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215 HOW THE TFS HAS INFLUENCED ME AS A WRITER, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHAT IT HAS MEANT TO ME AS A LISTENER by Elmer Kelton  The Texas Folklore Society meetings have long been a highlight of my year, in small part because I pick up inspirations for my fiction writing, but in much larger part because I simply enjoy the people, the stories they tell, and the songs they sing. I attended my first TFS meeting in 1976 at Arlington to deliver the banquet talk, “Three Kinds of Truth: Fact, Folklore, and Fiction .” I was struck by the broad range of subject matter and the laidback , informal manner of the presenters. The following year I went again, under the guise of being a reporter looking for a news story or two. Soon, I no longer needed excuses. I went because I wanted to, because I enjoyed the papers, and more than that, because I enjoyed the people I met. I have missed few annual meetings since. Over the years the papers have inspired me, and they have given me story ideas and obscure details which I have used shamelessly to help bring the illusion of life to my fiction. They have given me an insight into the lives and times of people who came before me, people who never show up in the standard history books. In all the history courses I took in high school and the university , I don’t remember one that mentioned Big Foot Wallace or Sally Skull or Ab Blocker, yet those people left a deep imprint on the Texas of their time. They and their anonymous contemporaries have left an imprint on us all. As a fiction writer I have tried to keep my antenna up for anything that can add color or a sense of reality to my stories. At one TFS meeting a long time ago, someone made reference to the use of madstones to draw poison from bites inflicted by rabid animals. I was told that J. Frank Dobie had written on that subject in an early TFS publication. At the moment I was having plot problems with a sequence concerning a cattle drive. I had heard about madstones since I was a boy, but this casual comment triggered my imagination. I found an article by Dobie and another by Michael Ahearn. Thanks to them and the TFS, I had a plot twist that lifted my story off high center. At another time I was writing a novel about boom days in early West Texas oilfields. From my own boyhood recollections of one such boomtown, I knew that bootlegging was of considerable economic importance during Prohibition. A paper at a TFS meeting described in detail the construction and workings of a homemade still. With permission of the author, Janet Jeffery, I worked this into my story to enhance the illusion of reality so necessary in a piece of fiction. I had long been aware of the great black folklorist J. Mason Brewer and his wonderful stories, like the one of the boys trying to baptize a cat and her kittens. (The punchline: “Jes’ sprinkle her an’ let her go on to hell.”) Jim Byrd’s TFS accounts of Brewer were helpful to me in constructing a continuing character I used in half a dozen books based on the early Texas Rangers. (I wish I could have told Brewer the reply my father received from a black service station attendant when Dad asked him the difference between regular and ethyl gasoline. The droll answer: “About two cents a gallon.”) Thanks to Joyce Gibson Roach, I have been able to place several high-toned women in various fictional settings. And thanks to Ernestine Sewell Linck, I learned to avoid any restaurant whose sign proclaims “Eats.” The beauty of folklore is that it is free of restrictions that so often bind the formal historian, who must be able to document every detail. Formal history too often squeezes out the breath of life, leaving only names, dates, and bare statistics. Folklore shines light into the black holes of history. It imparts life to men and women of the past and gives us insight into who and what they 216 The Folk: Who We Are and What We’ve Done really were. It recreates in color and detail events of long ago. It puts flesh on dry bones. This is very much what the historical novelist tries to do—to breathe life back into the past...

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