During the summer of 1981, University of South Carolina art history professor Charles Mack traveled through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Mississippi, visiting with members of the major Southern clay clans. The photographs he took and transcripts from audio-recorded interviews he conducted with potters comprise the bulk of the content of his new book, Talking with the Turners: Conversations with Southern Folk Potters . The result is a snapshot that captures a moment in the life of traditional Euro-American pottery in the South.
Mack’s was a final-hour mission, aimed at capturing traditional perspectives and practices and collecting examples before they all vanished and it was too late. He argues that the early 1980s represented a pivotal time for folk pottery, as older, utilitarian forms were in less demand and full-time potters were aging and passing away. Reading Mack’s interviewee biographical sketches and the excerpts from interviews, one wonders what ever happened to these folks and their potteries--the Smiths and the Millers of Alabama, the Georgia Cravens.
Happily, Mack provides an epilogue, entitled “A Generation Later,” which gives updates on all the potters featured in the book. Most everyone interviewed in the summer of 1981 has passed away, but in many cases their art lives on in a new generation of family members and neighbors who have taken up the wheel. They continue to adapt traditional pottery to ever-changing contemporary markets. What emerges by the end of the book is the important role individual will and interest play in maintaining traditional arts and occupations.
Mack makes clear that he is not interested in duplicating the fine histories of Southern pottery that have already been written, such as Charles Zug’s Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina , John Burrison’s Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery , and Nancy Sweezy’s Raised in Clay: The Southern Folk Pottery Tradition . His introduction is chock-full of footnotes, referring readers to these and other works for more in-depth perspectives on particular regions, potters, and techniques.
The book does provide a good state-by-state overview of the active potteries at the time of Mack’s research, acquainting the uninitiated with the likes of the Meadors and Hewells of Georgia, the Stewarts of Mississippi, and the Hiltons of the Catawba region of North Carolina and how, in some cases, their lives and work intertwined. Readers likewise will get a general picture of the characteristics of this Southern pottery tradition and its historical development in the region. In this regard, the book is a good reference guide for students of Southern material culture and for collectors of Southern folk pottery.
Mack donated to the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum many of the pieces he collected as well as the recorded interviews and photographs from his field excursion. Part of the mission of the book, he explains, is to draw attention to the museum’s Southern material culture collection generally and to his donated materials in particular, which have been newly digitized.
Indeed, Mack’s book reads much like a museum collections catalog. Thirty-nine pages are devoted to photographs of different potteries, potters, and examples of utilitarian wares (these latter comprise sixteen color plates at the center of the book), an arrangement that seems exhaustive of his photographic collection rather than representative. Thematically arranged interview excerpts stand alone, without analytical commentary. Such an approach can be a bit cumbersome to the general reader or novice student who may need a narrative thread to pull them in. Such readers might not persevere through abundant images of rural studios and what is necessarily at times the clunky nature of word-for-word transcription.
On the other hand, rich testimonies of life and work in the clay that may or may not have fit neatly into an academic argument are included here and provide tantalizing windows into the industry and the lifestyle. For example, in the section “On Being a Potter,” the itinerancy of many older potters comes to the fore. Howard Connor of Benton County, Mississippi, recalled the way his own father moved from pottery to pottery, often traveling out of state for work: “…he’d hobo--old potters, they used to do that. They’d work here a while, skip out, be gone to another town…” (63). Georgia potter Horace V. Brown, Jr., offers haunting commentary on the mobility and migration that fragmented family ties and created gaps in his own knowledge of family history: “They’d stayed close together for years and years and then started spreading out and spreading out, and then they kinda lost one another” (77).
Suggestive gems such as these tumble forth in the interview excerpts. Mack rarely followed up on these rich leads himself. But he captured them with his tape recorder, and has now made them available to anyone with the imagination to pursue further inquiry. What was the traveling potter’s life like? How did he integrate himself into other potteries? How did these moves impact the transfer of technologies and trends? And how did occupational migration affect family and community ties?
Other sections include equally dense talk that tells us not just about traditional craft, but also about work ethic, perseverance, and rural life. Carrie Stewart of Louisville, Mississippi, was one of the few women potters that Mack interviewed. Here she attests to the magnitude of work she and her family put into running their pottery and their homestead: “…And we was a family job. We all did our little turns, and in the meantime he [Winfred Stewart] had a dairy and we worked on a farm, and the times we didn’t do that we were working in the shop. There was no welfare for us. No food stamps, no nothing. We had to work for a living, and with the help of the Lord, we did make it” (96). Excerpts from interviews with other women likewise point to the range of work they did in addition to turning pots (working in sewing factories, taking care of the children, gardening, cooking).
As the title suggests, Mack’s book is primarily about what the potters have to say. And they say plenty, not just about pottery, but about life and work in the rural South during much of the twentieth century. A CD featuring the audio recordings of excerpted interviews accompanies the book and adds to the words on the page the rich texture of individual voices. Mack’s impulses were good in the summer of 1981, when he struck out along the Southern clay trail. What he leaves us with is an historical glimpse of a tradition at once tenuous and tenacious.
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[Review length: 1094 words • Review posted on September 19, 2007]