Folk Song and the Voice: Toward an Ethnography of Singing

Drawing from ethnomusicological voice studies and African American music scholarship, this essay advocates for attention to singing technique as a space of social meaning-making and enculturation in folk song performance. I analyze two contrasting recordings of white Appalachian traditional musician Frank Proffitt (1913–1965) that highlight underacknowledged influences from the African American blues tradition in Proffitt's vocalization. Finally, I propose that attending to the singing voice in folklore studies necessitates an ethnography of singing, modeled after the folkloristic ethnography of speaking.