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Folklore of the Great West: Slections from Eighty-three Years of the Journal of American Folklore by John Greenway

1969; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1969.0071

1948-7142

Jan Harold Brunvand,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviews Folklore of the Great West: Slections from Eighty-three Years of the Journal of American Folklore. Edited with extensive commentary by John Greenway. With line drawings by Glen Rounds. (Palo Alto: American West Publishing Company, 1969. 453 pages, $10.75.) This book must be approached with its full title page in mind to under­ stand its curious imbalances as a survey of western folklore but, nonetheless, its compelling charm. The Journal of American Folklore has never put special emphasis on the West, and so whatever western material has appeared in it since 1888 (thats eighty-one, not eighty-three years) has simply been fortuitous. However, John Greenway, the imaginative editor of JAF from 1964 to 1968, is precisely the person to convince you that he has indeed done the unlikely and extracted a truly “Western’ anthology out of what he immodestly describes as “the outstanding organ of folklore anywhere in the world.” Reading this collection is like sitting in the private library of an articulate, wonderfully learned, enthusiastic host who browses through a complete backfile of an esoteric journal, reads aloud from his favorite articles—skipping the footnotes— and supplies a witty running commentary. Eventually, the host himself may become more interesting than the readings; as here the editor competes with his selections and appears also in the roles of fieldworker, social critic, humorist, and scholar. Among scores of personal details, we learn, for example, that Greenway dislikes eating fish; he prefers dog, which he shared with the aborigines of Western Australia. Regionally, the book is lopsided towards the Midwest and South, which are allowed to squeeze into the “Great West.” The selections are heavy on the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the intermountain region (especially Utah). They practically ignore the Northwest, and they contain little from Reviews 227 California, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nevada. To fill out the material, Greenway dips into Ozark folklore and even makes excursions to Wisconsin, llinois, Ken­ tucky, and Tennessee. The subject matter is also lopsided. Only Indians, settlers, and SpanishAmericans are well represented. Cowboy lore is restricted to songs; mining is limited to a couple of highly specialized studies; and “Having Fun” (threequarters from the Ozarks) gets demonstrated only with play parties, folktales, and nude fertility rites. Even though Greenway seems to dislike them as a group (see page 412), Mormons get the longest look of any Western peoples, probably because there have been several active folklorists working in Utah. Explorers, fur traders, prospectors, freight drivers, railroaders, sheepherders, soldiers, buffalo hunters, tourists, guides, stockmen, loggers, and many others are slighted, simply because few writers for JAF happened to study their folk­ lore. (The section on Paul Bunyan is a put-on, since Paul Bunyan had little to do with the real West and almost nothing at all to do with genuine lumber­ jack folklore.) After reading Greenway’s satiric comments on American folklore scholar­ ship in his prefatory chapter “Following the Lore of the Folk,” and considering the specialied audience for these articles in their original publication, it is gratifying to find how informative and readable many are after all. Vance Randolph presenting Ozark materials is delightful. Helen Zunser and Juan Hernandez on New Mexicans, Francis LaFlesche and Alice C. Fletcher on the Omaha Indians, and descriptions of frontier recreations by Catharine Ann McCollum (Iowa) and Leona Nessly Ball (Idaho) may all be reread with pleasure and profit, though the latter is diminished greatly by the loss of all documentation in the, literally, hundreds of footnotes dropped from these authors’ articles alone. To Greenway’s credit as editor, some of the most original and best-written articles appeared during his five-year tenure—John I. White’s on cowboy songs, Kent L. Steckmesser’s on outlaws, Greenway’s own on Jimmy Rodgers and Woody Guthrie, and especially Juanita Brooks’ on her Mormon (misspelled “Morman” in the contents) girlhood. It is difficult to characterize a region on the basis of such random data as these, but one theme tends to stand out: the sense of nostalgia for the “Good Old Days, as one chapter is titled, when the westerner’s life was cer­ tainly harder than now but at least different from the rest...