As the South has never lacked story materials, so it has never lacked storytellers, audiences and occasions for storytelling. On farmhouse and country store porches, in the parlor and the nursery, at religious and political gathers, on courthouse steps and benches, at picnics and barbecues, around the campfire, on the job – wherever people came together for sociability and entertaining or persuasive talk, there have been tongues to tell and ears to hear the inherited repertoire.
In addition to the universal themes and motifs of yarns and tall tales and historical and local traditions, the South has a rich source of anecdote and story in the characters and doings of kinfolk, friends and neighbors, who are all the more readily assimilated to folk tradition by reason of the Southern code of personal ethics, which regards them first of all as human beings and individuals.
Besides the inherited themes there are the inherited techniques; and the art of casual narrative flourishes where life is causal, leisurely, and informal, paced to the relaxed tempo of Southern living. In an environment where people “do not like books so well, but…like to remember and memorize many things that [they] do love,” according to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, book-say is close to folk-say; and literate and non-literate reconteurs alike are caught up in the same stream of oral memory and “torrential re-collectiveness”.
In the mid 1800’s, some of the best and tallest tale-tellers who ever got into print were recruited from the rank of Southern lawyers, judges, ministers, editors and sportsmen. The newspaper became an important link in the story-telling chain, folklore and local color were the soil from which sprang the broad humor, the racy idiom, the anecdotal verve and the gorgeous yarn spinning of later humorists.
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Corn liquor is the most maligned stimulant in America. It is the purest whisky in the world. The only difference between bourbon and corn is that bourbon is the parlor name for corn!
There is a story of a local boy who once made some good corn and buried it in barrels under his barn. Lightning destroyed the barn. May years later he decided to rebuild and in digging his foundation he discovered the barrels. The lightning by some crazy twist has charred the kegs but hadn’t damaged them. The owner tasted the amber liquor and whooped. The neighbors tasted it and they all set to whooping!
At its most romantic, the praise of native corn liquor always belonged to the school of the fox who lost his tail pointing to taillessness as perfection. At its best, aged in home sized kegs, which could be purchased at most of the chain stores, corn liquor was a potable drink full of the mule’s heels. Gentlemen exchanged private systems for reducing the shock to the palate, which extended all the way from the introduction of dried fruits into the liquor to advanced chemical procedures. Sometimes they succeeded. But at their worst, corn liquor and monkey rum (which in North Carolina was the distilled syrup of sorghum cane) were concoctions taken stoically, with retching and running eyes, for the effect beyond the first fusel oil belch.
There was certainly a democracy in drinking then. Rich and poor drank with the same gasping. Indeed, when a death by gunshot wound resulted in the relation of the details of a party in one of the area’s richest houses, it came out that, before the gun went off, they had been drinking corn whisky and chasing it down with beer.
When one dines in a cabin back in the hills, he will taste some strange dishes that go by still stranger names. Beans dried in the pod, then boiled “hull and all”, are called
Drying the beans for “Leather-Breeches”
(this is not slang, but the regular name). The old Germans taught their Scotch and English neighbors the merits of scrapple, but here it is known as poor-do. Lath-open bread is made from biscuit dough, with soda and buttermilk, in the usual way, except that the shortening is worked in last. It is then baked in flat cakes, and has the peculiar property of parting readily into thin flakes when broken edgewise. It is suggested that poor-do was originally poor-doin’s, and lath-open bread denotes that it opens into lath-like strips. But etymology cannot be pushed recklessly in the mountains, and we offer these clews as a mere surmise!
Your hostess, proffering apple sauce, will ask, “Do you love sass?” It is well for a traveler to be forewarned that the word love is commonly used here in the sense of like or relish.
If one is especially fond of a certain dish he declares that he is a fool about it. “I’m a plumb fool about pickle-beans”. Conversely, “I ain’t much of a fool about liver” is rather more than a hint of distaste. “I et me a bait” literally means a mere snack, but jocosely it may admit a hearty meal. If the provender be scant the hostess may say, “That’s right at a smidgeon,” meaning little more than a mite but if plenteous, then there rimptions.
To “grabble ‘taters” is to pick from a hill of new potatoes a few of the best, then smooth back the soil without disturbing the immature ones.
If the house be in disorder it is said to be all gormed or gaumed up, or things are just in a mommick.
When a man is tired he likely will call it worried; if in a hurry, he is in a swivvet; if nervous, he has the all-overs; if declining in health, he is on the down-go. If he and his neighbor dislike each other, there is a hardness between them, if they quarrel, it is a ruction, rippit, a jower or an upscuddle – so be it there are no fatalities which would amount to a real fray.
To shamp means to shingle or trim one’s hair. A bastard is a woods-colt or an outsider. Slaunchways denotes slanting, and si-godlin or si-antigodlin is out of plumb or out of square (factitious words, of course – mere nonsense terms, like catawampus).
Critter and beast are usually restricted to horse and mule, and brute to a bovine. A bull or boar is not to be mentioned as such in mixed company, but male brute and male hog are used as euphemisms.
A female shoat is called a gilt. A spotted animal is said to be pieded (pied) and a striped one is listed. In the Smokies, a toad is called a frog or a toad-frog, and a toadstool is a frog-stool. The woodpecker is turned into a peckerwood, except the giant woodpecker (here still a common bird) is known as a woodcock or woodhen.
What the mountaineers call hemlock is the shrub leucothoe. The hemlock tree is named spruce pine, while spruce is he-balsam, balsam itself is she-balsam, laurel is ivy, and rhododendron is laurel. In some places pine needles are called twinkles and the locust insect is known as a ferro (Pharaoh?). A treetop left on the ground after logging is called the lap. Sobby wood means soggy or sodden, and the verb is to sob.
Evening, in the mountains, begins at noon instead of sunset. Spell is used in the sense of a while (“a good spell atterward”) and soon for early (“a soon start in the morning”). The hillsmen say “a year come June,” “Thursday ‘twas a week ago,” and “the year nineteen and eight”.
Many common English words are used in peculiar senses by the mountain folk, as call for name or mention or occasion, clever for obliging, mimic or mock for resemble, a power or sight for much, risin’ for exceeding (also for inflammation), ruin for injure, scout for elude, stove for jabbed, surround for go around, word for phrase, take off for help yourself. Tale always means an idle or malicious report.
Some highlander usages that sound odd to us are really no more than the original and literal meanings as budget for bag or parcel, hampered for shackled or jailed. When a mountain swain “carries his gal to meetin’” he is not performing some great athletic feat as was reported by Benjamin Franklin, who said, “My father carried his wife with three children to New England” (from Pennsylvania).
A mountaineer does not throw a stone; he “flings a rock”. He sharpens tools on a grindin’-rock or whet rock. Tomato, cabbage, molasses and baking powder are always used as plural nouns. “Pass me them molasses.” “I’ll have few more of them cabbage.” How many bakin’-powders has you got?”
On occasion, when the mountaineer is drawn out of his natural reserve and allows his emotions free rein there are few educated people who can match his picturesque and pungent diction. His trick of apt phrasing is intuitive. Like an artist striking off a portrait or a caricature with a few swift strokes his characterization is quick and vivid. Whether he uses quaint obsolete English or equally delightful perversions, what he says will go straight to the mark with epigrammatic force.
store porches, in the parlor and the nursery, at religious and political gathers, on courthouse steps and benches, at picnics and barbecues, around the campfire, on the job – wherever people came together for sociability and entertaining or persuasive talk, there have been tongues to tell and ears to hear the inherited repertoire.
