Even in the written w
ord Southern folklore and Southern folk-say succeed in catching the color, flavor, and excitement of a culture in the making and in communicating something of the same glow of discovery that the first settlers felt on going into a new country. Indeed, part of the heritage.
Never were land and lore more perfectly suited and wedded to each other. For in the South folklore is truly a way of life, and the way of life naturally breeds lore. The rural South is a land of the out out-of-doors come to the door and even indoors, where the “gallery”, the store-porch, the kitchen, the parlor, and the nursery are made for storytelling and for ballad singing; where the climate and the open sky make a man expansive and enduring of lung and tongue when it is his “night to howl” or when he is haranguing his “friends and feller-citizens” or “sistern and brethren”.
In the story telling belt of the South barnyard fowl and animals not only come up to the door but enter into the stories themselves, to talk and jest, while in the fields and forests, the hollers and ridges, are the heroes of yarns and tales as tall as the timber. This is the land of the sky, where fantasy and dread follow the winding creeks trails and penetrate the hidden ways of mountain fastnesses. It is a land of many waters, including the father of them all, of “going fishing,” of mysterious caverns, buried treasure and spelunking. It is a land of big talk and big eating, of home, homefolks, and homeward thoughts, where people “stand and take it”, “where they stand on their rights, they stand on faith in the Lord, and they stand on the justice of jury and court; they stand in self reliance, and they stand ready to help a neighbor in distress.” It is also a “dark and bloody ground”, where the invaders were bidden to go into the land and “possess it and to smite the inhabitants thereof ‘hip and thigh’”; where blood flows thicker than water and calls for blood when tempers flare; where the codes of personal and family honor, the duello, and the blood-feud make for strong loves and hates, violence and a “stern and selfish conception of justice.”
In this land of fighters and several wars against the invader, including fought against brother, men put daring above discipline and etiquette to give us heroes like the “Swamp Fox,” “Old Hickory,” Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, partisan rangers and raiders like Morgan and Mosby, and guerrillas like Quantrell. In this land of “our contemporary ancestors,” one hears the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare, stories that might have been told by the Canterbury pilgrims, and ballads of seventeenth and eighteenth century England and Scotland, handed down and kept alive by people of the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in America by people “who do not like books so well, but…like to remember and memorize many things that [they] do love.” Theirs is a land of “make it yourself or do without”, with the accent sometimes on the second alternative; of “don’t take no orders from nobody nohow,” “I’m agin it,” and “don’t care a damn,” where folks “down creek” or yan side” are furriners,” where the “fotched-on” or “newfangled” is resented or distrusted.
It is a land where the word “old” – the Old South, the old folks, Old Man So and So, little old this and that – terms of affection and pride rather than of reproach. It is a land sectional unity in a regional variety, where Southerners wear the name “Southern” as a badge of difference and a chip on the shoulder; where people like to stay put or move about and come back home as they please and live their own lives in their own way, without outside interference or criticism; where every man is caught in the giant web of his family inheritance and re-collectiveness, his limited solidarities, class loyalties and local rivalries.
In a land where folklore, like history (in Voltaire’s phrase) “does not always lie,” it was natural for both to overlap considerably and both to partake of folk say, a kind of individual folklore in which the people are allowed to tell their own story in their own way. And because folklore is closer to the way of life and more on the surface in the South, as compared with regions where, in the confusion of cities and babel of tongues, it is buried under a complicated overlay of artificial civilization, it was inevitable that a study of Southern folklore should shape itself around Southern life and character. Such ways and folkways were, of course, first of all American and universal before they were Southern, but because they have persisted longest in the South, in combination with one another, they have to come to be considered characteristically, if not exclusively, “Southern”.