These books may very well have many things in common, but the primary thread that connects them is that each creates, through personal story, a self-representation of an individual’s life. That in itself is not enough to qualify any of them for review in a folklore journal. Rather, the underlying subject matter of the books does, since each represents a life significant to folklore studies: each is a folkloristic memoir. Burton’s uses excerpts from interviews to tell the story of an Appalachian “bad man,” Ronda Lee Hicks; Lowinger’s tells his own story of how a New Jersey Jewish boy, recently graduated from Rutgers, becomes a fiddler in Bill Monroe’s bluegrass band, focusing both on himself and Monroe; and Narayan’s tells the story of her family in India, showing the crucible in which this world-class folklorist/anthropologist developed.
These three books probably would appear to be an odd lot to most people. I chose them to review together because, although they have obvious differences, they appeared to me to have striking similarities, once I paused to think about them: first, they all are memoirs of one sort or another; second, they are memoirs of some perceived “other” within American mainstream society; and third, they all deal with some kind of folkloristic theme. I also noticed that two are in some way connected to the American South (Burton and Lowinger), two are self-written memoirs (Lowinger and Narayan), and two deal as much with family as with self (Burton and Narayan). I also found it fascinating that JFRR even chose to list these books for review. That alone gave me pause to consider their folklore-worthiness. Upon reading them, I came to realize that these books are relevant to folklore precisely because of their common expository vehicle, the memoir: by employing the memoir, these books reveal themselves as written variants of the personal experience narrative, although through different stylistic modes. While the memoir is distinctly a literary genre, it is fascinating, and perhaps illuminating, to see folklore scholars and practitioners use it in presenting material significant to folklorists.
Burton’s documentation of Ronda Lee Hicks, a “bad man” in an almost stereotypically Appalachian way, is brilliant. Hicks is a cousin and a nephew by marriage of famed Appalachian raconteur Ray Hicks, the NEA National Heritage Award tale teller. He comes from not only this accomplished line of raconteurs, but also from an area in North Carolina famous for its tale telling traditions, Beech Mountain. So Burton’s decision to provide little commentary himself and to allow Ronda Lee Hicks’ words drive the memoir allows the narrative to emerge both genuine and ingenuous. The result is a self-portrait of this North Carolinian that paints a picture not only of himself, but of his family, community, traditional way of life, and worldview.
Now, Ronda Lee Hicks is no Ray Hicks. He shares with his cousin a natural, easy way of telling a story. But Ronda’s stories are all personal experience narratives, not the traditional wonder tales of Ray Hicks’ milieu. And while Ray Hicks invests his Jack Tales with true Appalachian pathos and character, Ronda reveals that same—and darker—pathos and character through his real-life stories. As you read through Ronda’s stories, you feel the folklorist come out in you, wanting to taletype his stories, because they all seem so universal and regional at the same time, even as they are quite pointedly and eccentrically Ronda’s own unique tales. Ronda is so likable in these stories, even as he tells tales of prison, murder, infidelity, alcoholism, drug use, habitual violence, vengeance, knifings, shootings, extreme family dysfunction, proud anti-authoritarianism, child abuse, and going AWOL. The stories are not all about him, but he is involved in all of them. Choosing to transcribe Hicks’ dialect as faithfully as may be possible, Burton allows Hicks’ voice and cadence to emerge, which adds true depth to the comprehension of the stories. While Ronda Lee Hicks invokes the spirit of the traditional mountain tales in his personal narratives, and even shades that spirit in dark, chaotic swirls, any folklorist reading this book would see that what he is portraying is quite tacitly the personal, difficult, real-life side to the wonder tales that have infused the traditional imagination of this region. The book is subtitled “The Memoirs of Ronda Lee Hicks”; perhaps Burton subtitled it exactly this way to reference how the memoir does represent a literary manifestation of the traditional tale. Ronda Lee Hicks, as talented a tale teller as his more celebrated cousin, definitively links the memoir to personal experience narrative through this incredibly readable set of tales documenting his wondrously difficult life.
Lowinger also provides tales of the Southern life, but as an outsider who found his way inside. As stated in the book’s introduction, Lowinger’s inspiration for his memoir was to do a photojournalistic work on Bill Monroe. His book is interesting for that fact alone, documenting Monroe through personal stories in the 1965–1966 period when Lowinger was the fiddler in the Bluegrass Boys, but also through photos and stories from Monroe’s last years, 1991–1996. I Hear a Voice Calling is categorically about Lowinger, though, not about Monroe. Lowinger covers his own life, from childhood on, and specifically in terms of how significant mentors shaped his artistic, vocational, and expressive interests. Bill Monroe was the first such mentor, but later ones came in classical music (Raphael Bronstein) and in photojournalism (Mario Cabrera). He mentions throughout the book significant names in folk/bluegrass/country-western music in the 1960s era (Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Del McCoury, Vassar Clements; the Ryman Auditorium, Sunset Park, New River Ranch, Gerde’s Folk City, etc.), but the reader would have to be fairly informed who these people, places, and events are, because Lowinger mentions them simply as figures in the context of his life, not so much in the context of their own lives or history. He does an outstanding job in characterizing Bill Monroe in his stories, and the reader gets a good sense of what the life as a Bluegrass Boy in the mid-1960s must have been like, living and working with Monroe.
Implicating the personal experience narrative genre, all of the context centers around the narrator and his experiences. The reader gets a glimpse of Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, but mainly performing in the northeast, where Lowinger was from and where he first saw him; or performing in the festivals where Lowinger accompanied him. A reader does not get a good sense of the length and breadth of Monroe’s life and influence, for the very good reason that Lowinger was not there to document it all. For instance, one of Bill Monroe’s significant legacies was to start and nurture the Bean Blossom Festival in Brown County, Indiana, yet Lowinger never mentions Bean Blossom. Lowinger played fiddle for Monroe from 1965–1966, and Bean Blossom began in 1967, so not covering it in that period makes sense. However, Lowinger then came back to photodocument Monroe from 1991–1996, so not covering it in this period does not make sense. That is, it makes no sense if this were a book truly inspired by Monroe. It does make sense in that this is rather a memoir documenting Lowinger’s creative life based on personal experience narratives. Lowinger is an amazing person, someone who could transform himself from a middle-class Jersey boy to a premier bluegrass fiddler to an accomplished classical violinist/violist to a professional financial systems analyst to a photojournalist in the course of his life. This book documents that, and it does so expressly by telling stories about mentors who spurred him to accomplish heroic deeds. The folkloristic value of the book would lie in 1) his portrayal of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys; and 2) his literary documentation of his own creative life. The connection between personal experience story as expressed in a personal memoir, however, is less evident in this work than in Burton’s publication of Ronda Lee Hicks’ folk narratives, or in Narayan’s more creative work.
Kirin Narayan has made a name for herself as an academic who converses comfortably within both anthropology and folklore. In this memoir, which her husband dubbed a “we-moir” because it deals more with the “we” of her family and society than the “me” of the author alone, she reveals that at an early age she was an aspiring writer, having written 135 pages of a book she characterized as “the adventures of Princess Snow Rose” (91). Her excellent writing style is self-evident in this memoir, making her early life and thoughts come alive within the context of her bicultural family—her mother American-born, her father Indian-born, and their children on the margins of both societies. What Narayan accomplishes so successfully is to provide a child’s-eye view of 1960s–1970s Indian life as lived in a dysfunctional bicultural household, where the American-born mother aspires to spiritual fulfillment through connections to gurus, lamas, swamis, and sadhus, the Indian born father falls into alcoholism and whittles away at his inheritance, and the children are caught in between. Kirin, of course, as a pre-teen and a teenager in this time period, expresses the child’s view best, and she does so magnificently, with a true writerly eye toward detail, emotional reactions, character development, and social interactions. The reader gets an immediate sense of what it was like to grow up in India with a variety of liminal identities—neither American nor Indian, but both; neither rich nor poor, but bridging the gap; both spiritually-inclined and materially-inclined; part of a family, but seeing the family fall apart. Through the tug and push tension that Narayan portrays herself going through as a child, she sketches an ethnographic sociocultural landscape informed by her own reflexive responses. At times I have to admit I questioned how she could possibly remember such detail for so many incidents—the conversations, the colors of clothing worn, the food eaten, all the jokes and banter, the facial expressions, the minutiae of daily life. She notes that she used information from her brother Rahoul’s lifelong diaries and notebooks, but even so, she could not have recreated all of the detailed information from her older brother’s observations. By the end of the book I was convinced (although she provides no further citations) that as a child, Narayan herself had kept densely written notebooks, no doubt meticulously organized, that she extensively drew from for her book.
Narayan is an accomplished writer, notably within academia, but, as evinced though this book, in creative prose as well. Her work, among the three reviewed here, is the strongest example of a folklorist creating a significant creative non-fiction work, much in keeping with AFS’s Folklore and Creative Writing Section, formed in 2005 in Atlanta. As such, she reflects a growing trend within our field of expressing personal experience through creative non-fiction. Burton’s book, on the other hand, allows Ronda Lee Hicks to provide, through transcribed interviews, an oral narrative of his life, thus recreating a series of tales that are redolent of traditional folktales, in form and structure, creating in fact a life history in the form of personal experience narrative. Lowinger’s recounting strikes me as more of a straightforward memoir that verges on the personal experience narrative but lodges more firmly in the memoir range. Perhaps most telling is that the two books that are most folkloristic—Burton’s and Narayan’s—are the two that folklorists wrote. All three books, however, represent excellent, interesting, compelling ways in which writers can document both the subject and the object of folklore.
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[Review length: 1912 words • Review posted on September 29, 2010]