THE DEVIL AND THE FARMER’S WIFE
Tune from Horton Barker. Text edited by R. C.
OLD DRY FRYE
From: John Martin Kilgore, Gaines Kilgore, Palmer Boiling (15 yrs.), of Wise County.—Type 1537. A teacher at Pine Mountain School in Kentucky had a modern version of this tale with episodes in it concerning street cars, automobile, the doctor’s office, etc.
CATSKINS
From: Mrs. Howard Ward, Shirley Johnson (12 yrs.), R. M. Ward, of Wautauga County. Dicy Adams, Mag Roberts Hopkins, of Wise County. Sally Middleton of Harlan County, Kentucky. Parallels: Type 510. “Catskin,” More Eng., p. 204. See also J. Jacobs’s notes to “Rushen Coatie,” More Eng. tale LXXIII, p. 256, for all the “Cinderella” parallels, etc Remarks: James Taylor Adams has a somewhat similar tale, “Seneca the Mush-Stick,” which has the “broken ladle” business in it, as in the J. Jacob’s “Catskin.”
ASHPET
From: Mrs. Nancy Shores (now deceased) of Wise County.—There is a German (?) tale “Ashenputtle,” but I have not been able to locate it as such in my copy of Grimm.—Hie magic washing of the pots is my own invention. Granny Shores had only the magic production of horse, dress, slippers, etc.—For “comb my head” the original had “crack three nits in my head.”
MEAT LOVES SALT
From: Betty Lou Ramsey (7th grade, Wise, Virginia, 1945). Remarks: At first I had doubts about including this tale. Could the child, I asked myself, have heard Lamb’s Lear read by her teacher? But how could she have combined it, on her own, with “Cap o’ Rushes”? The magic of the white roses, the tower, the two older sisters being caught in “the briery bush”—none of this gave any hint of coming from print I have found that there will be, amongst these natural oral tale-tellers, an occasional something that entered a told tale from schoolbooks. But I have not, in my setting down and re-telling of any tale, ever taken any clear case of elements coming from printed sources. This remarkable version of the ancient Lear story seems, in my judgment, to be entirely oral. I hope in the future to find other traces of this tale in Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.—Betty Lou could not (or would not for some reason) tell me from whom she learned this tale. I heard her tell it on three different occasions, and she tangled it up somewhat differently each time. I have merely straightened it out so that it would hang together. I added nothing. The “Duke of England” she also called the “Duke of Erlington.” The old king made his crown, in Betty Lou’s telling, out of briars.
SOAP
From: James Taylor Adams, Dicy Adams, R. M. Ward, Belle Kilgore, Emory L Hamilton.—Remarks: This is “Stupid’s Cries” in More Eng., p. 211.—“Right there I had it . . .” is from another tale told by Mr. Ward, and once used by someone—I think I heard it in Kentucky—in this same Soap tale.
SKOONKIN HUNTIN’
From: John Mason, Ray Higgins (16) of Salyersville, Kentucky. George Miniard, William Hardin Greer, John Greer, Jeanette Lewis. Remarks: This is the doctor’s long speech in the English Mummers’ Play. (See notes above.) It is quite common in our oral tradition. There is a parallel in Uncle Remus—“Gwine ’long one day, met Johnny Huby, axed him to grind nine yards of steel for me . . .” etc. This version is entirely my own compilation from these sources, and from reciting it many times myself.
PRESENTNEED AND SAM AND SOOKY
From: R. M. Ward, Nora Hicks, Kel Harmon—of Wautauga County, North Carolina. James Taylor Adams of Wise County, Virginia. Parallels: Type 1386,1541,1653,1383. Grimm, 1944, p. 283, “Frederick and Katherine.” Remarks: The name “Presnell Sneed” is my own invention. J. T. A. called him “Mr. Presentneed.” In the originals the rogue’s tongue is cut off with an old rusty pocketknife or a razor, or bitten off by the old woman.—Sam and Sooky is my own putting-together of another part of this same foolish-woman tale, which proved too much for one item. Title mine. In the originals the cards called her “lousy”; and the wheel called her a name—to which she answered, “Ain’t never hoed a row of corn in all my life!”—Pointing up of the supper business is my own. Last episode entirely my own use of motif in the song “The Old Woman and The Peddler.”
THE TWO OLD WOMEN’S BET
From: Maxine Caudell, Bonnie Creech, Thelma Campbell, all of Kentucky. Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”—Type 1406.
THE TWO LOST BABES
From: R. M. Ward, Nora Hicks, Stanley Hicks, Miles A. Ward.—Type 327. This is our own “Hansel and Gretel.”
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
This tune is, in part, from the singing of Victoria Morris of Al-bermarle County, Virginia. Basically it is the “old” and fairly familiar English tune as given by Baring-Gould. Text edited by R. C.
FAIR DAY’S HUNTIN’
From: John Greer of Laxon, North Carolina. I have included a few points from other tall hunting tales.
THE TALL CORNSTALK
From: “White Coon” Hubbard per James M. Hylton now of Bristol, Virginia. The “forty-foot well” is from Bert Tilton of Buck-field, Maine.—Gaines Kilgore heard me tell this tale once and the next time I saw him he said to me, “Richard, didn’t you leave out part of that tale about the tall cornstalk?” Gaines had a twinkle in his eyes and I suspected he had been studyin’ up something new. “Yes, I reckon I didn’t get quite all of it in when I told it to you the other day. What was it I left out?” And Gaines, out of his own fun with this tale, told me how the corn that lined that well “got to fermentin’. . .”
OLD ROANEY
From: J. M. Kilgore, Gaines Kilgore, Charlie Wince Carter, all of Wise County, Virginia. Remarks: Munchausen, by substituting a nail for the ball, pinned a fox’s tail to a tree and then slit its face and whipped it till it jumped out of its skin.—Mr. Ward took great delight in this tale, and told it delightfully but it came to him from the sources mentioned above.
OLD ONE-EYE
From: Ben Hall, Hayesville, North Carolina.
FROGGY WENT A-COURTIN’
Sources too many to remember. I have been enjoying this song for more than twenty years. Native oral versions of it abound. This is the usual type of tune for it.—The frog noises in this version came from John Bibb Tate of Marietta, Georgia, “son of Rev. John Ben Tate who was a Methodist minister in South Alabama.”
THE GREEN GOURD
Remarks: This was one of Mr. Ward’s best tales. I never heard anyone else tell it, nor have I located any parallel in any book.—I have elaborated a bit here, but only as hints and indications in the original led me, and after much telling of the tale to children. I never tell it quite the same twice, and after telling it I find it impossible to remember consciously what I should have included in putting it down. But one night when I told it to Harvey (7), Sylvia (6), and Laura (4), their parents, Darwin and Barbara Lambert, took it down as I told it. And thus several things were “caught” that enlivened the tale considerably from what I had already tried to write.
CHUNK O’ MEAT
From: Baxter Presnell, Chester Farthing, Mac Farthing (9 yrs.), R. M. Ward, Anna Presnell, Nora Hicks, all of Wautauga County, North Carolina. J. L. Campbell of Dalton, Georgia. Alice Henderson (12 yrs.), Charles Caldwell (16), Ben Hall, all of Hayesville, North Carolina. Mary Ritchie of Fisty, Kentucky. Parallels: “Teeny Tiny,” Eng., p. 65. “The Strange Visitor,” Eng., p. 210. “The Golden Arm,” Eng., p. 161. Remarks: On one of my first visits to Beech Creek, North Carolina, a small boy stopped me, put his foot on the running board, and looking me straight in the eye, asked, “You that man in here huntin’ for old tales?” “Yes, that’s me.” “Did ye ever hear that ’un about the big toe?” “No,—” And the young ’tin grabbed the top edge of the car door, as if I might go before he had finished, and without more ado, plunged into the tale. In the original a big toe is found in the garden, or cut from the big black booger’s foot which is sticking out the end of a holler log in the bean patch, and this is what was cooked up for “meat in the beans.” I substituted the chunk of meat because nearly everybody (exc
ept my informants, young and old!) objected to the big toe.
THE BABE OF BETHLEHEM
From: “The Southern Harmony,” 1835. One bar is from the singing of Lloyd Fitzgerald of Waynesboro, Virginia, through John Powell, and as given in “Twelve Folk Hymns,” ed. by Mr. Powell (J. Fischer & Bro.).
About the Author
Noted American folklorist RICHARD CHASE (1904–1988) has been called the man “most responsible for the renaissance of Appalachian storytelling.” A collector of tales that had been handed down from generation to generation in the Appalachian regions of the United States, Chase was born in Alabama and lived in the mountains of North Carolina. Chase was also the editor and compiler of The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris. “His forte was the ability to combine scholarly research on the origins of the stories and patient editing of the many versions he collected with his passion for encouraging their oral tradition of being told spontaneously” (Childrens Books and Their Creators, edited by Anita Silvey).
Footnotes
1. A riddel—an old-time sifter-thing all full of holes, where you strain something through it.
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2. Shop-house—that’s an old-time place where you fixed wagons and plows and guns. Had a forge and an anvil in it.
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3. That’s the way they used to carry fire: take an old hard-dried toadstool, the kind that grows kind of like a shelf on the side of a dead tree, cut it on the edge and put a hot coal there till it would start burning around inside. You could hold fire nearly a week that way.
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Grandfather Tales Page 17