arts in Earnest are based on personal interviews. Laura Lee, from Chatham County, describes the quilts she made from funeral flower ribbons; witnesses and friends each remember varying details of the Duke University football player who single-handedly vanquished a gang of would-be muggers; Clyde Jones leads a safari through his backyard, which is filled with animals made of wood and cement that represent nontraditional folk art; the songs and sermon of a Primitive Baptist service flow together as one——“ it fills you up all over"; Durham bluesman Willie Trice, one of a handful of Durham musicians who recorded in the 1930s and early 1940s, remembers when the active tobacco warehouses offered up ready audiences—“They’d tip us a heap of change to play some music”; and Goldsboro tobacco auctioneer H. L. “Speed” Riggs chants 460 words per minute, five to six times faster than a normal conversational rate. - Arts in Earnest gives a striking sense of the richness of North Carolina folk culture. In a state where family farmland borders the high-tech campuses of the Research Triangle Park, experiments in alternative energy sources stand atop the Appalachian Mountains, and the Great Dismal Swamp Canal runs alongside a four-lane highway in Pasquotank County, the folkways of North Carolina are the state's link with the past and its unifying path into the future.