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Elizabeth Madox Roberts 345 Cordia Greer Petrie “Angeline Jines the Choir” The Angeline Keaton stories by Cordia Greer Petrie are a variation of the ancient wise fool archetype: a naive country bumpkin goes to town (or court) speaking a rustic dialect but, under the cloak of ignorance and innocence, preaches good lessons to his or her betters. Sometimes he is a sidekick-servant to a master, such as Sancho Panza to Don Quixote; sometimes the comic moralist is a loner, like Angeline, who moves through a “superior” society and reveals its hypocrisy and hollowness. In most of her sketches the educated, affluent Cordia Greer Petrie assumes the mask of Angeline to take on urbane snobs of all kinds and undress them. Born at Merry Oaks in Barren County in 1872, Petrie attended Eminence College and later married a physician, Hazel G. Petrie, who practiced in eastern Kentucky for some ten years before moving to Louisville. She died in 1964. Most of her sketches focus on Angeline’s adventures in polite society, but in the following one she satirizes herself as Angeline tries to join a sophisticated choir in the county seat. h She sat upon the edge of the veranda, fanning herself with her “split” sunbonnet, a tall, angular woman, whose faded calico gown “lost connection ” at the waist line. Her spring being dry, she came to our well for water. Discovering that Angeline Keaton was a “character,” I invariably inveigled her to rest awhile on our cool piazza before retracing her steps up the steep, rocky hillside to her cabin home. “I missed you yesterday,” I said as a starter. “Yes’m,” she answered in a voice harsh and strident, yet touched with a peculiar sibilant quality characteristic of the Kentucky backwoodsman, “and thar wuz others that missed me, too!” Settling herself comfortably, she produced from some hidden source a box of snuff and plied her brush vigorously. “We-all have got inter a wrangle over at Zion erbout the church music,” she began. “I and Lum, my old man, has been the leaders ever since we moved here from Lick-skillet. We wuz alluz on hand—Lum with his tunin’ fork and me with my strong serpraner. When it come to linin’ off a song, Lum wuz pintedly hard to beat. Why, folks come from fur and near to hear us, and them city folks, at Mis’ Bowles’ last summer, lowed thar warn’t nothing in New York that could tech us. One of ’em offered us a dollar to sing 345 346 The Kentucky Anthology inter a phonygraf reckerd, but we wuz afeerd to put our lives in jopperdy by dabblin’ in ’lectricerty. But even celebrerty has its drawbacks, and a ‘profit is not without honor in his own country,’ as the saying is. A passel of ’em got jellus, a church meeting was called, unbeknownst to us, and ermong ’em they agreed to make a change in the music at old Zion. That peaked-faced Betty Button wuz at the bottom of it. Ever since she tuk that normal course at Bowling Green she’s been endeverin’ to push herself inter promernence here at Bear Waller. Fust she got up a class in delsarty, but even Bear Waller warn’t dull ernough to take to that foolishness!Then she canvassed the county with a cuttin’ system and a book called ‘Law at a Glance.’ Now she’s teaching vokle culshure. She orter know singers, like poits, is born, not made! Jest wantin’ to sing won’t do it. It takes power. It’s give up mine’s the powerfullest voice in all Bear Waller. I kin bring old Brindle in when she’s grazing in the woods, back o’ Judge Bowles’ medder, and I simply step out on the portico and call Lum to dinner when he’s swoppin’ yarns down to the store quarter o’ mile away. Fur that matter, though, a deef and dum man could fetch Lum to vittles. “Do you know Bear Waller owes its muserkil educashun to me? Mine wuz the fust accordyon brought to the place, and I wuz allus ready to play fur my nabers. I didn’t hafter be begged. I orgernized the Zobo band, I lent ’em my ballads, but whar’s my thanks? At the battin’ of an eye they’re ready to drop me for that quavery-voiced Button gal and them notes o’ hern that’s no more’n that many peryids and commers...

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