Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes is William Lynwood Montell’s fourth collection of tales in his series of six books to date showing what can be learned from interviewing professionals about their professions. As Montell points out in his introduction, “Were it not for books like this, the historically significant stories of professional groups, such as funeral directors, lawyers, doctors, and others, would not be preserved for future generations to read and appreciate.” Many of the tales show how the funeral business has changed over the years, but the stories also serve to humanize the death-care profession. First-hand accounts reveal not only how funeral directors see themselves but also how they view the families they serve in a time of loss and sorrow. Telling the stories, especially the humorous ones, provides funeral directors with some relief from working in a stressful occupation, and the stories provide contemporary readers with a greater appreciation of the role of funeral directors in death-care relationships.
Montell began recording stories from Kentucky funeral directors in 2007 and attempted to collect tales from all regions of Kentucky, although he points out that his “efforts to obtain tales from funeral directors from all portions of the state were unsuccessful.” Still, much of Kentucky is represented in these tales. After transcribing the stories from tape, he sent copies back to his informants, giving them an opportunity to edit their accounts, so, as Montell claims, “the stories in this book are verbatim accounts told by the story tellers.” The tales consist mainly of personal experience tales about the funeral business and third-person accounts of funeral directors told to Montell as true stories, though a few of them have variants in this and other collections. While there are some published memoirs of those working in the funeral industry, Montell’s book, as far as I know, is the first of its kind produced by a folklorist, and all of Montell’s informants are cited, with a brief statement by or about each funeral director in “Biographies of Storytellers” at the end of the book.
Sandwiched between Montell’s collections from two occupational groups, funeral directors and teachers, is his fourth collection of Kentucky ghost stories, Tales of Kentucky Ghosts. These tales “are all new,” according to Montell, and don’t repeat texts from his earlier collections of ghost stories--Ghosts along the Cumberland (1993), Ghosts across Kentucky (2000), and Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky (2001). Many of the tales are from the Western Kentucky University Folklore Archives, though Montell added tales he collected by “driving around the state, making telephone requests, and contacting staff members at college and university archives.” Following each tale are the names of the informant and collector and the place and date of the interview; however, Montell was not able to include a statement by or about each storyteller at the end of the book, as he did in Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes. The collection includes stories, mainly legends and memorates, about cemetery ghosts, family ghosts, haunted buildings, Civil War ghosts, road ghosts, headless ghosts, animal ghosts, ghost lights, screaming ghosts, and noisy ghosts.
One curious chapter title is the last one, “Legends and Folktales,” which is far too general since all the tales in the collection could be included under this heading. What’s more, most of the tales in this section could have been included in earlier chapters. This chapter includes international tale types (including Type 1676B, Clothing Caught in Graveyard, and two versions of Type 1791,The Sexton Carries the Parson); international motifs (including E632.1, “Speaking bones of murdered person reveal murder,” and E410, “The unquiet grave”); and urban belief tales (including “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “Boyfriend Hanged,” and “The Roommate’s Death”). Ghosts don’t appear in some of the tales in this section, though the tales presuppose belief in ghosts. For example, one tale is about a bootlegger pretending to be a headless ghost to frighten people away from his vocation, and another is about a boy mistaking a pig near a graveyard for a ghost and shooting it. Also there are humorous tales in this section, including the familiar “Ghost with One Black Eye” and a catch tale in which the teller grabs the listener and shouts “Boo!” at the story’s end.
Tales from Kentucky One-Room School Teachers is another important contribution to the oral history of working in America, much like Studs Terkel’s classic, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (1974). Montell’s teachers, like Terkel’s workers from various occupations, talk about working in an earlier and slower time–in this case an age before school consolidation and high tech classrooms. As one of Montell’s informants observes, “Times have changed but not all for the better,” and another teacher says that in one-room schools there was “a family-like atmosphere where children learned to care for each other. The young ones learned a great deal by listening to the classes of the upper grade children.” Fundamentals were stressed in one-room schools, but “Today,” another teacher says, “one can hardly read some written works due to handwriting and spelling,” in part because students “put too much dependence on computers.”
Following a brief introduction, the book is divided into twelve “chapters” and a conclusion, followed by biographical sketches of Montell’s informants. Montell points out in his introduction that unlike international folktale types “none of these oral accounts are universal,” but he fails to mention that the tales mirror the experiences of other teachers, including Kentucky’s most notable one-room schoolteacher, Jesse Stuart, who in the first sixty pages or so of The Thread that Runs so True (1949) previews many of the topics covered by Montell’s informants: carrying water to the schoolhouse, drinking from a common dipper, teaching students how to make cups from folded paper, teaching hygiene to students, teaching students older than the teacher, fighting between teacher and student (with teacher winning the fight and respect), riding a horse or walking to school, boarding with a local family, receiving low pay for long hours, checking record books by trustees before paying teacher’s salary, dealing with problems within the community, coping with students of different ages and learning abilities, getting all supplies (and very few of them) from a central office, painting the schoolhouse with the help of students (and other students messing up the fresh paint job), students chewing tobacco, students missing school to help with crops, competition with other schools (spelling bees, ciphering matches, ball games), and, among other things, games played at recess. Montell himself attended a one-room school in Kentucky and even appears as a bad boy in one tale, “Author Had to Sit in Teacher’s Lap,” suggesting that the book deals with first-hand accounts of teaching and living in an earlier and more innocent time.
With short introductions, without analysis, without annotation, and without chapter headnotes, these three books are intended mainly for general readers; however, since the occupational tales reflect common experiences and the ghost stories incorporate widespread motifs and common types, the collections also will be of interest to regional and comparative folklorists, although annotated tales would have made the book more useful to folklorists. Annotating the tales also would have made the author’s task of sorting the tales into chapters easier and more precise.
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[Review length: 1221 words • Review posted on December 12, 2013]