My Curious and Jocular Heroes: Tales and Tale-Spinners from Appalachia by Loyal Jones (review)

Loyal Jones literally wrote the eponymous book on Appalachian values, and one of the values he cites in that 1994 work is a sense of humor. On the topic of Appalachian humor, too, Jones has written the book . . . several, in fact. And then there’s the twenty-three years he spent as the director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College. Jones knows a thing or two about Appalachian storytelling and humor—so it is no small feat that he managed to narrow his list of tale-spinning heroes down to only four for this volume.

Jones chose well, and this book focuses on the life, repertoire, scholarship, and field collections of four luminaries of Appalachian storytelling and folklore:

• • Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882–1973), a North Carolina native who composed the song “Old Mountain Dew” and whose “memory collection” of the three hundred-plus “ballads, lyric songs, hymns, fiddle and banjo tunes, square dance calls, and stories” he had committed to memory was recorded twice, once in 1935 by Columbia University, and again in 1949 by the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

• • Kentucky native Josiah Combs (1886–1960), who arrived at Kentucky’s Hindman Settlement School barefoot in 1902 and went on to earn a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1925—his dissertation on Appalachian folk songs written entirely in French. Combs taught French and German at several universities during his academic career, including a stint at West Virginia University from 1922–1924.

• • Cratis T. Williams (1911–1985), another Kentucky native, whose dissertation, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction,” earned him the moniker of the “father of Appalachian Studies.” While Williams is known more as a scholar than as a performer, Jones ends his essay about Williams with a nod to Williams’s “vast storehouse of jokes, tales, and observations that he told with enthusiasm,” fondly concluding that “I chuckle often in remembrance of one of his rare stories, and I shall never hear them told so well again.”

• • Leonard Ward Roberts (1912–1983), another Kentuckian who—like Combs—came from an impoverished rural childhood to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa’s heralded creative writing program and a PhD from the University of Kentucky with his collection of ballads and folktales collected during a decade of fieldwork in eastern Kentucky. This work was later published as Sang Branch Settlers: Folksongs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family, which contemporary folklorist Carl Lindahl has called “the most important exploration of Appalachian folklife yet to be contained within the covers of a single book” (183). Roberts taught folklore and English classes at West Virginia Wesleyan University from 1961–1968, and served as president of both the Kentucky and West Virginia folklore societies.

My Curious and Jocular Heroes is organized into four major sections, one for each “hero,” and each of these sections is divided into two parts: a biographical and scholarly essay about each man, followed by a selection of the jokes, tales, and ballads he performed, and (in the case of Combs and Williams) selections from their scholarship.

The strength of Jones’s book is his familiarity with each of his subjects, three of whom he knew personally, and two of whom—Williams and Roberts—he knew well. Jones’s intimate knowledge of each man and his work makes his scholarly essays about them read more like memoir than scholarship, though the essays are indeed scholarly: Jones has spent a great deal of time combing through folklore archives and other sources to find material that best represents his heroes’ unique and important contributions to Appalachian folklore and scholarship. But it’s Jones’s warm regard for these four that make the book well worth reading; these men come to life both in Jones’s essays and then again, even more vividly, in the folkloric material Jones selects to illustrate their repertoire, performance style, and scholarly interests.

Jones emphasizes...