The Wolfpen Notebooks: James Still's Record of Appalachian Life

Abstract

The Wolfpen Notebooks: James Still's Record of Appalachian Life Jim Wayne Miller "There are twenty-three of them, six by four inches, wire-hinged,"1 James Still has written of the notebooks he began keeping more than half a century ago, soon after moving to a two-story log house between Dead Mare Branch and Wolfpen, on Little Carr Creek in Knott County, Kentucky. The original notebooks are preserved in Special Collections at the University of Kentucky. Their contents are now available in The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991). An extraordinarily multifaceted record, The Wolfpen Notebooks reveal much about the life of the scattered community Still became a part of. The entries often suggest sources for Still's poems, short stones, and novels. They are especially revealing for what they tell us about the folk speech of Still's chosen place, where he has lived and listened attentively for more than half a century. Asked to account for the way people in her community spoke, a Knott County woman observed: "The people here not having been told what to do or say 'the right way,' do things their way." Her explanation not only accounts for the speech of her east Kentucky neighbors, it is also a fair explanation or folk speech in any place, at any time. For folk speech is unconcerned with the criterion of correctness. Consequently, folk speech frequently manages to be eloquent without being grammatical or correct . Folk speech is too busy improvising , making do with what it has to work with. While folk speech often deals with general propositions and universal experiences , its materials are the particulars of local life. So it is little wonder a Hindi proverb maintains that language changes every eighteen or twenty miles! The improvisational spirit of folk speech accounts for its color and vividness . Folk speech employs verbs in striking ways: "You'd betterthrow a little air into them tires. They're about to go flat and hunker up."—"I used to be the worst drunkard ever was and I throwed it down. If I could, anybody can." Verbs become nouns, nouns verbs. A man speaks of being able to belly up to a table. Someone tells about a man with a head so big he can hardly pack it around. Someone is accused of telling a pack of lies. Folk speech is often close to poetry because , like poetry, it deals with abstractions by discoursing in concrete circumstances and particular instances. Folk speech is verbal bricolage, discourse made from the materials immediately at hand. Thus, not having recourse to the Kamasutra or to one of the several treatises on love from the Middle Ages, an east Kentucky sage whose words James Still recorded distinguishes and names his own categories: There's two kinds of love: the 'ground-hog case' and the 20 James Still at home on Little Carr Creek, Knott County, Kentucky 'cholera case.' The ground-hog case you can get over. With the cholera case it's marry or die." The Wolfpen Notebooks reveal that the folk speech of east Kentucky, like folk speech everywhere, contains numerous instances of naming—of plants, animals , seasons, places. Such naming is a fundamentally poetic activity, for it relies on the drawing of analogies and the expression of implicit and explicit metaphors . Thus the castor bean is known locally as dog tick (because it resembles a tick on a dog). The brown thrush is known as the corn-planter bird (because it is seen and heard at the time when corn is planted). The cold spells of spring are redbud winter, dogwood winter , blackberry winter (because they occur in conjunction with the blooming of these plants). An ear of corn with variously colored grains is skewbald, the same word used to describe a horse of brown and white coloring. (In a folksong about a famous racehorse, the word has become corrupted to Stewball.) An herb believed to cure incontinence is known as pee-in-the-bed. In the naming of people, places, and things, folk speech is rough and ready. A prized rifle is called "Death o' Many." A man named Ulysses, notorious...

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