The Tennessee Folklore Society compiled a volume of essays to commemorate its 75th anniversary during the same year that the Texas Folklore Society commemorated its century of existence. Both publications are fitting publications for commemorating the work of two important folklore societies. Both of these state folklore societies carry on legacies of important scholarship and continue to make important contributions to the documentation and interpretation of regional folk culture. The volumes, however, take markedly different approaches to marking these anniversaries.
Celebrating 100 Years of the Texas Folklore Society feels like a series of reminiscences that would be printed in a memory book or even inscribed within a yearbook. Short essays are organized into four sections that focus on what draws members to the organization as well as highlight the organization’s accomplishments, meeting activities, and publications. There are warm tributes to important folklorists such as Mody Boatwright, J. Frank Dobie, John Lomax, Américo Paredes, and other members of the Texas Folklore Society too numerous to mention. Having a volume that includes their contributions and provides easy access to the society’s publications through the past one hundred years is an important achievement. Essays by Lucy Fischer West, Tim Tingle, James Ward Lee, Charles Clay Doyle, Elmer Kelton, and Sue M. Friday are engaging discussions of Mexican-American folklore, Choctaw folklife, field research and writing, Pecos Bill, connections between the folklore society’s meetings and the process of writing, and the construction of a dog-trot house. These are the best of the book’s thirty-two essays.
The remainder of the essays tend to be sketchy overviews of the folklore society’s history, paeans to friends and associates, travel reminiscences, and descriptions of meetings and even accounts of members who erred by using up too much time in delivering conference papers. The writing may interest long-time members of the society, and these articles might provide outsiders with some documentation of a professional meeting. The problem, however, is that the essays tend to evoke more tinges of nostalgia rather than ideas that would be of general interest for those wishing to learn about folklore in Texas. The book’s readership likely will be confined to those who receive a complimentary volume with their membership.
A Tennessee Folklore Sampler fares better. Ted Olson and Anthony Cavender together edited an interesting volume of essays that they culled from the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin. The thirty-five articles include older publications as well as more contemporary pieces. They are organized into ten sections, nine of which present writing on various folklore genres and a final section that deals with “folk communities” in Tennessee. Each section concludes with a small discussion and bibliography for further reading, and the book also includes well-written prefatory essays by William Ferris, Robie Cogswell, and Walt Haden. A number of excellent photographs—both field-based and archival—illustrate the volume. It is especially interesting to see the continuity and differences over time in both the subject matter and methods of folklore scholarship in these illustrations and in the articles.
The editorial work by Olson and Cavender includes introductory essays to each section. These provide good rationales for including the content, as in the section on material culture where they explain why the Reelfoot Lake Stumpjumper, white oak baskets, sorghum molasses, and moonshine whiskey have achieved such iconic status within the state’s traditional culture. The section on folk medicine consists mainly of collected items, but Rosemary Brookman’s article on folk veterinary practices opens up a relatively ignored area of research topics. Sections on folk beliefs and customs include good descriptions of water-witching, conjuration, shivarees, cemetery decoration days, and an unusual ritual called an “egg fight.” The article by Bill Harrison and Charles K. Wolfe, “Shooting the Anvil,” is an excellent presentation of a topic that is surprisingly rarely presented in folklore scholarship, and Charles R. Gunter’s article on cockfighting is an especially interesting entry in the section on play and recreational folklore.
One of the strongest pieces of scholarship is Michael Montgomery’s article on Tennessee dialects in the Folk Speech section. Montgomery examines the truism that there are actually three states of Tennessee. While he holds to the regional distinctiveness between western, central, and eastern Tennessee, he convincingly demonstrates that the dialect differences actually are rather slight between these three regions. The importance of Tennessee’s verbal art is finely showcased in four excellent articles on Tennessee legends. Thomas G. Burton’s treatment of the execution of Mary the circus elephant arrives at the historical truth of this bizarre event. Teresa Ann Bell Lockhart gives a fine documentation of stories of Tennessee’s Bell Witch, and Michael Lofaro’s treatment of the saga of Davy Crockett is also one of the strongest pieces of writing in the entire volume.
Tennessee’s musical traditions support the geographic division of the state into three distinctive regions. Essays show these regional influences through discussion of Appalachian ballad singing, central Tennessee master guitar makers J. W. and Don Gallagher, and the Delta blues and gospel traditions of the western third of the state. Kip Lornell’s article on his fieldwork in Memphis with African-American gospel musicians is an excellent complement to his later book Happy in the Service of the Lord, and Bruce Nemerov’s writing on John Wesley Work III expands on our understanding of WPA fieldwork and research by Alan Lomax by emphasizing Work’s essential contributions. Sandy Conatser and David Schnaufer’s article on the Tennessee music box is an interesting discussion of an obscure relative to the dulcimer that is possibly unique to Tennessee. The instrument is constructed from a rectangular wooden box and features a thin neck at its center, but its origins and diffusion have been virtually undocumented.
The final section of the book consists of two articles that apply a folklife studies approach to Tennessee folklore. Mildred Haun’s portrait of Cocke County was first published in 1967, and her ethnographic descriptions now provide excellent resources for social history. The essay by Betsy Peterson and Tom Rankin on Free Hill is drawn from the research they conducted in the early 1980s in this predominantly African-American community. Rankin’s photographs in the article are excellent illustrations, and their research was presented prior to this publication in various public folklore programs.
A Tennessee Folklore Sampler provides readers with an excellent overview of key topics within the scope of Tennessee’s vibrant folk culture. Olson and Cavender’s editorial decision to bring these articles to a wider public makes this volume an excellent resource for both a popular and an academic audience.
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[Review length: 1075 words • Review posted on November 17, 2010]