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HIGH ART VERSUS THE ORAL TRADITION by Gene Young  I teach English—mostly American literature and Southwestern Literature , plus an annual installment of a course called “Texas Crossroads ,” which examines the intersections between Texas history, literature, and various segments of Texan culture. I’ve been doing this gig for a long time now, from the University of Tennessee, to Texas A&M, in Kentucky, and now at Sam Houston State University . I came to Sam from Kentucky in 1992 to be the chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages. Anyhow, one of my ideas during that time was to propose that we split our English 363 course, titled “Mythology and Folklore,” into two courses, simply “Mythology” and “Folklore,” the reason being that the fellows teaching the course were cramming the kids’ pointy little heads with lots of Mythology (of the Joseph Campbell variety) but not a bit of Folklore. In 1998, we put through the proposal, and two years later (two years being the gestation period for an academic course in the State of Texas), we took the wraps off our brand spanking new course, English 364, Folklore. I won’t go into the logic of placing such a course in the English Department. Big schools have whole departments of folklore. Over at Texas A & M, my folklorist buddy Sylvia Ann Grider, from by-God Pampa, Texas, just retired from the Department of Anthropology. Not all regional universities of our size—16,000— have folklore courses, but the ones that do tend to place them in the English Department, which is where the High Art versus Low Art aspect of this presentation comes in. Our hated purple Lumberjack rival up to the north has real folklorists, and so did we, for a while. We lucked into a young woman with a folklore degree from the University of Indiana, which to folklore studies is like Nashville is to a country singer wannabe. She was wonderful. She did radicalize great bunches of 305 the good country (and city) folk who attend our fair university, but—truth be told—that wasn’t so bad for them. Unfortunately, she left for higher altitudes (Utah). Hiring another folklorist to teach one course wasn’t in the works, so we mothballed Folklore for a while. However, in keeping with the “use-it-or-lose-it” mindset of our sainted governing board, a course has to be taught at least once every three years. As you have by now guessed, the person who caused the spawning of this Child of Satan is the one to whom fell the awesome responsibility of teaching folklore to English majors. I’ve done it once now, and that’s what this presentation is all about. I won’t go deeply into my background as a folklorist, mainly because there ARE no depths to my background as a folklorist. Basically, I’m from that population most loathed by professional folklorists. In other words, I am an amateur who still has the temerity to call himself a folklorist. I once presented a paper at the American Folklore Society (on elements of folklore in John Steinbeck ’s The Grapes of Wrath), and I have presented a few times at the annual meetings of the Texas Folklore Society. (Truth be told, my presentations here have been insubstantial meanderings crudely hitched to the work of my wife, Marynell, who has a deservedly national reputation as a collector and preserver of American fiddle tunes. As a good friend and colleague in Huntsville is wont to say, “Gene Young is widely known as the second most authoritative voice on American fiddle music in his own family.”) But the fact is, I have no claim to a shred of authority as a folklorist, much less a teacher of the subject. However, since I have never been known to be one easily encumbered by modesty, humility, or good sense, I agreed to take on the course. Now, before I get into the story of what happened, let me spend a little time talking to you about the discipline of English and about the typical English majors who populate it in our universities . The kids who come to Sam (as we affectionately call Sam Houston State University) are a splendid mix of the urban and the rural. About half come from Harris County, meaning Greater 306 Everything But the Kitchen Sink Houston, and about half come from rural east and southeast Texas. They—even those from the Big City—are by no means urban...

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