Conference Agenda

In southwest Wisconsin, a small but impactful Cornish-American community has cultivated a repertoire of music collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Cornwall in southwest Britain. At events like the annual Cornish Festival and Celtic Celebration in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, one frequently hears songs collected by British scholars like Ralph Dunstan (1857–1933) and Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924). During three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Wisconsin and Cornwall, I have found that musical communities in both places have cultivated a similar knowledge of many of these songs, partly because of shared memories of emigration realized through song. This paper investigates the ways in which Dunstan and Baring-Gould’s work contributed to a newly defined “Cornish Celtic folk” culture among the Cornish in Britain and those abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, classificatory frameworks were entangled with transnational “Celtic” movements that relied on shifting concepts of race, culture, and eventually, nationalism. It was a folk culture that was co-created alongside the elite culture of music scholarship and the popular culture of notated music, and Dunstan and Baring-Gould’s work demonstrates many of the marked shifts that occurred at the time. Drawing on philosopher Alexis Shotwell’s concept of “unforgetting” (2016), I ask what the work of these collectors does for musical communities in the present day and what it could do to enable a more holistic view of the Cornish colonization of North America. Drawing on folklorist Emily Hilliard’s ideas on “visionary folklore” (2022), I ask how this music could generate possibilities for a more just and inclusive future. This research utilizes interviews, participant observation, and archival work alongside scholars including Martin Stokes, Philip Bohlman, David Hesmondhalgh, Alan Dundes, José Muñoz, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, and Banu Subramaniam, to inform an understanding of community singing’s impact on concepts of colonialism, race, ethnicity, and cultural memory. Songs have been used to make and remake concepts of the Cornish Celtic folk many times throughout the last two centuries, and this work suggests an opportunity to remake or to unmake those concepts through collective action.