Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community

6. The Folk Culture

6 The Folk Culture Brooding over the moral and physical devastation resulting from the Civil War, fearful and suspicious of strangers, and engulfed in a protracted regional depression after 1865, the people of Cades Cove became increasingly introspective and retrospective during the Reconstruction Era. They had always been isolated from the outside world geographically. In the prosperous 1840S and 1850S, however, numerous immigrants from various parts of the nation and world had assured the community of frequent exposure to new ideas and attitudes. After 1865, the cove was no longer part of the Westward Movement; few new families entered the community, and the remaining families were related by blood and united in common values and attitudes through their shared wartime experiences. If the war served as a crucible which burned out of the community diversity and innovation, it also left a vacuum in the lives of people who, despite their geographic isolation, had always relied heavily on commerce and news from the market centers of East Tennessee. Gradually the market economy recovered, and cove farmers resumed the familiar pattern of selling their crops in Knoxville and Maryville and purchasing various mercantile goods there. In the wake of the terrible destruction from the war, however, there was little regional unity, politically , socially, or economically; after ·the central goal of winning the war had been accomplished, most of the rural communities of East Tennessee became isolated units temporarily alienated by poverty and bitterness from the larger region.l Although a cove farmer might continue to bring his crops to Knoxville; he no longer felt any closeness or sense 144 Cades Cove / A Southern Appalachian Community of community toward those outside the cove proper. The vacuum caused by this alienation and these temporary divisions within the larger region was filled by strengthening ties among themselves, thereby intensifying an already strong sense of community within the cove. In this atmosphere, an indigenous folk culture developed which compensated the cove people in part for their economic losses and greatly enriched the quality of their relationships with one another. Cultural historians, folklorists, and anthropologists have long disputed the exact nature and definition of "folk" cultures.2 For the purpose of this chapter, folk culture is defined simply as the totality of shared experience , knowledge, and mythology which the cove people communicated orally among themselves. The totality of this folk culture functioned almost as a foreign language inasmuch as it gave to the cove citizen both a frame of reference for interpreting new events and a code of anecdotes by which various attitudes or emotions could be immediately identified to other members of the group. Two important corollaries to this folk culture are the means by which it was expressed (regional dialect and its deviation from standard English), and the interpretation of the culture by outsiders and the representation of these interpretations in the fictional writings of such local colorists as Mary Noailles Murfree.3 This interpretation of folk culture is formulated only to explain and analyze the development of oral traditions within the cove and their functional value in the daily relationships of the cove people with one another. No serious study of folk culture can avoid, however, the warnings of Richard M. Dorson, who argues that the study of folklore has been "falsified, abused and exploited, and the public deluded with Paul Bunyan nonsense and claptrap collections" by money-writers who "have successfully peddled synthetic hero-books and saccharine folk tales as the stories of the people."4 The geographic isolation of the cove, for example, is one element in the development of their folk culture which must be examined with maximum critical skepticism. The diversity and number of immigrants moving into Cades Cove before 1860 offers patent evidence that the community was at one point neither inaccessible nor an undesirable place to live.5 The cessation of new immigrants after the war, and the expulsion of pro-Confederate families did lead to increasing social isola- The Folk Culture 145 tion and conformity. But this isolation was always relative. The cove people continued to sell their crops in Knoxville, receive visitors from other sections of the country, and remain informed of major state, national , and international events through an occasional newspaper. In turning its collective attention inward, the community did not completely cut itself off from the outside world, although it is a common fallacy of local historians to envision such geographic and...