Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
The expressive culture, including the music, of the ethnic groups of the United States has not been given much scholarly attention. What little has been done has often relied on models like decline and loss of Old World traits. If revivalism is mentioned, it seems to allude to what is sometimes called “retribalization”. Few researchers have followed up on the fascination of what the Canadian folklorist Robert Klymasz called the “immigrant folklore complex.” In a 1973 article, he wrote of a “dynamic state of flux replete with the various tensions, seeming contradictions, and ambivalence that reflect the conditioning impact of the acculturative process in the New World” (Klymasz 1973:135).