New Books In Folklore

Children’s folklore is simultaneously a conservator of tradition and a site for creativity and innovation. For over five decades, Dr. Jeanne Pitre Soileau documented and collected the jokes, chants, rhymes, and games that that she observed on school playgrounds throughout her career as a public school teacher in southern Louisiana. From the early days of integration to the first decade of the 21st century, Dr. Soileau has taken note of the evolving forms in which children’s play take and its reflections of contemporary times. Her book, Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Lousiana Children’s Folklore and Play (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), examines forty-four years of children’s folklore and play collected in southern Louisiana schools. The book has won the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize for excellence in folklore scholarship and the 2018 Opie Prize for the best published scholarly book on children’s folklore. In this podcast, we hear about Dr. Soileau’s early fascination with the sounds