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“Pecos Bill and His Pedigree”
- University of North Texas Press
- Chapter
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PECOS BILL AND HIS PEDIGREE by Charles Clay Doyle Upon this anniversary of the Texas Folklore Society, like other long-time members, I have been moved to wander back down the lane of memories and tellings, especially ones that relate to my alma mater, The University of Texas. I have newly examined the early volumes of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, the earliest of which (edited by Stith Thompson), from 1916, gives the programs for the first five official annual meetings (1911–1915) and a membership list from 1916. The names are impressive and, to me, personally noteworthy. How strange that just two or three “degrees of separation” can link a century ago with the here-and-now! My father, who died in 1965, had been a student of J. Frank Dobie’s; I cherish a yellowed carbon copy of a letter of recommendation that Dobie wrote for him in 1939. In 1947, when I was a small child, Roy Bedichek—Dobie’s friend and, evidently, my father’s—was a houseguest at my family’s home in Weimar, Texas (some ninety-five miles east of Austin; population 1,800); as a gift, he left an inscribed copy of his brand new book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, which the Society distributed to members as an “extra book” in lieu of a 1947 volume of PTFS. I myself spent most of the 1960s at The University of Texas (B.A. 1964, Ph.D. 1969). As an undergraduate, I majored in mathematics ; the mathematics department was housed in Benedict Hall—and H. Y. Benedict’s name appears on the 1916 roster of the Society (as does the name Sidney E. Mezes; Mezes Hall stands adjacent to Benedict Hall). In graduate school my principal folklore mentor was Américo Paredes, and I worked for a year or two as paper-grader and research assistant for the elderly-seeming Wilson M. Hudson (he was about fifty-seven, several years younger than I myself am now. Hudson’s hometown was Flatonia, a mere fifteen miles west of Weimar, and even smaller). My literary mentor, 181 Thomas P. Harrison, venerable and leonine Shakespearean, Spenserian, and Miltonist, did not belong to the Texas Folklore Society, but he once regaled me with an anecdote from his early years of professorhood: He had accompanied John Lomax and the visiting luminary from Harvard, George Lyman Kittredge (who— according to legend, at least—suggested to Lomax and Leonidas Payne the creation of the Society), to a Sunday service at an AME church in Austin. There Kittredge, an aged white man with a nimbus of white hair and a flowing white beard, was perhaps mistaken for Moses, or for God Himself; the congregants beseeched him to come forward and preach the sermon—which he did.1 I suppose it’s normal, now, as I hurtle toward my own dotage, that I should reminisce a lot about my collegiate and post-graduate times at the University and my childhood years in Weimar. In fact, I think much about childhood in general. So, I took an acute interest recently when one of my little grandsons, who has no connection with Texas (other than genes), mentioned that troublesome Texas icon Pecos Bill. Had he learned about him on television? In a book? From elementary school teachers? Perhaps even from oral tradition on the playground? (My own first acquaintance with Pecos Bill certainly did not derive from oral tradition; I remember, quite particularly, meeting him in the pages of Boys’ Life magazine .) How durable the character has proved in the imaginative life of American children! Here, then, I undertake, as a patriarchal duty, the following effort to clarify some points about the status and history of Pecos Bill—for the sake of new generations’ understanding of old things. Having meandered down Memory Trail, I now trudge back toward the present—but in the august footsteps, first, of Mody C. Boatright, one of the true giants of the Texas Folklore Society, friend and colleague of J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, and Wilson Hudson; and, next, of Dobie himself; and, then, of James M. Day, eminent historian of matters Texian and president of the Texas Folklore Society in 1978–1979. Day’s article “Pecos Bill: His Genesis and Creators,” in PTFS #44 for 1982, remains (remarkably) 182 Books, Papers, and Presentations: Texas Folklore Scholarship the most recent extended scholarly study of the subject, which members of the Society had pondered frequently during the preceding decades...