The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

  Blindboy Boatclub is an Irish artist and author, who has a weekly podcast on which he talks about pretty much whatever he thinks is interesting. Sometimes the topic is Irish folklore.  On a recent edition of the Blindboy Podcast , he recounted an eerie experience of being out for a walk and hearing a disturbing, shrill scream that he initially took for a child being tortured. He followed the noise and eventually found he had come into contact with a Banshee, or as he later figured out after doing additional research, a female fox with a cough. (No spoiler there, that's the actual title of the episode: "I Thought I Heard the Banshee But It Was a Fox With a Cough.") What struck me most about this story wasn’t the twist ending, amusing as it was, but the folkloric richness Blindboy unpacked along the way. As he explained the origins and traditions surrounding the banshee, I was reminded of my own encounter with another famous weeping woman of folklore: La Llorona. While t...

  What does a catchy, if obscure, 19th-century minstrel tune have in common with a rousing Irish sea shanty? More than you might think, and it all centers around the intriguing evolution of a single word: jamboree. My adventure into the etymology of "jamboree" began as many such quests do: pinpointing its earliest use. This trek through linguistic history led me to an 1854 song titled Whoop! Jam-Bo-Ree , penned by none other than Dan Emmett, the same composer behind the iconic Dixie . This piece, originating from the blackface minstrel shows of the era, portrays a narrative involving a black man aboard a riverboat—though the specifics of his role, whether as a worker or a low-ranking passenger, remain somewhat ambiguous. (The mock-dialect certainly obscures the meaning of certain lines.)  Whoop! Jam-Bo-Ree is characterized by its playful, albeit somewhat nonsensical use of the term "jamboree" in the chorus. The song, like many minstrel numbers, was crafted to enter...

  The mysteriously named jews harp, also called in early texts a jews trump, is a musical instrument that dates back thousands of years. It appears all over Asia and Europe, as well as in the Americas -- in fact, some of the earliest mentions of the Jews harp in the English language make their appearances in accounts of trading them in South America to the local tribes, who found the strange foreign instruments to be highly desirable.  The elevated status this instrument once held can be inferred from the medieval images at the Bayeux cathedral of angels playing the jews harp. While to a modern ear its springy, high pitched rattle sounds odd, perhaps even comical (probably no thanks to its use in providing modern cartoon sound effects) it is nevertheless used in some shamanic traditions as a trance inducing instrument. The sound can be very like modern synthesizer tones, the main difference being that a jews harp is primarily a percussion instrument with a very limited musica...

When one's doing research into the song  House of the Rising Sun , it's hard to get everyone you talk to to leave off the Animals version. One obsession that particular set of lyrics begets is an assumption that the song is necessarily about New Orleans and any actual location called The Rising Sun. The Rising Sun was not an unusual name for colonial taverns, with ones having existed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Milton, Massachusetts, and in Fredericksburg, Virginia; there were also several in England throughout the years, with a famous one in Cloth Fair, London. It was also applied as a name for ships and as a nickname for redheads or people with especially ruddy complexions.  The choice of the name likely has as much to do with the rhyme scheme as anything, and it's the kind of thing that gets easily changed (see Child's collected folks songs about a ship called "The Sweet Trinity" or "The Golden Willow Tree" or "The Golden Vanity" o...

I've been amusing myself with terrifying old murder ballads. Here's one from Francis James Child's collection that should be turned into a Hollywood film any day now. 93F.1 SAID my lord to his ladye, as he mounted his horse, (bis) Take care of Long Lankyn, who lies in the moss. (bis) 93F.2 Said my lord to his ladye, as he rode away, Take care of Long Lankyn, who lies in the clay. 93F.3 Let the doors be all bolted, and the windows all pinned, And leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in. 93F.4 Then he kissed his fair ladye, and he rode away; He must be in London before break of day. 93F.5 The doors were all bolted, and the windows were pinned, All but one little window, where Long Lankyn crept in. 93F.6 ‘Where is the lord of this house?’ said Long Lankyn: ‘He is gone to fair London,’ said the false nurse to him. 93F.7 ‘Where is the ladye of this house?’ said Long Lankyn: ‘She’s asleep in her chamber,’ said the false nurse to him. 93F.8 ‘Where is th...

A sort of visual aid to the book Mules and Men : some footage shot by Zora Neale Hurston in 1928, the same period when she was gathering information for the book. http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/130052.html Hurston's Crow/Buzzard song: