{"id":11588,"date":"2017-08-14T09:26:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T13:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=11588"},"modified":"2021-07-21T12:40:59","modified_gmt":"2021-07-21T16:40:59","slug":"redefining-urban-folklore-in-philadelphias-camingerly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2017\/08\/redefining-urban-folklore-in-philadelphias-camingerly\/","title":{"rendered":"Redefining Urban Folklore in Philadelphia’s “Camingerly”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
421 South Iseminger Street, March 2, 1959. \u00a0(PhillyHistory)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The neighborhood called Camingerly doesn\u2019t exist. What\u2019s more, according to the list of nearly 400 Philadelphia neighborhood names<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Abrahams explained his work of more than a half-century ago: \u201cCamingerly was really just us white folks name for what the [African-American] men called the 12th<\/sup> Street neighborhood, the place the old Twelfth Street gang used to rule until they got old enough to have jobs, \u2018old ladies\u2019 and to get thrown down by circumstances. \u2018Camingerly\u2019 was our abbreviation of Camac, Iseminger, and Waverly between Twelfth and Thirteenth, Pine and Lombard.\u201d If not for his living at 421 South Iseminger Street in the late 1950s, Abrahams wouldn\u2019t have done the work that led him to initiate University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Center for Folklore & Ethnography.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the deal with the neighborhood a few called Camingerly?<\/p>\n

\u201cThese old row houses built as servants\u2019 quarters as satellites to the square and townhouses on the larger thoroughfares,” wrote Abrahams. We called them \u2018Father-Son-Holy-Ghost Houses,\u2019 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\u2019t reached these parts completely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abrahams continued: \u201cThis 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<\/em> pimp country. Alice\u2019s Playhouse [an African-American bar at 522 South 13th<\/sup> 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\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1970, Abrahams noted, the neighborhood had \u201cbecome all white.\u201d And even as he lived there in the late 1950s, gentrification was beginning to take hold. \u00a0\u201cCamingerly already had a number of invaders from Center City,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMiss 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut,\u201d Abrahams observed, \u201cin 1958 the place was unmistakably black.\u201d And, for an emerging folklorist, full of possibilities.<\/p>\n

Abrahams’ story as to how he arrived: \u201cI was a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania and I needed quarters close to transportation to Penn. \u2026I 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\u2014reduced rent if improvements were made by the tenant. \u2026 So I moved to 421 S. Iseminger and began the never ending job of fixing the place up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
419-421 South Camac Street, 1963 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cOne 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 \u201cOld Banjo,\u201d 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 \u201cOld Banjo\u201d had been dead a year and that not only were there no old bluesmen in the area, but that kind of \u2018down-home\u2019 music was scorned by my neighbors. So I quickly gave up hope of finding a store of folkloric material.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, 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\u2014the performances of \u2018sounds,\u2019 the openly heroic, wildly imaginative, coercive, often violent stories and epic poems manufactured and performed by the young men.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to anthropologist and collaborator John F. Szwed, Abrahams rejected the \u201cargument that black Americans suffered not only from poverty but from a deficient culture.\u201d What Abrahams found in Camingerly was \u201ca portrait of a highly verbal, articulate people whose daily lives are charged with the importance of wit, metaphor, and subtlety in a thousand ways.\u201d Abrahams took what he observed from his base at Iseminger Street and \u201credefined 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abrahams described meeting Bobby Lewis who performed his material and introduced others. \u201cFortunately for me,\u201d wrote Abrahams, \u201ca number of good performers from the neighborhood liked the idea of getting their entire repertoire down on tape (and listening to it played back). \u2026 John H. \u2018Kid\u2019 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\u2014\u2018Shine,\u2019 \u2018Stackolee\u2019 and one of the \u2018Signifying Monkey\u2019 toasts\u2014and 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.”<\/p>\n

Abrahams did more than a paper. He completed his dissertation \u201cNegro Folklore From South Philadelphia\u201d in 1962 and published a book one year later. \u201cAbrahams described a new and vibrant verbal world, exuberant, profane and endlessly inventive\u201d wrote William Grimes in The New York Times’\u00a0<\/em>obituary. <\/em>\u00a0\u201cHe explained the fine points of the dozens \u2014 a street-corner battle of wits in which participants traded insults \u2014 and analyzed traditional poems like \u201cThe Signifying Monkey,\u201d whose opening line provided Professor Abrahams with the title of his book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Szwed and others described that book, Deep Down in the Jungle,<\/em> as an \u201cunderground classic.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Even if the neighborhood name of Camingerly never caught on.<\/p>\n

[Sources: Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia<\/em><\/a> (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970,) 2nd edition; John F. Szwed, \u201cReview of Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia<\/em><\/a>.\u201d American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Sep., 1971), pp. 392-394; William Grimes, \u201cRoger D. Abrahams, Folklorist Who Studied African-American Language, Dies at 84<\/a>,: The New York Times<\/em>, June 29, 2017; Bonnie L. Cook, \u201cRoger D. Abrahams, 84, Penn folklorist, writer, and performer,\u201d Philly.com<\/em>, July 7, 2017.]<\/span><\/p>\n

Next Time: A Sampling\u00a0<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The neighborhood called Camingerly doesn\u2019t exist. What\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}