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BACK IN THE OUGHT ’SIXTIES by Francis Edward Abernethy  I (an English teacher whose academic field was Renaissance drama) became a folklorist in the 1960s, and I am going to tell you about a few of those dear souls who stood in loco parentis and showed me the way. This all started over coffee and moon pie—at five cents apiece, I might add—in the Lamar Tech faculty lounge, in 1959. The subject of the Texas Folklore Society came up, and a colleague told me that I should join up with that group. And fifty years ago I did. The following Easter, in 1960, I took the Greyhound from Beaumont and went to present a paper at my first meeting in San Antonio. I was much impressed with the Menger Hotel, but I was much suppressed by the boisterous jollity of that Thursday evening’s TFS gathering at Casa Rio, when I lately arrived. After dinner, people sang. I sat in the last tier, hugging the shadows. Members were in full cry when I crept out and went back to the hotel to go over my paper for the fiftieth time. I was probably still going over my paper Friday morning at 8:45. Soon after nine, I made my first appearance before the Texas Folklore Society with “East Texas Josey Party Songs.” I was pleased that the audience did not go to sleep, walk out, or throw things. I was warmed by their reception. But, the high point of the session—and of many sessions and of many years thereafter— occurred when Hermes Nye, whom I had never heard of, passed me a note that read (I still have that note!), “Delightful! Let’s get together this evening.” And we did! After the banquet that night, Hermes, Américo Paredes, Roger Abrahams, and I and three or four others congregated in a dim corner of the banquet room. Everybody else had gone. Hermes had his guitar, and we circled up our chairs and began to sing, usually singly 273 but sometimes in duet harmony or as a group. We quickly worked it out that each of us would sing two songs and then pass on the guitar . A soldier from Arkansas wandered in and joined us, and a bunch of folks wandered by and sat in the darkness around us. We loved it. Nobody hogged the guitar. Everybody enjoyed everybody else. I remember singing “Precious Jewel” and “Little Green Valley ,” neither of which anybody knew. It was a close encounter of the very best kind, and I felt a sense of belonging with them and the Texas Folklore Society that I have never gotten over. I have missed only one meeting, last year at Lubbock, since 1960. Actually, during those morning and afternoon sessions, I enjoyed meeting a whole host of TFS folks, one of whom was Joe Doggett, a long-lost and distant cousin, and Hudson Long whose name was famous on an American lit textbook—and Jim Lee continually confused Hudson Long with Wilson Hudson. Ironically, later generations got confused between Jim Lee (He of Many Households) and Jim Byrd, and they called both of them “Jim Byrd Lee.” I met the poet Everett Gillis from Texas Tech and Brownie McNeill, who was famous because he had cut a folk song LP with his picture on the jacket and was to become president of Sul Ross, and John Q. Anderson with the tiny guitar that knew a thousand songs, and many who would become integral parts of my life. That is who I am remembering and celebrating herein, those TFS members of my parents’ generation, Back in the Ought ’Sixties , the ones who planted the vines from which I harvested the grapes, the richest part of my academic life—my years with the Texas Folklore Society. And I also secondarily celebrate those that came into the fold about the same time, because we were on the watershed, and we were the new generation. Jim Lee and Ed Gaston had come a year earlier in 1958, but we all—James Ward and Edwin Jr., Jim Byrd, John O. West, Paul Patterson, Jim Day—came about the same time. And later in the ’Sixties, the much younger Joyce Roach, Sarah Greene, and Sylvia Grider came on board. We were the new TFS generation in the ’Sixties. We were the kids! believe it or not, still wet behind the ears! 274 The Folk: Who We Are and What We...

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