Secrets Written in the Sky: The Folklore of Taylor Swift
Recently, Taylor Swift was finally able to buy back her Masters, after it had been sold to a variety of different owners, one of which was Scooter Braun. In a letter posted on her website about the purchase, many of Taylor Swift’s fans combed through it, searching for easter eggs and references.
This type of detailed, close readings of Taylor Swift’s work is not new. Songs in the Taylor Swift discography are no stranger to speculation, discussion, and detailed thoughtful expressions of meaning. Swifties – the term noted for fans of Taylor Swift – spend time distilling and analysing her songs, music videos, and even interviews. Swift has, either purposefully or inadvertently, created a community who feels comfortable creating detailed critical readings of song lyrics, symbols and notes which are important forms of communication between the community and their idol.
But these are stories, the songs are communications of a story on its own. These tales exist outside of their creator, and yet also live undeniably linked to her. The complicated web of stories, exegesis on songs, and Taylor Swift’s biography create a detailed and intricate mythos for any Swiftie – or budding Swiftie – to dig their nails and fingers into.
Essentially, Taylor Swift’s music exists as a form of contemporary folklore, and as such is not limited to Swifties alone. Her story, the stories she creates, and the stories spun from the original stories, all exist in a complicated weave of individual and communal storytelling which thrives on its context and its life outside of this context simultaneously.
In this essay, we’re going to explore how Taylor Swift’s music functions as folklore and how the multiple layering of narratives creates a complex weave of story and meaning. In a short primer, a brief essay, Swift wrote for her album titled folklore, she describes her idea of folklore as “a tale […] that is passed down and whispered around […] Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.” If anyone can feel this for their own life, it’s Swift, whose life has been the subject of speculation as well as the primary source of inspiration for her work. Her secrets, painted in the sky, have become, through the experience and speculation of her music, secrets of others, who also tell the stories and relate to them and connect to them. She has become, through this complicated interweaving of meaning, a piece of contemporary folklore.
Folklore Definitions
It is not just Swift’s definition of folklore we are going to be looking at. Folklore is the basis of an entire academic discipline, and therefore there exists many different definitions and considerations of what could be possibly considered “folklore”.
Most commonly, the idea of folklore is one tied to three primary ideas: traditionality, rurality, and irrationality. The primary idea of folklore, at least colloquially, is that folklore is something necessarily old, built upon years of tradition and oral recitations. Folklore is something our grandparents’ grandparents did, stories passed outside of time and location. Folklore is something happening in countrysides, in rolling hills from a people far from cities and education. It’s a furtherance of ideas going beyond old wives’ tales and stories of monsters hiding in the forests.
These ideas even held in academic studies of folklore. Stith Thompson, for example, wrote: “the idea of tradition is the touchstone for everything that is to be included in the term folklore”[1]. Richard Bauman, too, wrote: “there is no single idea more central to conceptions of folklore than tradition”[2]. In other words, the idea of the traditional nature of the stories was what made folklore folklore for many scholars, and this has spread more broadly for other cultural considerations.
Folklorist Daniel Ben-Amos, however, has fought against this idea. His essay “The Idea of Folklore” takes each of the three primary points of folkloric consideration – traditionality, rurality, and irrationality – and demonstrates why each of these either cannot or should not be used to define folklore[3]. For Ben-Amos, he claims these ideas are ideals scholars, and society more largely, have determined what folktales are, is truly something folklore “should have been, but only occasionally was”[4]. Ben-Amos was far more aligned with Mamie Harmon, who believed folklore may exist in any group or individual, regardless of any specific time or location requirements[5].
This sift was important in consideration because many folklorists noted how variation in narrative is an important characteristic for the process of folk communication, rather than something designated as something being particularly from the past and marred by misremembering over time. In other words, the ways narratives change between storytellers is a natural part of communication through a large group, and is sometimes even an important part of the creative process for storytellers, and not due to faulty memory of many years.
Folklore, like the people who share these stories, is far more complicated than the simple breakdown of time and place. Urban legends, while using amore “legend” moniker rather than folklore, still continues to exist and spread, and has also become a large subject of study in contemporary scholarship. Folklore existed in every society, and sometimes this folklore was attributed to an individual, and sometimes it was anonymous. Sometimes it was traditional, but sometimes it was not. When we look at much of folklore, the stories and definitions bend dependent on the community and individual narrative we are looking at. But, as Ben-Amos urges, we as folklorists in the contemporary age, must “demonstrate it anew”[6].
What is folklore, then, and how can we define it if not by the traditional boundaries of tradition, country and irrationality? Well, we must start with the people telling the story. Folklore is, by the very nature of the world, the lore of the folk, a story coming from a folk group of some sort. Alan Dundes, another folklorist, has defined a folk group as “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor”[7]. This means folklore can spread between any large group of people to any small group, to even just two or – in a case made by folklorist Jay Mechling – just one[8]. Many folklorists seem comfortable using Dundes’ broad consideration of the folk group, and many have demonstrated size is less important than the form of communication between the people.
The communication we are looking for is something which is sometimes described as “networked” by folklorists Beth Blumenreich and Bari Lynn Polonsky[9]. Folkloric communication, for them, is interactive communication and networks of experience. In other words, folklore is something to be determined on an individual level, based on their interactions and experiences. What is folklore to me may not be folklore to you, because we have different views, thoughts, experiences, and backgrounds.
While Bumenreich and Polonsky thought of networked communication as necessarily face-to-face, others have since demonstrated how virtual communication is just as folkloric as physical[10]. This is not meant as massive criticism toward Blumenreich and Polonsky, as they were writing far before the growth of online communication being something so second-nature and ubiquitous.
So, essentially, we’re looking at narratives communicated freely between a group of people which share something and see themselves as some kind of inherent group. Therefore, a group of people who share something in common could be the Swifties, who all connect through their love of Taylor Swift.
Saying there is a shared connection between peoples just for loving the same bit of pop culture may seem outright strange to some, but is a constant presence in fandom. When doing research at CoxCon, a fan convention for Youtuber and streamer Jesse Cox, one attendee expressed an ease at meeting new people there because they saw all attendees as “having the same values”. There is a connection drawn between enjoyment of a piece of pop culture and similar ideas about the world and worldviews for these fan groups[11].
It is not the reality of shared values that is important when we talk about community groups, but rather the assumption or perception of this shared trait. That’s how most community groups are formed, from the perception of connection more than any reality of it. Sometimes, the reality of it is important, but sometimes its just the idea of it. As Benedict Anderson has described this in his study of “imagined communities”. For Anderson, “imagined communities” are not imagined in a not-real sense, but in how the reality of these communities is based on imagined similar traits. As Anderson explains, it is not whether these traits are truly present that matters for the existence of the community, but the idea the trait exists[12].
So for Swifties, they are a community group - a folk group. They share something - a love for Taylor Swift. And this love for Taylor Swift is directly connected to many other traits, such as feminism, critical thinking, and an intention to embrace others.
While we’re thinking about definitions of folklore, Taylor Swift has her own. In her short essay which accompanied the release of her album entitled folklore, she described her idea of folklore.
“A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.”
cover of the album “folkore” by Taylor Swift
She ends her piece by encouraging the listener - “Now it’s up to you to pass them down.” She is calling to the idea of folkloric transmission, the encouragement of her folk group to continue their process of folk transmission and communication. To whisper and chat about the stories, to think about them, to pass them around, and continue the process of storytelling.
Taylor Swift, and her music, is not new to this form of storytelling. Gossip, speculation and continued retellings has become common place for her. While this form of speculation is not new to pop music, nor unique to Swift herself, it is particularly prevalent for her work. Her particular tendency to be at the centre of this kind of conversation is mostly due to her length of time in the spotlight, her history of affairs in the entertainment industry, and her tendency to write deep and personal songs directly related to her life.
Taylor Swift first came to prominence in 2006, with her debut album Taylor Swift which reached number five on the US Billboard 200. She would have been about 16 at this time. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, she was the subject of tabloid intrigue when Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech for Best Female Video for her song “You Belong With Me”.
Her dating history was also of huge interest, primarily through her romantic connections to other leading figures in pop culture, such as Harry Styles and John Mayer. Her songs became speculation on which figures she was discussing, and which she wasn’t. She rarely directly mentions the name of the individual her song is about. The closest she has gotten was “Dear John” about John Mayer, and “thanK you aIMee”, whose capitalization points at Kim Kardashian as the subject. But without these clues, there are other points of connection and hints to clue the audience into who the song is referencing.
Despite the specificity of her lyrics and the clear connection with the very direct experiences of her life, Swifties see a universality in her lyrics. Taylor Swift has come to embody the experience of the typical woman for many, her stories therefore moving from specific individual narrative to communal connection and universality. Finding personal meaning in her stories is a common experience for Swifties, and one which allows individuals to also connect to each other.
Her stories have a declared and obvious author, something not typical of the traditional view of folklore, and yet the way individuals connect, speculate, and interpret her narratives is quite similar to considerations of folklore.
Taylor Swift as Folklore
As an introduction to her pandemic album folklore, Taylor Swift wrote:
“A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghosts, stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.”
Swift’s definition of folklore is not too far off from our considerations of folklore so far. The focus here is on the way tales are explored and passed around, rather than on some other element of the narrative. As someone who also loves to blur the boundaries between the definitions of various types of traditional narratives, such as gossip, legend, myth, and folklore, I appreciate the combination of them here, the way Swift has connect the various ways stories can be more than stories, and are often more important than a simple distinction between truth and fantasy.
And I think this is an important part of folklore and storytelling for Swifties. Gossip and rumour become elements of storytelling in which narratives are given greater meaning. Because even outside of Swiftie descriptions of folklore, gossip and rumour can have a place in the greater landscape of storytelling.
We all know the way urban legends start: “I heard this from a friend of a friend” or “they say that…” These kinds of openings to more traditional narratives are therefore strangely like gossip. They spread through a strange string of whispers where one piece of the string can never even fathom where it even started.
Gossip is definitely something which follows Taylor Swift around, and has defined much of her career, whether she planned it that way or not. Her very personal storytelling in her songs, though without the direct mentioning of names, means fans are often left piecing together bits and pieces of her life through gossip and songwriting. Though we’ll talk more about that later.
But folklore does not exist in a vacuum. As we discussed in our various definitions of folklore, folklore necessitates more in-depth communication. And for Swifties, their own folkloric community is built on more than the stories they share. It’s not just music and gossip between them, but also aspects of material culture, symbols, and communication within a parasocial relationship.
Symbolically, Taylor Swift frequently uses symbols and motifs throughout her discography, music videos, and even fashion in order to communicate specific messages to her fanbase. When Swift and long-term boyfriend Joe Alwyn broke up, the fanbase was able to point to this before media outlets announced the separation because they saw her being photographed with a butterfly on her jeans. This butterfly is interpreted by many to be a symbol of freedom and a new chapter, and so seeing her re-using this symbol without her boyfriend in sight, the fanbase could interpret what was happening in her life.
Taylor Swift dressed referencing her song “The Albatross” at the Grammy’s
But Swifties also have their own symbols with one another. Inspired by her song “You’re On Your Own Kid” from her album Midnights, attention was brought to how Swifties make friendship bracelets for and with each other. Though, even before Midnights, the trading of friendship bracelets at Taylor Swift concerts was a common occurrence and a way for Swifties to make friends with one another. Since the groundbreaking Eras tour, the practice has grown much wider. Many of the bracelets spell out album names, or song names, or even sometimes an important lyric for the individual.
Once again, we see the importance of both the community and the individual happening simultaneously. While the actual choice of the album or lyric or song is important to the individual, it also is a communal act. The creation of the bracelets is a communal activity - Swifties gather to do so together. Sometimes, they are made alone, but the act is a form of communal cohesion, a way of signalling to others you are like them and one of them. The act of exchanging the bracelets is also communal, a way of connected to others like you, and to grow your own direct social circle and make new connections at the concert.
Like looking at the way stories can extend outside of just the telling of them to other social and culture activities, there are other forms of storytelling inherently linked to folklore and folkloric practices. Folklorist Alan Dundes talked about the role of “metafolklore”, which are folkloric statements on folklore[13]. For example, if I was doing a folkloric retelling, and made some asides as part of my performance, this would be metafolklore. But it can also be a lot more than this. Dundes describes metafolklore as also consisting of jokes about jokes, folklore about folklore, and folksongs about folksongs.
We as humans are essentially storytelling machines. We tell stories all the time, and therefore we can very easily tell stories about our stories. We create our own commentary, create new versions of what used to be, and make a story about how we have altered this story to fit our needs. We joke about the jokes people used to tell. This type of commentary reveals a lot about how cultures can change overtime, and how we may have altered our storytelling to fit this change - or maybe how we hope to create that cultural change through our storytelling.
Much of Taylor Swift’s discography can be related to metafolklore. The metafolklore for Swift happens in a few different ways. Much of the way Swifties connect and discuss the music is in the digestion of its meaning and relationship to Swift’s greater life and contexts. Swifties pick apart the lyrics to find the exact references and individual’s the song may be about. This creates a greater catalogue of stories about the stories Swift has written, a library consisting of video essays, blog posts, and online threads. Therefore, the Swifties are creating folklore about the narratives Swift has provided, and often these commentaries become just as important to the songs as the songs themselves.
But fans are not the only ones who create metafolklore on Swift’s songs. Swift herself does this, not just in commentary online but also in the songs she writes. Songs reference other songs. Most recently, her song “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus” on the Tortured Poets Department album directly references “Maroon” from her album Midnights: “So if I sell my apartment / And you have some kids with an internet starlet / Will that make your memory fade from this scarlet maroon?”
So while songs may reference and give other clarity to other songs, there is also commentary on her relationship to the fanbase and how they overanalyse her songs. Also from the Tortured Poets Department, her song “But Daddy I Love Him” directly discusses her fanbase and their parasocial connections to her. Directly referencing some of her fan base feeling they could control her own choices in life is made clear from the very beginning of the song: “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing "What a mess" / I just learned these people try and save you / ... cause they hate you”. Swift directly plays with the way the fanbase assumes truth and reality in every lyric by a piece of her chorus: “I'm having his baby / No, I'm not, but you should see your faces.” And, true to her assumption, there are a plethora of reaction videos online to this lyric, where you see people assume Swift was pregnant for a brief second.
Swift, therefore, has written a song about the way the fanbase creates and spins metafolklore about her. So “But Daddy I Love Him” is metafolklore on metafolklore, a deeply interwoven tapestry of stories upon stories which continue to build with each new commentary on it.
Conclusion
As I have written in many other places before, traditional forms of storytelling have not died out. The idea of folklore, mythology and legends not existing anymore, they are only carried forward from a time long past as some kind of museum-esque remnants, is a gross misunderstanding of folk-telling and how storytelling functions for individuals. As Ben-Amos already explained to us, to think of folklore as only traditional and rural and old is to think of an idealised folklore which many never truly exist.
We, as humans, love stories. We tell stories all the time. We tell them when we are asked about our day. We listen to them through whispered gossip. And we even listen to them through our headphones, being sung to us by a woman we’ll never meet.
Folklore, like myths and legends, have not stopped at some arbitrary point in time, it has only changed the form it comes to us in. Understanding how folklore looks and function sin our contemporary society will give us a better understanding of how people connect and why they connect. We do not have to wait for our times to pass to be able to study them. We can do it now, through the stories we tell, whisper and sing.
What Taylor Swift’s specific form of storytelling and story-singing shows us is how folktales and songs still linger, in strange new forms of celebrity idols whose life we speculate on and whose songs we dissect for meaning. We find personal meaning for the writer, but also personal meaning for us, and group social meaning for all of our community.
We can learn a lot from Taylor Swift, and not just in the way fan group can be built and maintained. We can learn about how our contemporary narratives are carried in the voice of someone like her. She is our contemporary folklore – not the only version of it, but definitely the most known.
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Asimos, Vivian. 2019. ‘Navigating Through Space Butterflies: CoxCon 2017 and Fieldwork Presentation of Contemporary Movements’. Fieldwork in Religion 14 (2): 181–94.
———. 2021. Digital Mythology and the Internet’s Monster. Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Bauman, Richard. 2010. ‘Folklore’. In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook, edited by Richard Bauman. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1983. ‘The Idea of Folklore: An Essay’. In Studies in Aggadah and Jewish Folklore, edited by Issachar Ben-Ami and Joseph Dan, 11–17. Folklore Research Center Studies, VII. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press.
Blank, Trevor J. 2009. ‘Introduction: Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet’. In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, 1–20. Logon, Utah: Utah University Press.
Blumenreich, Beth, and Bari Lynn Polonsky. 1974. ‘Re-Evaluating the Concept of Group: ICEN as an Alternative’. Folklore Forum Bibliographic and Special Series 12, Conceptual Problems in Contemporary Folklore Study:12–17.
Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. 2015. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave Pivot. New York: Palgrave Pivot.
Dundes, Alan. 1965. ‘What Is Folklore?’ In The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
———. 1966. ‘METAFOLKLORE AND ORAL LITERARY CRITICISM’. The Monist 50 (4): 505–16.
Harmon, Mamie. 1987. ‘Folklore’. In Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, edited by Maria Leach, 1. paperback ed., [Nachdr.]. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row.
Mechling, Jay. 2006. ‘Solo Folklore’. Western Folklore 65 (4): 435–53.
Thompson, Stith. 1955. Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. http://www.ualberta.ca/~urban/Projects/English/Motif_Index.htm.
[1] Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955. http://www.ualberta.ca/~urban/Projects/English/Motif_Index.htm.
[2] Bauman, Richard, and Richard Bauman, eds. ‘Folklore’. In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010 [1992].
[3] Ben-Amos, Dan. ‘The Idea of Folklore: An Essay’. In Studies in Aggadah and Jewish Folklore, edited by Issachar Ben-Ami and Joseph Dan, 11–17. Folklore Research Center Studies, VII. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983.
[4] Ben-Amos 1983, 16.
[5] Harmon, Mamie. ‘Folklore’. In Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, edited by Maria Leach, 1. paperback ed., [Nachdr.]. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1987.
[6] Ben-Amos, 1983.
[7] Dundes, Alan. ‘What Is Folklore?’ In The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965. Emphasis in original.
[8] Mechling, Jay. ‘Solo Folklore’. Western Folklore 65, no. 4 (2006): 435–53.
[9] Blumenreich, Beth, and Bari Lynn Polonsky. ‘Re-Evaluating the Concept of Group: ICEN as an Alternative’. Folklore Forum Bibliographic and Special Series 12, Conceptual Problems in Contemporary Folklore Study (1974): 12–17.
[10] See for example: Blank, Trevor J. ‘Introduction: Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet’. In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, 1–20. Logon, Utah: Utah University Press, 2009; Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave Pivot. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2015; Asimos, Vivian. Digital Mythology and the Internet’s Monster. Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
[11] Asimos, Vivian. ‘Navigating Through Space Butterflies: CoxCon 2017 and Fieldwork Presentation of Contemporary Movements’. Fieldwork in Religion 14, no. 2 (2019): 181–94.
[12] Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
[13] Dundes, Alan. ‘METAFOLKLORE AND ORAL LITERARY CRITICISM’. The Monist 50, no. 4 (1966): 505–16.