| tyrie
smith
He was strongly moved
by old mountain folk ballads that were sung around the fireplace
[...] Reece, in maturity recalled that some of his earliest
memories were the vocal renderings of old ballads such as
“Fair Eleanor,” “The Hangman’s Tree,”
“Barbary Allen,” and the American version of
“The Wife of Usher’s Well”
--Raymond Cook, The
Mountain Singer
When discussing “The Bear” from his novel Go
Down, Moses, William Faulkner often alluded to the relationship
between his story and a Lafayette County, Mississippi legend
centering on a bear the locals called “Old Reel Foot.”
Faulkner admitted, and those who knew him attested to the
fact, that he had never seen the bear, but as John Cullen,
an Oxford native, put it, “he [Faulkner] heard many
hunters tell tales about him” (Watkins 131). When it
comes to Southern literature, there are many such instances
of this bit of folklore or that finding its way into a story,
poem, play, or novel. Folklore in the South is everywhere
– from the way Southerners drink tea to how we (for
I cannot hide my being Southern) worship on Sundays, there
is no shortage of cultural traditions in our day-to-day life.
These folkways define how we negotiate our time and space.
What’s more, these traditions are not peripheral. While
residents of other regions of the United States have, in large
part, lost touch with much of their cultural “matter,”
the South has been more resistant to the dominance of pop
culture that is seen elsewhere in the U.S. and has retained
much of its folk traditions. This is evident in the literature
of the region. The inclusion of folklore is a necessity for
any work of Southern literature so as to add credibility and
to create a relevant context. Foodways, performance, material
culture, and oral traditions are all important folk genres
in the South that are often utilized to enhance setting, drive
plot, and validate the works of Southern writers. One tradition
that many have utilized – a tradition within the South
that has long held the interest of scholars – is the
folk ballad as found in the mountain regions of the upland
South.
To say that the ballad tradition of the Southern Appalachians
has been well-studied would be, at best, an understatement.
Ever since the first 19th century scholars wandered into the
mist-laden mountains that stretch from Virginia to northern
Alabama, there has been great interest in the seemingly timeless
landscape and the seemingly timeless people inhabiting it
– in their heritage and traditions. For these scholars
– Emma Belle Miles, Cecil Sharp, Allen Eaton, Albert
E. Friedman and others – this land and its people have
been a boon for researchers and aided in our understanding
of how ideas move with people, how these ideas become tradition,
and how those traditions are maintained over time and space.
No other tradition has captured the attention and imagination
of folklorists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and linguists
over the past century as has the folk ballad. Literary figures
of the 19th century such as Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott
popularized the form through printed versions collected from
oral sources and written versions scribbled or published in
small quantities. Similarly, we can see the ballad’s
influence working its way into the poetry of Keats [fn1],
Wordsworth, and Coleridge and into the novels of Hardy [fn2],
Joyce, and others. In the case of these canonical writers,
the influence has very much to do with the search for identity
– the rise of nationalism via collection and categorization
of verbal folklore that began with the work of Johann Gottfried
von Herder (1744-1803) and was continued by Wilhelm and Jacob
Grimm – the search for the volkskunde [fn3]
in the interest of identifying a “true” German
character.
In modern times, we see the influence of the ballad appearing
in academic as well as popular mediums. Consider the use of
the ballad “The Demon Lover” (Child 243) in Bob
Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” [fn4]
and in the short stories “The Demon Lover”
by Elizabeth Bowen and “Where Are You Going? Where Have
You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. These artists and others
like them find something familiar and relevant in the ballad
form and utilize its content, style, and motifs (some of which
are five or more centuries old) to communicate values, fears,
and the worldview of a community. With some authors, the inclusion
of ballads and other folkways is, at best, superficial. The
use of these elements is a means to an end – a way of
enriching their text for the sake of the text. Oftentimes,
such a writer may research a location and learn of a culture’s
traditions through anthropological or historical scholarly
texts. From these out-of-context evaluations, she may pull
out any number of related or unrelated folk mediums and apply
these to her novel or poem or short story. For these individuals,
it could be said, folklore is perceived as a tool of literature.
On the other side of things, there are authors – especially
those from the South where folkways remain very much relevant
– for whom the inclusion of folklore such as ballads
into their works comes honestly, through personal interaction
and intimate knowledge of these traditions and their cultural
contexts. In either case, folklore is removed from the fluidity
of the living, organic context and placed into the seemingly
static literary context (note the examples provided above).
Folklore is first “de-situated” from its cultural
“home” and “re-situated” into a literary
frame to serve as a means of enhancing/enriching the work
of the author (de Caro and Jordan 6). Thus, the perception
is often that folklore serves as a “tool” or device
of literature, which diminishes traditional forms and their
place in the history of artistic expression – placing
folklore into the role of a subordinate form to the more “elite”
Literature. Folklorists have spilled much ink in their attempts
to validate folklore’s place in the relationship between
the two forms and have endured much frustration when their
message is unable to break through the fortress of the literati.
The unfortunate consequence of this struggle results in a
severed connection between the mediums and the scholars, which,
in turn, distorts the discourse. This is, at best, a simplistic
view of a very complicated issue. However, it is my wish that
as you read on the complexities of this relationship become
clearer.
For the purposes of this essay I ask the reader – literary
scholar, linguist, folklorist, everyman – to think of
folklore and literature in these terms: that the written word
is an evolutionary state of verbal communication. Regardless
of the perceived stasis of words on parchment and paper, literature,
like its oral predecessor, is created largely through innovation
rather than invention. The same narratives are told and retold,
stylistic elements of oral tradition continue to appear, and
motifs are recycled again an again throughout the literary
canon. The two are inexorably linked by a bond as strong as
that which ties us to kin, country, and religion. Bruce Rosenberg
labels the two as “rival siblings;” however, the
relationship better resembles that of parent and child.
The Farmer Poet
These hills contain
me as a field, a stone
Yet I contain them also: when I fare
Beyond their borders and am all alone
I need but think of them to see them there,
Each hill, each hallow, each familiar place
As clearly imaged as a loved one’s face.
--Byron Herbert Reece
(qtd. in Sellers iv)
The Choestoe community of
extreme Northeast Georgia is not even a pinpoint on the map
[fn5]. Like many of the small, pastoral communities
that once dotted the rural routes and state highways of the
South, the birthplace of Byron Herbert Reece as it was has
all but died – living now only in the memories of those
who have lived long enough to remember it as a community.
Politically, it is a voting district. As part of the booming
vacation-home industry in that region of the state, Choestoe
is largely made up of retirees and urban expatriates. Every
year, more houses pop up along the banks of the Nottley River,
which flows through the heart of the valley. New home construction
is the dominate industry throughout Georgia’s mountainous
region [fn6]. As family lands in Northeast
Georgia are sold off to developers, new vacation homes and
retirement cabins are erected. It is an epidemic – its
victims being the once strong cultural traditions that had,
previous to the last thirty years, survived over three centuries
of pioneering, migration, settlement, and war. For the region’s
newest “pioneers,” none of this history really
matters. They come to capture something “authentic”
– they hope to bottle their little piece of this once-breathtaking
landscape. What they create is a new suburban model. While
the view from one’s back window is improved, homes in
some developments are built 20 feet apart, one on top of the
other, crowding the land, eroding the mountains and river
banks, and draining the natural resources. Yet, the area is
still marketed as a “unique, exclusive, unspoiled, undeveloped,
peaceful, rare” area where, for $250,000 or more, you
can be in “The Real North Georgia Mountains” [fn7].
The houses are like tombstones – “here lies a
community, may it rest in peace.”
Yet, it has not always been so and in the time of Byron Herbert
Reece, Choestoe was very much a community of people –
neighbors, families, kinfolk, churchgoers, musicians, storytellers,
farmers, moonshiners, philosophers and balladeers. It was
a community. Like most of the small communities in Appalachia,
the people of Choestoe had their own history, traditions,
and worldview. And, as is the case with any folk group, the
people of Choestoe utilized this cultural matter to articulate
their unique perspective on the world in which they lived.
As a member of the Choestoe community, Reece encountered this
matter in his day to day life. Like the other members of his
community – his family, neighbors, school mates, and
teachers – Reece utilized these traditions to understand,
explore, and confront the world around him. These folkways
served as the filter through which Reece viewed his time and
place. And while his Bible study, school lessons, and the
“printed works of the great English and American poets”
certainly influenced the young Reece, it is apparent in the
style, content, and context of his works that the author paid
careful attention to the intimate transmission of folktales,
ballads, legends, and local histories in his community and
that these traditions made a marked impact on Reece the writer
(Cook 11). In poems such as “The Riddles,” “I’ll
Do As Much For My True Love,” “Ballad of the Travelers,”
“The Betrothed From the Grave,” and others, we
see Reece utilize the formulaic elements of the folk ballad
– hard rhyme, strophic meter, ballad motifs and refrains
[fn8]. In his two novels, Reece recreates
the contexts and traditions of various folk genres and builds
his narrative around them. In both forms, Reece reveals his
love and loyalty to his community and aims to communicate
something about place and tradition to his audience. In the
small body of criticism on Reece, references to Reece’s
use of folklore are few. However, in a letter to the Saturday
Review Reece specifically notes, “I am casually
familiar with the whole body of English poetry, but aside
from the ballad influence which I encountered in oral tradition,
and not as printed literature, I have not felt any specific
influence” (97). Furthermore, most don’t identify
Reece as a writer whose works contain any significant allusions
to a place that resemble Reece’s home. In the largest
critical work on Reece to date, Alan Jackson argues the poet’s
work is decidedly devoid of purely Appalachian characteristics
noting that “Byron Herbert Reece did not produce poetry
that fit neatly into the standards of Appalachian local color
– tall tales, folk themes, idealized mountain folk,
dialect, and above all, an explicit identity as Appalachian”
(44). Jackson makes a good point. Reece does not include place
names. He does not make superficial use of Appalachian stereotypes
and caricatures – no bumbling hillbillies or expert
mountain men. However, Jackson misses something very significant
– that Reece does make extensive use of his catalog
of Appalachian folk traditions in both his poetry and prose;
specifically the folk ballad. Reece’s ballads mirror
themes and motifs found in Appalachian ballads. Much of the
same can be said of Reece’s fiction. Scholars who miss
Reece’s use of Appalachian forms do so because they
apply an outsider’s perspective of Appalachia onto Reece’s
work or limit their analysis to the search for more obvious
signifiers. This is not due to any deficiency in their scholarship,
but is representative of a fundamental difference in the ways
in which literary scholars read a text and the ways folklorists
read a text. As Mark Workman notes, “folklorists have
important insights to share with their colleagues in literature
departments [: this has to do with] the nature of the subject
matter which so clearly is context-bound; the second has to
do with the nature of folklore as a discipline, as much scientific
as humanistic” (134). Folklorists bring a very different
perspective to a work of literature in that they are aware
of specific patterns and codes associated with those communities
they study. When a folklorist reads Reece, he does so with
Reece’s community in mind. By researching Reece’s
community and others that may share certain traditions, the
folklorist constructs a filter, or lens, though which to read
and study the text and analyze how the literature fits into
a living context.
As discussed earlier, the use of folkloric forms in literature
is nothing new. Numerous writers, in the South and elsewhere,
have “re-situated” folklore genres into their
works so as to enrich the text – to add color and life
to their fictional creations. But with Reece there is evidence
of something more involved in terms of his use of folkways.
A great deal of Reece’s work feels like folklore. His
ballads are almost indistinguishable from those collected
in the field. The plots and motifs used by Reece could be
seamlessly dropped into a living tradition without a flinch
from the live audience. To those in Reece’s Choestoe
community, ballads such as his “Ballad of the Rider”
or “The Weaver” may have just as easily been created
in the oral tradition along side “Barbara Allen,”
“Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” or “The
Cherry-Tree Carol” [fn9]. Likewise,
in his novels, Reece utilizes the ballad form and other folkways
as well as the influences of his physical environment to establish
a specific context – a context that very much parallels
his community in Choestoe; that being rural, isolated, Southern,
and possessing a strong sense of community. The inspiration
for this content did not come to Reece from books. Nor did
the author travel to some distant place to observe the traditions
of some exotic culture. He drew on his own experience and
wrote about the people and landscapes he best understood and
utilized their cultural “language” – the
communicative processes through which the people of Choestoe
engaged the world around them – to speak and transmit
ideas and perspectives to a different “community”;
a community of readers. The result is a literary form that
works like folklore. If, as I noted earlier, we can view literature
as a descendant of folklore – that the verbal begat
the written –then we can accept that literature can
function as folklore. Just as oral ballads help a community
to negotiate its environment by serving as a conduit through
which it can communicate values, morals, taboos, fears, anxieties,
and the like, so too can literature communicate the worldview
of the author to his audience for the same purposes associated
with verbal genres – to entertain his “audience,”
to validate his place within a specific community and to educate
that community as to what its values (morals, perspectives,
beliefs) could/should be [fn10].
In Reece’s body of work, the most complete example of
literature functioning as folklore is his novel Better a Dinner of Herbs (1950). While his ballads are certainly
intriguing illustrations of Reece’s use of folkloric
form and function, in the novel the author develops folkloric
contexts that create an environment in which there exist literary
recreations of folklore. Simultaneously, he creates a work
of fiction that is, itself, very much like a piece of verbal
folklore. That is, there is folklore imbedded and created
in the context of the narrative and the narrative itself is
like a folktale or a ballad or other folk form. In these novels,
Reece creates the context of community as a vehicle through
which he can communicate specific ideologies to his of readers
via a familiar folkloric framework. Within that framework,
his characters are speaking to each other through folk traditions.
The journey of Enid and Danny takes place within a community
context that resembles Reece’s Choestoe and the areas
surrounding it. Within this context, there is folklore –
oral, material, performance – that allows the characters
within the community to communicate to one another and negotiate
the environment. For the reader, Enid and Danny and the groups
with which they interact, are, in many ways, like those characters
and circumstances that survive in the folkloric forms most
encounter in family lore, urban legends. With Reece as performer,
the readers sit as audience – disconnected in time and
space, but unified by the experience of the story. The intimacy
still exists. There is still the folk-like transmission of
ideas by way of intimate instruction (is there anything much
more than intimate to read another’s words). In the
case of Reece and other authors with similar backgrounds,
does the fact that words come on a page rather than by mouth
really make the experience any less folkloric? In the strictest
definition of “folklore,” the answer is a firm
“yes.” Folklorists don’t agree on much,
but most agree that without intimate, face-to-face contact
there can be no folklore. However, if we can look at literature
as “just” another form of communication –
that it is really a part of the larger chain of communication
that includes speech, dance, music and hand gestures –
then that definition begins to loosen and the idea of literature
as folklore seems less abstract. Because folklore was such
a part of Reece’s upbringing, when we apply this approach
to our reading of Reece we get closer to understanding Reece’s
motivations behind both his poetry and prose. We begin to
understand the function of Reece’s performance.
Structure and Function
In terms of oral formulae, the reader’s initial response
to Reece’s opening chapters in Better a Dinner of Herbs may be that the novel does not appear to be modeled
after oral narrative forms. This first section introduces
the reader into the story in medias res and contains abstract
notions of time and space. The reader knows it is morning,
but the cycle of segments through the varying perspectives
of each character in varying states of consciousness (and
mental ability as in the case with Ezra) makes for a fractured,
disorienting beginning to the story. It would seem to the
reader that the novel is very much a work of modern fiction
as opposed to something like a work of local color or historical
fiction – two genres more readily identified with the
use of folkloric forms. However, while not glaringly apparent,
Reece is taking advantage of oral formulation common to the
Anglo ballads carried into the Appalachians by Scots-Irish
and English settlers.
In his anthology of folk ballads, Albert Friedman observes
that the characteristic narrative style of the ballad is that
it
[…] breaks into
its story at a moment when the train of action is decisively
pointed toward the catastrophe […] through rapid movement
is the rule, the ballads occasionally linger at some stages
of the action in order to underline a fact or to enhance
an emotional effect (xiii).
In the first two sections
of Reece’s Better a Dinner of Herbs, the reader observes
similar narrative characteristics; however, these are mixed
with modern literary conventions. In Part I, the narration
begins on the morning following the preacher’s death
– after, as opposed to building up to, the “catastrophe.”
However, Reece does make use of “leaping and lingering”
as observed in ballads such as Child’s collected “B”
version of “Bonny Barbara Allan,” which slows
for four stanzas to highlight Barbara Allan’s mourning
for the loss of her lover or the mother from “The Wife
of Usher’s Well” lamenting the death of her three
soldier sons for three stanzas. Here, Reece slows the narration
to underline the contrasting emotions of the characters following
the catastrophe. The reader is asked to spend time with each
character in order to gain insight into the individual’s
response to the preachers’ death – adding emphasis
to what is already a clearly important moment in the story.
W. K. McNeil notes that leaping and lingering also tends to
“shift the narrative to another scene with little or
no transition” (22). McNeil’s description can
be applied to the first section of the novel, which moves
from character to character with little to no transition from
one to the next – as perceived by the audience, their
presence in the same time and place and the acknowledgement
that the Preacher has died as the result of a tragedy is all
that binds them.
By the time the reader reaches Part II, she is clear as to
the direction of the narrative – that the story must
lay out the events that build to the aftermath described in
Part I. This realization points to Reece’s intended
emphasis on the telling and the performance (through which
content is accented) as opposed to the conclusion –
a shared trait with many performers of verbal art (Bauman
1977). As is the case with many oral forms, the ending is
known well before the story begins. The entertainment and
relevance lay in the performance of the tale. In terms of
function, these oral traditions are told and retold to maintain
the community’s sense of itself and to underscore the
values, beliefs, and laws important to the preservation of
community. No one much minds that they’ve “heard
it before” because it serves the purpose of reinforcing
a community’s stance on issues that the community encounters
regularly.
Part II demonstrates Reece’s abilities as a storyteller
– the author’s focus being on the telling of the
tale. Part I suggests a duality in the narrative voice and,
thus, a duality within Reece himself. There is Reece the modernist,
who we encounter in the opening chapters of the book and elsewhere
throughout the novel, and there is Reece the performer, or
teller, who utilizes the familiar narrative formulae encountered
in his community. For Reece – the teller – the
real beginning commences with the short narrative preceding
Enid’s first chapter in Part II, “The Outward
Journey.” Here, the audience is allowed into the context
of the telling via a formulaic introduction. In Part I, the
reader is thrust into the action without any real establishment
of time or space, but she is quickly roped into a performance
with the opening of Part II, which feels much like a formulaic
opening to a verbal performance:
There had been a time, the major portion of their lives, when
Uncle Enid and Danny had not known the Preacher nor his family.
The web of fate that drew them toward the Preacher’s
household looped them with its first strand on a January noon
when they harnessed the mare to the wagon and set forth on
a journey through a fall of snow (55).
Here, the reader is prepared for the journey that is to come
– it’s as though she is being told, “but
I’m getting ahead of myself, the story really started
when . . . .” In addition, by beginning at the point
that Enid and Danny set off on their journey, Reece is utilizing
the element of the folk ballad pointed out earlier by Friedman
– the idea of starting the narrative at ”the moment
when the train of action is decisively pointed toward the
catastrophe.” If there is no journey, there can be no
death of the preacher as far as Enid and Danny are concerned.
Leaving their home is the event leading them to the tragedy
revealed in Part I. This kind of formulaic introduction in
storytelling is common throughout the South and elsewhere.
It is as familiar as sweet iced tea. Consider the following
opening to the tale of a haunted house told by the Reverend
James H. Mull of Cedartown, GA, just 10 miles south of Rome,
GA:
I’ll never forgit
when I was a young kid at home – an’ that’s
been a long time ago – ‘bout the only way there
was to pass off the time then – there was no TV, no
radio – was to go spend bedtime with a neighbor or
them come spend bedtime with us. An’ the ol’
folks sat around an’ talked about these ol’
ghost stories back yonder, an I used ta go to bed scared
to death to hear them tell about the ol’ haunted house
(in Burrison 1991, 83).
Here, as in Reece’s
prologue, the narrator – the teller and performer –
establishes a context of time and space. Previous to the opening
of Part II, the reader is unsure of where the events are occurring.
Once she encounters the opening of the second section of the
novel, the reader learns that it is in a time before Enid
and Danny knew the Preacher, it is January, and the two are
at their home – a home which they are leaving. In the
case of Reverend Hull’s story, the audience is introduced
to a ghost story through the context of his childhood, in
a time before technologies such as radio and television began
to replace folk entertainments – when ghost stories
were a common form of entertainment. In both instances, the
reader/audience is brought into the tale through the establishment
of time and place in the narrative context with knowledge
of how the story will conclude – with the death of the
preacher and the haunting of a specific house – conclusions
revealed by the author/narrator prior to beginning the primary
narrative. The beginning of Reece’s narrative also marks
the beginning of his more evident use of storytelling techniques.
The novel takes on a tone very different than that which is
established in Part I. Exit modern author, enter verbal performer.
One of the most common oral narration devices utilized by
Reece is repetition. In verbal art, this formulaic element
can denote significance or it may be used as a tool to aid
the speaker’s memory [fn11]. In addition,
repetition is an aesthetic element that adds to the poetic
quality of a piece of verbal art. Richard Bauman names this
parallelism and defines it as “repetition, with systematic
variation, of phonic, grammatical, semantic, or prosodic structures”
(18). Roman Jakobson calls it the “empirical linguistic
criterion of the poetic function” (qtd in Bauman, 19).
Bauman further notes that the appearance of parallelism within
the performance of verbal art is a marker of the teller’s
competence. In terms of Reece’s novel, the appearance
of repetition fills all of these purposes. What is important
in terms of this analysis is that the reader understands that
such devices are not the products of modern and post-modern
literary technique. These devices are characteristics that
long predate written language. The reader’s first encounter
with this kind of narrative device is that of rhythmic repetition
in the opening chapter of the novel. Danny’s half-waking
ruminations of the previous day’s events are written
in a mix of staccatic fragments and dreamy, floating sentences.
To wake in that house.
To erupt from sleep into
the world of neither night nor morning, in the large old
attic close under the rafters. To be in the state of neither
waking nor sleeping. To move in the twilight world […]
(13).
The rhythmic repetition
of the preposition “to” adds emphasis to the content
through aesthetic, poetic diction. Later in that same chapter,
the narrator uses repetition once again as Danny cycles through
descriptions and feelings concerning those closest to him
– Uncle Enid, Jason, and Ezra – again generating
a rhythmic sequence (18). The use of repetition continues
throughout Part I – creating rhythms and maintaining
a tone of otherworldliness and varying states of waking established
in the first chapter. In Jason’s chapter, repetition
is used to examine the dichotomy of the world outside and
the world inside of his mind. Ezra, as a character, is full
of repetition in the form of the repeated, mantra-like gibberish
– again supplying rhythm to the narrative. Mary’s
moment in Part I repeats the idea that “the child”
– the product of her and Enid’s affair –
is the cause of her troubles; that “the child is guilty”
(45).
The novel contains this kind of formulaic repetition throughout.
In Part II, we see the repetition of event names (“the
days of the lost gold piece”), place names (“nobody
rooms”), monikers (“five pigs”), and the
repetition in the descriptions of landscapes – nature
being very much a character unto itself in the novel. In Part
III, the repetition appears in more complex forms. There is
the repetition of proverbial language, of ballads and ballad
refrains, and, in some instances, single words are repeated
– these I will analyze closer in the next section.
The most prominent oral narrative element is Reece’s
use of overlapping stories within the frame of a larger narrative
similar to the form found in epics, oral histories, and reminiscences.
It is right to assume that Reece’s encounter with epics
was limited to those found within the literary canon –
namely The Iliad, Beowulf, Paradise
Lost. While it is widely accepted that The Iliad,
Beowulf, and similar epics as we know them today are
literary compilations of folklore, there are no recorded examples
of these tales or elements of these tales appearing in oral
tradition. Suffice to say, Reece never heard a performance
of Beowulf’s swimming contest with Brecca. However,
in recordings of family lore and oral histories, members of
a group encounter multiple stories embedded within the frame
of a larger narrative. For instance, in recent oral history
collections such as the one generated by the Veterans History
Project, there appear multi-layered narratives – sub-narratives
within the frame of a larger, primary story - within the wartime
experiences of veterans. The time at war (e.g. “My platoon
and I were sent to Europe on March 31, 1942 and I returned
home in November of 1946) serves as the frame and the tales
within that frame (e.g. “the time this Frenchman jumped
in my foxhole to ask me for help because his sister was having
a baby”) help fill out that larger narrative frame.
In Reece’s work, the larger narrative revolves around
the love triangle between Enid, Mary, and the Preacher and
the consequences of that affair. However, to fully understand
that story, the reader must gain detailed information about
the players involved. They get this information via the imbedded
stories such as the tale of Daisy and the stranger, Enid and
Danny and the gold piece, Jason sneaking to the dance, and
others. Each of these smaller narratives adds depth to the
larger narrative much in the same way smaller narratives within
a larger narrative in verbal art function to emphasize important
elements of the larger story. This more conversant form of
storytelling fits in well with those Reece would have encountered
in Choestoe. In relation to ballads, jokes, and some tall
tales (such as the Jack Tales found in Appalachia), this form
of oral narrative is the most common. Unfortunately for our
discussion of Reece’s use of uniquely Appalachian forms,
such narrative construction is common wherever there are families
participating in oral narration – meaning the form can
be found throughout the United States. However, the novel’s
content and context do elicit the conclusion that Reece is
very much a member of Southern Appalachia and a participant
in Southern Appalachian traditions.
Each of these traditional formulae function within the narrative
much in the same way as they function within oral genres.
Just as the performer utilizes repetition or leaping and lingering
to call the audiences attention to an integral moment within
the story, so too does Reece use these methods to highlight
the most important moments in his narrative. Furthermore,
the performer uses these tools to entertain and create aesthetically-appealing,
audile experiences for his audience. Reece creates equally
beautiful passages. Anyone who has ever read Reece aloud can
attest to the lyrical and poetic quality of his prose –
a prose that begs to be heard. While Reece’s critics
attest to the influence of specific authors in his poetry
and fiction (namely A.E. Housman, John Greenleaf Whittier,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) the elements of his works that
seem beyond definition and devoid of influence are more than
likely the result of his experience with the folk forms found
in the predominantly oral culture of Choestoe in the Southern
Appalachians.
Content and Function
My parents remember that
forty years ago one of the commonest forms of social recreation
was to congregate at the home of someone, preferably a person
of good voice who knew a lot of songs, and sing away the
Sunday afternoons.
--Byron Herbert Reece, Songs
My Mother Taught Me
Reece once commented that
mountain singers – those he was familiar with from his
youth – “prefer the strong emotional mean of tragedy
to the light wine of comedy” (qtd. in Sellers 1992;7).
Better a Dinner of Herbs is certainly a tragedy. Specifically,
it is a tragedy that surrounds a love triangle involving three
tragic characters: Enid, a man with no family; Mary, the lonely
wife of a physically and emotionally absent husband; and Mervin
(the preacher), a tormented man of God. In terms of traditional
motifs and characters found in the folk ballads of Appalachia
– and of England and Scotland before that – the
plot revolves around a handsome swain, a landed lord and his
lonely wife and the events that transpire due to the lord’s
absence. It is a story as old as the storytelling tradition
and a plotline common to a fair number of ballads including,
but not limited to, those collected by Child. “Little
Musgrave and Lady Barnard” (Child 81) and “Lord
Thomas and Fair Annet” (Child 73) come to mind. These
and other romantic tragedies fill a goodly portion of the
“canon” of folk balladry. And, by Reece’s
own reminiscences, ballads were also a popular form of entertainment
among members of his family and community. Those looking for
Reece’s “Appalachian signifier,” look no
further. As discussed earlier, the stylistic and mechanic
components of the ballad tradition and other oral genres are
found in his poetry and in Better a Dinner of Herbs; in addition,
Reece also draws on the content – the motifs, characters,
and plots – of these folk traditions for his work. Reece
does not merely imbed his novel with folklore for the purpose
of adding color. Instead, he uses folklore as a deeper layer
of text through which to communicate to his audience –
it is a vehicle for performance. As well, the folkloric elements
of Reece’s novel function much in the same way folklore
in traditional contexts function; namely as a means of communicating
and reinforcing the worldview of the performer and his community.
In the case of his using folk balladry, Reece relies on a
familiar model. As noted earlier, ballads that center on a
love triangle are common place in both the academic canon
of folk balladry and the canon of folk ballads as they exist
in a living tradition. In addition to those listed above,
which largely deal with adulterous wives, there are also examples
involving women, often sisters, fighting over a single man
such as “The Twa Sisters” (Child 10, all versions
except A). In the context of a living tradition, these love
triangle ballads function on a number of levels. Most obviously,
the ballad, as is the case with most oral tradition, serves
as a form of entertainment. On deeper levels, these “love
songs” (to use the Appalachian term) communicate some
very important messages about one’s community. A ballad
ending in the tragic death of three lovers, as in the case
of “Little Musgrove and Lady Barnard,” communicates
the dire consequences (though perhaps not the literal consequences)
of infidelity, lust, and envy [fn12]. Because
the audience associates these specific consequences with specific
behavior, the ballad works to subconsciously control the actions
of the audience/community – dictating a set of unspoken
folk “laws.” The young girl who hears ballads
such as “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” (Child
4) will delight in the story, but also take note that the
“merry greenwood” is no place for unaccompanied
young women, disobeying one’s father can lead to trouble,
and strangers on the path who appear kind may be sinister
and intend harm. Reece’s narrative of a love triangle
communicates a similar worldview – one which fits with
Reece’s community in Choestoe. Like many rural communities
in Appalachia, there is a strong instinct to protect women
from harm and to keep them in a community as opposed to “losing”
them to another community through, for example, marriage.
Within Reece’s larger narrative, there are two sub-narratives
that enrich the primary story and add to the function of the
novel as a cautionary tale. These sub-narratives appear to
function similarly to oral forms warning young women against
the dangers of sex and sexuality. The first of these is the
story of the preacher’s seduction of Daisy; the second
is Mercidy’s ballad, “The Riddles.”
The fallen preacher is a familiar motif in much of western
folklore. This character appears in off-color jokes, jests,
and toasts. In the literary canon, this figure appears as
both comedic and tragic. In the literature of the South, the
preacher is often the villain or the object of ridicule. William
Tappan Thompson, George Washington Harris, Mark Twain and
other humorists found the character to be an easy vehicle
for comedy – the authors often noting that their caricatures
stemmed from known evangelists. Later, the likes of Faulkner
and Flannery O’Connor created memorable, conflicted
preachers such as Gail Hightower and Hazel Motes, respectively,
who demonstrated the human weakness of clergy. In relation
to Reece’s community in Appalachia, circuit riders,
evangelists, and religious conmen were characterized in the
oral traditions of mountain folk. Perhaps no professional
group was as equally revered and loathed as that of the minister.
Because of the nature of their work, traveling preachers were
the least trusted within this group and often turn up in oral
tradition as either the villain or the buffoon. Their more
stationary counterparts – ministers living in the community
– were not as vilified, but there is always the occasional
jest at the local rector’s affinity for fried chicken
and unannounced visits around suppertime (Burrison 7). The
preacher as sexual predator is not as common in the folklore
of Appalachian whites, but it is not without precedent. Within
black communities in the South, this character appears more
often; though, his appearance is usually in the context of
off-color jokes and anecdotes.
Reece has produced two preacher characters who succumb to
their desires in his work. The first of these appears in his
ballad “May Margaret” (Ballad of the Bones)
and the second, of course, is Mervin. It is hard to tell whether
or not the poem inspired the sub-narrative within the novel.
At the time of Daisy’s rape, Mervin is only known as
the friend of her singing teacher – not yet a preacher.
Yet, in comparison to the preacher in the ballad, the two
are similar in that both are dark grotesques – much
like the false knights and bluebeards found in oral tradition.
In “May Margaret,” a young woman taken with the
handsome minister concocts a story to lure the minister into
the woods (a bit of a role reversal) for the purpose of fulfilling
her naïve fantasies of love and romance. It is in the
woods, however, that the minister, dressed in his “long
black preaching gown,” with eyes “darker than
she thought,” and speaking “silkily,” assumes
the persona of the darker, demonic incubuses found in oral
tradition (34) [fn13]. Similarly, Mervin
is described in terms of a sinister, supernatural presence
during his first encounter with Enid, following Daisy’s
“withering”. His appearance seems to be otherworldly.
Mervin is a “stranger” whose face is “expressionless
in the moonlight,” “something monstrous,”
and “ghost-colored” and whose escape through the
woods sounds like the movements of a “startled buck”
[fn14]. In both instances, the ministers
are referred to in language more often used to describe a
demonic, supernatural presence. In oral tradition, the function
of such descriptions is to warn against encounters with strangers
– a serious danger in the isolated countryside of 15th
century England that was transferred to the equally dangerous
(and more isolated) wilderness of the Appalachians. Of the
transient figures passing through the region, traveling preachers
were among the most common. Tent revivals and stump sermons
brought salvation and fellowship, but also brought the occasional
conman and fornicator into the mix. In both his poem and the
in the novel, we see Reece utilizing a folk form to express
his views – negotiating and understanding a strange
figure and a particular event encountered by his community.
This kind of functionality is at the heart of what folklore
is to a folk group.
Mercidy’s ballad functions in a similar fashion. While
the story of Daisy is not a performance within the novel,
but directed to the reader/audience, “The Riddles,”
is placed within a fictionalized, traditional context. It
is an interesting moment in which the reader sees how folk
tradition works within the subconscious – motivating
Mercidy’s choice of song after her failure to grasp
the discrepancy between the arrival of Mary’s baby and
the time of the Preacher’s return to the farm [fn15].
Like the primary narrative, “The Riddles” (first
published in Ballad of the Bones) narrates the consequences
of a love triangle. In the story, a landed man, O’Brady,
has returned from war and is traveling back to his home in
the company of his man servant – who, it is discovered,
has remained on the farm to tend to its operation in his master’s
absence. On their journey home, O’Brady questions the
body-groom as to the state of his holdings. In his initial
report, the servant gives a glowing, straight-forward assessment.
When O’Brady inquires about his wife’s faithfulness,
the ballad takes on a different tone as the servant gives
a curt answer and quickly changes the subject. Through a series
of riddles, the body-groom relates the happenings of the farm
centering on a sequence of miracles that deal largely with
the birth of livestock without the presence of sires. These
riddles build to the servant finally relating the greatest
of the miracles – the birth of a son in O’Brady’s
absence,
My master’s Lady
bore a son,
The fairest ever seen,
When he had twice-twelve-months been gone
And seas surged them between (165).
The lord then goes to his
wife and asks to see each miracle. One by one, he solves the
mysteries – the climax being the moment he deciphers
the riddle of the Lady’s child, charging his body-groom
with the betrayal. In true ballad fashion, both his wife and
servant pay for this transgression with their lives and are
laid together with the sword between them.
By placing the ballad in a traditional context, Reece conveys
a great deal about his characters – who they are, where
they live, and their worldview. As previously noted, the presence
of balladry in Appalachia is well-documented. While it is
a tradition that no longer thrives in the changing, modern
Appalachia, in Reece’s time it was fairly common. Reece
himself has commented on more than one occasion as to the
importance oral tradition – specifically ballads –
played in his community. The context he constructs in the
novel is one of many he could have chosen to present the ballad.
However, Reece chooses to create a situation that forces the
reader to think of the ballad and its function as something
beyond that of lullaby, performed art, raucous drinking song,
or other popular, preconceived idea of the “primitive”
entertainments of isolated “hillbillies.” By showcasing
the ballad in the context of Mercidy’s intimate, inner
thoughts, Reece reveals something about his people’s
intelligence and competence (Glassie 1975 17). The scene demonstrates
how a tradition bearer reaches back into her mental catalog
of a specific tradition – in this case the ballad –
and draws out a selection to help her conscious mind better
understand a particular event or situation. Simultaneously,
the ballad fulfills the basic need for self-amusement during
an otherwise meticulous, repetitive action -- knitting. In
that singular event, Reece reveals some important information
to his audience about the individuals in his narrative –
that they are a part of a specific community and thus take
part in traditions unique to that community. In this case,
the community is Appalachia and the tradition is the performance
of folk ballads. In addition, he gives the audience/reader
a glimpse into the psychology and intelligence of an individual
in that community. Furthermore, Reece uses descriptive terms
to describe Mercidy’s singing that also point to an
Appalachian community. He writes, “In a voice that was
thin and pure, except on the high notes when cracks ran through
it like the lines in glaze on a piece of pottery, she began
to sing:” (162). Here, the fact that Reece chooses to
utilize another folk form familiar to his home region in North
Georgia – that of pottery – to describe a separate
form calls attention to the metaphor. Southern folk pottery,
as an object, diffused throughout the South by some means
or another; however, as a tradition, the form was limited
to a few specific regions. One of the regions home to some
significant potteries was Northeast Georgia – including
the Meaders pottery in the Mossy Creek community of White
County, the Hewell’s pottery of Gillsville in northern
Hall County, and the Jones’ pottery in Young Cane, Union
County – approximately ten miles from Choestoe (Burrison
1983). The fact that there was a pottery within such close
proximity of Reece may provide a clue as to the author’s
inspiration for his use of this particular metaphor. However,
regardless of any contact with the Jones pottery or not, Reece
was very familiar with the form and the look of cracking alkaline,
or ash, glaze [fn16] and identified the
object as something integral to his community. It is through
signifiers such as this that Reece recreates a specific idea
of place that mirrors that of his own community in Choestoe
– further identifying his characters and location as
Appalachian. More importantly, Reece identifies himself as
a purveyor of and participant in folk tradition. By utilizing
those forms most familiar to him, he maintains the transmission
of tradition.
Conclusions
The end result of Reece’s
use of folkloric forms is a multi-layered, multi-genre work
of literary folklore. In it the reader encounters performance
in text – descriptions of performance, material, and
verbal art. She is allowed to look in on a community of people
who take part in a variety of folk traditions, and, ultimately,
is made member of a community of readers – an audience
witnessing a performance – and is drawn into the narrative
through the teller’s, Reece’s, literary creation
of verbal art. His creation becomes the physical manifestation
of one man’s traditional competence packaged in a “traditional”
context created out of his memories of place. The physical
“book” – the cover, leaves, glue and string
– is of little consequence. The perceptions of written
literature as being stagnant and static only distort our understanding
of the human impulse to create, perform, or listen to narrative.
When we “read” Reece, we are actually witnessing
the modern manifestation of performance – as well as
engaging a piece literary ethnography.
Through his art, Reece re-situates the folklore of his community
into the context of a novel. Yet, because of the structure
of his work and its “urge” to function as folklore
functions, the novel becomes a traditional form. Reece takes
his narrative cues from a living oral tradition. He utilizes
traditional forms. The motifs, characters, plot, landscapes,
material crafts, etc. are all derived from the variety of
cultural matter the author encountered in his life, living
as a member of the Choestoe community. His presentation of
these folk forms differs from his neighbors only in its format
– that it is written. Is that a disqualifier?
Reece’s work is not alone in this regard. As more folklore
concentrations appear in departments of English, the more
interdisciplinary examination – utilizing folklore as
well as literary theory – of literature needs to occur.
Novels, poems, plays, etc. that contain the levels of folklore
as do Reece’s works may not be commonplace, but it is
hopeful that these kinds of works will open up a dialogue
between disciplines on the relationship between folklore and
literature and will, no doubt, broaden out understanding of
man’s need to turn a pot, dance a jig, or tell a good
story.
---------------------------
1) Here,
I’m specifically thinking about Keats’ “Le
Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
2) I refer to Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles and Return of the Native.
3) Term
anglicized by William John Thoms into “folklore.”
4) Dylan
has also recorded a version of Child 243 on the Columbia Records’
1991 release The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3: Rare and Unrelased
1961-1991. Dylan recorded a variant of the North American
version, “The House Carpenter.”
5) In 2006
the Georgia Legislature removed 488 small communities with
populations less than 2,500 from the official state map.
6)Tourism
is the only other real economy for the region.
7) Just
as a test, I “googled” some terms dealing with
real estate in the Choestoe area. I found this quote at www.thebuyeragency.com/choestoeinfo.htm.
8) Raymond
Cook notes that the ballad form “became his most skillful
medium” following a presentation by ballad scholar Roosevelt
Walker to the Quill Club in 1939 (21).
9) Child
ballads 84, 74, and 54 respectively.
10) I don’t
see Reece being so didactic as to tell anyone what he or she
should do. However, in the context of his community, many
oral forms – specifically ballads – function as
a means of moral instruction. Reece is participating in a
living tradition and utilizing a traditional form as it is
intended.
11) See
Albert Lord 1960, Richard Bauman 1977, and Albert Friedman
1956.
12) This
ballad appears as “Little Massie Grove” in the
Southern Appalachians.
13) There
are also elements of the poem that point to the Green Knight
from Sir Gawain as a possible inspiration as well. The minister
tells you May Margaret, “My church lies in this wood”
– reminiscent of the location of the Green Knight’s
chapel. Likewise, both the minister and the Green Knight resemble
the Elf Knight or “False Knight” found in oral
ballads – an interesting demonstration of the evolution
of a character type from oral tradition to written tradition.
14) In
both Anglo and Celtic mythology there are gods possessing
the horns of a stag as well as shape-shifters that take on
the form of a stag. In the Anglo myths, this individual is
often associated with hunting or rangers. In the Celtic tradition,
the horns of the stag are associated with the underworld.
15) Thomas
similarly portrays this application of a folk form in Tess
of the D’Urbervilles when Tess remembers the ballad
“The Boy and the Mantle” (Child 29) just before
her wedding day.
16) Burrison
directly identifies the Young Cane shop as one utilizing alkaline
glaze.
---------------------------
Bibliography
Bauman, Richard. Verbal
Art as Performance. Long Grove, Ill: Waveland, 1977.
Burrison, John A. Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia
Folk Pottery. Athens: UGP,
1983.
_______. Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the
South. Athens: UGP, 1989.
Child, Francis James ed. The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads. 5 vols. Mineola, NY:
Dover, 1965.
Cook, Raymond A. Mountain Singer: The Life and Legacy
of Byron Herbert Reece.
Marietta, GA: Cherokee Publishing, 1980.
de Caro, Frank and Rosan Jordan. Re-Situating Folklore:
Folk Contexts and Twentieth
Century Literature and Art. Knoxville: UTP, 2004.
Dorson, Richard M. “The Identification of Folklore in
American Literature,” Journal of
American Folklore. 70 (1957): 1-8.
Friedman, Albert B. ed. The Viking Book of Folk Ballads
of the English Speaking World.
New York: Viking, 1956.
Glassie, Henry. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural
Analysis of Historic
Artifacts. Knoxville: UTP, 1975.
________. Passing the Time in Ballymenone. Bloomington:
IUP, 1995.
Jackson, Alan. Byron Herbert Reece 1917-1958 and the Southern
Poetry Tradition.
Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2001.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
HUP, 2000.
McNeil, W.K. Southern Folk Ballads. 2 vols. Little
Rock: August House, 1987.
Reece, Byron Herbert. Ballad of the Bones and Other Poems.
Atlanta: Cherokee, 1985.
_______. Better a Dinner of Herbs. Athens: UGP, 1992.
Rosenberg, Bruce A. Folklore and Literature: Rival Siblings.
Knoxville: UTP, 1991.
Sellers, Bettie. The Life of Byron Herbert Reece.
Georgia Humanities Council, 1992.
Watkins, Floyd C. “Old Times in Faulkner Country.”
in Bear, Man, and God. ed. Francis
Lee Utley. New York: Random House, 1964: 130-31.
Workman, Mark. “Folklore and Literature: From Text to
Context.” in Once Upon a
Folktale: Capturing the Folklore Process with Children.
ed. Gloria T. Blatt. New
York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1993.
.
|
|
