The writing of a folklore collection can be a thankless job. The full value of the collected material may not emerge until a distant future, when it more easily may be recognized as a meaningful reflection of early twenty-first-century culture and history. Contemporary readers, on the other hand, are harder-pressed to consider such content objectively, since they live in the same historical context that the material illustrates.

Folklorist William Lynwood Montell’s Tales from Kentucky Sheriffs bravely confronts this concern. His words take up no more than a dozen of the book’s 290 pages, with the rest devoted to transcripts of oral histories gathered from current and former sheriffs in twenty-six of Kentucky’s 120 counties. These histories are largely unofficial, meaning that administration and legality serve as the backdrop to anecdotes about the people and places of Kentucky, as told by members of one of the oldest branches of United States law enforcement. They are also short, never taking up more than a few pages at a time. Such organization allows Montell to divide his book into mini-collections of brief anecdotes, each indexed under mischievously plain chapter headings like “Arrested People’s Behavior” and “Dangerous or Fatal Events.”

Montell’s collection has the markings of a linchpin study for the future researcher of Kentucky law enforcement, and of United States sheriffs in general. In his introduction, he even suggests a future-oriented view for this book: “Much meaningful history can be written only after oral traditional accounts are adequately researched and documented.” Yet I found that a patient reading of Tales reveals a trove of ethnographic data that may be just as interesting to critical readers today. And while it takes a moment to puzzle out viable sets of ideas about this data (since Montell prefers to let his informants do most of the talking), the extra work is worthwhile. Through such effort, the nuances of the unique community inhabited by these Kentucky sheriffs begin to come into focus.

First and foremost, Montell’s sheriffs are human beings. This is just to say that they are complex, sensitive, and something other than cold, foreboding upholders of the law. Any good study of a law enforcement community would eventually come to this conclusion, but these sheriffs’ voices are a welcome note of moderation after a year of pepper spray-toting policemen breaking up protest rallies. It is heartening to read about a deputy who would drive hours through a snowstorm to get a stricken man to the hospital for surgery when airlift services have been grounded. It is provocative to think about a sheriff driving around with a full carload of arrestees--all local, all from the same troublemaking family--and enlisting their help during an additional arrest that takes place en route to the jail. It is interesting to learn about sheriffs’ pride in their departments, especially in parts of Kentucky where success might be measured in modest terms, like the procurement of enough money to buy uniforms for deputies.

After hundreds of pages of colorful examples like these, Montell’s community of Kentucky sheriffs begins to stitch itself together as the inhabitants of a kind of borderland. They are non-geographically bound to one another in terms of collegial associations, but they are also, for the most part, unquestionable authorities on the geography, people, and distinct cultures within their own jurisdictions. In this way, the value of the twenty-first-century folklore collection emerges. When field sites are so often non-geographical, or in some cases hybridized among non-geographical and geographical components, perhaps it makes sense to return to the collection as a way of framing sociality. Allow the social actors to speak for themselves, and let the folkloristic project be a process of vigilant transcription and selective editing with the goal of accurately portraying community borders and shared values.

Of course, the danger of the folklore collection is still in presenting a portrait that is too decontextualized. Sometimes, the author needs to step in with practical and critical orientations that would remain invisible unless clearly stated in the text. In this book, a simple addendum stating the basic geography and demographic of the Kentucky counties in question would help to clarify what these sheriffs are facing each day on the job. And although Montell’s critical introduction neatly states his methodology as well as his view on the importance of oral history in the historical research of the future, there is an intellectual gap in terms of how such material may be used today. I have described my ideas in this review, but it surely would have been interesting to hear more about the author’s opinion on the matter.

Yet it would be unfair to dwell on these faults when Tales from Kentucky Sheriffs so admirably updates an old format, the collection, with just enough scholarly adornment to get critical readers excited about new perspectives on community, folk voices, and folkloristic methodology.

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[Review length: 809 words • Review posted on March 5, 2012]