Folk Groups of Cleveland
As I’ve mentioned before, one of my strongest professional interests is heritage preservation, the documentation of the often-endangered cultural ways of various folk groups in the Rust Belt region. Here is a list of folk groups in Cleveland that particularly interest me.
Bus riders. It’s not insignificant that I’m thinking about this today, the day when RTA implements massive, life-altering service cuts. You might not have thought of it like this before, but when you take away a bus route, a certain community is lost forever.
Bingo ladies. When Gen X and Y reach retirement age, will there even be such a thing as bingo ladies?
Steelworkers, ex-steelworkers, and former auto workers. The Rivers of Steel program does an excellent job of preserving Western Pennsylvania’s industrial heritage. We need to get better at that here.
Catholics. The church in my neighborhood was one of the many churches in Cleveland that closed last month. Now we have an empty church in the neighborhood. No church bells, no Sunday morning traffic. Another community that is lost forever.
Parma. When I was growing up, I never once heard a burning river joke but boy oh boy did I hear LOTS of Parma jokes. There’s probably not any one community in the Cleveland area that, folklorically speaking, interests me more than Parma.
The Creative Workforce Fellowship is a program of the Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture, made possible by the generous support of Cuyahoga County citizens through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. 
As of recently, I no longer consider myself a member of the bus riders group. I do consider myself part of a new group, bicycle commuters; but from my perspective Cleveland’s RTA is broken beyond repair. It’s really very depressing to see how bad it’s gotten.
1Fun fact: I do not know how to ride a bicycle.
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