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GrowinG little traditions: 
Baltimore’s little miss hon Contest

dAvid J. PugliA

Baltimore’s HonFest festival draws folkloristic attention because it is one of the few 
urban public festivals to celebrate a folk group not based on any particular ethnic, 
religious, or occupational affiliation. The Little Miss Hon contest is one popular 
part of the two-day HonFest festival.1 Recognized as a “Baltimore” tradition, 60,000 
festivalgoers attend HonFest each year. These range from neighborhood locals 
to out-of-state revelers. Many hail from in between: the Baltimore metropolitan 
area, but not the city proper. Some of the notice the festival receives derives from 
its controversial depictions of longtime, blue-collar, local residents, especially 
apparent in the two featured stage contests: the adult’s Best Hon Contest and 
the children’s Little Miss Hon contest. The performed “Hon” image is perceived 
by some as a buffoonish characterization, while others see it as an exaggerated 
celebration of strong women based in an accurate historical past. Additionally, 
the festival—and particularly the stage contests—raises folkloristic questions of 
the invention of tradition in urban America as a means of battling an inferiority 
complex. Baltimore, a once great city, lives in the shadows of New York, 
Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Elaborating on this urban issue, the Little 
Miss Hon contest reveals a devotion to a tradition, a tradition that itself is devoted 
to the image of a white, blue-collar city. Further, in the Baltimore context, both 
supporters and detractors have heightened the symbolic meaning of the “Hon” 
image because of the perceived connection to ideas of local identity, belonging, 
race, class, gender, and occupation.

There is a small body of scholarly research on or related to HonFest (Gadsby 
and Chidester 2007, Rizzo 2008, Shackel and Gadsby 2008, Chidester 2009, 
Chidester and Gadsby 2009, Rizzo 2010, Gadsby 2011, Britton and Faust 2012, 
Puglia 2015). In addition, it has received much attention in the local media, from 
the Baltimore Sun to the blogosphere. The event that receives the most attention 
is the adult Best Hon Contest. But little attention has been paid to the children’s 
version, the Little Miss Hon contest, which takes place in advance of the Best Hon 
Contest and on the same stage. In some ways, the Little Miss Honest contest is the 
Best Hon Contest’s undercard. The junior event is quicker, breezier, and receives 
less notice than its older sibling. But it has also become some festivalgoers’ most 
anticipated HonFest event. The Best Hon Contest is a rhetorical attempt to reclaim 
Baltimore as a white, blue-collar city, differentiated by a down-to-earth, quirky, 
and kitsch aesthetic, in the face of Baltimore’s class and racial discord—a fact that 
became national headline in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray and the 
subsequent Baltimore protests (Berlinger 2015). But what can the Little Miss Hon 
contest tell us about the uses of tradition in Baltimore? One might assume the Little 
Miss Hon contest would portray the same message, albeit watered down to suit 
children’s needs. In fact, the Little Miss Hon contest has a much stronger message 
than that. It is a continuation of the sociocultural program set forth by the Best 



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Hon Contest, that is, an attempt at growing and cultivating a “little tradition”2 that 
boldly proclaims white, blue-collar ownership of a majority black, postindustrial 
city.

The Little Miss Hon contest takes place during HonFest, which is held one 
weekend each June. The girls, or their parents, register to participate the day of 
the contest. Some prepare in advance, while others sign up on a whim. This essay 
focuses on the Little Miss Hon contest, attempting to understand it in relation 
to the adult version of the tradition, the Best Hon Contest.3 I conduct a brief 
ethnographic description, followed by a rhetorical and contextual analysis of 
the Little Miss Hon contest tradition, in the context of my HonFest and Best Hon 
Contest research.

The Little Miss Hon Contest

A girl bearing a number “1” walks onto the stage. She wears cat-eye glasses, a 
beehive hairdo, and a leopard print dress. She appears tentative, but she receives 
roaring approval from the large festival crowd, many of whom are dressed the 
same way. A woman in a similar outfit approaches the girl, microphone in hand. 
“Kaylee, can you say hi, hon?” 

“Hi, hon.” 
“Where are you from?” 
“Bal-ti-more.”
“Yeah? And what school do you go to?” 
The girl at first appears stumped. Somebody shouts from the crowd that she 

doesn’t go to school. 
“Oh, are you in school yet? Do you go to preschool?” 
“I go to ballet school!” 
The crowd roars with laughter. The woman sends the girl to stand on a bench 

at the back of the stage. And with that, the number “2” is on stage. She also has 
a beehive hair-do and cat-eye glasses, but in place of a leopard skin dress, she 
wears a flower patterned house dress. 

“Julie, can you say hi, hon?” 
“Hi, hon” 
“Can you say how you doin’?” 
“How you doin’?”
“Can you say welcome to Baltimore?” 
“Welcome to Baltimore” 
“And where do you go to school?” 
“Pine Grove Elementary” 
“And where is that?”
“In Maryland” (more laughter)
Each girl is interviewed on stage for twenty to thirty seconds, twelve in total, 

all between the ages of four and seven. The host asks the same questions, with 
only slight variations. The girls give short, direct answers, rarely approaching 
a Baltimore accent, some even leaving out the “hon” altogether (although one 
peppers everything with hons, to howls of the crowd’s delight). The girls’ 



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unpredictability and their costumes hold the attention of the crowd. When one 
young girl in a short leopard dress is complimented on her dress, she motions like 
a Price is Right model. Yet another whispers her answers into the hosts ear rather 
than the microphone. Another contestant, sporting a beehive with a long pink 
ribbon and dressed in a pink shirt and striped pink skirt is asked on stage “What 
brings you to Hampden today?” “I don’t know,” she replies. Each is dressed in 
an immaculate, exaggerated style, a combination of post-war women’s wear and 
trash connoisseur John Waters films. As the girls line up on the bench in the rear 
of the stage, they create a kaleidoscope of florescent colors. This is the Little Miss 
Hon contest, a tradition that is part of Baltimore’s ever-growing annual HonFest, a 
celebration of Baltimore’s Hon tradition.

While on the stage of the Little Miss Hon contest, host Denise Whiting 
sometimes uses the rhetoric of the beauty pageant, including occasionally 
telling girls that they look beautiful. Bits of the performance are similar to a 
classic beauty pageant. The girls strut across the stage, do interviews, listen to a 
concluding serenade, and blow kisses. However, differentiating this contest from 
other child beauty pageants, many conventions are turned on their head. The 
blatantly amateur contestants do not so much strut as stumble onto the stage. The 
interviews are softball questions that last in total no more than twenty to thirty 
seconds, yet the girls often flub them anyway. And rather than a tuxedoed host 
concluding the ceremonies with a rendition of “There She Is Miss America,” a four-
year-old sings “Skiddy-Mer-Rink-A-Doo.”

Perhaps most importantly, the Little Miss Hon contest does not have a winner, 
whereas child beauty pageants and the Best Hon Contest do. The Little Miss Hon 
contest holds the experience higher than winning. There is little overt competition 
in the contest beyond the reactions of the crowd. In fact, at the conclusion, 
the girls are told that they are all winners.4 Upon closer inspection, the lack of 
competition between contestants makes sense under the guise of promising a 
future generation of a particular type of Baltimorean. It is not the winner but the 
approval of the crowd and the consensus of the image. The Little Miss Hon contest 
is growing a tradition.

Growing Little Traditions

What was the meaning of the Little Miss Hon contest as revealed in ethnographic 
observation in the opening scene? The practices I documented reveal that HonFest 
is a location, or “play frame”—to cite the folkloristic concept of a subaltern space 
in which behaviors outside that frame can be reversed and mocked, and inside the 
frame cultural expressions build solidarity—for Baltimoreans to create a current, 
idealized identity out of a romantic, nostalgic past (Bronner 2010). The local folk 
speech of “hon” transitions into the female “Hon” image. For some onlookers, the 
Hon is a folk hero who symbolizes hard-working women, strong communities, 
and Baltimore’s idiosyncrasies. For others, it is either a mischaracterization of 
Baltimore’s working class or an attempt to romanticize Baltimore’s white, working-
class past in lieu of its African American present. According to U.S. Census data, 
Baltimore underwent a rapid demographic shift in the second half of the twentieth 



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century. Baltimore was majority white from its founding through the early 1970s. 
Today, Baltimore’s racial demographics stand at approximately two-thirds black to 
one-third white, and its neighborhoods remain highly stratified.5 

How did we get to this strange scene that plays annually in modern Baltimore? 
Baltimore has been growing the “hon” tradition for nearly three decades: 
linguistically, visually, and performatively. For those Baltimoreans whose value 
system is rooted in an industrial economy and a working-class ethos, the collapse 
of the local industrial economy in the second half of the twentieth century created 
an existential crisis questioning whom the city and its residents are and what 
they stand for. The difficult discourse on identity has shifted to more manageable 
battlegrounds, including the Little Miss Hon contest. In fact, HonFest has been at 
the front of these vernacular wars. 

Baltimoreans have sought to solve Baltimore’s problems through the creation 
of public traditions for many years. Proponents of these invented traditions have 
attempted to bring a cohesive identity to a fragmented, chaotic city. Examples 
abound over the centuries. The Baltimore Sesquicentennial and its successor, 
the Oriole Festival, heeded the zeitgeist of uniting the city and served as the 
first attempt to do so through the creation of a citywide tradition. Beginning in 
1880, Baltimore endeavored to capture its penchant for public display through 
festival. On its 150th anniversary, Baltimore attempted to bring disparate Baltimore 
groups together as Baltimoreans for the Baltimore Sesquicentennial to celebrate 
their illustrious past and to prepare for the city’s future. The festival returned the 
following year as the Oriole Festival.6 The Oriole Festival only lasted three years, 
from 1881-1883, but the acclaimed7 festival and pageant proved that Baltimore 
was capable of more than ethnic and neighborhood celebrations (Ammen 1912, 
255-258). Other citywide festivals succeeded the Oriole Festival, including the 
couth and polite Flower Mart of the early twentieth century and the civic-corporate 
hybrid Baltimore City Fair of the late twentieth century.

These festivals have sought to create a sense of shared identity, although 
some residents have contested that vision. HonFest’s tradition of staged events 
are a powerful form of symbolic practice that residents enact in an attempt to 
define an authentic sense of place and identity and that participants reshape to 
negotiate a cognitive sense of identity and belonging. Little Miss Hon performs and 
exaggerates the Hon image through a self-perpetuating, self-referential, and ever-
growing tradition. 

Geographically, Baltimore’s regional identity remains ambiguous. Neither 
northern enough to be Northeast nor southern enough to be a southern city, and 
too far east to be a rustbelt city, Baltimore is left with the lukewarm designation of 
Middle Atlantic. That is, the Middle Atlantic is the “remainder” or “left overs” after 
the stronger regions of New England and the South are identified. Folklorist Simon 
J. Bronner has noted that the Middle Atlantic is “the least conspicuous of America’s 
regions, both to outsiders and to its inhabitants” (Bronner 2006, 789). It was not 
always so. From 1830-1860, Baltimore was America’s second largest city. It ceded 
that honor to Philadelphia after the Civil War and never regained it. Baltimore was 
also once a city of a million residents (1950s), but the population has declined 



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ever since then. Today, Baltimore is a midsized and prosaic city, set near the rich 
and the powerful.

Baltimore has some legitimate reasons to feel inferior. Officially “Charm 
City,” Baltimore has received some negative nicknames in the twentieth century, 
including “Harm City,” “The Heroin Capital of America,” “The City that Bleeds,” 
and “Bodymore, Murdaland”8 due to the high per capita murder rate in the city, 
hitting its peak of violence in 1993 with 353 slayings.9 Baltimore ranks 33rd 
among the most deadly places in the United States.10 Although the murder rate 
has dropped substantially since its peak in the 1980s and 1990s (a low of 196 
murders in 2011), Baltimore is still two to three times the national average in 
all varieties of violent and property crime. In addition, residents are referred 
to as (and sometimes refer to themselves by) the humorous folk demonym 
“Baltimorons,” referencing the city’s slack education accolades.11 Fifty percent of 
Baltimoreans have a high school diploma or less, and Baltimore’s public schools 
are constantly mired in controversy.12 In response to the negative publicity, 
energetic and optimistic mayors like William Donald Schaefer and Martin O’Malley 
have attempted to devise new images for the city with nicknames like “America’s 
Comeback City,” “The Greatest City in the World,” and the ubiquitous park bench 
placard “Believe.” But it is the non-institutional “Hon” image that has been the 
most powerful rebranding.

Baltimore is known as a “blue-collar” city.13 But the city’s easy blue-collar 
designation merits examination, especially with its once blue-collar workers now 
employed in the service and information economy at a rate of 90%. The aesthetic 
leaks overtly into the city’s perception of its culture. Historian Kenneth D. Durr 
argues that Baltimore is indeed a blue-collar town, and a prescient one at that. 
Its blue-collar workers seem to be harbingers for working-class sentiment to 
come elsewhere. Durr notes particularly how “Baltimore was far ahead of the 
nation when it came to the era’s defining conflict—one staged by policymakers 
but waged by working whites and blacks—over the deteriorating institutions and 
the economic crumbs left over in the deindustrializing city” (Durr 2003, 4). The 
continued deindustrialization of the city and continuing competition for cultural 
ownership of the city has propelled the Hon image, showcased in the Little Miss 
Honfest, into Baltimore’s spotlight.

But why is the word “hon,” heard across the United States, so closely 
associated with Baltimore and so dear to many Baltimoreans hearts? While “hon” 
is not unique or distinctive to Baltimore, it has been adopted as symbolic of 
Baltimorese—the local vernacular—and the related local, blue-collar aesthetic. The 
embracing of the term “hon” first became a citywide tradition when a mysterious 
gentlemen nicknamed “Hon Man” began plastering the word on the “Welcome 
to Baltimore” parkway sign. This word transitioned to the capitalized “Hon,” a 
beehived, cat-eyed woman in garish or frumpy dresses and indulgent make up 
sporting a strong Baltimore accent (and likely to use the word “hon”).14

An essential starting point to unpacking the Hon image and the Little Miss 
Hon contest is a closer look at filmmaker John Waters’ most successful movie, 
Hairspray (1988). Born near Baltimore in 1946, Baltimore filmmaker Waters 
embraced Baltimore’s quirks in a way few others had. He writes, “I would never 



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want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you’ll never 
discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It’s as if every eccentric in the 
South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay” 
(Waters 2005, 76). In 1988, Waters released Hairspray. Set in Baltimore in the 
1960s, Tracy Turnblad and other beehived Baltimoreans endeavored to integrate 
a televised dancing show. Although never referred to as Hons, the big haired 
women who set the canon for HonFest are seen throughout. In fact, in many 
ways, HonFest is an unattributed Hairspray fan convention, although because 
the iconography has gone beyond the movie and into “tradition,” attendees can 
reference previous HonFests rather than Hairspray directly.

Throughout the second half of the 1990s, “hon” continued to transition from 
the term of address, “hon,” to a type of person, the admirable Baltimore “Hon.” 
In 1996, for example, the Baltimore Sun’s fashion editor, Vida Roberts offered an 
elaborate, mostly positive description of how a Hon dressed. The subtitle of her 
article, “Treasure those Baltimore ladies who call you ‘hon,’ hon. Because they’re 
a vanishing treasure characterized by hearts of gold—and some other traits you 
can’t miss” is reminiscent of the “eleventh-hour ethnography” of folkloristics’ past 
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 300). Boiled down to the essentials, Roberts article 
listed the characteristics of a Hon (1996). In her estimation, Hons are the big-
haired, down-to-earth, friendly, maternal, hard-working women of Baltimore. 
Roberts’ article was a clear transition toward the Hon as a type of woman, 
although she was not yet at the point where she was ready to capitalize the word 
“Hon.”

Roberts made an effort to add benign feminist and maternal connotations to 
the “Hon” phenomenon. For example, she argued “big hair alone does not a hon 
make; a real hon has a generous spirit as big as her beehive. It’s her willingness 
to scrub, hug, scold and help family and her neighbors that singles her out” 
(Roberts 1996). This connotation of the motherly Hon seems to have been created 
to give the “Hon” image a positive connotation, in contrast with the “slutty” Hon 
that some perceived. In addition, one can see the romanticism and nostalgia at 
play, reminiscing back to the time when neighbors looked out for and assisted 
one another. This is an embodiment of the nostalgic white, blue-collar image of 
Baltimore’s past.

Since his upset victory in 2000, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley had made 
it his mission to change the perception of Baltimore. But a horrendous murder 
rate and a national portrayal on The Wire (2002-2008) as a center of drugs, crime, 
violence, and corruption had done little to improve the city’s image. As the 
official commissioned report would later state, “Baltimore is plagued by negative 
press and harmful characterizations by the media, resulting in an inferiority 
complex” (Donovan 2005). O’Malley and the City Council brought in branding 
strategy experts Landor Associates to change the image of the city and improve 
nationwide perception. Instead of attempting to compete directly with New York, 
Washington, D.C., Orlando, or Las Vegas, the report encouraged Baltimore to play 
up its downhome, authentic characteristics, what it referred to as “the Hon factor” 
(Donovan 2005). This factor brings a small town feel to a big city, something 
not to be found in Washington, D.C., or New York. The residents surveyed had 



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spoken positively of Baltimoreans as “quirky,” “funky,” “off-kilter,” “hilarious,” 
“bizarre,” and “a little-off center” (Donovan 2005). While this was never adopted as 
an “official” Baltimore brand, the Hon fills this need by playing precisely to these 
characteristics.

The “Hon” tradition in Baltimore seems to follow Dundes’ inferiority complex 
thesis that small countries (or cities in this case) suffering from poor self images 
are particularly active in using folklore to promote themselves and allow them 
to actively reflect on and debate their identity (Dundes 1985). In Baltimore, a 
city with a well-documented, century-long inferiority complex, “hon” and “the 
Hons,” best captured in the Best Hon Contest and the Little Miss Hon contest, are 
deployed to distinguish and redeem a location in the midst of the competing East 
Coast cities of Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. As a little big city 
that has fallen on hard times since the 1970s, Baltimore is in the midst of a local 
inferiority complex.

Enter the Baltimore Hon. In many ways, Baltimore’s Hon image is similar to 
the American folk heroes of yore, reminiscent of Richard M. Dorson’s “American 
Comic Demigods”: hard-working, kind, of the people, down-to-earth, and 
independent (Dorson 1941). While Dorson despised the commercially fabricated 
Paul Bunyan, Dundes pointed out that Dorson’s criticism is primarily a matter of 
origins rather than function. As far as function, Dundes saw fakelore filling “a 
national, psychological need: namely, to assert one’s national identity, especially 
in a time of crisis, and to instill pride in that identity” (Dundes 1985, 13). Further, 
he argued fakelore seemed to be invented “where folklore is deemed lacking 
or insufficient” and creative people “fill the void” by “creating a national epic or 
national ‘folk’ hero ex nihlio if necessary” or, more common, “embroider and 
inflate fragments of folklore into folkloristic fabrications” (Dundes 1985, 13). That 
is, when needed, locals grow their own folk heroes.

When asked, the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association denied 
that “the Hon” was a Baltimore tourist draw or even on the average tourist’s radar. 
The association claimed tourists are primarily interested in strolling through the 
Inner Harbor, visiting historic neighborhoods, and feasting on steamed crabs. The 
spokesperson told the Baltimore Sun, “If you do a survey with visitors and you 
ask them, Hons wouldn’t rank…Hons wouldn’t even be on the radar screen…It’s 
not something that people think of, and it’s not as if visitors come in the Visitors 
Center and say, ‘Where’s the Hon?’” (Sessa 2008). While his comment was meant 
to downplay the importance of the Hon phenomenon in Baltimore, it proves 
HonFest to be even more locally important. According to the Baltimore’s tourist 
bureau, HonFest is not an important tourist destination. It is a performance by 
Baltimoreans for Baltimoreans, even if it is only organized by a select few and 
only appreciated by some others.15

As part of the land-language-lore complex (Abrahams 1993), urban American 
folk speech is used in an attempt to create a local tradition that connects 
people to place. In the face of a rapidly changing city, “hon” transitioned from 
a stigmatized vernacular term associated with the lower class to an esteemed 
vernacular term tied to local roots and city identity. “Hon” and the “Hon” image 
served both as Baltimore’s most prominent example of the esteemed vernacular 



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and as a rhetorical battleground where issues of race, class, gender, and belonging 
clash with conceptions of identity, heritage, and nostalgia over the attempt of 
civic leaders to construct a citywide local tradition. The Little Miss Hon contest 
demonstrates a commitment to an annual performance of this tradition.

Furthemore, “Hon” seeks to create a “natural” connection between an 
imagined group and a recently demarcated political boundary (Abrahams 1993). If 
Baltimore represents the epitome of an overindustrialized, and, now, postindustrial 
landscape, “hon” helps redeem a sacred homeland by referring not to the vacant 
buildings and shuttered plants, but instead to a nostalgia for an neighborly, folksy, 
down-to-earth city. While there was some stigma associated with “hon” in the 
1990s16 and earlier,17 by the 2000s, “hon” had entered the esteemed vernacular. 
Baltimoreans now use “hon” in speech, on merchandise, and on highway signs to 
make what linguist Barbara Johnstone calls “self-conscious regional identity claims” 
(Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006, 78; see also Johnstone 2009). In response 
to Baltimore’s conflicted, volatile past, this esteemed vernacular tradition has been 
one growing attempt to connect residents to the local in a transient world.

Alan Dundes encouraged folklorists to collect not just folklore, but the meaning 
of folklore. These native interpretations are valuable, and I have attempted to 
elicit HonFest’s meaning from the festival’s devotees. However, crossing the 
“triviality barrier” has proved challenging (Sutton-Smith 1970). Most festivalgoers 
reiterate that the festival is fun and carefree, that they have a familial connection 
to Baltimore, that they want to celebrate the old way of life, or that they want their 
children to experience Baltimore. These native interpretations call attention to a 
deeper unspoken meaning that demands analytic interpretation. In such instances, 
Dundes hypothesized that “it is often the taboo activities and ideas which find 
expression outlets in symbolic form” and “if the folk consciously recognized the 
symbolic significance of the joke or folksong element, this element might not be 
able to continue to serve as a safe, socially sanctioned element” (2007, 85). Viewed 
in isolation, the native interpretations appear valid, perhaps even accurate. But 
when the festival is studied in the context of Baltimore’s race relations, perhaps 
best exemplified by the death of Freddie Gray and the 2015 Protests, a deeper 
meaning emerges. The Little Miss Hon Contest, and HonFest in general, is one 
battle waged in the larger, symbolic campaign for cultural ownership of Baltimore. 
Through this annually invoked and embodied ritual, Baltimore’s heritage as a 
white, blue-collar city is reassured for the audience and participants. The battle 
must be waged symbolically rather than overtly, lest the violent and chaotic 
Baltimore of 2015 become the constant state of the city. 

Conclusion: Baltimore’s Little Tradition

In Baltimore, the Hon image, taken from and symbolizing the larger local, 
working class dialect known as Baltimorese, became a symbolic battlefield 
for issues of race, class, gender, identity, and belonging. While some residents 
and commentators dismiss the image as trivial, the attention the issue receives 
coincides with the symbolic significance that Baltimoreans implicitly understood 
about the image. In the land-language-lore complex, the owner of the local 



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language has the best claim to cultural ownership of the land. The Little Miss 
Hon contest is not a silly diversion, but a cultural battle over who can lay natural 
claim to Baltimore. Its function is an extension of the function of the Best Hon 
Contest (see Puglia forthcoming, “The Hons of HonFest” chapter). The difficult, 
unspeakable, symbolic discourse on racial and class identity has shifted to this 
safer, more manageable, and more respectable battleground. Children are paraded 
as extensions of their parents who have prepared them to play a role. While the 
Little Miss Hon contestants lack the agency and maturity of Best Hon Contest 
contestants, more important than their individual motivations is the event, the city, 
and the zeitgeist that celebrates them.

In Baltimore, the “Hon” image’s understated but understood commentary 
on local identity, belonging, race, class, gender, and occupation have made the 
“Hon” a powerful symbol. In this essay, I have attempted to show how this 
seemingly benign, recently invented tradition lends its support to the nostalgic 
vision of a white, blue-collar city of the past. In addition to the quickly changing 
demographics, Baltimoreans seem to have an inferiority complex, living in the 
shadow of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. HonFest, and especially 
the Little His Hon contest and the Best Hon Contest, give folklorists ample 
opportunities to explore how inferiority complexes are addressed through the 
invention of tradition in the modern American city. Baltimore’s current answer, 
the “Hon,” is denigrated by some as a lampooning of Baltimore’s working class 
past, but celebrated by others as a commemoration of the strong, hard-working, 
maternal, and uniquely stylish women of Baltimore. The “Hon” tradition seems 
to hold importance to Little Miss Hon and Best Hon Contest participants and the 
HonFests tens of thousands of attendees, who come from both Baltimore and 
the Baltimore diaspora. The Little Miss Hon contest is an annual celebration of a 
perceived traditional group, one not based on any particular ethnic, religion, or 
occupation affiliation, but rather a group formed purely out of the American urban 
experience.

Children are presented strategically as part of this growing tradition. While 
adults provide the framework for the annual contest, it is exclusively children who 
perform as the little Hons. By performing, they confirm the establishment and 
continuity of the tradition, showing that this is a wide-ranging, multigenerational 
tradition that encompasses youth and that will carry forth. Now firmly planted, the 
little Hon tradition has spread its roots, blossomed, and continued to grow.

NOTES

1. This is reminiscent of what Richard M. Dorson was searching for in Gary, 
Indiana in his classic article “Is There a Folk in the City?” (1970). Dorson yearned 
to find distinctive American traditions that came directly out of the American 
experience, rather than immigrant traditions imported from abroad.

2. My title is meant to be a double entendre, referencing both the small 
children who perform the annual tradition in Baltimore and the work of 
anthropologists such as McKim Marriott (1955), Robert Redfield (1955, 1960), 
Gustave E. von Grunebaum (1955), John H. Bodley (2000), and Knut Odner (2000) 



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who distinguished between “great” and “little” traditions. This school of thought 
referred to the cultural and religious tradition of nations and empires, including its 
art and literature, as the “great” traditions, and the local and informal traditions of 
the peasants as “little” traditions.

3. I chose to analyze the 2007 Little Miss Hon contest, as that year was the only 
time the contest was fully documented. A full recording can be found on YouTube 
uploaded by WBAL-TV 11 Baltimore titled “Lil Miss Hon Contest.” https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Ari0VwXHXqA/ While it would be preferable to have 
a wide range of Little Miss Hon contests to observe, only one has ever been 
recorded in full.

4. Joel Best has written about the everyone-is-a-winner phenomenon 
extensively in Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture.

5. As of 2011, the U.S. Census reports that Baltimore is 63.7% black or African 
American and 29.6% white alone. http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/
PST045215/2404000/. For additional demographic analysis, see Yeip (2015). Yeip 
points to the Baltimore’s low score on the U.S. Census Bureau’s “Diversity Index” 
as another indicator of Baltimore’s stratification.

6. The Oriole Festival as sometimes alternatively referred to as the Festival of 
the Oriole or the Oriole Celebration. The Oriole is the Maryland state bird and one 
of the mascots of Baltimore, not because it is native to Baltimore, which for the 
most part it is not, but rather because its orange and black coloring is similar to 
Lord Baltimore’s coat of arms.

7. It even received a September 13, 1882 write up in the New York Times. The 
author says the festival was “celebrated to-day with more than usual ceremony and 
display.”

8. This nickname was popularized by real street graffiti featured in the opening 
credits of the HBO television series The Wire.

9. If it had the same population as New York, New York, Baltimore would have 
recorded nearly 4,000 murders in 1993. (New York reported 1,960 homicides that 
year).

10. City-Data, Baltimore, Maryland, “Baltimore on our top lists” http://www.
city-data.com/city/Baltimore-Maryland.html

11. Also see Baltimore local Ernest Smith’s Hey Hon!: How to Talk Like a Real 
Bawlamoron.

12. For an example of the accolades Maryland receives for its public school 
system, see “Maryland schools ranked number one—again,” Washington Post, 
January 12, 2012. The level of individual educational attainment can be found on 
United States Census Bureau’s Table 233 “Educational Attainment by State.” More 
Marylanders hold advanced degrees than any state but Massachusetts.

13. “Blue collar” can at times be polite code for “dowdy” or “depressed.”
14. For more on the events that led to HonFest and the Little Miss Hon contest, 

see Puglia (forthcoming).
15. Folklorist Regina Bendix refers to a similar phenomenon in Interlaken, 

Switzerland. She argues that in Interlaken, even if traditions are performed 
outwardly for tourists, the act of performing gives the Interlaken community the 
opportunity to express their culture in their own words and on their own terms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ari0VwXHXqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ari0VwXHXqA
http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/2404000
http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/2404000
http://www.city-data.com/city/Baltimore-Maryland.html
http://www.city-data.com/city/Baltimore-Maryland.html


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89

16. There had been complaints about racial, gender, and class connotations and 
the general association of “hon” with diner-waitress speak. For more about the 
specific debates, see Puglia (forthcoming).

17. Informants in the podcast “Welcome to Baltimore, Hon: Exploring Hon as a 
Linguistic and Identity Marker in Baltimore” by Holly-Catherine Britton and Heidi 
J. Faust recall their parents attempting to eliminate their Baltimorese as a means of 
social advancement. 

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http://graphics.wsj.com/baltimore-demographics//

	CFR_2017_Part19
	Growing Little Traditions: Baltimore’s Little Miss Hon Contest
	David J. Puglia


	CFR_2017_Part20
	CFR_2017_Part21
	Pages from CFR_2017_Part22



