Leonard W. Roberts: Folk Narrative Scholar

Leonard W. Roberts: Folk Narrative Scholar by Lynwood Montell Leonard W. Roberts was born January 28, 1912, on isolated Toler Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky, eighteen miles east of Prestonsburg. He was one of eleven siblings— eight boys and three girls—born into a farming and sawmilling family. Leonard went to a one-room school on Toler Creek the first six years, then moved to Pikeville where he completed the last two grades. He attended Betsy Layne High School for one year before joining the army at age 18 in 1930. His daughter Rita Kelly feels that during his stint in the army, Roberts developed an appreciation for his home culture that strongly influenced his choice of career as a regional folklorist. Roberts completed high school at Pikeville in two years, then moved immediately to Berea College, where he graduated in 1939 with a double major in English and music. That fall, he taught in a junior high school in Jackson, Kentucky. Following a one-year stint there, he became band director and basketball coach at a junior college in Brevard, North Carolina, where he remained until 1942, at which time he returned to Pike County, Kentucky. Roberts taught one month at Belfry High School that fall, but resigned in order to enroll at the University of Iowa to pursue a Master's degree in English. He dreamed of a writing and college teaching career at that time, having been encouraged along these lines by his friend and hero, Jesse Stuart, whom he had met some months earlier. Stuart's influence on Roberts was reflected in the latter's choice of a thesis topic which, not surprisingly, was a novel called Home in the Rock, which was a novel of Eastern Kentucky. The story was based on his eldest brother's teaching career and, to an extent, his own teaching experiences at Stringtown during the summer of 1942. Leaving Iowa City in 1943, Roberts took a teaching job in Elkhorn City, Kentucky. The following year, he began teaching in the Army's V-12 program, designed to train enlisted men to become officers. This took him to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he not only taught for the military, but began doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina on the side. Family members think it was here that he first met Stith Thompson and William Hugh Jansen, folklorists at Indiana University. Roberts remained at Chapel Hill until the war was over in 1945. From here, the Roberts family moved back to Berea, where he taught English at the Berea Foundation School until 1950, and actively involved his students in collecting folktales and songs from their families back in the mountains. By the summer of 1948 he was able to enroll at Indiana University to study folklore under Thompson and Jansen. Roberts then transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1949, following Jansen who had taken employment there. During the 1949-50 academic year 46 Roberts began work on his doctoral dissertation under Jansen's supervision. In the fall term of 1950 both Leonard Roberts and his wife were on the faculty at Pine Mountain Settlement School, where he taught and pursued his interests in collecting folktales, songs, and other forms of family lore. It was during the stay at Pine Mountain (1950-53) that he learned of the Couch family, who were to become his single most important informants. The dissertation was finally completed in 1953, at which time Roberts and family were in Piedmont, Georgia, where he was on the college faculty there. His doctoral study was based on the large body of folk narratives he had recorded from Eastern Kentucky, mainly in Leslie and Perry counties. It was published at Jansen's recommendation by the University of Kentucky Press in 1955 under the title South from Hell-fer-Sartin, Kentucky mountain folktales. The 105 "authentic folktales" as they were constantly referred to by reviewers , were classified and annotated so as to indicate their parallel occurrences in other Indo-European cultures. Roberts carefully pointed out that "most of the tales are from the British Isles," but with dominant Irish influence. The second most important source was Germany, he...