Repetition.
It feels like Blindboy and Emily Hilliard are both trying to get at the same thing through two different angles with their most recent work. Hilliard — author of Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia — responded to a question from Bolt Magazine so —
The way I think of folklore is the creative expressions and practices of everyday life that are rooted in place and/or community, so it is something that everyone has and is a part of. In West Virginia, that means all the people and cultural communities who make their home in the Mountain State. Folklore is living and breathing, always evolving, and part of contemporary life—the twist you add to an heirloom recipe, a lullaby sung to a child at bedtime, the in-jokes that emerge among families, the vocabulary unique to a particular occupation, the beloved foodways of a certain place, the meme altered and shared among friends.
Compare that answer to Blindboy speaking about the intersection between storytelling, the environment, and mythology above. You could make the argument that the same story is being told between the two of them. And, if that’s your jam, if that’s what you like, then you could take this logic even further — into the practical leaps afforded those ‘creatives’ — and talk about repetition in storytelling more broadly, whether it’s in a game like Telephone (or ‘Narrative Telephone,’ as Critical Role dubbed it) —
— or in Homer’s infamous epithets, Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” —
— silly remixes of a newsletter, the lyrics of a song, or the kind of story you tell again and again, the kind of story that boils down into a jewel of a fairy tale meant for — in the words of Sabrina Orah Mark — “very ancient children, trees, or angels.”
But, why? Ignore the language from the previous paragraph that reads like contemporary literary magazines trying to get creative with their calls for submissions. (“Send us a story that tastes like the kind of soda an angel will drink on a warm, summery night in the heart of the city. Send us the kind of story that acts like soda on an angel’s teeth.”) Why do we do this — this thing with story — again and again? One possible answer, one answer of many, from Hilliard once again —
Folklorist Henery Glassie elaborates on his conception of tradition as ‘the creation of the future out of the past. A continuous process situated in the nothingness of the present, linking the vanished with the unknown; tradition is stopped, parceled, and codified by thinkers who fix upon this aspect or that in accord with their needs or preoccupations’ … What current narratives will constitute the base of future folklore? What must we fight for in the present to that future communities will retain their sovereignty and have agency over how their traditions are transmitted?