Month: August 2017

Not far from his small rented house on Iseminger Street, Roger Abrahams could hear echoes young girls chanting to the distinctive slap of jump rope on pavement.

Folklorist antenna up, Abrahams recognized the chance to collect what he guessed wouldn’t be around much longer in his gradually gentrifying neighborhood—a community White newcomers called Camingerly. He took out his notebook and tape recorder and got to work documenting the rhymes of his young neighbors.

“I found out early that when I went more than two blocks away from the area in which I was known, I ran into a stone wall. To many Negroes in this section of Philadelphia,” Abrahams wrote in the early 1960s, “a white man is either a policeman, a landlord, or a bill collector.” Most of what he collected was found within the two city blocks around Iseminger and Lombard Streets. “I never went farther east than Twelfth Street, farther north than Pine, farther south than South Street, and farther west than Juniper,” he later wrote.

The games documented in 1958 and 1959 seemed “considerably more complex than those observable in most places elsewhere.” In early 1963, Abrahams published much of what he found in the journal of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society.

“In common with the singing games collected in this neighborhood, there is great emphasis on individuals doing dance steps and other difficult feats: Wiggling, doing the ‘rumba,’ touching your toes, going ‘up and down the ladder’ (jumping toward one end and then toward the other, the return often being backward jumping), ‘pepper’ (jumping while the rope is turned faster), and hopping.” Abrahams noted that as many as three or four girls would jump at the same time until one missed a step. She then would be become the object of “amused abuse.”

Here are a few from Abrahams’ collection, starting with a vestige of popular culture from the 1890s, including references to local features (the Delaware River and the Daily News,) and concluding with a parody of Dream Lover, Bobby Darin’s Rock and Roll hit recorded in April 1959:

Teddy bear, teddy bear, show your shoe, shoe.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, I love you.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground, ground, ground.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn all around.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, one and two, two.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, I love you.

~

Acka-backa, soda cracker.
Does your father chew tobacco?
Yes. No. Maybe so.
Yes. No. Maybe so.

(Girls who missed on “yes” and “maybe so” were laughed at.)

~

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Children, too.
There’s a little white girl
Going looking for you.
Hands up, torch-a-torch.
Two years old, going on three.
Wear my dresses upon my knee.
Sister has a boyfriend,
Comes every night,
-Walks in the parlor
And turns out the lights.

Peep through the keyhole,
What did I see?
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Put your arms around me.
Girls, girls, ready for a fight.
Here comes the girl with the skirt all tight.
She can wiggle, she can friggle,
She can do that stuff.
But I bet she can’t do this.

(Jumping while the rope is turned faster.)

~

Postman, postman, do your duty
Here comes Susie just like a beauty.
She can rumba, she can tango,
She can do the strip.
She can wear her dress above her hips.

Policeman, policeman, do your duty.
Here comes Adelaide the American beauty.
She can wiggle, she can waggle,
But she sure can do the split, split, split.

(The jumper then straddles the rope.)

~

Blondie and Dagwood went downtown.
Blondie bought an evening gown.
Cookie bought a Daily News,
And this is what I say to you
Close your eyes and count to ten.
If you miss, you take the end.
1, 2, 3, etc.
Ice cream soda, Delaware punch,
Tell me the name of your honeybunch.
A, B, C, etc.

~

Dream lover, where are you?
Upstairs on the toilet stool.
Whatcha doing way up there?
Washing out my underwear.
How’d you get them so clean?
With a bottle of Listerine.
Where’d you get the Listerine?
From a can of pork and beans.
Where’d you get the pork and beans?
In the City of New Orleans.
How’ d you get way down there?
‘Cause I killed a polar bear.
Why’d you kill the polar bear?
Cause he dirtied my underwear.
I want a dream lover,
Never have to dream alone.

[Sources: Roger D. Abrahams, “Some Jump-Rope Rimes from South Philadelphia,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly, Spring, 1963 and Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970,) 2nd edition.]

The neighborhood called Camingerly doesn’t exist. What’s more, according to the list of nearly 400 Philadelphia neighborhood names, current and defunct, it never did. But thanks to the fieldwork of the late folklorist Roger Abrahams, Camingerly survives in scholarly literature, if not in the hearts and minds of would be Camingerlites.

Abrahams explained his work of more than a half-century ago: “Camingerly was really just us white folks name for what the [African-American] men called the 12^th Street neighborhood, the place the old Twelfth Street gang used to rule until they got old enough to have jobs, ‘old ladies’ and to get thrown down by circumstances. ‘Camingerly’ was our abbreviation of Camac, Iseminger, and Waverly between Twelfth and Thirteenth, Pine and Lombard.” If not for his living at 421 South Iseminger Street in the late 1950s, Abrahams wouldn’t have done the work that led him to initiate University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Folklore & Ethnography.

So what’s the deal with the neighborhood a few called Camingerly?

“These old row houses built as servants’ quarters as satellites to the square and townhouses on the larger thoroughfares,” wrote Abrahams. We called them ‘Father-Son-Holy-Ghost Houses,’ as did some of our neighbors, because they each had three rooms, one on top of the other. Some of them, in fact most of them, had a lean to kitchen appended to the first floor; and some of them had indoor plumbing. All the houses on our street were electrified, but not those two blocks to the south of us. The local hardware stores carry the stock of the country store, because in many ways the city life hadn’t reached these parts completely.”

Abrahams continued: “This was not the heart of black Philadelphia, though it was only a block from one of its main centers of activity, South Street. It was a little too far north, too close to the high-priced townhouses and stores. It was pimp country. Alice’s Playhouse [an African-American bar at 522 South 13^th Street] barbecued-chicken-on-the-corner country, but just one block north was Pine Street with all its antique stores and its police station (run by Frank Rizzo…”

By 1970, Abrahams noted, the neighborhood had “become all white.” And even as he lived there in the late 1950s, gentrification was beginning to take hold.  “Camingerly already had a number of invaders from Center City,” he wrote. “Miss Haines, had lived there for years, a Quaker nurse of great sensibility who was home wherever she found herself. And there were four or five others, more recently come, attracted by the closeness to downtown Philly.”

“But,” Abrahams observed, “in 1958 the place was unmistakably black.” And, for an emerging folklorist, full of possibilities.

Abrahams’ story as to how he arrived: “I was a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania and I needed quarters close to transportation to Penn. …I had a friend, a roommate from college, living just a block away, and he was willing to take me to his landlord and to help me strike the same kind of bargain he had been able to make—reduced rent if improvements were made by the tenant. … So I moved to 421 S. Iseminger and began the never ending job of fixing the place up.”

“One of the reasons why moving into the area was exciting was that a couple of years before, my wife-to-be and I had been driving through the area and had seen an old man sitting on a doorstep playing his five-strong banjo. I was a folksinger then, just beginning to collect songs and singers, and so we leapt out of the car and had a delightful hour with “Old Banjo,” as he called himself. So in moving to Camingerly I had hopes of collecting oldtime songs, survivals of the trip north by immigrant singers. However, after I moved I soon found that “Old Banjo” had been dead a year and that not only were there no old bluesmen in the area, but that kind of ‘down-home’ music was scorned by my neighbors. So I quickly gave up hope of finding a store of folkloric material.

“Ultimately, it was not vestiges of the past traditions that exploded in my folkloric imagination, but the oral traditions that were largely the product of the urban experience—the performances of ‘sounds,’ the openly heroic, wildly imaginative, coercive, often violent stories and epic poems manufactured and performed by the young men.”

According to anthropologist and collaborator John F. Szwed, Abrahams rejected the “argument that black Americans suffered not only from poverty but from a deficient culture.” What Abrahams found in Camingerly was “a portrait of a highly verbal, articulate people whose daily lives are charged with the importance of wit, metaphor, and subtlety in a thousand ways.” Abrahams took what he observed from his base at Iseminger Street and “redefined what folklore was, in every sense. He moved it from the written text toward performance, and put the material into a political and cultural framework.”

Abrahams described meeting Bobby Lewis who performed his material and introduced others. “Fortunately for me,” wrote Abrahams, “a number of good performers from the neighborhood liked the idea of getting their entire repertoire down on tape (and listening to it played back). … John H. ‘Kid’ Mike was the first of the great talkers to come by, and he soon agreed to tell me his stories and toasts. He recorded a few of them—‘Shine,’ ‘Stackolee’ and one of the ‘Signifying Monkey’ toasts—and I immediately made transcriptions. Being a graduate student in folklore, I brought the texts to my professors, MacEdward Leach and Tristam Coffin. They both became excited about the stories and their performance and encouraged me to write about them in a term paper.”

Abrahams did more than a paper. He completed his dissertation “Negro Folklore From South Philadelphia” in 1962 and published a book one year later. “Abrahams described a new and vibrant verbal world, exuberant, profane and endlessly inventive” wrote William Grimes in The New York Times’ obituary.  “He explained the fine points of the dozens — a street-corner battle of wits in which participants traded insults — and analyzed traditional poems like “The Signifying Monkey,” whose opening line provided Professor Abrahams with the title of his book.”

Szwed and others described that book, Deep Down in the Jungle, as an “underground classic.” Twenty more books and scores of chapters and scholarly articles by Abrahams would follow. And much of it transformed the field of American urban folklore.

Even if the neighborhood name of Camingerly never caught on.

[Sources: Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970,) 2nd edition; John F. Szwed, “Review of Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Sep., 1971), pp. 392-394; William Grimes, “Roger D. Abrahams, Folklorist Who Studied African-American Language, Dies at 84,: The New York Times, June 29, 2017; Bonnie L. Cook, “Roger D. Abrahams, 84, Penn folklorist, writer, and performer,” Philly.com, July 7, 2017.]

Next Time: A Sampling 

After six years and 200 posts here at PhillyHistory, I have a handle on what’s in the archives, at least the portion of it that’s online. So now’s a good a time as any to take a moment to reflect on what it means to delve into thousands upon thousands of images and write the better part of 175,000 words. To consider what’s next and what’s likely to never be the subject of posts.

Yes… I’m asking, what’s it all mean? For what earthy reason do I persist in researching and writing? And why do you continue reading?

First a little background. This blog was underway long before I got here. It started in 2006, May 30^th to be exact, a year after the launch of its parent site, PhillyHistory.org. I was working then as head of WHYY’s Arts & Culture Service. About the same time, web manager Rich Baniewicz urged me to start a blog about the city’s creative culture. An opportunity soon presented itself with the 45-day deadline to keep (or lose) Thomas Eakins’ painting, The Gross Clinic. On November 16^th I published the first in a series entitled “Eakins Countdown” in an effort to help keep the painting in Philadelphia.

I liked to think the name of that blog, The Sixth Square. was resonant in a city with five original, physical squares. The stated upfront purpose: to “serve as a convener of ideas, a framer of issues, and a source of facts relevant to this important civic conversation.” A few others agreed with this mission. When I left for Temple University in 2008, WHYY kept The Sixth Square alive—for a time.

In 2010, Jonathan Butler invited me to write a weekly column at the Philadelphia clone of his successful Brownstoner Blog in Brooklyn, New York. Thirty-four columns later that project came to an end, but proved again that we had more than enough material, and sufficient interest, to share discoveries about Philadelphia.

Then the folks at Azavea offered me this gig. I jumped right in and got to know many of the city photographers. Some were identified only by partial names: Thum, Primavera, Madill in the 1920s. A few others: D. Alonzo Biggard, Andrew D. Warden and Julius Rosenberg (also in the 1920s). Wenzel J. Hess in the 1930s, Francis Balionis and Atheniasis Mallis in the 1950s. I got to know and appreciate work by Haag, Ebba, Cuneo, and Abuhove. And then there’s the unnamed and immensely talented photographers whose identities may be lost to history. I’m partial to the anonymous master worked on North 7th Street (and elsewhere) in the first decade of the 20th century, producing images that always stand out. The “Row of Houses” illustrated above is more than a document, it’s a testament to architecture, to the poetry of frontality and symmetry.

I got hooked. There’s a rich, wonderful and still untold history to those photographers and their fantastic work. Someday they’ll get their due.

The images are more than illustrations. I’d be adrift without the photographs, just as I’d be lost without the foothold of historical research. Where the books and articles help me grasp what I’m looking at, the images offer an aesthetic connection more emotional than informational. When the photographer made a connection with time and place, we get to “feel” the scene, the moment, the time and the place. The images ground the stories, making them readable beyond the words. They enable us to connect place, space and story with an emotional grasp; they are the glue that morphs information into meaning. From my point of view, experiencing that burst of discovery again and again makes the search all the more exciting. When a connection is made, when a nugget of visual realization joins historical narrative, we’ve accomplished something special.

There’s nothing like the combined power of images and narratives.

Which is why blogging has worked (mostly, I think) for a couple of hundred times—and why Rutgers University Press will publish 95 in a book to be entitled Insight Philadelphia. (More on that another day.)

What’s next for me during year seven here at the PhillyHistory Blog? I’ve kept a running list of ideas, a list that I started with every intention of ticking off the topics, and shrinking the list, one by one. But darn if it doesn’t grows longer every time I look at it. And then there are image files I’ve compiled. They grow, too. There are hundreds awaiting research. I have no doubt, if I was so fortunate to write another 200 posts here, or even 400, that there’d still be a long and promising list for the future. That’s the kind of collection the City Archives is. That’s the kind of city Philadelphia is.

I am looking forward to publishing posts on subjects from displacing the pig farmers of South Philadelphia to the manufacturing of subway cars and the evolution of street games. And then there are those images that don’t easily attach themselves to any narrative. Those images can be powerful in what they project, yet weak in that not much can be found out about them. These I keep in a growing file entitled “Too Good To Ignore.” It includes the “Row of Houses” of 1904 (illustrated) and others by the same photographer. And then there’s another file entitled “Word on the Street,” my compilation of signage, painted walls, etc. Pictures just too good to let go of. “West side of 7^th Street,” also by the 1904 photographer (illustrated above) is a stellar example. Call it urban visual vernacular. Call it worth the effort.

Turning to the “VOID” photograph (below) as metaphor, I’m pleased to report there’s much more out there in the void. Only some of it is in hand, other of it is yet to be found. But when it is uncovered, I am absolutely certain, there’ll be no shortage of images and stories to reconnect.

That’s the kind of collection the City Archives is. That’s the kind of city Philadelphia is.