4 /

Oral Styles of American Folk Narrators

Since folklore became a field of learning in the first half of the nineteenth century, collectors have given their primary attention to the distribution and origin of texts. Especially for the folktale has the pattern set by the Grimm brothers in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen been endlessly repeated, a volume of collected tales, somewhat “improved” for the reading public, with the human sources suppressed. At best, an appendix will provide a bare list of names and ages of the storytellers. The great fallacy in this approach is the divorce of texts from the folk artists who alone give them life. One notable exception is Russia, where A. F. Gil’ferding (1831-1872) established the principle in folklore studies of centering attention on the by liny performer, and furnishing the maximum information about his biography, repertoire, and creative talent.¹ But Russian folklore science, now propagandizing the class struggle, has failed in this one commendable respect to influence Western folklorists. Rarely does an article appear in Western publications like James H. Delargy’s “The Gaelic Story-Teller,” singling out individual narrators for discussion.² We find occasional descriptions of storytellers by the excellent British folklorists of the late nineteenth century; Hartland discussed “The Art of StoryTelling” in general terms, and Campbell of Islay gave pleasing detail about his Highland bards.³ Recently Bowra in his lucid examination of Heroic Poetry devoted considerable attention to techniques of composition and presentation used by folk poets in scattered cultures who recite verse narratives of stirring adventure.⁴

The fact remains that folklorists have only incidentally and sporadically concerned themselves with problems of folk-narrative style. Archer Taylor has said that we know less about the structural details than about almost any other aspect of the folktale.⁵ Stith Thompson in surveying our knowledge of folktale style reported mainly on problems still to be studied.⁶ Olrik’s general laws of epic style are one positive accomplishment and appear to cover all forms of oral narration: the oral tale is simply told, it contains no subplot, it opposes a good and an evil character, it contains much repetition, two persons only appear in a scene, the weakest character triumphs.⁷ When it comes to any discussion of individual storytelling styles, however, Thompson must turn to the Russian folklorist Azadovsky and his analysis of three principal types of raconteurs: the specialist in the obscene, the precisionist anxious to relate every detail of the tradition accurately, and the embroiderer who fills in the structure of the tale with the realism and pathos of everyday life.⁸

Anthropologists have infrequently looked at myths and songs of nonliterate peoples for their qualities of style as well as their ethnographic content. Boas, for all his concern with tales as a mirror of culture, did call attention to their formal and esthetic elements.⁹ His student Reichard analyzed “The Style of Coeur d’Alene Mythology” in terms of plot, action, motivation, characterization, and stylistic devices, although she used only two informants and admitted that the Coeur d’Alene were not especially adept storytellers.¹⁰ Usually the anthropologists comment on general characteristics of tribal style rather than on the creative role of individual narrators. One difficulty, of course, for the anthropological student of style is the translation barrier.¹¹ In my own fieldwork with bilingual Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Sioux, I have collected fluent English narratives in which the Indian storytellers act as it were as their own interpreters. In such texts, however, we should study acculturated rather than native style. This field experience strengthened my conviction that only certain gifted individuals, whether Indians or anyone else, are the storytellers, and hence that oral style should be considered individually as well as tribally.

The American folklorist faces a considerably different field situation from that of the European folklorist or the anthropologist. They confront a unified culture where storytelling is ritually formalized and transmits a stable body of narratives which furnish cultural sanctions and aesthetic satisfactions.¹² American civilization has produced informal yarns and anecdotes and tall tales and personal experiences, rather than elaborate creation myths or heroic sagas or night-long wonder tales. We cannot speak of the culture but rather of a score of ethnic, regional, and occupational subcultures which form the chief targets of the folklorist. Storytellers and folktales are less easily spotted in the United States than in Europe or among nonliterate cultures. Are jokes and anecdotes folktales? Can a true storyteller flourish among the mass media? Yet the very complexity of American civilization makes possible a broader inquiry than is possible in a simpler culture. We can search out storytellers who represent a wide variety of folk groups, from tradition-directed pockets to other-directed societies in American life.

Two younger American folklorists, Jansen and Ball, have recently published provocative papers on the problem of folk style. Jansen asks for a distinction between folk aesthetic and art aesthetic, and for proper recognition of the artistic folk performer above his ordinary fellows who merely remember or half-remember.¹³ In view of the vital living context of folk narration, Jansen even suggests a classification of verbal performance, based on the degrees of casualness and formality in the storytelling situation.¹⁴ Ball continues this plea with a demand for good collecting of good performers, to portray in full dimension the “dynamic relationship among style, story, teller, audience, and culture.” The culture, the tale, and the teller each contribute to the style of a given text.¹⁵

Folk aesthetic does indeed differ from art aesthetic, but still a student of oral narration can borrow some concepts from literary criticism. He, too, is scrutinizing a text and considering its qualities of structure and language. However, the texts he handles are not composed by their speakers or singers, and they do not possess a constant form. The text is in continual flux, even when repeated by the same narrator. Yet the gulf is not so enormous as it appears; literary texts too undergo revision, the folk narrator like an author composes within a tradition, and folklore and literature continually feed each other themes and plots and characters and phrases.¹⁶ A crucial difference lies in the audience; the writer writes for a private reader, the teller speaks to visible listeners. Before he sets his création in type, the author can prune and polish and perfect, but the narrator delivers his piece as the words pour from his mind, and even though he may have told the tale often, when they are literally recorded many imperfections appear—false starts, circuitous sentences, tangled grammar. Such faults little affect the response of the listening circle, for the speech of the first-rate folk narrator is fresh, clear, and vivid, and the flaws that may vex the pampered reader vanish in the excitement of the living text. An added physical dimension enters into the elements of folk style; the narrator employs voice and body as well as words to dramatize his text. Facial expression, hand gestures, intonation and inflection, and the whole human presence mold the recitation. The audience, too, conditions the performance, and so do external factors of time and place. The critic of folk style must necessarily also be the collector-observer, and if he invites others to discuss the style of his narrators, he is bound to furnish facts about the manner of their delivery, along with the texts of their tales.

Narrators in the Field

In the present paper I propose first to discuss the styles of seven folk narrators from whom I have collected sizable bodies of tales, and who reflect five storytelling traditions within American civilization. They include two Southern-born Negroes whom I met in Michigan, J. D. Suggs and John Blackamore,¹⁷ two Yankee lobster fishermen from Maine, Jim Alley and Curt Morse; and from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a Polish immigrant and a Swedish immigrant who had worked as miners, lumberjacks, and farm hands, Joe Woods and Swan Olson; and an auto mechanic of FrenchCanadian background, Burt Mayotte. All qualify as outstanding narrators, from a folklore collector’s point of view; they told tales fluently and graphically. For each I will give some biographical and repertoire data and discuss a characteristic text.

The Narrators. James Douglas Suggs was my number-one informant. In the course of my visits to him in 1952 and 1953 in Calvin, an all-Negro farming township in Cass County, Michigan, he related 170 folk narratives and sang a score of folksongs. Sixtyfive years old when I met him, Suggs had grown up in northern Mississippi and roamed widely about the country in various occupations. Although only a day laborer with ten children to feed at the end of his life, he possessed uncontrollable high spirits and delighted in talk and company.

John Blackamore was thirty years old when I found him in Benton Harbor, Michigan, in 1952, where he had lived for nine years after moving north from Kentucky and Missouri. He was adapting himself successfully to Northern business ways, working in a foundry, driving his own truck, and renting rooms. Stolid and burly, he gave no outward appearance of possessing the narrative gift, and yet he could recite lengthy stories for hours on end.

In the little town of Jonesport and neighboring Machias high upon the Maine coast I met two raconteurs in July, 1956, who had spent their lives as lobstermen in the coastal waters. James Alley at seventy-six scraped out a living knitting heads for lobster traps, shucking clams, and delivering papers. He lived on a tiny road known as Alley’s Lane where a number of related Alley families had moved from Head Harbor Island in the bay nearly half a century before. James had low status in the community and was not known as a storyteller. But I found him sensitive and sharp-minded and an inexhaustible fountain of anecdotal tales.

By contrast, the reputation of “Uncle” Curt Morse as a humorist and a character had spread through the county. Although he lived at the end of a country road in Kennebec overlooking a scenic cove, he spent every afternoon lolling along the main street of Machias, the county seat five miles away, and he frequently visited in Jonesport, where indeed I first met him. Curt at seventy did a little clamming, but principally he enjoyed his local fame as wag and entertainer. Curt had never left Maine.

Joe Woods migrated to the United States in 1904 at the age of twenty-one, from Csanok, province of Galicia, in Austrian Poland, where he was born Joseph Wojtowicz. He had traveled through many of the northern states, working in the woods and on the harvest, but he lived most of his years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where the iron mines offered fairly steady work. Mine dampness gave him rheumatism, and he was invalided from 1930 to 1936, in the state mental hospital at Newberry. This fact may have led to local talk of his being a teller of crazy stories, the scent that led me to him in Crystal Falls in 1946, and back again in 1947. But I found him perfectly clear-headed and a narrator of well-known European tales.

Swan Olson also came from the Old Country, in his case Sweden. I met him accidentally in a barbershop in Negaunee in the Upper Peninsula, where I heard him recounting an incident about being served fly pie. Though a gentle old man of seventy-three in 1946, Swan bristled with experiences of his life in America, working on farms, in lumber camps, and down in the mines. He still worked, as mason, plasterer, bricklayer, and carpenter. At seventeen he had left Stockholm, in 1890, and taken his first job in Litchfield, Minnesota.

Burt Mayotte was born in Michigan but retained his FrenchCanadian identity. One branch of his family had come from AlsaceLorraine. His grandfather was a pioneer in Keweenaw County, the lonely finger of the Upper Peninsula thrusting into Lake Superior and a preserve for French-Canadians come down from the lumberwoods of Quebec. Burt was an auto mechanic at Sault Ste. Marie when I met him in 1946, a wiry, energetic youngish man under forty.

Traditions. 1. The Southern Negro tradition of Suggs and Blackamore is more casual than Negro recitation in the West Indies, where the formal style of African storytelling persists. There we find, say in Beckwith’s collection from Jamaica, ending formulas and cantefable structure (songs included within the tales), which are only fragmentarily preserved in the United States. The animal tales so prevalent in the West Indies cross over to the mainland, but they blend with tales based in slavery, supernatural experiences borrowed from the Whites, American anecdotes and tall tales, and European folktales. In spite of these diversified sources, a corpus of Southern Negro tales can be recognized; the same tales are collected again and again from Negro storytellers. This wide range of story materials permits different selections of content by individual tellers. For instance, one informant may specialize in brief, punchending jests, and another may indulge in extended, circumstantial relations.

2. European immigrants coming to the United States have brought with them the fictional folktales made famous by the brothers Grimm and known as Märchen or fairy tales. These complex and elaborate tales of wonder, adventure, and magic possess substantial structures and special stylistic features. The long tale will often be divided into equal and symmetrical episodes—say in the Cinderella-type narratives where the three sisters perform identical tasks in succession—which are sometimes linked by interrogations addressed to the listeners. Märchen furnished entertainment for the unlettered peasantry of medieval Europe, and deal with kings, castles, treasure, ogres, witches, and lucky youths of low birth. Joe Woods provides a case, rarely recorded by collectors, of the immigrant relating Märchen in his new tongue. Although the Celtic people of Ireland and Scotland have a wealth of fairy tales, the English are nearly barren of Märchen and contributed few to America.

3. Along the Maine coast, where an isolated Yankee stock gains a bare living from the lobsters, herring, and clams in the coastal waters, a homogeneous culture rich in folklore persists. A good deal of indigenous American yarnspinning flourishes here, drawing its materials from supernaturalism of sea and land and the humor of native character. The tall tale, the local anecdote, the marine legend abound, and specialists can be found for each vein. Here the natural requirements of storytelling under American conditions shape the style, rather than inherited narrative conventions. These requirements are keyed to the informal, gregarious group; hence the tale must be relatively brief, conversational, topical, and pointed toward laughter or shock. Even Old World plots, when they turn up, will be trimmed to this mold. Curt Morse and Jim Alley yarn within this tradition.

4. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a special form of humorous dialect story has developed from the close proximity of foreign-born and native-born Americans. The sons of the immigrants mimic the daily mistakes in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary made by adults forced to acquire English as a belated second tongue. At the same time they ridicule the cultural shock and mishaps of the newcomer, who becomes a stock fool character. In the Peninsula several types of comic dialect are found, chiefly the French, Finnish, and Cornish, and secondarily the Swedish and Italian, reflecting the nationality groups of the area. Each neighborly town in the Peninsula vaunts at least one “dialectician” of repute, who entertains at lodge meetings and church socials, and most of the American-born Peninsularites can tell at least a few dialect jokes. Walter Gries, a well-known mining company executive, has told his dialect stories throughout the state in after-dinner speeches and at high school graduations. The linguistic features of each dialect are based on the relation of the parent tongue to English and the common mistakes that ensue when a speaker of that language attempts to master English. Mimetic ability is at a premium, and this extends to facial expression and hand gestures. Length, however, may vary from a two-line joke to an adventure of several thousand words. Dialect stories appear throughout the United States wherever a nationality group lives in close contact with American-born generations. Danish dialect tales have been recorded from Ephraim, Utah, in the Southwest the Spanish-Mexican dialect blossoms, in Pennsylvania the German, in big cities the Jewish.

5. The stories of Swan Olson are not usually classed as folktales. They purport to be accurate autobiographical experiences, albeit of a hair-raising nature. As oral narratives they interest the folklorist, and they appear to represent a pattern of storytelling especially fertile along the frontier, or in communities like the Upper Peninsula with frontier characteristics. Here exists a society reminiscent of Heroic Age cultures, where individual strength and daring are the admired virtues, and heroes boast of their feats. In the Peninsula I encountered other autobiographical saga men like Swan, whose derring-do, physical prowess, and violent humor echo The Narrative of David Crockett, which rests on an oral, heroic, autobiographical base. The successful personal saga evokes belief, suspense, and admiration. On examination its episodes show resemblances to tall tales and hero legends.

Individual Repertoires and Delivery. Suggs told me about 170 narratives during my visits with him over the course of two years.¹⁸ They covered every theme of modern Negro tale telling: speaking animals (23), Biblical and moral lessons (14), Old Marster and clever John (10), hoodoos and fortune telling (11), spirits and hants (10), social protest (5), exaggeration (15), Irishmen (5), preachers (13), humorous anecdotes (10), with a scattering of migratory fictions, folk history, and supernatural beliefs not easy to classify. In his varied life he had worked for a year with a touring “minister” (minstrel) show and still retained some instinct of the stage performer. Suggs possessed an infectious good humor and ebullience, which spilled over into his narration; he talked with animation and gusto, and laughed from tip to toe at his jest, or mine. Yet he had his somber side, too, and spoke of occult mysteries with solemn conviction. Whichever kind of tale he related, he projected himself completely into the situation, sometimes changing from third to first person in the course of the relation, as he identified himself with the chief actor. His animation compensated the northern listener bothered by his thick Mississippi Delta dialect. A sweeping range of inflection enabled Suggs to simulate the shrieking woman at revival meeting with a high-pitched electric shout, and in a breath he was back to the rumbling tones of the preacher. Telling a personal experience with a ghost train, he conveyed the mood in short, staccato sentences with his volume turned low. Two special features of a Suggs rendition were his tendency to recapitulate the tale, or its final episodes, in a swift, excited summary immediately upon its completion; and his inclination to moralize upon the story, sometimes even adding an incident from his own personal knowledge which confirmed the lesson of the piece.

John Blackamore told me 29 tales during the same period I was collecting from Suggs.¹⁹ They included humorous animal, Old Marster, and Irishmen and preacher narratives, but no supernaturalism. His texts are exceptionally long, a good deal longer than usual variants of the same tale type. Several of his stories reach 1800 words, a remarkable length for American Negro texts. Blackamore will take a short anecdote familiar in the Negro repertoire and clothe it with panoramic detail of daily life. Up in the North this storytelling style no longer holds an audience, and a few of his buddies left the room in boredom while he was dictating to me. But in Charleston, Missouri, he used to indulge in all-night sessions. Blackamore delivered his meaty narratives in monotone, with no attempt at inflection. Unlike other of my gifted black informants, he seemed to lack any singing ability and recited the story of Billy Lion and Stagalee, which is customarily sung as a ballad, in rhyming couplets. He knew his texts faultlessly and dictated them to me with never a miscue.

Joe Woods related eighteen tales to me during my two visits in 1946 and 1947.²⁰ Besides Märchen (6), he told satirical jests of priests and Jews (5), one heroic and one local legend, one novella, a comic Devil and a comic fright tale, an exaggeration, and an unusual true story, all of obvious European origin. The length of his longest Märchen, over 3000 words, is not surprising since Märchen are extended adventure stories, although we rarely encounter fullbodied examples in the United States. Woods claimed seven languages (“Polock, Russian, Croatian, Bohemian, Serbian, Slavish, English”) and had narrated his fictions and jests in Polish and Slavish to his countrymen in the mines and the lumber camps. In recounting them to me in English, his errors of pronunciation did not hamper the ease of his delivery. After reading the artificial language of fairy tales in children’s books, I was relieved to hear his fresh, colloquial, idiomatic speech. He was obviously a practiced craftsman, knowing his involved plots faithfully and presenting them confidently. He handled dialogue with great ease, spaced his incidents in natural paragraphs, and carried his story line forward with clarity and directness.

In one collecting session in a tavern that lasted from 9 P.M. to 2 A.M., Swan Olson reeled off to me half a dozen sensational experiences that had befallen him in the northwoods country.²¹ The episodes seemed sharp and clear in his mind, and he told each one as a unit, although all were connected as segments of his autobiographical saga, and they even repeated each other. He had two accounts of whipping his boss Eric Ericson, two of driving off robbers, two of mine mishaps. The violence of the stories contrasted oddly with Swan’s gentle demeanor and ascetic features; his head swung continually from side to side from age, and he doddered when he walked. Contrary to popular belief, old people are not necessarily good informants, who must all possess keenness of mind and lucidity of speech. An old man’s reminiscences may prove unbearably tedious, rambling, and disjointed. But Swan wasted never a word; he had searched out the spectacular incidents of his life in America and arranged them into neat episodic shockers. What influences had shaped his style, in the absence of any conventional form of saga tale, could only be conjectured, but this kind of storytelling based on personal adventure and exploit flourished in the Upper Peninsula, and men of the woods, mines, and lakes relished matching such experiences.

During a three-week stay in Jonesport, Maine, I saw Jim Alley nearly every day, and by the time I left he had narrated 143 tales (only 4 of them published so far) into my tape recorder.²² Many of these were brief Irishmen jokes, which turn up with astonishing frequency in the Negro South, the Kentucky mountains, and the New Jersey piney woods. But he also knew a store of anecdotes about odd local characters, several Old World comic tales which he also told anecdotally, and supernatural legends of the Jonesport area. Although Jim uttered his tales with great assurance, none of his kinfolk and townsmen thought of him as a storyteller, except one neighbor woman whom he habitually visited to pour out his troubles. Alley had household problems, usually looked severe and troubled, and was easily offended. He gave forth his stories positively, almost raspingly, whereas his older brother Frank spoke soft and low. Stories came to his mind easily enough if I triggered him off with a tale of my own, or if Frank were on hand to prime his memory, and once under way he kept stimulating himself in an endless flow. He preferred the pithy, compressed, economic anecdote and indeed never gave me a narrative longer than 500 or 600 words. His authoritative air and humorless mien made one think of a very seedy professor delivering a lecture, rather than of a storyteller of the folk regaling his cronies.

On the other hand, the name of Curt Morse was given to me immediately I reached Jonesport and inquired for storytellers. Everyone knew Uncle Curt. I met him accidentally when he visited a home in Alley’s Lane, much in character, being the worse for beers, with a couple in tow who screamed with laughter at his every word. Curt lived for his audience and was constantly on display, exuding gags, tall tales, comical expressions, and jocular pieces. He eventually gave me 61 narratives, nearly all humorous, save for one local legend and some heroic exploits of Barney Beal, the strong man of Beal’s Island.²³ Curt had done a stint on Gene Hooper’s Cowboy Show that toured through Maine, been publicized in the county newspaper, and owned a reputation he felt compelled to maintain. Hence Curt played for the laugh with a showman’s touch. Nevertheless he knew his countryside and its legends faithfully and had stories a-plenty about the old characters, the witch Sal Joe, and a wild man of the woods called Yo-ho. He made more out of a tale about a local character than did Jim Alley, adding descriptive details of appearance and behavior and smaller jokes along the way to build up the yarn. Frequently he inserted himself into comic personal experiences, thus extending his role as funnyman from storyteller to protagonist. In such narratives as the description of his trip, riddled with mishaps, to Aroostook County to dig potatoes, he played a comic counterpart of Swan Olson’s hero.

Two meetings with Burt Mayotte, one quite brief, yielded five dialect stories, four in French and one in Finnish.²⁴ His prize narrative, “Paree at the Carnivalle,” he claimed to have composed from his grandfather’s retelling in broken English of Burt’s own misadventures at a carnival. This ran to 1200 words, and his version of the immigrant’s first visit to a baseball game, a dialect favorite, was even longer. As raconteur for the Allouette singers, the local French-Canadian club of Sault Ste. Marie, Burt held a semiprofessional status, evident in the poise and ease with which he delivered his pieces. In the act of reciting he stimulated the Canadien with darting eyes, nervous twists of head and shoulders, and gesticulation of hands, all adding up to a spasm of physical activity that suggested the befuddled, excitable Gallic character of his tales. Burt’s phrases fell into a rhythmic beat as he poured forth the story, the French nasal intonations providing neat upswings on which to pause. The vibrancy and lilt of his speech further animated the narration. All five of his texts portrayed a scene—a carnival, a ball game, a hunting trip—and even an ignorant Finnish cop giving a city speeder a ticket took on the dimensions of a little tableau. Furthermore, he set several of his recitations in a frame of straightforward prefatory remarks that explained the situation and the background quite astutely.

The Tales. 1. “The Farmer and the Snake” (J. D. Suggs)²⁵ is a version of the tale known in the Aarne-Thompson Type-Index²⁶ as “The Ungrateful Serpent Returned to Captivity,” Type 155, and Motif J1172.3.²⁷ This was one of Aesop’s fables and has enjoyed worldwide currency. It is reported from Europe, Africa, India, China, Indonesia. Joel Chandler Harris has it in Nights with Uncle Remus. In one common subtype the serpent is returned to the original position from which he was rescued by a third animal called in as judge.

Suggs gives the story a realistic setting on a Southern farm. Accurate details are included: the reason for the farmer’s plowing, the appearance of the snake. The factual background sharpens the comic fantasy of the talking snake; the tale is given matter of factly as an actual occurrence. A Br’er Rabbit influence appears, as Suggs personalizes the snake, calls him Mister, and puts idiomatic conversation in his mouth. Suggs’s range of intonation proved especially effective in the dialogue parts, where he simulated the snake’s whining pleas and the farmer’s dubious tones. His plastic voice conveyed the initial pity of the farmer, the sternness of the deceitful snake, and the final resignation of the fatally bitten farmer. This is a moral tale, and Suggs always seized on the moral for a personal footnote. In this instance he gives an illustration from his own knowledge documenting the moral, just the sort of application to human conduct that Aesop was suggesting. The story of Dan Sprowell is more than half the length of the folktale and is told in a different manner. There is no narrative structure, but a sequence of astonishing facts with cumulative impact. Suggs ends the piece with racy phrases— “he was as crooked as a barrel of scales”—and a character judgment that brings him back to the moral of the folktale. No conflict develops between Dan Sprowell and some particular individual who befriends him, although Uncle Jack Suggs might have played the farmer to Sprowell’s snake. The two sections are, however, meant to stand together; the fiction and the reality enhance each other, and their union is a mark of narrative imagination and moral insight.

2. “Coon in the Box” (John Blackamore)²⁸ is usually told in a dozen sentences or so, even by Suggs. It is one of the most popular Southern Negro tales in the Old Marster cycle. Actually the Negro tale is one episode extracted from a European story complex known as “Doctor Know-All” (Type 1641), in which a poor peasant named Crab (Cricket, or Rat) purchases a doctor’s garb, pretends to be omniscient, and manages through luck to detect thieves. He is then put to the test to divine what is hidden under a dish and says “Poor Crab!” in despair; he has guessed right. In the American Negro form the colored man always refers to himself as “coon.” Blackamore takes the initial idea, that the clever slave has a reputation for uncanny wisdom, and gives it depth and dimension by the logical device of having Jack hang around his master’s quarters and eavesdrop. Next Blackamore fills in the script with three examples of the sort of thing a field hand might very well hear his master talk about in connection with the next day’s farming chores. The incident where Jack’s boss bets with a rival planter he sets in a council meeting, to introduce the skeptic Carter. Other Southern Negro tales contain scenes where masters put their best slaves to the test, and in the final episode Blackamore strokes this in with a crowded barbecue gathering for the backdrop. He ends the tale with a formula couplet, a convention disappearing from modern Negro narratives. The milieu and cast of characters are drawn from young Blackamore’s life in the new South: Old Boss and Jack the handy man replace Old Marster and John the clever slave from plantation times; crackers talk at a council meeting; Jack knows the tractor and fertilizer of the modern farm. Blackamore relies on no oral effects of intonation: for instance, he states that Jack answered his boss “rather slowly,” where Suggs would have actually dragged out the words with exaggerated slowness. He does employ considerable dialogue, between Old Boss and Jack, and Old Boss and Carter. Blackamore’s talent lies in the supplying of elaborate details of everyday life to clothe the story outline.

3. “The Rich Landlord and the Poor Shoemaker” (Joe Woods)²⁹ has enjoyed considerable distribution in Europe, where it is commonly known as “The Master Thief” (Type 1525). Like Doctor Know-All, it appears as one of the Grimms’ household tales but is a good deal longer, containing four or more distinct adventures in which the clever thief steals possessions of the lord who has commanded him to attempt the thefts. Woods refers to each thieving episode as a “proposition” and gives six thefts: of dogs, bull, wife’s sheets, wife’s ring, stallion, and finally abduction of the priest. No doubt this division into similar episodes, characteristic of Märchen, assists in the considerable feat of memorization; the narrator need keep firmly in mind only the six objects stolen. One of the problems encountered by the collector is seen in Woods’ refusal to tell me completely the proposition involving the theft of the wife’s ring, which took place in her bedroom. Earlier he apologized for another indelicate incident, saying that was how he had heard the story. Oral tales are invariably expurgated when presented to any large reading public. One stylistic device in this tale, employed as a connective between the episodes, and commented on by Thompson³⁰ as a convention of Märchen, is the direct question addressed to the audience: “Why can’t they find the shoes? The shoemaker has picked them up when he hang up the dummy”; “Well, what’s shoemaker going to do? Is he going to steal that horse?”; “Can you guess wThat he gonna do, that priest, with the minister?” Woods ends with his own salty moral, but in other tales he uses a formula ending. He reproduced plaintive, subdued, and angry tones. Frequently he omitted the bothersome prefaces of “He said.” Often oral narrators inject “say” several times during one quoted conversation, to indicate the speaker is still talking, and they experience trouble too with personal pronouns, repeating “he” instead of the personal name, so that the reader of the text becomes confused. Woods steers clear of these blemishes with a clear, straightforward story line. Although he follows the plot of the tale type consistently, he uses his own muscular and pungent language to tell the story. The action moves forward swiftly. Yet Woods paints in a detailed setting, describing the barn scene minutely, setting down precisely all the objects and trappings involved in the shoemaker’s machinations. The effect of realism is enhanced by his asides, emphasizing the typical European style of the barn and the life and death power of the lord over the peasants as remembered by his grandmother. Although his accent was thick and his pronunciations often incorrect, Woods never floundered or groped for a word. The total effect was one of complete control over a complicated text.

4. “My First Job in America” (Swan Olson)³¹ differs from the preceding tales in that it does not belong to a definitely known folktale type and does not even qualify as a folktale, since it purports to be a true personal experience. Often, however, folktales will be told in the first person, and were more of these autobiographical sagas collected, we might find the same motifs and themes reappearing. In any event, since this is an oral narrative by a folk narrator, it does interest the folklorist. This account has the symmetry of a folktale, with its series of separate but parallel episodes, in which the brutal Eric Ericson gets severely mauled: plopping in a ditch, getting knocked down with his own gun, being smashed with the stove pipe and whaled with a ramrod. The unsavory character of Eric is demonstrated regularly, to create a satisfaction in the listener at all this mauling. Eric is introduced as a wild man drinking straight alcohol and abusing his family; we see him again drunk in a bar, trying to shoot Swan with no reason; we find him in the act of beating his second wife; we are told he never paid his hired men. In addition to the major sensations there are minor matters to startle the listener, such as the cheapness of eggs at two cents a dozen, and the snake bedfellows in the hay loft. Finally there is the beautiful O. Henry climax, with Eric rewarding the man who had pummeled him all through the preceding day. The smaller touches of realism, like the description of the Old Country chest, and the statement that only silver dollars then circulated, contribute to the effect of authenticity. But the tautness and coherence of the piece, combined with the heroic role of Swan, and the evidence of other similar tales related by him—although not so fully rounded—indicate elements of composition here. Even if it all happened, the narrator must select, arrange, describe, connect the parts. If Swan had been retelling the narrative since 1890, repetition could have perfected it in the course of half a century; and if he had begun to relate it as a septuagenarian reminiscence, his memory could have clutched the feats of other saga men. He used no verbal tricks of intonation to heighten his tale, but let it speak for itself.

5. “The Duck Hunt” (Burt Mayotte)³² is a tall tale in dialect. Actually it combines three episodes that could be told separately. The first incident, of a Frenchman on a raft or boat who says in the morning, “Bah gosh, we ain’t here, we seven miles from here,” is widely told as an independent anecdote about the simple Canadien who twists phrases comically. The second and third actions belong to the pervasive American tall-tale tradition of remarkable hunting and shooting. The Motif F638.3, “Man is waiting for bird to fall that he had shot eight days before,” is also known in India. Two humorous figures, here Joe and Curley, frequently occur in dialect stories, under various names, as a pair of comic foils who speak to each other in mangled English and match each other’s oddities. Mayotte employs a framework to introduce them and carry on the narrative between comic incidents, but suddenly he switches from the role of objective narrator speaking perfectly good English to the dialectician who is telling about Joe and Curley in their own Canadien speech. This switch comes immediately after a rather literary phrase, “with grave aplomb,” which provides a rhythmic lilt to end a sentence and suggests the sober appearance of the Frenchmen, thus intensifying the ludicrousness of their behavior.

The humor of dialect is present throughout. Instances are the use of aspirated h’s before consonants, homemade synonyms (“Two-pipe shoot-gun” for “double-barreled shotgun”), nonsense construction (“nobody see some more ducks”), and Canadien expletives (“maudit,” “sapré”). Although obviously farcical, the tale remains true to the local culture; the place names and manner of duck hunting and reference to the chantier are all accurate, and the French-Canadians do exist and perform in a way to invite mimicry and caricature. This tale, like all of Mayotte’s, relies considerably on verbal effects, both of dialect and rhythm; the sentences are broken into unit phrases with clear pauses in between, making almost a singsong: “So we h’all go hinside / han’ Joe cook de pancake / han’ heverybody h’eat.” “You know / Cur lee / Hi’ll have haim / for his neck.” Some creative writers employing the FrenchCanadian habitant speech, like William Henry Drummond, have chosen verse as a vehicle for dialect humor, to capture the verbal rhythms.

6. “Clever Art Church” (Jim Alley)³³ is not a single tale but three independent anecdotes told about the same local wag. Anecdotes of local characters comprise a large section of American folk narrative but have never been seriously collected or systematically studied. Art Church was an actual person, but the tricks he played are similar to those credited around the country to locally celebrated pranksters and fastened onto the Yankee in the newspaper humor of the 1830’s and 1840’s. The first trick belongs to the theme of the literal contract based on a double meaning. Uncle Josh took “best part” to mean most, but Art pointed out that the two sticks of hardwood were indeed the best part of the cord he sold Uncle Josh. The next supposedly true happening, where Art is asked to lie and says he has no time because so-and-so has just had an accident and he must get a doctor—which is a lie—is an international folktale attached to various American yarnspinners, such as Gib Morgan, the tall-tale bard of the Pennsylvania oil fields.³⁴ The third anecdote is a variation on the Yankee trick to outwit a creditor. Alley presents the meat of the brief stories without trimmings or elaboration, to achieve the terse, pithy quality that gives the anecdote—as distinct from a casual yarn with deliberate build-up— its impact.

Direct, idiomatic dialogue in each anecdote sharpens the pace and gives a sense of immediacy, as if Jim himself had been there as witness. Quoted indirectly, the dialogue would lose its bite. Each little tale ends with a statement of chagrin by the dupe. This seems unnecessary in the hardwood story, which could stop with Art’s triumphant explanation of the literal sale, but the triumph is sharpened by having the last word a lament from Art’s victim. Brief as they are, the anecdotes contain a certain amount of repetition: the phrase “the best part of it was hardwood” in the first; “I ain’t got time” in the second; and the parallel utterances and actions of Art and McFall in the third. These repetitions give form to the anecdote; they impress salient points on the listener unfamiliar with the personalities or the situation, who could easily lose the sense of the rapid-fire tale, perhaps hinging on a wordplay, if his attention were not arrested and riveted to the key idea. Alley’s positive, even authoritative, delivery contributed to the success of the anecdotes, which become blurred and confused if the speaker falters or stumbles. In a long story a lapse can be picked up without much damage.

7. “The Horse Trade with Bill Case” (Curt Morse),³⁵ told as a personal experience, falls within an honored cycle of American trickster yarns dealing with horse trades. The formula requires that a trade be agreed on and a sorry animal be fobbed off by a Yankee sharper, who adds insult to injury in his subseqent explanation. Here Curt makes himself out to be the Yankee, projecting himself into the story according to his wont. Jim Alley would simply relate the comical saying or deed of the character Bill Case, but now attention is shifted from comical Bill Case to crafty Curt. Curt elaborates the yarn with incidental humor, as in the reference to Bill and his sisters being “rolled-oat eaters,” and the graphic description of Bill’s nose. Like Alley, Morse salts the story with natural-sounding dialogue, not only between the traders but also between Bill Case and his sister, and he too ends the tale with a wry comment by the dupe. A humorous vocal effect in the present piece is Curt’s reproduction of the snuffling whistle that punctuated Bill Case’s speech, formed probably by a sharp intake of breath through a slightly open mouth. Curt used his throaty voice and timbre for doleful and lugubrious inflection.

Both verbally and structurally Curt contrives a continuously humorous piece. Bill Case himself is a comical-appearing and sounding character; he has a humorous exchange with Curt, and another with his sister, and then finally comes the jest of the second swap. Humorous improvisation is by now instinctive with Curt; when he was listening to a playback of another tale he had told about an eccentric hermit, he was surprised to hear himself say the hermit could play “The Mocking Bird” on his violin “so real that you’d have to take a stick to keep driving off the birds from the strings.” In the course of narrating his yarns Curt can easily insert gags and comic expressions which he repeats regularly in his everyday banter.

Do these seven folktale texts, selected by the personal taste of the collector from the vagaries of his own field encounters, show any common stylistic features? One point that had escaped me until they were placed on the dissecting table is their plentiful use of dialogue. The tale becomes fresher, livelier, and clearer when natural conversation is introduced, and avoids a tedious and confusing trait of some folk narratives, the ambiguous use of indirect quotation.

Throughout their stories the speakers avoided garnishment with literary words and highbrow allusions. Although only three of the seven narratives purported to be true—and these contain highly dubious points (Olson, Alley, Morse)—each teller gave his story the maximum appearance of reality, through use of background detail, internal conversation, personal comments, and earnestness of delivery. This earnestness comes from an act of identification with a protagonist of the tale: Suggs with the trusting farmer against the snake and the confidence man; Blackamore with the handy man against the cracker bosses; Woods with the shoemaker thief against the rich landlord; Swan with his own role as hired man against maniacal Eric Ericson; Mayotte with the comical Frenchmen against the alien Yankees; Alley with clever Art Church against his dupes; and Morse with himself as a shrewd Yankee trading against Bill Case. There is conflict in the tales, sometimes merely a lighthearted battle of wits in the serious business of swapping and trading (Morse, Alley), and again a grim struggle between landowner and serf (Blackamore, Woods, Olson) cloaked in comic sparring. Whether in fairy tale, saga, or jest, the tellers are committed to their tales and communicate their passion and sympathy.

These texts do conform to Olrik’s laws for oral narrative. They are simple and unsubtle, they pit together a good and a bad character, and they contain repetitions, even the short anecdotes. But these laws, binding as they seem, still permit considerable play to the talents of individual folk artists.

Lincoln as Folk Narrator

The approach suggested here for analyzing the oral style of superior folk narrators has been applied to living storytellers encountered in the field. Now I shall try it on Abraham Lincoln. From the wealth of Lincoln material we find far more data on storytelling style and repertoire than exists for most folktale tellers of the present day. Lincoln biography fully accepts the fact that Lincoln was an engaging and masterful raconteur, and numerous observers, acquaintances, and friends have described his delivery and written down his texts. In his own lifetime the daily press and Abe Lincoln jokebooks circulated around the country endless yarns, sayings, and witticisms attributed to him, many of them apocryphal. Enough, however, are authenticated, by reliable authorities, so that we can recognize Lincoln tales. Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography pays special attention to the yarns and sayings and skillfully weaves them into the life.³⁶ In spite of all the attention given Lincoin as humorist and narrator, no one has seriously analyzed his relation to folk tradition. I am convinced that the evidence proves Lincoln to be an artistic folk narrator and performer on the order of Suggs and Curt Morse and Jim Alley.

Background. Lincoln grew up in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois after the first wave of pioneers had opened the country, when farmers were beginning to break the soil and settle the land. He was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, moved after seven years, in 1816, to Little Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana, and in 1831 trekked 200 miles west to New Salem on the Illinois prairie, where a dozen families had founded a town. Here in Illinois he made his permanent home and traveled around the state as a circuit lawyer, gossiping and swapping tales in taverns. Lincoln grew from what folklorists like to call a folk background, a setting in which the formal instruments of learning have scarcely appeared and society is much influenced by time-honored beliefs, word־of־mouth reports, and the natural environment. In time, of course, other influences played upon Lincoln. By the mid-nineteenth century the earlier currents of frontier humor were being submerged by a new breed of professional funny-men writing in urban newspapers—Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr—and Lincoln read and repeated their manufactured jokes. But the stock of humorous tales on which he drew most frequently and intimately came from his youth on Indiana and Illinois pioneer farms. He said that his best stories came from country folk.³⁷

Delivery and Repertoire. Most persons raised in the midst of a folk tradition never become expert folktale narrators. Only certain individuals with the flair and the relish to remember and perform the tales are themselves remembered for such talent. Lincoln said that he always recalled every story he heard and admitted that he was a mere “retailer” of yarns—a valuable clue to their folklore nature. Witnesses have testified to his enrichment of a story with mimicry of characters and acting out of parts; he reproduced a stutterer’s peculiar whistle between syllables (like Curt Morse), gyrated his arms and legs in accompaniment to the text, and twanged in dialect. Under the spell of the tale his melancholy countenance glowed with animation and he seemed transformed, almost handsome. At the Capitol he was soon recognized as a champion yarnspinner.³⁸ “His favorite seat was at the left of the open fireplace, tilted back in his chair, with his long legs reaching over to the chimney jamb. He never told a story twice, but appeared to have an endless repertoire always ready, like the successive charges of a magazine gun.”³⁹ One observer stressed the dry chuckle, the gesture of rubbing the hand down the side of the long leg, the gleam in the eye.⁴⁰ Lincoln tremendously enjoyed relating his fables. “I can’t resist telling a good story,” he said. Once he got up in the middle of the night to rouse a sleepy friend and tell him a yarn that was tickling him irresistibly. When he met another tale teller he responded immediately with a matching yarn—again a sure sign of the folk raconteur. An office seeker topped Lincoln’s parable with a splendid folk yarn of his own, whereon Lincoln promptly gave him the job. He appreciated the painter Conant for one especial tale he borrowed himself, and he would introduce him as the author of “the Slow Horse story.”⁴¹

John Hay guessed that Lincoln knew a hundred stories. Any such surmise is problematical. Sandburg lists 135 in the index to The War Years and gives a score more in the less well-indexed Prairie Years. Beyond a doubt Lincoln possessed an extraordinary repertoire rarely equaled by folk narrators currently being recorded in the field.⁴² He specialized in the humorous anecdotal yarn, “neither too broad nor too long,” said Horace Porter. His texts are fuller than the brief anecdotes of Jim Alley, but pointed and concentrated on a single incident so that they never wandered off into a rambling yarn, in the fashion of Mark Twain’s garrulous talkers.⁴³ Apparently he adapted his stories to differing situations, and variants appear for certain ones, in distinction to separate versions of the same yarn recorded by different bystanders.

The Tradition. The particular folk tradition represented by Lincoin is not immediately clear. He does not belong to the backwoods vein of Davy Crockett that branched through the Kentucky and Tennessee canebrakes in the early years of the nineteenth century, producing tall tales of bear hunting and Indian fighting and melees between boasting bullies. The scene of Lincoln’s stories is the prairie farm, not the forest clearing; the setting is in cornfields and country stores, not in the isolated cabin. His aphorisms and expressions grow from pioneer farm life and concern hogs and ploughs, blacksmiths and circuit preachers. Crockett is the solitary hunter, tangling with occasional eccentrics who penetrate to the backwoods, like Yankee peddlers or uncouth squatters. Some backwoods anecdotes do turn up in Lincoln’s repertoire, but few, and they are told on degenerate log cabin families, rather than by the intrepid backwoodsman, as in Crockett’s yarns.⁴⁴ Lincoln comes a stage later than the Kentucky hunters and Mississippi keelboatmen who pioneered the West and brought forth hero legends of Crockett and Mike Fink. His folk are farmers. Folklorists have collected surprisingly few farm tales, considering the importance of America’s agricultural past and present. Therefore we cannot find many variants to Lincoln’s farm stories, but they bear all the internal marks of folktales. Several choice examples follow.

Some of Lincoln’s yarns are recognizable folktales. Mrs. Vallandigham, wife of the Copperhead leader, said she would never return to Ohio except as wife of its governor, a statement reminding Lincoln of a story about a candidate for the county board in Illinois who told his wife on election morning that she would sleep with the township supervisor that night. After the returns came in, she dressed up to sleep with the victor, her husband’s rival. I heard the same anecdote told on an unpopular old fellow in Munising, Abe Artibee, during a field trip I made to upper Michigan in 1946.⁴⁹ An odd horse tale of Lincoln’s dealt with a balky animal traded off by its owner as good for hunting birds; it squatted in the middle of a creek, and the owner called out to the dupe: “Ride him! Ride him! He’s as good for fish as for birds.”⁵⁰ This popped up in recent years in the cycle of “shaggy dog” stories and was told me in pretty much the same form as this by a colleague at Michigan State University, LeRoy Ferguson, save that the horse sat on grapefruit instead of birds. A superb yarn about a blacksmith hammering a big piece of heated wrought iron into successively smaller tools and finally throwing it into the water to make a “fizzle” out of it, suggests another shaggy dog favorite about the “cush-maker,” which has an early variant.⁵¹ The boy sparking the farmer’s daughter who is chased by her father with a shotgun and outruns a rabbit falls into the tall-tale theme of fast runners who outrace ghosts and rabbits.⁵² The tearful deathbed reconciliation of Old Brown with his sworn enemy, to be voided if the sick man recovers, is told the same way by Shepherd Tom Hazard in his recollected traditions of South County, Rhode Island.⁵³ Lincoln used the anecdote to express his feelings at having to release the Confederate envoys Mason and Slidell to Great Britain. Hearing of a young brigadier general who was captured by the Confederates with his small cavalry troop, Lincoln said, “I can make a better brigadier any day, but those horses cost the government $125 a head.” So does a Maine sea captain mourn the loss of a couple of dories over that of one sailor and a couple of “Portygees,” and a Michigan lumbercamp boss is pleased that a lumberjack rather than a teamster’s horse is killed by a falling tree.⁵⁴ Commenting on Douglas’s scrap with Buchanan over slavery in Kansas, Lincoln told of the backwoods wife who found her husband in a savage tussle with a bear and cheered both on impartially: “Go it, husband, go it, bear.” A Joe Miller jokebook carried this tale in 1865, and later in the century the sensitive reporter of Vermont folk life, Rowland E. Robinson, placed it in the mouth of one of his raconteurs: “Go it, öl’ man, go it, bear, it’s the fust fight ever I see ‘at I didn’t keer which licked.”⁵⁵

Individual Style. As Sandburg remarks, Lincoln’s talk was salted with new American words and twists of speech soaking into the language. Lincoln had the gift—as does Harry Truman—for employing the homely barnyard metaphor and earth-drawn proverb to nail his point. “Small potatoes and few in a hill” he said of a signal rocket that fizzled out. Of the Gettysburg address he fretted to Ward Hill Lamon, “Lamon, that speech won’t scour,” using a figure of speech derived from mud sticking to the mold board of a plow and hindering its movement. “I don’t amount to pig tracks in the War Department,” he remarked ruefully. “As they say in the hayfields he requires a good man to ‘rake after him,’ “ was one of his farming saws applied to a sloppy worker. From his father he gained the proverb “Every man must skin his own skunk.” “Why, I could lick salt off the top of your head,” he said to a short man, and of a blowhard he commented, “the only thing you could do would be to stop his mouth with a corn cob” Lincoln used the comparative exaggerations still current in rural speech, and called an argument of Stephen A. Douglas as thin as “soup made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” As War President he remarked: “Some of my generals are so slow that molasses in the coldest days of winter is a race horse compared to them. They’re brave enough, but somehow or other, they get fastened in a fence corner, and can’t figure their way out.” Country words continually arrested the attention of his associates, who were startled when he asked, “My young friend, have I hunkered you out of your chair?”⁵⁶

Obviously such dialect words and expressions sauced Lincoln’s yarns and added a barnyard aroma to his farming stories. Here, unfortunately, the texts are at their weakest, since reporters of longer narratives would hardly remember the racy turns of phrase that stuck in their minds when used in proverbs or single utterances. Still some of the tales, like that of the rival powder merchants, convey authentic flavor of speech.⁵⁷

Structurally the chief characteristic of Lincoln’s storytelling style is his application of the yarn to an immediate political or social situation. A genius shines forth here, in the uncanny aptness of his illustrative anecdotes. As Seward and others remarked, his little tales were fables and parables of wisdom. Aesop, we know, appealed to Lincoln. The perfection of his folktale lies in its moral lesson. So in the Middle Ages did priests relate exempla to make their point. Whereas Suggs moralized on his tale after telling it, dipping into his past experiences with sinners, Lincoln broke into his story from a live situation—frequently when beset by importunate office seekers. Examples here would include most of his known repertoire, but two felicitous instances are his story of the boy hoping his captured coon would escape so that he would not have to kill it, which Lincoln told when asked what disposition he intended to make of Jeff Davis; and his anecdote of the farmer who trapped nine skunks and then let eight go because the one he killed made such a stench, given in reply to the query why he did not fire his whole cabinet and not just Cameron.⁵⁸

The tale of “The Highand the Low-Combed Cock” can be cited to illustrate characteristic elements of Lincoln’s storytelling style.⁵⁹ The political problem posed by the Kentucky Senator, how to woo the shifting factions in Kentucky, prepares the way for the President’s yarn, and the moral emerges crystal-clear upon its completion. This was Lincoln’s customary framework. The tale itself contains a backcountry scene from Lincoln’s own folk experience, in this case a cockfight in Kentucky, and so contrasts sharply with the huffing political arena of the White House. Still fable and crisis are neatly linked, for both pertain to Kentucky, and the weaselly Squire, who hedges his bets until the winning cock is determined, symbolizes the mass of shifting Kentuckians. No doubt the original text would show racier speech, but dialect is rendered, in the Squire’s quoted words. The yarn is delicious by itself, limning the shallow fraudulence of the puffed-up Squire. He resembles one of the sharpers and scapegraces whom Baldwin, Hooper, and other antebellum Southern humorists loved to portray. Much of Lincoin’s humor was aimed at such solemn frauds. The narrative possesses enough detail to depict the scene and engage the listener’s interest but avoids extraneous description that could overload the story and smother the moral. As Horace Porter said, Lincoln’s tale was neither too broad nor too long.⁶⁰

Appendix: The Tale Texts

1. The Farmer and the Snake (J. D. Suggs) *

Farmer’s out early breaking his land in February, he wants to get good subsoil. Well, he’s plowing along, and he plowed up Mr. Snake, a great big one. Mr. Snake was in a quirl where he’d quirled up for the winter, you know; he was cold and stiff. Farmer stopped and looked at him, says, “Well I declare, here’s Mr. Snake this time of year.” Mr. Snake says, “I’m cold, I’m about froze to death. See how stiff I am, I can’t even move. Mr. Farmer, would you put me in your bosom and let me warm up a bit? I’m cold.”

Farmer says, “Noooo. You’se a snake, I can’t fool with you, you might bite.” He said, “No, I wouldn’t bite you for nothing in the world. Do you reckon I’d bite you after you warm me up?” He talked so pitiful Mr. Farmer decided he’ll warm him in his bosom. So he stoops down to pick up Mr. Snake, and puts him in his bosom. Well, he tells his horses, “Git up,” gets his plow, and goes back to work.

About nine o’clock he unbuttoned his shirt, looked down in his bosom. “How do you feel, Mr. Snake?” Mr. Snake says, “I feel pretty good, I’m warming up considerably.” He buttoned his shirt up, goes on and plows till about ten-thirty. Unbuttoned his bosom, looked at it, says, “How do you feel, Mr. Snake?” “Oh, I’m feeling pretty good. Ain’t you feeling me moving around? I can move now.” The farmer says, “Yes, I’m glad you feeling better, feeling warm.” Well, he plows till about fifteen minutes to twelve. He said, “Well, I’ll go down to the other end and put Mr. Snake down.” He could feel him moving around quite spirited like, so he didn’t bother to unbutton his bosom at all. After a while when he got near to the other end, he was going to take him out and go on to dinner. He kinda looked down and the snake done stuck his head out and was looking right in his face and sticking out his tongue. (A snake wants to fight then, you know, when he sticks out his tongue.) Farmer says, “Now, Mr. Snake, you said you wasn’t going to bite me; you said after I warmed you up you wouldn’t bite me.” Snake says, “You know I’m a snake, Mr. Farmer.” “Yes, but you said you wouldn’t bite me.” Mr. Snake said, “Now you know, Mr. Farmer, I’m s’posed to bite you.”

So he bit the farmer in the face. The farmer goes home, tells his wife how he carried Mr. Snake in his bosom and got him good and warm; then Mr. Snake bit him. Said, “Don’t care what a snake says, don’t never take one in your bosom to warm him up. For when he gits warm he will bite.” In the end Mr. Farmer lay down and died.

(Now you know there’s people will confidence you just like that snake. Like Dan Sprowell. He was the terriblest rogue, and just as pleasant to look at, and a good worker. Dan was from Goodman, Mississippi, in Attala County. As a boy he began stealing onion sets from stores, put them in his pocket. The laws caught him, and sent him to the pen. He chopped cotton so fast they made him a trusty in three weeks, and he walked out—changed states. He worked for my Uncle Jack Suggs after he got out, for just his keep. One day my uncle was going to Memphis on an excursion. While he was gone Dan pressed the clothes of the boys and the girls and took them all. He stole a horse and buggy in Water Valley, worth about 1175, and was driving some girls around, and they arrested him and was carrying him back for a trial, when a gang took him to lynch him. They was going off a piece, and Dan knocked down the fellow with the lantern and made a lunge out in the woods. They fired at a man’s height and he was crawling off on his all fours, so he got away.

They arrested him for stripping a woman’s clothes line. The judge asked him, “Have you ever been in the Penitentiary?” “Yes.” “How long?” “Three weeks.” “How long were you sentenced for?” “Three years.” The judge said, “I sentence you to six years of hard labor.” But in three weeks he was out again.

Yeah, he was crooked as a barrel of scales. He’d steal his own hat off his hoe, just to keep in practice. And as fine-looking a young man as you ever seen. He just loved to steal, and he’d sell for nothing. And he didn’t drink either. Anybody’d fall for him. He was a snake. You put him in your bosom and he’d bite you.)

2. Coon in the Box (John Blackamore) *

Once upon a time there was a Boss had a servant on his farm, kind of a handyman. Every night this handyman, Jack, would go down to the Boss’s house and listen while he ate supper, so he’d know what Boss was going to do the next day. One night when Old Boss was eating supper he told his wife he was going to plow the west forty acres the following day. After Jack heard that he goes home to bed; next morning he gets up earlier than usual, and gets the tractor out and hooks up the plow. When Old Boss come out Jack was all ready to go. So he said, “Well Jack, we’re going to plow the west forty acres today.” He said, “Yes, Boss, I know, I got the rig all set up.” Well, Old Boss didn’t think much about it. He gets on his horse and goes in there and shows Jack how he wants him to plow it up.

So the next night when Boss sits down to eat his supper Jack goes on down to his favorite spot where he could hear everything. He heard his Old Boss tell his wife that he was going to round up all the livestock for shipping. Next day Jack gets up early, and gets the Boss’s horse ready that he always rides when he rounds up the livestock. When Boss comes out later, he starts to tell Jack what he’s got on the program. Jack cuts him off and says, “Yes, Boss, I know, we’re going to round up the livestock this morning. I got your horse all saddled and ready to go.” So Boss says, “Jack, what puzzles me is, every morning when I get up you tell me what I’m going to do before I tell you.” And he wants to know what’s happening, how did Jack know what he’s gonna do. Jack says, “Well I don’t know, I just knows.” So Boss says, “Well, something funny going on.” Jack says “Maybe so, but I know.”

So they goes on to round up the livestock, and at the end of the day Boss sits down at the supper table again. And Jack takes the same position at the window, so he can hear everything that’s talked about. Boss tells his wife about he’s going to clean out the stable the next day, to use the waste to fertilize the fields. So the next morning Jack was out in the stables cleaning ‘em out, before Old Boss was up. Boss eats breakfast and he goes on out to the barn, sees Jack busy working. So he asks Jack, “How did you know I wanted the stables cleaned out today?” Jack says, “That’s all right, I knowed you wanted to get it cleaned out so I went and got it started so I could hurry up and get the job done.” So Boss says, “Yes, that’s right, but what puzzles me is how a nigger like you can figure out what I’m going to do every day before I tell you.” He says, “Well that’s all right, Boss, I know everything.” So Old Boss shook his head and walks on up. So that night he was still puzzled at suppertime. Jack was still at the window. He listened to what his Boss was talking about. Old Boss told his wife, “Well this handyman we got around here, he’s the smartest one I ever seen. Every morning I go out to tell him what to do he’s already done it or he’s telling me what we are going to do. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

So he was going up to the council next night, where the landlords have their meeting every Wednesday night to discuss their crops and problems. When Old Boss comes out of the house to go to the meeting, Jack had his rig all ready. Old Boss says, “Well thank you, Jack.” And Jack says, “I hope you have a good time at the meeting, Boss.” So Old Boss went on down to the meeting and he was telling the other landlords about this smart nigger he had down at his place. All the other councilmens laughed at him. But it didn’t tickle Old Boss. He says, “You guys think I’m joking, but that’s the truth.” So one smart aleck he jumped up and said, “There ain’t no nigger that smart.” Everybody laughs again. So Old Boss got peeved. He says, “Well, all you crackers think it’s so damn funny; I’ll bet money on my nigger, ‘cause he knows everything.” Everybody begins to get quiet then, except this smart aleck. He says, “Well Jim, since you think so much of your nigger, I got $100,000 to say that I can outsmart your nigger.” Old Boss called the bet. He said, “Now any of you other crackers in here think that’s so funny and want to bet, I’ll cover you too.” So everybody kicks in with $ 100,000 apiece. When the total was counted up the bet run over a million dollars. So this Carver—that was the smart aleck—he says, “Well you can expect us down tomorrow about two o’clock, and we’ll have something your nigger can’t tell us about.”

Old Boss went home. Old Jack was still up waiting, so he could find what’s going to happen tomorrow. Old Boss went into his bedroom, and he sat down side of the bed and he commenced to telling his wife what he was doing. And he said he was going to give a big barbecue the next day, so he needed to have food and drinks ready for the crowd when they come on down. Then he went on to bed.

Next morning old Jack was still sleeping when Old Boss got up. He was making himself scarce. He knowed they had some kind of a trick for him; he didn’t want Old Boss to think he was so smart any more. So Old Boss rapped on the door, said, “Jack, get up, it’s day.” He says, “Coming, Boss.” Old Boss walks on off and went on back in the house. And Jack was so used to Old Boss getting up and he being ready for him ahead of time, he begins to prepare for the party, without the Boss even telling him. When Old Boss come out, he says “That’s right, Jack, that’s right. We’re going to have a big party this afternoon, and I got a lot of money bet on you.” Jack wanted to know then what for he had his money bet. So Old Boss said, “Well you know—you’re trying to kid me that you don’t know.”

When the crowd had all of them gathered around they called Jack. Jack came around slowly. Old Boss said, “Come on up, Jack, come on up, don’t be bashful.” So Mr. Carter, the smart aleck, he says, “Well darky, they tell me you’re pretty smart around here.” So Jack says, “Aw, I wouldn’t say that.” Old Boss says, “Oh he’s just trying to be modest.” Then Old Boss said to Jack, “Didn’t you tell me the other day that you know everything?” So Jack stretches his head and says, “Yes, that’s right,” rather slowly, scared to call the Boss a liar. So Mr. Carter says, “All right, let’s get down to business, we got a lot of money bet on this. And I want you to tell us what it is, ‘cause if you don’t, I’m going to have your head tomorrow.” Then Carter he called Jim over to tell him what the surprise was, before Jack would tell them. Carter told Jim it was a box in a box in a box in that box, and in the small box was a coon. And why they had him in so many boxes was so that Jack couldn’t hear the coon scratch.

And then Jack started scratching his head and trying to tell them what was in the box, although he didn’t really know. So Carter asked him again, “Well Jack, what do you say is in the box?” Jack started repeating what Carter had said. He says, “In the box, in the box, in the box.” And he decided that he didn’t know in his mind what, so he just scratched his head and said, “You got the old coon at last.” (He was using that as an expression.)

So Old Boss grabbed him and shook his hand and said, “Thanks, Jack, thanks, that’s just what it is, a coon in them boxes! “

3. The Rich Landlord and the Poor Shoemaker (Joe Woods) *

Once on a time a rich man wanted ride on a horse for his pleasure. And he passed shoemaker house. Window was open, so he stopped to look in to see if the shoemaker was in. Shoemaker was sitting on a bench fixing the shoes, his wife was washing dishes. Every time his wife went to the other room, he jumped outa the bench, run to the back, grabbed the bottle a whisky from under the cover (pillow), and take a snort. Then he run back to the bench. And five minutes after that, he do the same thing, when his wife was not there.

So the rich man was thinking: What the dickens he do that? So he get up offa the horse and went to the house. So he says: “Good morning, master shoemaker. Can you tell me why do you that? Whenever your wife leave the room you jump up and take a snort out the whisky. Can you do that in open, when your wife is here?”

He says: “No, my lord. My wife bought whisky for me, but she won’t give me. I gotta steal from her.”

So lord say: “I give you proposition.”

“My lord, what kind proposition you gonna give me?”

“Are you good stealer?” lord ask him.

So the shoemaker say: “Yes, my lord, I can steal anything that’s in this room.”

“Here’s my proposition,” rich man says. “I got two dogs. Watchman take care of them. If you can steal them tonight, I give you hundred ducats. Or if you can’t do it, I give you one hundred lashes. That’s the bargain.”

And the shoemaker, he know them dogs very well. Nobody come at night except the night watchman. So he went to town, go to the drugstore, buy sleeping powder. And from butcher shop he get nice two steaks. And soaked them steaks in sleeping powder, in water. So he went to the rich man’s yard, and hide himself in the bush. When night fall, watchman came and pick out chains from doghouse and go around on his night watch. So when dog was out of the doghouse, he sneaked in and put the meat in there. So, middle night, watchman come and put in dogs on chains, he gonna get supper for himself.

So when the dogs finda juicy meat there they eat ‘em and go to sleep. That’s all shoemaker was waiting for in the bushes there. So he had nothing to do, he stepped in, tie both dogs by the tails together, throw them over the shoulder, and carry them home. (’Cause he can’t drag them—those heavy dogs.)

So what happens, the landlord wake up middle of night and think he forgot to tell watchman to guard those dogs. So he went to the watchman and he tell him, “Mike, watch the dogs tonight, ’cause I think somebody’s going to steal them.”

The watchman says, “No, my lord, nobody can steal them, ’cause they never let nobody to go to the yard. I’m the only one that feeds them. But I’m gonna see them right away, anyway.” But when watchman went to the doghouse there was no dog there. So the watchman run outside and yell: “Tiger! Leopard!” ’Cause that was the dogs’ names. But there was no answer.

So he was thinking: “By gosh, somebody steal them. But it wasn’t my fault, because he didn’t tell me early.” So he went right away and reported to his landlord. When he come to the palace, he ring the bell, and landlord come out and ask him, “What’s the matter, Mike?”

“Lord, the dogs is gone. I can’t find them no place.”

“I think that damn shoemaker got them.” So the lord early in the morning went back to the shoemaker house, rap at the door, and the shoemaker come out and say, “What the matter, lord?”

“Are you get them?” the lord say.

“Yes, lord, I got it. I have them.”

“But how the dickens you get them?”

“That’s my business,” the shoemaker say.

So the lord pay him the hundred ducats, in the golden money. So when shoemaker take his hands to rub the money, rich man say: “Wait a minute. We going to have another bargain. You think I gonna lose those hundred ducats. I guess not. I have three-years-old bull in my barn. You gotta steal them tonight, you get hundred ducats, if you don’t you get two hundred lashes. And remember, I ain’t fooling.”

Then when he went home, he was figured that way: “If I leave the bull in the barn, he might stole it. I go call the two men, and at night they going to take the bull to the other village, half a mile outa his palace.”

Then sometimes shoemaker was figuring himself: “If I was in that lord’s place, I never keep it in that place, I transfer it.” He was figuring same thing.

To go to the other place (the other farm) they have to go through the woods. So he make a dummy look like himself—mask, and piece of rope in the pocket, and one pair brand-new shoes. Then he went behind the barn, and he’s sitting there waiting what’s gonna happen.

At nine o’clock that night, two men come out the barn with the big bull, two rope around the ring-nose. And they started go to the other barn. So when they come to the timber, shoemaker take the shortcut, run ahead before them to the road which they gotta pass, and drop one shoes. Then wait, then run on ahead again, ‘bout fifty yard, drop the other shoes. Then run ‘bout hundred yard ahead, and hang his dummy. Then he run back where he drop the first shoes (now can you guess? ) and he wait there.

Then coupla minutes after, them two men with the bull coming. And one said, “John, look, new shoes.”

“Well,” George said, “only one, but good one. Maybe shoemaker trick.”

So they left the shoes and started going. Soon they’s come to the other shoes.

So John says: “George, look. That other shoes make swell pair of shoes, and we left the other one behind.” So John says: “George, you go ahead get the bull, and I go ahead get the other shoe, so we have swell pair of shoes.”

“Oh, no. That’s a shoemaker trick. If we left the bull over here, he might steal it. The hell with the shoes! We gotta look after our landlord’s bull.”

Then they left the shoes and started going ahead. Then ’bout hundred yards from them they had a big surprise. The Mr. Shoemaker hang up in the tree by a rope.

“Well, what happen?” George say.

“Nothing happen. He can’t steal the bull, so he hang up himself. He didn’t want to get lashes.”

So George says: “You know, we tie up the bull, and we go steal the shoes. No use leave the good shoes in the woods, somebody take them.”

So they tied the bull and run like crazy, ’cause each one wanted them pair of shoes. And they run to the edge of the timber, and still no shoes—can’t find the shoes.

Why can’t they find the shoes? The shoemaker has picked them up when he hang up the dummy.

So John and George run to the other end of the woods, and no shoes, no bull. So then they afraid go report to the lord. Then they run away, cause they know what happen when they report that. (You know that time of the story the lord can kill the men like they kill the dogs—they own the women, the children, everything, like slaves. My grandmother remember that yet.)

So in the morning the lord send the page to the barn, to see if the bull there. The page come back and report that George and John take the bull to the other farm. So he told the stableboy to saddle the horse, and went to the farm himself. And the lord was smiling to himself how’s he going to give the two hundred lashes to the shoemaker and take the money back. But when he come to the other farm, there was no George, no John, no bull there—never was.

Then back he go to the shoemaker. Then the shoemaker have big smile on his face when he come there.

“Did you have it my bull?”

“Yes, my lord, I have [softly]. He’s chewing out there in my barn.”

“But tell me, how the dickens you get that bull from the two men?”

And the shoemaker says: “That’s my business.”

“Well,” he says, “I gotta pay you.” So he pull his money outa his pocket and pay the shoemaker. Happy shoemaker. “Thank you for money, my lord,” says the shoemaker.

“Oh no, my friend,” says the lord. “I gonna give you another proposition. Now my friend you gotta steal the sheets from my wife when I go to bed with her. And remember, three hundred lashes and money back if you don’t do that.”

“But lord, that cost you lotsa money if I do that.”

“I don’t care for money. I want to get revenge on you.”

When the lord come home, he tell his wife: “Now watch my dear, that damn shoemaker outfox me again. But I going to get even tonight.”

So shoemaker think same thing, you know. “Now how am I going to get that sheets?” He went to the (what you call) game warden, and bought some gas powder, and went to the toy shop and bought a whistle—you know, like policeman whistle. He made himself like old man, take bottle whisky with him, he went to the kitchen, the lord’s kitchen. And he mixed up the powder with the whisky, and treated them. Then he went to the barn and throwed that wolf meat between the cattle. Went back to the kitchen, pull up from the pocket the skin of a dead rabbit, and throw between the girls. And he put the whistle in the back quarter. And when the gas escape from the body, the whistle was blow, “Fee fo fo.” (That’s the story the way I heard it—I can’t help it.)

Then in the barn when the cattle smell the wolf meat, they start a racket. Then he went under the window, he had some dummy what he hang up, he stick the hat right in the window. Then he rapped the window pane gently with his finger. So the lord jump outa the bed; he looked at the window; he see his friend the shoemaker. “Now I going to get you.”

He jumped out the bed, take the gun and blasted it right at the shoemaker. And he heard the shoemaker fall down. So he says to his wife, “Now I got him.” He run outside with his nightgown. But he heard a noise in the kitchen. “What the dickens is this thing now?” And fighting. The two girls was fighting. They find the dead rabbit skin and thought it was a baby. “Mary, you had baby.” “No, Katie, you had baby.”

He come there, light a match, find the rabbit. “That’s a goddamn shoemaker trick.”

So when he settle with the girls he went back to where he kill the shoemaker. He want to hide the body. He didn’t know that the shoemaker throw the dummy into the old well. That time when he look for shoemaker, the shoemaker go in the front door to the bedroom, and was whisper to his wife: “Give me that sheets. That bugger will steal them, he didn’t get kill.”

She says, “Well, what you gonna do with the sheets?” He’s going to hide them, so he won’t have no chance to steal them that night.

Half hour after the hunting for the shoemaker in the park, he can’t find him, so he’s come back to his wife, in the bedroom. He say, “Are you here, my sweet?” She says, “Yes.” He says: “That’s funny, I know I kill him, but I can’t find his body no place. So I am going lay down for a while yet. I going to wait for him, whether he come back or not.”

When he touched the bare mattress, he asked her, “Where’s the sheets?”

“Oh, Jesus, you just take them while ago. You told me you going to hide them.”

“Sure, sure, that wasn’t me, that was shoemaker. Can’t you judge by the voice?”

“How can I judge by the voice? He was just whispering to me. I thought it was you.”

Well, so next morning, lord going see shoemaker. The shoemaker had the answer ready: “Yes, lord, I take your sheets.” So lord forget to ask him how he do that. The lord pay him the hundred ducats.

[Joe omitted a “proposition” here because he said it wasn’t fit to print. I coaxed a synopsis from him. The shoemaker was supposed to steal the ring worn by the lord’s wife. He hides in the bedroom. The lord and his wife make love. Then she goes to the bathroom. He knocks on the door and asks for her ring, so she won’t lose it in the dark. She gives it to him. Then when she goes back into the bedroom, he climbs out the bathroom window. She asks the lord for her ring. He says he doesn’t have it. “But I just gave it to you.” “That wasn’t me, that must have been that damn shoemaker. Didn’t you know it wasn’t my voice?” “But he was whispering.”]

So now the last proposition was: “I don’t have much more money. I got a stallion in the barn. You gotta steal him. And remember, there will be some guards to steal [watch] him. And if you don’t steal him, that will be four hundred lashes, and all the money back.”

“Yes, my lord, I try my best.”

So, when the lord come home, he call the barn boss. Now he says: “Remember, you work long time for me. Now I tell you, you put the good guard, and you guard yourself that horse there. Take how much money you need it. Two men watch the door. One man stay on the top horse. I want another man should hold the line, the rope. And you, my friend, you stay and hold the tail.”

“Okay, thank you, lord, we do that, our best.”

Well, what’s shoemaker going to do? Is he going to steal that horse?

He dress himself like lady, like pregnant lady. He tie big pillows under the dress. In the basket he put a ham, nice sandwiches and sausages, bottle wine, bottle whisky, dozen boil eggs. And the wine and whisky was opened. So ‘bout nine o’clock at night he walk right straight to the barn, to the door. Two men was sitting by the door, and she walked right to them, and started moaning. “O my good friend, are you good Christian? My time come, I going to have a baby, and like Mary have Jesus in the manger, can I come in and have my baby on the piece of straw in the barn?” [plaintively].

So like good Christian they let her come in the barn, and they put piece of straw in the corner and coat over her so she can lay there. And she says: “Thank you, my dear friend. There is some refreshment there in my basket. On a chilly night like tonight you can warm yourself with that.”

So she didn’t have to tell them twice. They jumped at once at the proposition. The barn boss drop the tail and go to the basket and take a good snort. And the fellow on top the horse say, “Hey, leave some for me too” [loudly].

And the lady says: “Don’t fight boys, there’s enough for all of you. And the rest of you, there’s some sandwiches, take a bite.” So they were so happy. In half hour both bottles was empty. Then something happen. The barn boss start to rub his eyes. So the boss was started sleeping, and his helper too. So the old lady got up from the corner, make the rope outa the straw, and tie that man who is sitting on the horse to the rafter. And barn boss, he tie him to the post and put broom in his hand—he was supposed to hold tail, you know. And them two fellows who was sitting by the door, shoemaker take the wax and warm it, and put it on their heads, and stick their heads together. They’re stuck together. And that man who’s sit on the manger, he gives him the empty bottle. Then he open main door from inside. (In the barn in Europe there is always a main door and a side door in the back for the servants.) He take the stallion out. Then he come back in, lock the door from the inside. There was in the yard a grain house. On the ground floor was full of grain. On the top floor was empty. There was a sack of straw in the yard. He bunch him up that straw, put under the wall, make like bridge sloping. So he take the stallion and make him walk up the bridge onto the second floor, shut the door behind him, remove all the straw, then went home.

Then in the morning the lord go to the barn. First, see the two men what is sitting on the doorstep, two head bent together, sleeping. So he started horsewhip them. Men wake up, but they can’t get out; started hollering, “John, let me go, let me go my hair.” So one’s hair was a little weaker, goes out, so they get out anyhow. The worse thing was on that man what was hanging on that rope on the rafter. Every time he whipped him he started to swing like pendulum. When he come back he nearly knock lord down with his knees. And barn boss get it worst ‘cause he can’t get outa the post. Lord take the broom and break the broom on him, but that was nothing. When he come to the one what had the bottle in his hand, he smelled it and said, “Aha, so that was it, that’s what put you to sleep.” So he cooled down little bit.

He went to the shoemaker now. “So you have my horse, huh?” he asked the shoemaker.

“Yes, lord, yes and no.”

“What do you mean—‘yes and no’?” the lord asked.

“Because I stole him, but he’s still in your yard.”

“All right, I didn’t pay you money before I find out.” So the lord went back and look all over—every barn, every shed, every nook, every corner, in the bushes, in the yard—no horse. For one hour they look all over, the house servants; no trace of the horse.

So he went back to the shoemaker and he say: “You lie. There is no horse in my yard. There is no place for horse in my yard.”

“Lord, how much you give me if I show you where your horse?”

“All right. I give you ten ducats extra, when he’s in my yard.”

“Let’s go.”

They went right under the grain house. Shoemaker take the ladder, put against the wall, climb up, open the door, and there is the stallion.

“Nee-hayaah.”

And poor lord look in his blue eyes there and can’t believe himself.

“How the dickens you get him there?”

“That’s my business.”

“Well, how you get him down?”

“Well, it depends how much you give me.”

“What, you think I gonna pay to get that horse down?”

“Oh, my lord, you forget you don’t pay me the two hundred and ten ducats extra for stealing and showing you where’s the horse.”

So the lord take the money and pay him, one hundred ten ducats. He offer him ten ducats more extra to get that horse down.

So shoemaker say: “You gotta do that yourself. I show you how, for I don’t wanna work like I work last night.”

So the lord think, “I don’t care for the ten ducats, but I wanna find out how he make it.”

So he tell his servants to bring the bunch of straw back, make a slope. So they make that slope. So he jump on the horse and ride down. “Here’s your horse, lord.”

Then lord say: “My dear friend, you ruin me. I’m bankrupt.” He says: “You know, I gotta friend, minister. Some way that story get out, so he gotta good laugh on me. That priest say, ‘Poor ordinary man, he can outfox the learned man.’ Can you fix him some way so I can get a good laugh on him?”

“Yes, lord, I can do that. Take a little time, and money. But I do that for nothing. Next week Sunday, the rich peoples make a ball, dance. Twelve o’clock, at middle night, you should be out in the dancing hall. You have there fireplace in your dancing hall, lord?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So at twelve o’clock, at middle night, all the lords and ladies should sit around in a circle, and look on the fireplace. And look when miracle come.”

What shoemaker going do?

On Saturday morning he hire coupla boys to catch him couple hundred lobsters (you know what lobster is?). At Sunday night, he went to the church with the bag full of lobster, and a coupla hundred Christmas candle. He open the door with a master key, lock himself in from inside, and went to the altar where there was big statue of Jesus, take the Jesus, put it on the floor behind the altar, and he’s dress like Jesus and stand in his place.

Before he went on the altar, he took the lobsters out the bag, light the candles in the pincers, and they look like angels coming there—there was no light in the church.

When the priest had the signal, somebody went in the church, he went outside, seed the light in the church. He didn’t know what happened. So he went to the church through the sacristy door. Then he see the thousand lights on the floor. And he heard a voice come from the Jesus’ mouth. And Lord say with a voice like thunder: “Minister, you gotta come to heaven, with me, tonight, to take confessions from the poor souls.”

And minister says: “O Lord, you take me dead or ‘live?”

And the Lord says: “Take off your clothes, ‘cause you can’t wear them to heaven. Climb in the bag, I’ll do the rest.”

Can you guess what he gonna do, that priest, with the minister?

[To wife: “You think I tell you everything. Thousand story I forget.”]

So he climb in the bag, naked. Then he climb out the altar, tight the bag so the priest can’t get free, remove the lobster, and put the Jesus on the altar. He take that bag on his shoulder, put the minister in, then walk with him to the lord’s castle. Then he put the priest on the ground, finda two ladder, one put on top the roof, the other put against the roof. Then he look on the clock—it was five minutes to twelve. Then he went on the front door and tell the servants to call the lord, he wanna see him.

When the lord come he ask him, “Are you ready?” And the lord say: “Yes, yes, we all ready. Can you tell me what going to happen?” the lord ask him.

The shoemaker say: “No. Look and see.” And went.

And before he went he told him, “Keep all the lights on, and all the ladies and guests should look in the fireplace.”

So lord say: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s one minute to twelve. Exactly on twelve o’clock we going to see something extraordinary. But what, I don’t know myself.”

And the same time, shoemaker is climbing on a ladder up, with the bag with the minister in. Then he stop by the big chimley, cut the string down on the bag, shake the bag so the minister start sliding down the chimley to dancing room to the fireplace. And all the peoples in dancing room staring with eyes on the fireplace. And what you think is come down? First thing is come out bag, and behind is black devil. Only the devil had no tail from behind, he had it in front.

And poor minister when he see so many people staring at him, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where he was neither. He know he wasn’t in heaven. So he run to the window, jump through the window, and knock himself cold—bump his head on the frame. Even the lord didn’t know who that was, didn’t know he was devil, for the shoemaker didn’t tell him. The lord tell his servants to clean him up. And that was the minister what was laughing at him.

So minister give all the money back to the lord what he lose to the shoemaker, to keep the secret.

That is story of how the brain work. A great many millionaire have no education you know. And many millionaires become bums.

4. My First Job in America (Swan Olson) *

See chapter 3, pages 93-95.

5 The Duck Hunt (Burt Mayotte) †

Two old Frenchmen decided to get an early start to Munoscong. They wanted to get down early, so they tied up at Brady Pier here night before. Buck season opened the next day. Curley was the first one to waken—the boat had broken loose from its moorings and drifted down to Hay Lake. “Woke up, Joe, woke up, we’re not here at all, we’re twelve miles from here.” “What’s de difference?” said Joe. “It’s too dark to hunt anyting.”

It was getting gray in the east. Curley said, “I see one duck myself two mile off—dee ducks he come pretty quick.” So Joe said, “Get your thirty-eight feefty-five and take dee first won.” No, it was too far for Curley. Then Joe said, “Hit’s not too far for me. Hi’ll take my two pipe shoot gun han show you how to get dat duck. Hi’ll raise my gun hup high, and Hi’m take pretty good haim.” He said, “Bang, bang, Hi’ll shoot. Maudit, what you tink? De duck he’s fall, and when Hi’ll pick heem hup, he have been hit on de behin’. You know, Curley, Hi’ll have haim for his neck.”

The fellows told him he’d scared all the ducks away, so they might as well start cooking their breakfast before the flocks came in. So they went into the chantier, but there was no kindling. So Joe came out to get some kindling and spied more ducks but they were way up high, too high for his trusty two pipe shoot gun. He said to himself, “Joe halso have de pretty good heye, but not good henough for duck dat high.” He called Curley with his thirty-eight feefty-five. Curley looked at the height of the ducks, with grave aplomb.

“Dis time Curley take de hell of a good haim. Bang, bang, he shoot. Two times he shoot some more, bang, bang, and nobody see some more ducks. So we all go hinside, han’ Joe cook de pancake, han heverybody h’eat. W’en all of a suddink, she’s come one hell of a noise on dee roof. Joe he’s don’t fineesh wid dee dish. So he says, 4Curley, you go see who’s make all dat rakette.’

“Curley she’s come back in, she’s have dee great beeg smile on hees face. He said, ‘Wat de hell do you know, Joe? Dem maudit sapré duck was high.’”

6. Clever Art Church (Jim Alley) *

DORSON: You were telling me that this Art Church was quite a fellow. Who was Art Church?

JIM ALLEY: Oh, a fella lived up Injun River.

DORSON: What was he known for?

JIM ALLEY: Well I don’t know.

FRANK ALLEY: Oh he was a nice fella, clever.

JIM ALLEY: Clever.

FRANK ALLEY: AS clever a fella as you ever see. But if he got it in for you, boys look out. He’d lie to you just as quick as flies.

DORSON: Didn’t he play a trick on your Uncle Josh?

JIM ALLEY: Yes, he sold Uncle Josh a cord of wood and he told him the best part of it—he’d find the best part of it was hardwood. And Uncle Josh paid him for it and when he went out and looked he had just two sticks of hardwood. And Uncle Josh got after him about it and he said, “I told you the best part—the best of it was hardwood.” “Well,” he said, “I only got two sticks of hardwood.”

DORSON: NOW that that whistle has stopped blowing, perhaps you’d tell us one of Art Church’s lies.

JIM ALLEY: Art Church was going downtown by Porter Cummings, and Porter hollered “Art, come in.” He says, “I ain’t got time.” He says, “Come in long enough to tell me a lie.” He says, “Well, I’m in a devil of a hurry, I ain’t got time.” Says, “Your father, I just come down by him and he’s cut himself awful and I’m after a doctor.” Well Porter jumped into his wagon—no automobiles then—and rushed up there and his father hadn’t cut himself at all. And he said “The devil, he told me a lie right on the road.”

DORSON: What’s that one about the other time he wanted to get a receipt in full?

JIM ALLEY: He owed McFall a bill and McFall tried to git it. And he wrote him and wrote him and Art didn’t pay no attention. And at last Art started from Machias and he got up Mason’s Bay and he met McFall a־comin’. Art says, “I’m just comin’ over to pay that bill.” Well McFall says, “I’m just comin’ over at your house after it.” McFall’s horses headed toward Jonesport and Art’s headed toward Machias. “Well,” Art says, “write me out a receipt and I’ll pay you.” He wrote him out a receipt and Art grabbed it and started his horse and McFall turned around and tried to get him, but said, “It’s no use, he’s got the receipt and that’s all there is to it.”

7. Curt Gets the Best of Bill Case in a Horse Trade (Curt Morse) *

DORSON: Who was Bill Case?

CURT MORSE: Bill Case was an old fella lived here with his sister. She was an old maid and he was old bach and they lived together. I guess they was kind of rolled-oat eaters, they’d eat sour apples and rolled oats, didn’t cost ‘em more than thirty cents a year to live. They was a comical pair. Fact, Bill had one of them great wide long transparent noses you look right through it. He was comical, but an awfully good old fella.

DORSON: Talked funny, eh?

CURT MORSE: Yeah he talked funny. So he says to me, he says “[sucking noise] Devil,” he says, “How’ll we trade horses?” he says, “[sn] I like the looks of your horse.”

“Well,” I says, “I don’t know, I got a good horse.”

Says “ [sn] I got a better one.”

But I said, “Before we trade I’ll have to have your harness, your wagon and the hames, corn, brush, and blanket, and them six hens and that Plymouth Rock rooster.”

“Well he looked at me and he says, “[sn] Want the ell off the end of the house too?”

Anyhow we hit up a trade, I guess he was kinda lazy about lookin’ after the horse. Well that horse I let him have had the blind staggers. So the next day I heard him hollerin’ at me to come over and see what ailed the horse, and I went over and he said, “The horse has got a shock.”

I says, “Well you know, anybody’s apt to have a shock.” Just then his sister looked through the little hole in the barn door and she says, “William, don’t you sell that Plymouth Rock.”

He says, “Hallelujah [sn], you go in the house or I’ll knock your devilish head off.” Well anyhow, we got the horse outdoor she kinda straightened up, and he says, “[sn] Want to buy her?”

And I says, “No, I’ll give you the six hens you give me yesterday for her.”

And Bill says, “[sn] You bought her, bring my six hens back.” I got both horses and the whole outfit for the six hens he give me. Never come to him till the next day, Bill says, “[sn] Great trader I

am”

Notes

1. Y. M. Sokolov, Russian Folklore, tr. C. R. Smith (New York, 1950), p. 128. Cf. Roman Jakobson, “Commentary,” in Russian Fairy Tales, tr. N. Guterman (New York, 1945), pp. 631-56.

2. James H. Delargy, “The Gaelic Story-teller,” Proceedings of the British Academy 31 (1945): 177-221. Subsequent considerations of Gaelic storytellers appear in Maartje Draak, “Duncan MacDonald of South Uist,” Fabula I (1957): 47-58; Calum I. MacLean, “Hebridean Traditions,” Gwerin 1 (1956): 23-33.

3. Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales (London, 1891), Ch. 1; J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1860), Introduction.

4. C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952).

5. Archer Taylor, “Some Trends and Problems in Studies of the Folktale,” Modern Philology 37 (1940): 19.

6. Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York, 1946), pp. 449-61.

7. Ibid., pp. 445-56, from Axel Olrik, Folkelige afhandlinger (Copenhagen, 1919).

8. Ibid., pp. 451-53, from Mark Azadovsky, Eine sibirische Märchenerzählerin (Helsinki, 1926).

9. Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York, 1948), pp. 491-502. A linguistic approach and references to other stylistic studies of North American Indian tribes are given in C. F. Voegelin and J. Yegerlehner, “Toward a Definition of Formal Style, with Examples from Shawnee,” in W. E. Richmond, ed., Studies in Folklore (Bloomington, Ind., 1957), p. 149, notes 3 to 7.

10. Gladys A. Reichard, An Analysis of Coeur d’Alene Myths (Philadelphia, 1947), pp. 5-35.

11. Ibid., p. 25. Reichard writes: “The story ‘Cricket Rides Coyote’ owes its humor to the fact that combinations of comic sounds are repeated until the story becomes side-splitting. This is only one of many examples which shows how impossible it is to carry over the spirit of the tale into a language like English, which has no machinery for the expression of such an effect.”

12. Linda Dégh, “Some Questions of the Social Function of Storytelling,” Acta Ethnographica 7 (1957): 91-146.

13. William H. Jansen, “From Field to Library,” Folk-Lore 63 (1952), 152-57.

14. William H. Jansen, “Classifying Performance in the Study of Verbal Folklore,” in Richmond, ed., Studies in Folklore, pp. 110-18.

15. John Ball, “Style in the Folktale,” Folk-Lore 65 (1954): 170-72.

16. Cf. Sokolov, pp. 10-14.

17. In Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), ch. 2, I discussed individual styles of six Negro folk narrators, including Suggs and Blackamore. Here I wish to contrast them with narrators from other subcultures.

18. Of these, 59 have been printed in my Negro Folktales in Michigan and the remainder in my Negro Tales from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Calvin, Michigan (Bloomington, 1958).

19. Richard M. Dorson, “Negro Tales [of John Blackamore],” Western Folklore 13 (1954): 77-79, 160-69, 256-59.

20. Richard M. Dorson, “Polish Wonder Tales of Joe Woods,” and “Polish Tales from Joe Woods,” Western Folklore 8 (1949): 25-52, 131-45.

21. Richard M. Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 250-57.

22. Only four of them published so far [1960], in Dorson, “Collecting Folklore in Jonesport, Maine,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 101 (1957): 270-89.

23. Four of them are printed in Dorson “Collecting Folklore in Jonesport, Maine,” and six in Dorson, “Mishaps of a Maine Lobsterman,” Northeast Folklore 1 (1958): 1-7. [Additional tales for both Alley and Morse have since been published in Dorson, “The Folktale Repertoires of Two Maine Lobstermen” in Internationaler Kongress der Volkserzählungsforscher in Kiel und Kopenhagen, ed. Kurt Ranke (Berlin, 1961), pp. 74-83; and Dorson, Buying the Wind (Chicago, 1964), section I, “Maine Down-Easters.”]

24. Dorson, “Dialect Stories of the Upper Peninsula,” Journal of American Folklore 61 (1968): 121-28.

25. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan, pp. 196-97.

26. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale (Helsinki, 1928).

27. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, six vols. (Bloomington, 1955-58).

28. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan, pp. 51-53.

29. Dorson, “Polish Wonder Tales of Joe Woods,” pp. 39-47.

30. Thompson, The Folktale, p. 458.

31. Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers, pp. 251-54, untitled.

32. Dorson, “Dialect Stories of the Upper Peninsula,” p. 127.

33. Tape-recorded in Jonesport, Maine, July 10, 1956.

34. Mody C. Boatright, Gib Morgan, Minstrel of the Oil Fields (Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1945), pp. 29-30, Motif X905.4.

35. “Curt Gets the Best of Bill Case in a Horse Trade.” Tape-recorded in Kennebec, Maine, July 13, 1956.

36. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, vols. 1-2 (New York, 1927); Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vols. 3-6 (New York, 1940).

37. Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America (New York, 1941), ch. 10.

38. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, vol. 2, p. 302; Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, pp. 61, 322, 335.

39. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, vol. 1, p. 357, quoting a newspaper reporter.

40. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 4, p. 285, quoting English author-correspondent Edward Dicey.

41. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 323, 329, 339; vol. 4, pp. 56-57. It was Anthony J. Bleecker who matched Lincoln with a tale of a converted Indian praying for his enemy, in order to heap coals of fire on his head and “burn him down to the stump.”

42. Cf. A. K. McClure, Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories, a Complete Collection of the Funny and Witty Anecdotes that Made Abraham Lincoln Famous as America’s Greatest Storyteller (Chicago and Philadelphia, n. d.), and a modern collection of recollections, E. Hertz, Lincoln Talks, a Biography in Anecdote (New York, 1939).

43. Jim Blaine’s story of the old ram in Roughing It, which never does get to the point, is a good example of the discursive yarn.

44. Backwoods stories are in Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, pp. 8, 328, 639-49 (a traveler in a thunderstorm asks for less noise and more light; a pioneer woman tells a Bible salesman, “I had no idea we were so nearly out”; a traveler denied food by a niggardly couple stirs up the ash cake hidden in their hearth fire).

45. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 245; a variant is in vol. 2, pp. 299-300, placed in Indiana.

46. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 328.

47. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 638; a variant follows, pp. 638-39.

48. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 326.

49. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 379; Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers, p. 160.

50. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, vol. 2, p. 300.

51. Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee (London, 1833), pp. 79-80. William H. Jansen reported in “The Kleshmaker” (Hoosier Folklore 7 [1948]: 47-50) the analogue between Crockett’s story and the current shaggy dog jest. The story does not appear in Crockett’s Autobiography. Cf. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 6, p. 150, for a text from Horace Porter; a variant by Grant follows, pp. 150-51.

52. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, vol. 2, p. 296. Baughman cites examples of “Lies concerning speed” under Motif X1796, in Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America, Indiana University Folklore Monograph Series 20 (The Hague, 1966).

53. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 3, p. 368; told on Sylvester and John Hazard, in Thomas R. Hazard, The Jonny-Cake Letters (Providence, 1882), pp. 170-72, and The Jonny-Cake Papers of “Shepherd Tom” (Boston, 1915), pp. 165-66.

54. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 4, p. 38; Horace P. Beck, The Folklore of Maine (Philadelphia and New York, 1957), p. 130; Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers, p. 197.

55. Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (Cleveland, 1894), P. 263; R. Kempt, ed., The American Joe Miller (London, 1865), p. 207; Rowland E. Robinson, Danvis Folks (Rutland, Vt., 1934), p. 191.

56. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, p. 321; vol. 4, pp. 472, 305, 299; Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, vol. 1, p. 296; vol. 2, pp. 246, 293, 302; Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, p. 331; vol. 4, p. 203.

57. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, p. 62.

58. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 237; vol. 4, p. 284; a variant is given in Abraham Lincoin, the Prairie Years, vol. 2, p. 447.

59. Text from Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, p. 327, “as published in the Philadelphia Times and other newspapers, and credited to [Colonel James Sanks] Brisbin.”

60. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, the War Years, vol. 5, p. 61.

Reprinted from Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., New York, and London: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley and Sons, 1960), pp. 27-51. The texts of four of the six tales in the Appendix were not printed with the original article.

* From R. M. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 196-97.

* From R. M. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 51-53.

* From Western Folklore 8 (1949) : 39-47.

* From R. M. Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 251-54.

† From Journal of American Folklore 61 (1948): 127.

* Tape recorded in Jonesport, Maine, July 10, 1956.

* Tape recorded in Kennebec, Maine, July 13, 1956.