The William R. Ferris Reader, Omnibus E-book: Collected Essays from the Pages of Southern Cultures, 1995-2013

By William Ferris

Renowned folklorist William R. Ferris has captured the voices of southern musicians, artists, writers, and thinkers for forty years—and we have been proud to publish his work in Southern Cultures for nearly half of that time.

To celebrate Southern Cultures' 20th anniversary, we present our inaugural special omnibus ebook, The William R. Ferris Reader. Collected here for the first time are all 20 of Bill Ferris's essays and interviews as they have appeared in our pages between 1995 and 2013, as well as an introduction to the collection by Ferris.

From folk humor to moon pies to Faulkner, Welty, Walker, and so much more, we are delighted to share this special collection of a favored friend, mentor, and colleague.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Apr 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469620831

William Ferris

William Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris is coeditor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and author of several other books, including the informal trilogy The South in Color: A Visual Journal, The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, and Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues.

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The William R. Ferris Reader, Omnibus E-book

Collected Essays from the Pages of Southern Cultures, 1995–2013

Published by the

University of North Carolina Press

for the

UNC Center for the Study of the American South

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

Center for the Study of the American South

Kenneth R. Janken, director

Editorial Board

Edward L. Ayers University of Richmond

E. M. Beck Sociology, Emeritus, University of Georgia

Catherine W. Bishir North Carolina State University Libraries

Merle Black Political Science, Emory University

James C. Cobb History, University of Georgia

Peter A. Coclanis History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Thadious Davis English, University of Pennsylvania

Pam Durban English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

William R. Ferris History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Wayne Flynt History, Emeritus, Auburn University

Thavolia Glymph History, Duke University

Rayna Green National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Larry J. Griffin Sociology and History, Georgia Southern University

Ferrel Guillory The Program on Public Life, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Peggy Hargis Sociology, Georgia Southern University

Trudier Harris English, Emerita, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fred Hobson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lisa Howorth Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi

Patrick J. Huber History, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Anne Goodwyn Jones English, University of Florida

Michael Kreyling English, Vanderbilt University

Louis Kyriakoudes History, University of Southern Mississippi

Malinda Maynor Lowery History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Michael O’Brien History, University of Cambridge

Ted M. Ownby Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

James L. Peacock Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Theda Perdue History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

C. David Perry University of North Carolina Press

Tom Rankin Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University

John Shelton Reed Sociology, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Anne Firor Scott History, Emerita, Duke University

Bland Simpson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vincas P. Steponaitis Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Steven Stowe History, Indiana University

John M. Vlach American Studies, George Washington University

David Wilkins American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota

Charles R. Wilson History, University of Mississippi

Southern Cultures Copyright © 2014 Center for the Study of the American South

Indexed in Humanities International Complete. Back Issues are available through www.SouthernCultures.org

The William R. Ferris Reader, Omnibus E-book: Collected Essays from the Pages of Southern Cultures, 1995–2013

A Reflection on Twenty Essays and Twenty Years

Introduction to the Special Omnibus E-book by William R. Ferris

Southern Literature and Folk Humor

Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995

Eudora Welty: ... standing under a shower of blessings

Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003

Alice Walker: I know what the earth says

Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004

John Dollard: Caste and Class Revisited

Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004

Robert Penn Warren: Mad for Poetry

Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004

Harold Burson on interviewing Faulkner for the Memphis Commercial Appeal

Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

Everything leads me back to the feeling of the blues: B. B. King, 1974

Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006

Walker Evans, 1974

Volume 13, Number 2, Winter 2007

Pete Seeger, San Francisco, 1989 (with Michael K. Honey)

Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007

Alan Lomax: The Long Journey

Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007

Alex Haley: Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1989: Angels, Legends, and Grace

Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008

The Devil and His Blues: James Son Ford Thomas

Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009

Blues Greats

Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009

My Idol Was Langston Hughes: The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence (with Margaret Walker Alexander)

Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010

Touching the Music: Charles Seeger

Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010

A lengthening chain in the shape of memories: The Irish and Southern Culture

Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011

Those little color snapshots: William Christenberry

Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011

Bobby Rush: Blues Singer–Plus

Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011

Trading Verses: James Son Ford Thomas and Allen Ginsberg

Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2013

Moon Pies and Memories (with Lee Smith, Doug Marlette, George Tindall, John Egerton, and Mildred Council)

Volume 19, Number 2, Summer 2013

A Reflection on Twenty Essays and Twenty Years

Since Marcie and I moved to Chapel Hill in 2002, we have cherished our relationship to Southern Cultures. My first article published under their masthead was Southern Literature and Folk Humor, which appeared in 1995. At that time, I directed the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Little did I imagine that seven years later I would be on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and that my work at UNC would be intimately tied to this wonderful journal.

As Southern Cultures celebrates its twentieth year, I proudly celebrate that they have published twenty of my articles. Those articles foreshadowed and helped me develop my two most recent books Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues and The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, both published by UNC Press, where Southern Cultures and my work have found a happy home.

On a personal level, I have shared many wonderful conversations with editors Ayse Erginer, Dave Shaw, and Emily Wallace as they prepared each issue of Southern Cultures. I love to read the impressive outline of future issues on the whiteboard on their wall. That outline reflects their deep knowledge of the American South, and readers impatiently await their special issues on music, food, and photography. Standing in their modest office reminds me of the view from the helm of the Delta Queen when it plied the waters of the Mississippi River though the limitless expanse of water and land. Readers of Southern Cultures experience a similar thrill each time they open an issue and read its engaging, and always thought-provoking, essays about the American South.

Southern Cultures is truly a national treasure, and I am enormously proud to be associated with the publication. I am confident that their next twenty years will bring exciting new issues that will help us better understand the rich, complex history of our region and its future. Southern Cultures enriches my life in more ways that I can count, a gift for which I am deeply grateful.

— William R. Ferris

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2014

Southern Literature and Folk Humor

William Ferris

During his first visit in this country, Carl Jung noted the distinct style of American humor. Jung was struck by the real American laughter, that grand, unrestrained, unsophisticated laughter and felt it showed remarkable vivacity and ease of expression. Americans, he wrote, are great talkers.¹

America's great talkers are the root of literary traditions that emerged in the nineteenth century as the country defined its identity through regions such as New England, the South, and the West.² Prior to this time American writers looked to Europe for their models of humor, imitating eighteenth-century neoclassical comedy in a generalized style, with no particular background in place or time. In 1805 American author Hugh Brackenridge lamented the failure of American humor that had in fact, yet no character; neither the clown nor the gentleman.³

American literature countered this criticism in the nineteenth century through writers such as Mark Twain, A. B. Longstreet, and Josh Billings, whose work developed regional humor. In the work of each we encounter the great talkers whom Jung felt were the essence of American humor. Folk humor developed a comic vision of American character, and indigenous folk forms such as the tall tale were developed by writers. It was no coincidence that American folk and literary traditions blossomed at the same time.⁴

How does one explain the importance of folk traditions such as the tall tale that developed in American literature? One writer attributes them to the existence of lime in the water.⁵ A more likely reason is the isolation of regional Americans who felt a strong sense of place, and from this regional sense emerged the greatest American folk art—the art of oral story telling.⁶ Nineteenth-century travelers commented on the vitality of folk tales, and James Russell Lowell urged writers to develop these tales in their fiction. No language . . . that cannot suck on feeding juices from the mother-earth of a rich common-folk-talk, can bring forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor of expression does not pass from page to page, but from man to man.⁷

American folk humor of the nineteenth century is defined by three regions—New England, the South, and the West. Each developed a distinctive dialect and stereotyped characters. New England humor developed the Yankee Peddlar, a shrewd trader who speaks through his nose and travels from town to town with his wares. Southern humor offered the slow-talking farmer such as the Arkansas traveler who outwits city folk in stock situations. Western frontier humor produced the fighter and heavy drinker, given to goughing [sic], chewing off ears, and butting. By 1830 traditions of both folk and literary humor existed that constitute the birth of American humor. Regional snobbery sometimes emerged, and one writer of the period commented on how the Bostonian looks down upon the Virginian—the Virginian on the Tennessean—the Tennessean on the Alabamian—the Alabamian on the Mississippian—the Mississippian on the Louisianian—the Louisianian on the Texan—the Texan on New Mexico, and, we suppose New Mexico on Pandemonium.⁸

Early travel accounts describe exaggerated boasts that were uniquely American in their expression and note the rugged quality of both landscape and speech as a basic part of the American experience. A famous example of exaggeration, or tall talk, was heard in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1808: ? am an alligator, half man, half horse; can whip any man on the Mississippi, by G—d . . . i am a Mississippi snapping turtle; have bear claws, alligator's teeth, and the devil's tail; can whip any man by g—d.' This was too much for the first, and at it they went like two bulls.⁹

The tall talk boast and the tall tale both develop humor through exaggeration, and the latter is distinguished from tall talk by its narrative form.¹⁰ Like the epic, the tall tale creates a superhuman world of men and animals, some of which are popularized in images such as Paul Bunyan, the Jolly Green Giant, and

Texas post cards of men riding jackrabbits. European visitors were struck by the exaggeration in American folk humor and felt it captured the vitality and spirit of frontier life.¹¹

Understatement is an equally important vehicle in folk humor and has received less attention than exaggerated boasts and tall tales. Slow-talking farmers outwit urban travelers in the folk humor of New England, the South,and the West. A stock situation, often called the Arkansas traveler, shows the lost city dweller asking directions from a local farmer.

Which way is Junction City?

I don't know.

You don't know much, do you?

No, but I ain't lost.

The folk often feign ignorance as a defense against outsiders, feeling it is better to understate one's knowledge than to be caught a fool, a technique that Will Rogers, Josh Billings, Mark Twain, and A. B. Longstreet developed in their humor.

Understatement and irony are less appreciated than their exaggeration, and to neglect them is to underestimate the subtlety and wit of folk humor. Vance Randolph feels an emphasis on grotesque exaggeration in folk humor fails to acknowledge that the story teller appreciates understatement also, and knows more of irony than many sophisticated comedians.¹² Western humor that is often associated with the tall talk relies heavily on understatement, and in his essay Out where the Jest Begins, Eric Howard notes that understatement ... is perhaps even more often (than exaggeration) the foundation of the Westerner's special brand of comedy—as unique an expression of regional character as remains in this country.¹³

Deception

The most important question to raise about regional folk humor is what makes it an American expression. The element of folk humor most common to the American experience is deception. American folk humor is based on deception through either exaggeration or understatement. Though deception appears in folk humor of other cultures, the American style of telling a tale and unfolding humor is unique. Early travelers noted that deception was the major part of American humor. Frederick Marryat commented in 1839 that there is no country perhaps, in which the habit of deceiving for amusement, or what is termed hoaxing, is so common.¹⁴ The hoax or lie was a basic American institution that rose to an art in folk humor.¹⁵ Local speakers vied for the honor of being the greatest liars, and the western frontier was as full of accomplished liars as the average tavern sugar bowl was of ants.¹⁶

The truly great liar was more than a mere prevaricator. To simply not tell the truth was unacceptable; in fact, the lie had to rest on a solid foundation of truth. The speaker paid careful attention to circumstantial detail in order to maintain audience belief, and artistic restrictions forced the liar to embroider truth so that the lie remained believable. This verbal embroidery was carefully developed through an ingenious piling up of epithets, a sudden transition, a non-sequitur—something besides mere exaggeration.¹⁷

Deception was a dominant theme of folk humor in every region, and Vance Randolph appropriately titles his collection of Ozark humor We Always Lie to Strangers (1951). Randolph notes that in Arkansas the tradition was limited to men because most country women fail to see the distinction between a whack and an outright falsehood.

Americans openly enjoyed deception in their folk humor, and occasionally liars organized competitions that lasted an entire evening and attracted large audiences. In 1888 a Liars Club was founded in Springfield, Missouri, and each member given a lithographed certificate.¹⁸

The American love for deception was commercially exploited by P. T. Barnum who saw humbug as a form of American social therapy. Barnum felt that American audiences not only did not mind cries of trickery but were attracted by them. Amusement and deceit coexisted in their minds, and audiences were

attracted by suspected humbug such as the mermaid who was actually the body of a monkey sewn together with a fish.¹⁹ Like the folk humorist, Barnum understood that Americans were attracted to deception, especially when delivered with style and eloquence.

Mark Twain

Humor based on deception is an integral part of American character and is firmly rooted in her folklore. The art of lying through exaggeration or understatement is also an important theme in American literature, and nineteenth-century writers such as Mark Twain and Josh Billings were also renowned storytellers who spoke as effectively as they wrote. Twain was attracted to storytelling and considered it an indigenous American art. He explained that the art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.

Twain defined himself as a writer through folk humor and mined it for a literary style and content that are uniquely American. He carefully studied the American folk humorists' manner of telling as opposed to English comic and French witty stories that depend upon the matter. The latter European models depend on brevity and end with a point. American humor, in contrast, could be spun out at great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive at nowhere in particular.

In his own performances Twain developed understatement rather than exaggeration, as suggested in his comment that talk about his death had been greatly exaggerated. He was attracted to the unemotional storyteller whose face never reflected the humor of his tale. This unemotional delivery of tales was similar to performances by traditional ballad singers. The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.²⁰ Twain perceived that the speaker's style was as important as the actual story told, and an amateur might tell the same story without success. One's narrative style and ability to tell a story are far more important than originality. The performer is judged in the telling of a tale, and an audience is often entertained with familiar stories if they are delivered with humor and drama.

Twain carefully developed what Walter Blair calls the poetry of folk speech that was firmly grounded in the style and form of American storytellers.²¹ As early as 1891, Yale Professor Henry Beers stressed Twain's use of American folk humor, and more recent studies by Bernard DeVoto, Walter Blair, B. T. Whiting and Brander Matthews have made similar points.²²

Twain was familiar with frontier humor of the South and Southwest and developed characters whose counterparts he had met. Their lives were filled with stories that Twain recognized as the threshold of literature. The classic example of Twain's use of folk humor is the Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County that he heard in a dilapidated California hotel while visiting a mine in Angel's Camp. Twain had never heard the story before and was amused that neither Ben Coon, the narrator, nor his audience saw anything humorous about the yarn. Like Ben Coon, Twain's Simon Wheeler Never smiled, he never frowned ... he never betrayed the slightest bit of enthusiasm. The tale was frequently told by California miners during the early years of the Gold Rush and first appeared in print in the Sonora Herald, two years before Twain's version was published in the Saturday Press.²³

Twain's story was a great success with eastern audiences and launched his writing career. His gift for humorous understatement was reflected in his response to the story's success when he expressed chagrin that the East should have singled out for praise a villainous backwoods sketch rather than many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good that were written before the Jumping Frog.²⁴

Though Twain first heard the story in 1865, earlier versions have been recorded. In 1894 Henry Van Dyke asked Twain how old his story was and Twain replied, Forty-five years. Van Dyke then showed him Henry Sidgwick's college text, Greek Prose Composition, in which the story is told in a matching of wits between an Athenian and a Boeotian. In Twain's defense, however, the style of presentation is that of American folk humor, and as he correctly pointed out, the telling is more important than the story itself.²⁵

Understatement and folk humor are carefully developed by Twain in his treatment of deception. Like Barnum, Twain was fascinated by the duplicity, and Malcom Bradbury feels his work emerges from a deep sense that in America imposture is identity.²⁶

Twain's clearest statement of imposture is in the Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn. They offer an unforgettable American portrait, and similar figures appear in our fiction, folklore, and actual experience. Elmer Gantry, the folk trickster figure, and the local used car salesman are all cut from the same cloth.

The Royal Nonesuch are liars and deceivers in the best American tradition in that they use folk humor and drama to profit financially. As royalty on the raft, as relatives of the deceased, and as actors on the stage, they perpetrate dramatic deceits in their favor. Twain draws a clear line between such deceit and the romantic games that Tom Sawyer plays. The Royal Nonesuch are awake in the folk sense because they play on their audience's emotion and love for drama, and they skillfully manipulate the audience to their benefit.

Horse Sense

An understanding of American folk humor and Twain helps us focus on writers who develop folk humor through portraits of the trader and his animals. The theme of love for horses and mules and humorous tales associated with them recur in the works of American writers as diverse as Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, A. B. Longstreet, Josh Billings, P. T. Barnum, William Faulkner, and Will

Rogers. Throughout their work each uses horses and mules as humorous subjects. Sherwood Anderson gravely dedicates Horses and Men to Theodore Dreiser in whose presence I have sometimes had the same refreshed feeling as when in the presence of a thoroughbred horse.²⁷

Twain approaches the horse in a less serious vein when Buffalo Bill's steed introduces A Horse's Tale: I am Buffalo Bill's horse. I have spent my life under his saddle—with him in it, too, and he is good for two hundred pounds, without his clothes.²⁸

Faulkner, Longstreet, Rogers, and Billings address the folk world of livestock and develop humorous tales about auctions, traders, and the mule. Each writer is drawn to the world of horses and mules and its link with common sense and folk humor, for horse and mule people are rooted in the soil and have little respect for high culture. Walter Blair argues that these writers drew upon folk humor and what he terms horse sense. According to Blair, a man with horse sense does not have to look into a book to find the answers ... he can solve his own problems because he was born with a long head on him, he has 'been around,' and he has learned everything he can from experience. ... He doesn't depend on stuff in print . . . [and his answers] will be short.

American writers thus turned to folk humor and what many would consider the antithesis of literary tradition for their materials. As they celebrated muddy booted heroes of southern and western life, they separated themselves from European literary models. Jung's real American laughter and Blair's horse laugh are at the heart of both literary and folk traditions. American writers sensed the power and honesty of folk characters, like the trader whose verbal art paralleled their own.²⁹

Josh Billings

Josh Billings and Mark Twain were contemporaries who combined successful careers as lecturers and as writers, and a basic link exists between folk humor and

their fiction. Though Billings and Twain were personal friends, they disagreed on how folk humor should be used in fiction. Twain disliked Billings's spelling and felt it interfered with the flow of his text.³⁰ Billings was sensitive to this criticism and published an alleged letter from his friend on the subject:

Dear Josh: —I think a great deal of you, as a friend of long standing; ... It is acknowledged on all sides that you have thrown new light on the Mule, and also on other birds of the same family . . .

These researches ought not to die; but what can you expect?

Yale University desires to use them as text books in the natural history department of that institution, but they cannot stand the spelling. . . . Your friend, Mark Twain³¹

As Twain's letter suggests, Billings throws new light on the mule, and at times he seems obsessed with the animal. Tales of mules and Tall Talk appear often in Billings writing. He was famed as an auctioneer, and when a stranger inquired about him, a neighbor replied He's an auctioneer. He has been the auctioneer of the town (Poughkeepsie) for many years. As an auctioneer Billings was paid to sell the goods of others, and his success depended on his verbal skills. He described the auctioneer as an unfortunate individual who duz other peoples lieing for 10 dollars a day, and boards himself. He haz not az much jaw as a wolf trap, and as mutch cheeck az a 10 year ole mule ... A kuntry auckshioneer, and a kuntry horse jockey (trader), are two wonderphull cusses, in the rural deestrickts. I hav been an auckshioneer and kno what i am talking about.³² Billings felt a kinship with both the auctioneer and the trader whose verbal skills complemented his own as a writer.

Billings's, writing abounds with mule lore that ranges from praise to disgust for the animal. His first taste of fame and a welcome check for one hundred and fifty dollars came from his Essai on the Muel that was published in a Boston newspaper. His comments on mules were much loved by readers, and President Lincoln is said to have shocked his cabinet by quoting Billings with the comment, tha are sum men, verry korrupt at harte; I've know them to be good muels for six months, just to get a good chance to kick sumbody.³³

In his lectures Billings always included a major section entitled Josh on the mule. One critic describes his presentation as an hour of short paragraphs, every one worth its weight in gold. The humorist-philosopher always wore long hair and sat down when he lectured. He delivered quaint philosophy with his bright eyes looking over his glasses.³⁴

In his writing, Billings developed short humorous sketches similar to the short paragraphs, every one worth its weight in gold used in lectures. These tight, pithy statements served his needs as a writer and lecturer with equal success and differ from the humor of longer folk tales such as Twain's Celebrated Frog.

Billings portrays the mule as a stubborn animal whose mean temper was feared even after death: I don't take enny phoolish chances, if i waz called upon to mourn over a ded mule, i should stand in front ov him, and do mi weeping.³⁵

Billings links the mule's deceptive character with his stubborn temper and feels his character helps us understand our own worlds. He writes Mules are like sum men, very corrupt at harts.—I hav known them to be good mules for 6 months, just to git a good chance to kik sumboddy. Billings's humor at the mule's expense reveals his admiration for the animal, an admiration that Faulkner later develops in The Reivers when he writes of the mule, He will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once. Like Billings, Faulkner believed man's best hope for survival lay in his ability to endure in spite of adversity, a trait long understood by mules.³⁶

Billings had a great love for horses and felt their life, like the mule's, was a metaphor for the human experience. While Billings associates stubborn endurance with the mule, he links the horse to life's brevity and hardship. In his 1878 calendar each month contains a sketch and a verse describing the twelve stages of the horse's passage from birth to death. He evokes a sense of tragedy when sickness and death befall the noble horse, and one senses the author feels the same about his own life. About the time a man haz got old enuff to travel a good gait on hiz experience, death taps him on the shoulder, and wants him just around the corner.³⁷

Billings prided himself on his knowledge of horses and insisted on having only the best in his stable. He felt that the true test of pedigree for both men and horses was in their performance rather than their papers. I don't insist upon pedigree for a man or horse,—if a horse kan trot fasst, and honest, the pedigree is all right. If he kant, i wouldn't give a shilling a yard for his pedigree. Billings describes his ideal horse as a spirited animal who leaves his stable with the spirit of a wild pigeon leaving his cage, and felt a good horse is half human and should never tied to a plow.³⁸

Billings was a horse trader and usually fared well in his deals. Once, however, he traded for a horse standing in a muddy ditch, and when he led the horse away, he discovered that the water had concealed its deformed foot. Horse jockeys or traders recur in his work as he gives humorous advice to both traders and their customers. He counsels the trader that if, in swapping horses, yu git kornered, and kant lie, postpone the trade until the next day. Later he warns customers that the trader haz but little affecksun for a hoss, and only luvs him, for the cheat that iz in him . . . [he] needs az mutch watching az a hive ov bees do, who are just gitting reddy to swarm. Perhaps commenting on his own trades, Billings issued the four-line moral:

Tew sway a horse and not git beat,

Iz sumthing nice tew brag on,

I tried it once,

and that's the time I lost a horse—and a waggon.³⁹

The trader, the auctioneer, horses, and mules are important themes in the humor of Billings who develops folk humor in his writing. Billings was familiar with the world of traders, and the sales of his books attest to a widespread public interest in horses, mules, and traders.⁴⁰

Billings stands firmly in the tradition of American writers who develop folk humor. He focuses on humorous deception in his portraits of the trader and auctioneer and was keenly interested in lying. Like Barnum, he believes lies should be told with style and should benefit the liar. In his essay Lying, he reflects, As easy az it iz to lie, I am astonished that there are so few engaged in the bizzness, and that so few fust-rate lies are ever told ... I can't tell how long a man would be willing to tell white lies for fun when he might be turning an honest penny for himself by telling black ones.⁴¹

Lying with style is an integral part of American folk and literary traditions, and writers like Twain and Billings were attracted to both the lie itself and the style of its telling. Their fiction is based on deception and, like the folk narrator, they rely on verbal skills to create believable situations. The world of tale tellers has important parallels with the writer's world, and their respective audiences are both familiar with American folk humor.

Will Rogers

Will Rogers developed folk humor in a popular vein during this century. Rogers considered the mule was a vital part of American character and linked him with America's agrarian traditions. The mule has got to bring the farmer back. A mule was a fundamental that we had thought we could discard, but we couldn't and that's just one of a thousand fundamentals that we will have to get back to. Rogers commented that the mule business is one of the few areas that Wall Street and Government haven't been able to monkey with and predicted a day when machinery would be worthless. Tractors, cars, and cake will all be gladly traded on a span of hard-tales.⁴²

Like folk raconteurs, Roger's humor embroiders the truth: I use only one set method in my little gags, and that is to try and keep to the truth. Of course, you can exaggerate it, but what you say must be based on truth.⁴³

Rogers understood horses and was much loved by cowboys and livestock traders. He was known for his humorous stories, many of which are drawn from the sagebrush philosophy of the cow country. Rogers refrained from judging men because, like horses, no two are ever alike. Nobody can look at a horse and tell what he is worth, he is worth to you just how good he is to you and how bad you want him and how well he suits you.⁴⁴ Rogers was reluctant to commit himself too early in judging either men or horses.

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and William Faulkner both use horse traders as characters in their fiction and, interestingly, both Longstreet and Faulkner have links with Oxford, Mississippi, where Longstreet served as president of the University of Mississippi and Faulkner lived most of his life.

Longstreet was part of the Southwestern Humorists, and his work focused on folk characters set in Georgia. Longstreet recorded realistically local customs and manners in an effort to preserve the picture of an era that was rapidly passing away. The language of his characters was new to eastern literary audiences who welcomed its imagination and frontier spirit. Longstreet's stories are filled with characters who do not know all they need to know, and the tension between knowledge and ignorance is a basic source of humor.⁴⁵

In 1835 Longstreet published a collection of short stories entitled Georgia Scenes and stressed that his stories were by a Native Georgian who sought to develop Georgia language and Georgia humor. He consciously developed regional characters and their humor, and as Walter Blair notes, What was best in Georgia Scenes was at least in part derived from the method of the oral tale, for folktales were a familiar part of Georgia culture.⁴⁶

Longstreet develops humorous deception in his best-known story, "The

Horse Swap, in which an old trader outwits a younger man to whom he trades a blind and deaf horse for one with a concealed sore. The trader assures the younger man, If you can only get Kit [the horse] rid of them little failings, you'll find him all sorts of a horse."

Throughout his short story, Longstreet uses slang expressions that reflect an intimate knowledge of horse trading. He uses giraffe, for example, to describe a horse that is so large and clumsy that he is worthless for riding and Boot for money exchanged to cover the difference in a trade.⁴⁷ Longstreet carefully observed traders and incorporated their lore in his fiction. The relationship he develops between the seasoned old trader and the inexperienced young trader, and slang expressions in The Horse Swap have important parallels in folk tradition.

Edgar Allen Poe's comment on the ludicrous evinced in the portraiture of the steeds in Longstreet's Georgia horse trade springs from a literary rather than a folk perspective, for the role of the trader is to make the ludicrous quite believable. Longstreet's biographer, John Wade, stresses the etiquette of southern trades in which absolute silence is maintained by the onlookers, for to beat a man in a horse trade . . . was a matter of great pride.⁴⁸ Trades were conducted with the same serious or mock-serious tone found in folktales and frontier humor.

William Faulkner

When Sherwood Anderson befriended Faulkner in New Orleans and told him to return and write about the little patch of Mississippi he knew, he was aware of the power of folk characters and their oral tradition. Faulkner later acknowledged, Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about, and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.⁴⁹

Yeats found John Synge in a similar exile in Paris and advised him to return and write about Western Ireland Where men must reap with knives because of the stones.⁵⁰ Both Anderson and Yeats strongly believed literature and folk tradition could merge with special force as regional voices. Cleanth Brooks stresses the important parallels between Faulkner and Yeats in their use of folk materials: To both men there was available an oral tradition—a fountain of living speech. The Irish like to talk . . . Southerners also like to talk . . . and the art of telling a tale is still very much alive.⁵¹ Arthur Palmer Hudson laments that, apart from the work of Faulkner and Longstreet, the best stories told in Mississippi have never been written down, and perhaps never will be.⁵²

In 1927, Faulkner developed a tall tale that he published under the title Mosquitoes. In the story sheep mate with alligators in Louisiana swamps, and a fisherd [sic] gradually changes into a shark. One critic argues that this early work anticipates Faulkner's later use of tall tales in Spotted Horses. Harrison Smith was the first critic to note Faulkner's use of folk sources, and in a 1950 review of Collected Stories he urged readers to appreciate the robust humor in . . . his backwoods or hunting stories rather than dwelling on themes of cruelty and horror in his work.⁵³

Spotted Horses

Literary analysis of Faulkner's work should be tempered with an understanding of the folk tradition from which it is drawn. Spotted Horses, for example, has been called the culminating example of American backwoods humor. The closest literary precedent for the story is George Washington Harris's Mrs. Yardley's Quilting, a short story in Sut Lovingood's Yarns.