(A speech to the Laclede County Historical Society Lebanon, MO 1990) Good evening, and thank you for having me here tonight. As my central focus tonight, I want to talk about, mainly, the interconnections between folklore and history. We have a tendency in our daily language to use the word "folklore" to say that something is not true. Of course, much of what folklorists study is, in fact, not true -- legends and fairy tales, for instance. Even those areas, though, help us get at the Truth, which is what folklore study is really about. Folklore is a discipline which studies human culture. We look at things like fairy tales and legends for what they can tell us about the people who created them -- how they thought, what they valued, where they came from, how they conducted their daily lives -- the same kinds of things historians are interested in. We look at such things as building techniques used in the construction of log cabins because we can deduce from them migration and settlement patterns; holiday traditions will tell us similar kinds of things. Variations on the techniques or traditions may tell us about the economic or social or religious conditions the forming culture endured or was shaped by. Some of my recent researches have provided me with a very telling example. I have been studying violence in Ozark folklore and was suddenly struck by how many of the stories involve the use of a knife. My great-great-grandmother, Serepta Perkins, had her throat cut in a robbery attempt, for instance. As I probed the story, I discovered that the only weapons used in the incident were knives: the would-be robber had one and my great-great-grandfather had one. The significance of this particular detail isn’t completely clear just yet, but it does suggest some important things. We’re all quite used to the notion that the pioneers always had a trusty muzzle-loader close by. But perhaps that’s merely an assumption based on the novels or television programs we’ve been indoctrinated with. My grandfather, according to this story, didn’t trust the man who tried to rob him, yet he went with him voluntarily and armed only with a knife. I can only ask, "If the gun was so much a part of pioneer life, why didn’t grandpa have one with him?" I don’t know the answer, but the logical conclusion is that, for whatever reason, people didn’t take guns along except on special occasions. That, in turn, suggests that perhaps they were too precious, or too expensive, to be used as an everyday tool. A quick glance through Vance Randolph’s collected stories and through other materials of the early times in the Ozarks suggest a much wider use of knives than I had realized, and a correspondingly lower use of guns. We have to turn to history for a more precise statement of the reasons. What is important here is the question. I don’t have the answer, or any immediate plans to hunt it down. Rather, I want to stress the shift of perspective on our history that folklore can provide. Verbal folklore -- as it is being passed on, not as it is being studied -- tends to focus on the dramatic and exciting details, the violence and gore, for instance. Thus, the details tend to be passed down accurately. So, by listening carefully, we can learn things we might not learn from other sources. The use of knives suggests something about the economic conditions in the Ozarks -- that my grandfather was too poor to carry a gun perhaps. Folklore, then, is a handmaiden of history, retaining details history might overlook or attitudes that historians might not have access to. Before I go on, though, I need to try to define folklore a little more thoroughly. It is, of course, impossible to do that very completely because folklore is a continuum that shades off in every direction. The common use of the term, as I mentioned earlier, usually refers to untruths, to lies, or fairy tales, or myths, or superstitions. And folklorists do study those things, but they also study other things. For instance, one of the most thoroughly studied elements of Ozark folklore is music. Some folklorists study what we call "material culture" -- such things as folk architecture -- that is, how log cabins were built, what kind of lumber was used, what floor plans were used, and how the logs were cut, shaped, and joined -- and what kind of out-buildings were constructed and how. One of my friends wrote a book a few years ago on the origins and types of cattleguards. Another friend did a book on the preaching styles of pentecostal women preachers. Another did a book on folk justice: how people dealt with crimes in areas where there was no law. Others study language, or crafts, or cooking, or quilting, or medicine, or children’s games and rhymes, or whatever. Folklore covers virtually all the facets of human experience and laps over into about all the other scholarly professions as well. But it does have some signal characteristics. First, it tends to study the common people -- what they say and do and think. We want to know how Granny treated a cold, not how some white-coated, 500 dollar an hour specialist does it. We want to hear Grandpa’s memories of World War I, not some scholar’s analysis of impersonal facts. We want to know how Uncle Tom used to forecast weather, not how the KY-3 [local television] meteorologist does it. We want to know how Aunt Sally made jelly, not how Welch’s does. We want to know, in other words, how people used to think and act. And we want to know it so we can understand how we got to be what we are now. Folklore also tends to deal with oral material. Even in our studies of material culture, we are most interested in those things that one does not learn from books -- traditional knowledge passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. From this material, we can learn how people thought in the past and how they think now. An example: a few years ago, my mother was rocking my daughter to sleep and singing her a lullaby. The lullaby was, by the sound of it, an old folk song, and one I had never heard before, so I asked her about it. She had learned the song from her own grandmother, who had raised her. I taped the words and talked to Mom about the song. In the course of the conversation, Mom told me that she had changed a couple of the words because they were not the kind of things one can say. The word she had changed was "pickaninny." She replaced it with the phrase "little baby," which fits fine in the song. So, by something as simple as comparing two versions of a lullaby, we can learn something about ourselves and our ancestors. My great grandmother’s world was not offended by such words as "pickaninny," but my mother's is. To date, I have found no one else who has ever heard the song, though there is a similar title in a collection in West Virginia. Thus, I don’t know how the song got here, where it come from, or much else about it, but I think it quite interesting, given all the collecting fever of the last several decades that there could still be uncollected folksongs floating around the Ozarks. Folklore is, then, primarily study of oral material that lives among the common people. My own primary interest is in contemporary oral legends -- legends that are still being passed down. I am probably interested in them because my family seems to have so many of them, and because I was a full grown adult before I realized they were legends. Last summer I spent a great deal of time and money researching a particular one -- one that some of you may already be familiar with. (If you are, I'd like to get your names and addresses so I can get back in touch with you.) I spent hours driving backroads, slogging through abandoned cemeteries, exploring and photographing caves, reading old books and talking to every one I could hold down, and even more hours and hours analyzing my materials. I still don’t have all the facts, but I know a lot more than I did when I started and, as is usually the case with such research, have stumbled onto a whole bunch more topics I wish I had time to research. One of my informants told me that if one goes far enough back into the cave, one will find Joe’s petrified heart. Another told me one would find his petrified tongue. Another told me that Joe’s clothes were discarded on the hill above the cave and lay there for a long time -- the implication being that they did not decay normally, perhaps, that something horrible is connected with it, perhaps something supernatural, or perhaps it is merely one of those concrete details so common in such stories that are supposed to make the hearers want to believe the story. One informant told me the actual murder happened along the Robidoux over by Waynesville. One informant told me that the girl lived, but that she had brain damage, because Joe stabbed her in the head. A published version of the story says Grizzle and Mrs. Rafferty were taken to the Warsaw jail instead of the Waynesville jail. Most versions recount how the wolves were drawn to the odor of the boiling flesh, making it dangerous for people to approach the cave. (This last detail makes me wonder if there were wolves in the area then.) And most versions imply that Dr. Dodson stayed in the cave day and night for weeks and that the slaves who brought his food to him were too frightened to approach very near to the cave. And on and on. After I have tracked down all the details, I will know a great deal about the early history of the area, because much of it is contained in the details of this story. And that is the main point I would like to leave you with: folklore is the handmaiden of History. It can tell us how the common people thought about the world they lived in and give us a clearer picture of their lives, perhaps, than any other accounts can because folklore is the people themselves speaking to us.