Daniel Patterson, longtime professor (now emeritus) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and builder of the folklore program and archive there, has published a book that, even in a career of magna opera, might well qualify as his grandest magnum opus. It is, as its subtitle suggests, a study of a family of Scotch Irish stonecarvers, the Bigham family, who migrated from Ireland’s Ulster Province in the eighteenth century to Pennsylvania, and thence to the Piedmont region of North Carolina and South Carolina. Their history as stonecarvers ranges roughly from the 1730s to the 1830s, and the book focuses on that century, from colonial times through the American Revolution and past the Great Revival into the early decades of the nineteenth century. Taking the wider view, the book often peers back into the seventeenth century in the Old Countries and forward to the American Civil War and its aftermath. It is, simply put, a monumental contribution to scholarship and a benchmark in folkloristic analysis.

The True Image is astonishingly detailed, but every time one thinks “Are we going to get lost in this forest?” its author guides us back to the open plain again. At the detailed level it is about the Bigham family and their associates in Ulster, Pennsylvania, and especially the Carolina Piedmont--but as stonecarvers they do business with many neighbors and sell their stone markers to people in a broad crescent of Scotch Irish settlement centered in Mecklenburg County, the location of present-day Charlotte. So we meet the Bighams’ customers, too, and by degrees the reader realizes that they are not only part of the stonecarvers’ story but also major players in a much larger story unfolding as the book progresses--the story of the community of Scotch Irish immigrants in the Carolina Piedmont.

The book uses the term “Scotch Irish” in its subtitle and repeats it dozens--perhaps hundreds--of times. Daniel Patterson is well aware that many people think “Scotch Irish” is somehow a mistaken or misbegotten term, and as a result some scholars have hesitated to use it. Perhaps, they think, the term of choice should be Northern Irish, or Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish. But millions of Americans use the term Scotch Irish, and have used it for generations, to describe themselves or their family genealogy and history, and a folkloristic sensibility begins with a proper respect for the names people call themselves. The book carefully considers all these issues, and then adopts “Scotch Irish” as its term for describing these early Americans and their descendants. It is important enough as a book that it may settle the question once and for all.

Yet this is not another book (there are many) attributing all sorts of virtues or vices to the long history of Scottish displacement or other experiences hardwired into the Scotch Irish temperament. The author is cautious and insistent upon examining every known fact before generalizing about ethnic or national character. Sometimes the book seems to be not just incorporating in its purview but presenting in glorious detail every scrap of the available data. The Scotch Irish emerge as a complex and multifaceted community, and they also evolve over time through their active participation in the American experience. Not just the Ulster upbringing but the Pennsylvania experience, the social impacts of the American Revolution, the cultural tsunami of the Great Revival, and the interaction with the many other ethnic groups on the frontier--all these factors contributed to the shaping of the Scotch Irish stonecarvers and their neighbors.

Three chapter titles convey the multiple folkloric dimensions of the book. The chapters on “Reading Scotch Irish Emblems” and “Seeing Scotch Irish Inscriptions” provide close readings of the visual emblems and verbal inscriptions on a large corpus of headstones and ledger stones by the Bighams and their associates. This explication de texte analyzes the data presented by the headstones at three interpretive levels. First there is authorial sorting to try to establish which headstone was carved by whom. The carvers rarely signed their work, and supplementary documentary information, such as bills of sale or estate inventories, only occasionally answers the question of authorship. It takes total visual immersion in the extant corpus to classify the gravestones (or most of them) by maker. Second is the exercise of unfolding the artistry and divining the meaning of the choices made by the craftsmen in the practice of their art. Third comes the effort to compare the stonecarvers’ art through time and space, considering the larger corpus of data from Ulster, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas, in search of comparative features that might indicate larger cultural trends and contrasts.

The chapter on inscriptions is greatly enriched by Patterson’s deep knowledge of English literature. Hence the inscriptions are fully identified as to both original author (Alexander Pope, say, or Isaac Watts) and as to likely paths by which they may have found their way to the stonecarver’s chisel. The book is also informed by deep knowledge of religious practice, religious history, and psalmody and hymnody in the Scottish and Scotch Irish churches. Thus we are able to imagine the great Presbyterian debate about psalmody versus hymnody as an index of larger changes sweeping across the Scotch Irish community in the Carolina Piedmont, and when we realize that a verse quoted on a headstone comes from Isaac Watts, we also may surmise that the family and their church had come to favor the newer hymnody of Watts over the old-style Presbyterian psalm-singing tradition.

A third explicatory chapter is “The Scotch Irish in the Light of Legends.” Here we find an array of legendary narratives about Scotch Irish characters in Mecklenburg County and the Carolina Piedmont, as preserved in family histories and local history accounts. The keen ear of Patterson as a folklorist catches in these accounts not details of factual history but gems of lore with the potential for explicating the values of the Scotch Irish community within which the stonecarvers lived and worked.

That Patterson is equally conversant with religious history, regional history, folklore, folksong and folk music, and gravestone history and art helps the book achieve something extraordinary. It marshals an astonishing amount of data from multiple strata of expressive culture in order to limn a portrait of the Scotch Irish in the Carolina Piedmont from the later-eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century. It is in fact an extended exercise in historical ethnography, meaning that it applies both historical and ethnographic techniques and perspectives to understanding and evoking a portrait of an important ethnic community in early America. Ethnography is challenging enough when done in the present, but understanding an era two-and-a-half centuries ago requires a powerful combination of observation, knowledge, and imagination. As with other fields where data is scarce, imagining what might have been the cause or purpose of something is a key tool to understanding. Yet imagination undisciplined by cautionary cross-examination is risky, so the book is both bold in imagining and extremely judicious in settling on any single explanation.

Luckily, the key expressive genre before us here is carved in stone, so that we can examine it today after more than two centuries have elapsed. Happily, this is literally true; readers can examine the headstones along with the author, for the book contains roughly 230 black-and-white photographs taken by the author. These are not only clear and beautiful; the author reveals that, at great expense of time and energy, he traveled to the cemeteries when the sun was close to noon at the correct seasons. The results are splendid and--considering the age of the headstones and the difficulty in achieving just the right light--astonishingly high in quality.

In the light of such a plenitude of documentation, it may seem odd to wish for more, but I longed to know more about the photography. What was the date for each photograph (the date of the photograph, not the death date recorded on the gravestone)? Are the photos film or digital images? With what camera equipment and in what format was this work done? The photographs are a magnificent gallery of the available visual evidence from the headstones, and they are supplemented by the author’s meticulous transcriptions of the inscriptions. In many cases, seeing a headstone with our own eyes would be less revealing than seeing these photographs, because of inhibiting factors such as the time of day, the season of the year, or the cloud cover. We are seeing the originals in the best possible light.

“Best possible light” brings us to the book title, The True Image, which is a quotation from Ezra Pound: “The true image divides into shade and light” (Kakitsubata). That perfectly describes the book’s glorious black-and-white photography, which renders images in what might better be described as “shade-and-light.” Patterson also addresses the metaphoric applications of “shade and light,” being desirous of portraying the people of this time past in a way that reveals both their virtues and their flaws, both their attractive and their unattractive features. Thus there is a chapter on “The Scotch Irish in Slave Economy and Landgrab.” It becomes clear, despite various sentimental depictions looking back at them, that not all the Scotch Irish of Mecklenburg County were purely virtuous, nor did they live in a land of peace, plenty, and harmony. Their adaptation to the American experience included the embrace of slavery by many in the Scotch Irish community. Others objected, but the social environment persuaded the objectors that they would not prevail, so they mostly held their tongues, and many of them moved to Midwestern states like Ohio and Indiana for their families’ sake. Some of the better connected Scotch Irish also became land-speculators in the territories being opened up for settlement in Tennessee, using political connections and sometimes shady practices to maximize private gain. Indeed, some of the Bighams moved to Tennessee, but that reflected not their speculation but their declining fortunes in the Carolina Piedmont.

In the book’s epilogue the reader comes finally to contemplate the most famous American to rise from this Scotch Irish community in the Carolina Piedmont, Andrew Jackson, whose upbringing and career reflect many of the Scotch Irish features, both “shade and light,” as they were being reshaped by the American experience. Thus the reader has come by degrees from examining a family of stonecarvers and their work, to meeting and learning about their neighbors and customers, to contemplating through the lens of expressive culture the shape and character of a large regional group of Scotch Irish in their first century in America. This extraordinary book is a landmark in historical ethnography. It will or should be a benchmark study for several professional fields – in particular, folklore and folklife, anthropology and ethnology, archaeology, history, American studies, regional studies, and ethnic studies. The roughly 230 photographs are not only exquisite; as a corpus they are unique and irreplaceable contributions to knowledge. The production by the University of North Carolina Press is excellent, matching in production values the book’s intellectual stature. The True Image is a welcome and gratifying achievement.

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[Review length: 1839 words • Review posted on May 6, 2014]