American Folklore
The folklore of the Americas from the Inuit villages of Arctic Alaska to the Quechua highlands of Peru — Native American oral tradition, Latin American syncretism, Appalachian frontier tales, and the modern cryptids.
In this section
Appalachian Folklore
The folk tradition of Appalachia and the American frontier: the Scots-Irish, English, and German inheritance, the Cherokee voices, the Mothman and the Jackalope, the ballad tradition, and the modern folk revival.
Latin American Folklore
The folk tradition of Latin America: the pre-Columbian inheritance of Aztec, Maya, and Inca myth, the Catholic overlay, the African diaspora, the folk saints, La Llorona and the Chupacabra, the syncretic religions, and the gaucho, samba, and cumbia.
Native American Folklore
An introduction to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America — Navajo, Hopi, Lakota, Cherokee, Haida, Inuit, and many others — from trickster tales and Thunderbird legends to medicine bundles and modern retellings.
American folklore is a vast, layered, and living body of story, song, ritual, and belief. It stretches from the Inuit villages of Arctic Alaska to the Quechua-speaking highlands of Peru, and from the haunted hollows of West Virginia to the samba schools of Rio de Janeiro. Across these landscapes, generations of storytellers have woven together indigenous memory, African survival, European transplant, and immigrant reinvention into a tapestry that is at once deeply local and unmistakably continental. This guide offers a thorough overview of that tradition: the people who carried it, the creatures and heroes who populate it, the rituals that give it rhythm through the year, and the modern voices that continue to retell it.
The folklore of the Americas is not a single thing but a federation of many. The great Native American cycles, with their trickster Coyote and their world-shaping Thunderbird, belong to a tradition tens of thousands of years old. The Latin American tradition is a centuries-long conversation between indigenous gods, Catholic saints, and African orishas. The Appalachian tradition grew from the meeting of Scots-Irish, English, German, and Cherokee voices on the colonial frontier. Beyond these regional centres, the immigrant communities of the United States and Canada — Hispanic, French, German, Scandinavian, Slavic, Chinese, Japanese — have each brought their own folkloric inheritance and adapted it to the new land.
The Indigenous Inheritance
Long before any European ship crossed the Atlantic, the continents of North and South America were alive with story. Every nation, from the Navajo and Hopi of the Southwest to the Iroquois of the Northeast, from the Inuit of the Arctic to the Mapuche of Patagonia, kept an oral tradition that explained the world’s making, taught the moral order, and bound people to the land they lived on. These were not isolated bodies of belief. Trade routes carried stories across vast distances, and similar figures — the trickster, the culture hero, the sky bird, the underwater panther — appear in forms recognisably related from the woodlands of Quebec to the deserts of Arizona.
The continent’s first peoples developed an extraordinarily rich storytelling practice. The Navajo, for instance, preserved an entire body of creation stories in which the Holy People, the Holy Beings, emerged from a series of underworlds into the present world, the Fifth World, in which we live. The Iroquois Great Law of Peace, kept in the longhouse tradition of the Haudenosaunee, encodes a political philosophy that historians have compared to the constitutional thought of the European Enlightenment. The Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande kept their cosmology alive through ritual drama and the kiva, while the nations of the Pacific Northwest, from the Haida to the Tlingit to the Tsimshian, recorded their lineage and their history in the towering poles of red cedar that still stand in ceremonial villages.
What unites these diverse traditions is a relationship to land, to language, and to the cycle of the seasons that is fundamentally different from the European inheritance. A story is not a possession but a trust, to be told in the right season, in the right way, by the right person. Coyote, the trickster of the American Southwest and the Great Plains, is at once a creator, a fool, a thief, and a teacher. The Thunderbird, whose wingbeats cause the thunder and whose eyes flash the lightning, is a being of immense cosmic power, and his image is carved into the totems of the Pacific Northwest, the kachina masks of the Southwest, and the silver jewellery of the Plains. The medicine bundle, a personal collection of sacred objects wrapped in hide or cloth, holds the spiritual power of its owner and travels with them through life.
The arrival of European colonisers after 1492 brought catastrophic change. Whole nations were reduced by disease, displacement, and violence. Yet the older stories did not vanish. They persisted in the oral tradition, in the family, in the ceremony, and they are now being recovered, retold, and written down by a generation of Native American authors. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa novelist and poet, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, a novel rooted in the rhythms of Native American oral narrative. Louise Erdrich, an Ojibwe writer, has built a fictional universe around a North Dakota reservation that draws on the trickster tradition and the family stories of her own heritage. Leslie Marmon Silko of the Laguna Pueblo has done the same in works such as Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. Their books, and many others, have brought the older stories into the wider literary world without ever losing the sense that the stories belong first to the people who have always told them.
The Meeting of Worlds
The second great current in American folklore is the story of encounter. From the moment Columbus’s ships made landfall in the Caribbean, the Americas became a place of collision, mixture, and survival. The Spanish brought Catholic ritual, the romance ballads of medieval Iberia, the cult of the saints, and the figure of the Devil as a personification of indigenous spiritual power. They brought, too, the language of chivalry and the long, melancholy songs of the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and who joined the colonial venture in significant numbers.
Alongside this came the African diaspora. The transatlantic slave trade, beginning in the early sixteenth century and continuing until the nineteenth, carried millions of West and Central African people into the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. They brought with them the traditions of the Yoruba, the Fon, the Kongo, and many other peoples. In Brazil, these traditions gave rise to Candomblé and the martial art-capoeira of the Bahian quilombos. In Cuba, they gave rise to Santería, in which the Catholic saints are layered over the Yoruba orishas, with Saint Lazarus standing in for Babalu Aye, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre for Oshun, and Saint Barbara for Shango. In Haiti and Louisiana, they gave rise to Vodou, the religion that would later enter the American imagination through the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and the popular imagery of New Orleans voodoo.
The encounter was not only a matter of religion. It was a matter of food, music, medicine, agriculture, and language. From West Africa came the rice cultivation of the Carolina lowcountry, the okra and the black-eyed pea, the banjo (descended from West African stringed instruments), and the practice of conjure and rootwork, in which a healer or brujo could lay a spell or cure a sickness through a mixture of Christian prayer, herbal medicine, and inherited African formulae. From indigenous America came the foods that would transform the world’s tables — maize, tomatoes, potatoes, cacao, vanilla, chillies — and the medicines — quinine, curare, coca — that would change the world’s bodies. The syncretic world that emerged is sometimes called mestizaje, the mixing of bloods and cultures, and the folklore that grew up in it is the folklore of the Latin American tradition today.
Latin American Storytelling
The folk tradition of Latin America is one of the most layered in the world. Beneath the Catholic surface lie the pre-Columbian gods and stories: the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent who willed himself into the morning star; the Maya Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, who defeated the lords of the underworld in a ballgame; the Inca Viracocha, the bearded creator god who walked among his people. Each of these gods was not destroyed by the conquest but was folded into the new order. Quetzalcoatl became a folk memory conflated with the returning Christ; the Maya calendar became a folk memory conflated with the Christian apocalypse; the Inca sun god Inti became a folk memory conflated with the saints.
The Catholic Church, for its part, was more than a religion. It was an administrative system, a calendar, a music, a processional world, and a way of binding together communities of mixed blood and mixed origin. Around the imported saints — the Virgin of Guadalupe, said to have appeared to the indigenous man Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531; the Black Christ of Esquipulas in Guatemala; the Virgin of Luján in Argentina — there grew up rich local traditions of pilgrimage, procession, and miracle. Folk saints, unauthorised by the official church, also flourished. Santa Muerte, the skeletal saint of death, is venerated across Mexico and the Mexican-American borderlands, despite the Church’s repeated condemnations. San La Muerte is venerated in Argentina, Paraguay, and southern Brazil. Jesús Malverde, said to have been a bandit in early twentieth-century Sinaloa, is venerated as a folk saint of narco culture.
The African inheritance, too, remained close to the surface. In Cuba, the Cabildos de Nación of the nineteenth century preserved the songs, dances, and drum patterns of specific African ethnic groups within a Catholic framework. In Brazil, the Candomblé houses of Bahia, the Umbanda and Quimbanda of Rio, and the Macumba of the Amazon basin continued to honour the orixás and the spirits of the dead. In Haiti, the revolution of 1791–1804, in which enslaved people and their allies defeated the armies of Napoleon, gave the world a nation built on Vodou and a folk tradition in which the lwa walk openly with the living. The great literary voices of this tradition include Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, whose novels The Kingdom of This World and The Lost Steps brought the Afro-Cuban world into world literature, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, whose magical realism helped make the syncretic world of Latin America visible to readers around the globe.
Among the recurring figures of Latin American folk story are the curandero and the brujo, the folk healer and the folk sorcerer. The curandero draws on herbal knowledge, prayer, and sometimes a special gift; the brujo is feared as a person who has chosen the darker side. Both are present in every village and city of the region, and the line between them is often a matter of reputation. The Day of the Dead tradition, observed in Mexico and parts of Central America, brings the worlds of the living and the dead together in late October and early November. Families build altars in their homes, the ofrendas, with photographs, candles, marigolds, and the favourite foods of the dead. The folk stories of the season — the returning spirit, the woman in white, the wailing mother of a lost child — draw on figures like La Llorona, one of the most famous and most frightening figures in the region’s oral tradition.
The Frontier Inheritance
Further north, in what is now the United States and Canada, a different story unfolded. The Appalachian and frontier folk tradition grew from the meeting of several European immigrant groups — chiefly the Scots-Irish, the English, the Germans, and the French Huguenots — with the African survivors of the slave trade and the Cherokee, Shawnee, and other indigenous nations whose lands they crossed. The result is the tradition now known by the umbrella name of Appalachian folklore, although its roots reach far beyond the mountain South into the broader backcountry of the colonial and antebellum United States.
The early Scots-Irish settlers, who came in great numbers in the eighteenth century to the valleys of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee, brought with them the ballad tradition of the British Isles, the folk belief in fairies and the devil, and a strong tradition of pre-Christian lore. The English contributed the tales of King Arthur, Robin Hood, the devil in the pulpit, and the Jack tales, in which a clever but resource-poor young man outwits the rich and powerful. The German settlers of Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Texas Hill Country brought the Powwowing tradition, a folk magic in which a healer could cure illness and protect against witchcraft through a mixture of Christian prayer and inherited charms. From Africa came the conjure tradition, and from the Cherokee and other indigenous nations came the knowledge of the land and a deep body of story that would, in time, find its way into the wider American tradition.
The frontier produced a great harvest of tall tales and folk heroes. Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack of the upper Midwest, was born in the logging camps of the nineteenth century. Pecos Bill, the cowboy raised by coyotes, was born in the cattle ranges of Texas. John Henry, the steel-driving man who beat the steam drill and died with his hammer in his hand, was born among the railroad crews of the Appalachians and is commemorated in one of the great American folk ballads. Mike Fink, the keelboatman of the Mississippi, was born in the river trade of the early nineteenth century. Davy Crockett, the Tennessee congressman who died at the Alamo, was born in the backcountry and was already a folk hero before he ever went to Texas. These figures blend history and legend, the frontier and the backwoods, the comic and the heroic.
The ballad tradition is one of the great treasures of Appalachian folklore. Songs like Barbara Allen, The Twa Sisters, The House Carpenter, and Lord Randall came across the Atlantic with the Scots-Irish settlers and were transformed by the new landscape. The ballad of John Hardy, who killed a man in a card game in the 1890s and was hanged for it, was collected in the 1930s by the folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax, who travelled the South with a recording machine and saved a vast body of song from being forgotten. The ballad of Tom Dooley, another North Carolina outlaw of the 1860s, was collected by Frank Warner and became a national hit in 1958. The Lomaxes, working from the Library of Congress, gave the world a portrait of the folk music of the American South at a moment when the older ways were dying out.
The Cryptid Tradition
The American cryptid, the strange and supposedly real creature whose existence has not been confirmed by science, is a particularly American form of folklore. It draws on the older Native American and European traditions of strange beings, on the deep woods and the open range, and on the modern media cycle that has made a single sighting at the edge of a road into an international news story within hours. Some American cryptids are old — the Mothman of Point Pleasant, whose appearances in 1966–1967 presaged the collapse of the Silver Bridge, is in part a recasting of the older Thunderbird. Some are newer — the Chupacabra of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, whose first reported sightings date only to 1995, is a creature of the modern media age. Some are deliberate hoaxes that have become true folk figures, like the Jackalope, the antlered rabbit of the American West, which was popularised in the 1930s by a pair of taxidermist brothers in Douglas, Wyoming.
The American cryptid tradition is a popular form of the older question of what wildness still survives in the new world. The Jersey Devil of the Pine Barrens, said to be the thirteenth child of a woman who cursed it at birth, has been reported since the early eighteenth century and is plausibly the oldest American cryptid. The Bell Witch of Adams, Tennessee, said to have haunted the family of John Bell in the early nineteenth century, is one of the great American ghost stories. The Hodag of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, was the hoax creature of the lumber baron Eugene Shepard in 1893, but it has lived on in the folk memory of the upper Midwest. The Snallygaster of Frederick County, Maryland, is a dragon-like creature of the Civil War era. The Flatwoods Monster of Braxton County, West Virginia, appeared in 1952, the year of the great UFO wave. Each of these is rooted in a specific landscape and tells a story about the place and the people.
The American Folklife Center and the Discipline of Folklore
The American folklorist as a professional figure is a relatively recent invention. The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888, the same year as the founding of the National Geographic Society, and brought together the amateur collectors, the anthropologists, and the literary scholars who had been gathering American folklore for the previous century. The Society’s first president was the linguist Francis James Child, who had spent the previous decades compiling The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a monumental collection of folk song that has been a touchstone of the discipline ever since. Other important early figures include Alanson Skinner, who worked with the Menominee and other nations of the Great Lakes, and James Teit, who collected the traditions of the Nlaka’pamux of British Columbia.
In the twentieth century, the discipline was reshaped by the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who collected African-American folklore in the rural South in the late 1920s and early 1930s; by Stith Thompson, whose six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature became the standard reference for the comparative study of folk narrative; by Richard Dorson, who insisted on the importance of the urban and industrial folklore of modern America; and by Alan Dundes, who brought a sharper, more theoretical approach to the study of jokes, proverbs, and the folklore of the body. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, founded in 1976, continues the work of the Lomaxes and is now the national repository for the documentation of American folk culture. The Center’s archives hold field recordings, photographs, manuscripts, and oral histories from every part of the country.
The discipline of folklore has had to wrestle with the legacy of nineteenth-century collecting, in which Native American stories were too often taken from their original tellers, retold by white scholars in romanticised English, and presented to the reading public as quaint curiosities rather than living traditions. The discipline has also had to wrestle with the difficult question of authenticity — the question of whether a particular story or song is the “true” version of a folk tradition or simply one of its many variants. The answer of the modern discipline is that folklore is always in motion, that variants are the very life of the tradition, and that the most important thing is the relationship between the story and the community that keeps it.
Folklore and American Identity
The place of folklore in American national identity is a complicated one. The United States, unlike most nations, was built on a political idea rather than an ethnic or cultural one, and so the question of what counts as American folklore has always been a question of what counts as American at all. In the nineteenth century, the answer was given in the work of writers like Washington Irving, whose Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809) and The Sketch Book (1819–1820) created the folk figures of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman; James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leatherstocking Tales brought the figure of the frontier to world literature; and Mark Twain, whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi gave the American folk voice its first great modern expression. The folklorist Charles Leland in the 1880s argued for the existence of a distinct African-American folklore in his Legends of the Black Folk, one of the first serious studies of the subject.
In the twentieth century, the question of what counts as American folklore was sharpened by the rise of popular culture. The comic-book industry, founded in the 1930s with characters like Superman and Batman, drew on a deep well of folkloric material — the superhero is, in a sense, a modern incarnation of the folk hero. The horror comics of the 1950s (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, House of Mystery) were direct descendants of the older European folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm a century before. The urban legend — the contemporary story told as if it had happened to a friend of a friend — became a recognised form in the work of the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, whose books The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981) and The Choking Doberman (1984) gave the genre its academic respectability.
The American tradition of the campfire story, the late-night telling of scary tales in the woods or at a sleepover, is in many ways a direct descendant of the older traditions of the séance and the hobgoblin tale. The vanishing hitchhiker, the hook-handed killer, the babysitter who gets strange phone calls, the man with the kidney in the ice chest — these are the modern American versions of the old folk stories, and they have spread around the world through film, television, and the internet.
Folklore in the Modern World
The American folklore tradition today is more alive than ever. The New Age movement, Wicca, the various reconstructions of indigenous and African-diaspora traditions, and the neo-pagan heathen and Druid communities are all part of the living folklore of the contemporary United States. New Orleans Voodoo, the descendant of West African Vodou and Haitian Vodou, has become a tourist industry in the French Quarter but is also a living religious tradition with a long history. Its most famous historical figure is the priestess Marie Laveau (c. 1801–1881), who led the community in the nineteenth century and whose tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is still a place of offering. The twentieth-century Voodoo Spiritual Temple, founded by the Haitian priestess Priestess Miriam in 1972, continues as an active religious institution.
The immigrant communities of the United States and Canada have each brought their own folklore. The Hispanic communities have brought the traditions of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America into a North American setting. The French communities of Louisiana, the upper Midwest, and New England have brought the traditions of Acadia, Brittany, and the Catholic parishes of Quebec. The German communities of Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and Texas have brought the Hexerei and Brauch of the old country, the Krampus of the Christmas season, the Hexenbrennen of spring. The Scandinavian communities of the upper Midwest have brought the trolls and the nisse. The Slavic communities of the industrial cities have brought the rusalka, the domovoi, the firebird. The Chinese and Japanese communities of the West Coast have brought the folk religion of their own traditions, with Buddhist temples, ancestor altars, and the folk practices of the lunar calendar.
In all of this, the older stories continue to do their work. They warn the young, comfort the old, explain the world, and keep the community together through the long nights. They are also being retold in new ways. The novelist Stephen Graham Jones (Amskapi Piikani / Blackfeet) has built a horror fiction around the Thunderbird and the older figures of the Blackfeet world; his The Only Good Indians (2020) is a touchstone of the new wave of Native American horror. The poet Joy Harjo (Muscogee / Creek), the first Native American United States Poet Laureate, has written the folk voice into the modern American poem. The Māori-Jewish filmmaker Taika Waititi (Boy, Thor: Ragnarok, Our Flag Means Death) has brought a folkloric sensibility to the superhero genre. The video game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), released in 2014, was developed in collaboration with the Iñupiaq of Alaska and tells its story in both English and the Iñupiaq language.
A Living Tradition
The folklore of the Americas is not a museum. It is a living, growing, changing body of story, song, ritual, and belief, and it is being added to every year. The most common mistake a reader new to the field can make is to think of folklore as the quaint survival of an older world. The truth is the opposite. Folklore is the part of culture that people carry with them, change with them, and pass on to the next generation, often without noticing that they are doing it. The child who tells the story of the hook-handed killer at the sleepover, the teenager who quotes the urban legend of the choking doberman, the adult who leaves a candle on the altar of a dead parent on the Day of the Dead, the immigrant who cooks a dish from the old country on the new country’s holiday — each of them is doing folklore, and each of them is keeping the tradition alive.