LeRoy Tucker, Ozark 'Folkliarist'

I have stumbled across a genius named LeRoy Tucker.

My fellow hillbilly friend Denny Elrod, who blogs at Exploring Izard County asked me yesterday if I had heard of French Town, which he put at about 15 miles outside of my hometown, Salem, Arkansas. I was aware of the name and location -- due east of Salem, on a dirt road, and not far from the South Fork River -- but I had to admit to Denny that I knew nothing substantive about the place, and so far as I know, it's no longer an incorporated community . . . though I could be wrong since it shows up on Google Maps.

But his query got me to thinking about the name of the place and wondering if a French trading post had once been located there in that obscure, isolated part of the Ozarks back when the territory still belonged to the French, though that didn't seem likely.

I therefore did a Google search for references to the place and stumbled across a the mention of French Town in a blog titled "Folk Liar of the Ozarks." Initially, I thought of Vance Randolph, but when I looked more closely, I realized what an authentic treasure I'd discovered. This self-proclaimed 'folkliarist' -- who apparently resides in Jonesboro, Arkansas -- hails from around Highland (I gather), not too far from my own hometown. He's a youthful 79 years and writes with a gifted literary hand. Given his obvious intelligence and his origins, I figure that he's related to Dr. Tucker, who lives at Highland and attends the church that my brother John pastors in Salem.

This 'folkliarist' LeRoy Tucker provides two photos on his blog, which he started last year, but the photos, which can be seen above, are rather earlier than his current age, for the one on the left is from 1949 and the one on the right from 1969. I don't yet know his erstwhile profession, for I've not read enough of his blog, but I already know that he can surely write. Here's the opening of a recent entry titled "The Electric Chicken":

When I was a boy I knew nothing about electricity. Now at seventy nine I know next to nothing about it. But I do know that you must close the circuit and that is the sum total of my knowledge of that subject. I enjoyed learning that, otherwise I never would have learned it. I never was much interested in accumulating beneficial information. If it wasn't fun forget it.

I did know something about chickens. All farm kids learn about chickens. Also, all farm kids learn to wipe their feet before going in the house. Chickens cause that. It started by accident, really, the product of a boy's imagination, a boy who had little to do but experiment with this or that with no discernable plan and with no expectations concerning the outcome. Some worked, some didn't. It made no difference. I had plenty of time and energy.

It started in 1946 when I found an old hand-crank, wall type telephone in the trash pile behind an abandoned farm house. Those old phones were already obsolete. I remembered that if you turned the crank the thing would produce electricity, but this particular one had been out in the rain and all kinds of weather for a long time so I didn't expect it to work. But I held the naked end of the wires with one hand and turned the crank with the other. I was surprised. The thing gave me quite a nice jolt! I knew right then that there was some fun to be had. As a matter of fact, I was confident that the fun would involve chickens. Don't ask me how I knew -- I just did.

If you think that you can anticipate what's coming next, you might be correct, but you'll still be surprised and laugh out loud at what LeRoy Tucker discovered in his subsequent 'scientific' experiment.

I wish that I knew more about this old fellow and what he did with his life, gifted as he is. He must also be a source of many old Ozark stories, some of which he has posted to his blog . . . along with what appear to be fictional writings of real literary quality that capture the dialect of the hill folks.

Time to update my blogroll . . .

Expat Living: "In search of an Ozark dialect"

Buffalo River River Trail Overlook

"Splendid Isolation"

Near Steel Creek, Boston Mountains

(Image from Wikipedia)

My most recent column for the Korea Herald's Expat Living section has posted online, but finding it there would be a chore since the site doesn't allow for direct links to specific articles, so I'm reposting it here for your edification, entertainment, and convenience:

In search of an Ozark dialect

American folklorist Vance Randolph, famous for "Pissing in the Snow" and getting off Scot-free, not only collected and published those off-color Ozark stories for which he is known, but also did groundbreaking scholarly work in 1929 on the Ozark dialect.

On field trips throughout the Ozarks in the southern United States, Randolph encountered many unusual words and expressions, much as did I growing up in those same rough hills, but I no longer remain convinced of a specifically Ozark dialect, though I currently have time to reconsider as I show my family around these mountains for two weeks.

In my youth, I yearned to believe that we Ozarkers spoke our own dialect, and I imagined myself to have uncovered empirical evidence during the summer of '76, when I turned nineteen and was working as a chainman for a surveying crew in the wild Ozark woodlands.

Mostly, my job entailed lugging chain, a surveyor's level, hatchet, plumb-bob, hammer, laths, stakes, and other equipment through thickets where I had to cut lines, or up and down steep hollows which threatened havoc to our measurements.

One tough place stretched along the isolated hollow of a spring-fed river where our crew sought a corner marker to set up the theodolite, and where I learned an unfamiliar word. Scrambling for our bearings, we asked an old hillbilly if he knew where the marker, a metal spike driven into the ground, was located.

"Yeah," he replied, his face wrinkling with concentration, "but ye got to go antigogglin' over that thar hill to get thar."

Anti-what!? I thought. But it was pretty clear what the old man intended -- the way was not straight, as we had figured all along.

But, for assurance, when I arrived home that evening, I checked with my septuagenarian grandmother, who confirmed that the word meant "crooked."

I imagined that I had found support for Randolph's thesis, but I eventually stumbled across antigogglin' in other Southern states, and gradually inferred that the word characterizes Southern speech patterns, rather than any specifically Ozark one.

This conclusion has ruined my life, and I have taken to staying out nights drinking to drown my hillbilly sorrows in moonshine and to write guilt-ridden songs like "Day Breakin'":

Oh, all night, I been out drankin',
now mah head's as thick as clay,
So I 'spec' mah woman's waitin'
with some high-tone words tuh say,
But I'd need uhn extra drank
tuh help me face that judgment day!
-- an' another shot uh whiskey
jus' might warsh mah sins away.

Oh, the mornin' light is growin',
but mah head fades more like dusk,
An' mah wife could blast mah lies
away like wind'll blast a husk,
Yeh, the judgment that's a-waitin'
can be swift an' sure an' brusque
-- so, jus' one more shot uh whiskey,
save mah soul from gettin' cussed.

Oh, the crack uh dawn is creakin'
an' mah min' could crack in two
At the thought uh whut that scornful
woman's scorchin' speech can do
-- She got words as sharp as arrows,
an' she aims each one so true!
-- yet uhn extra shot uh whiskey
save me on this rendevous.

Oh, the sun is fully risen,
an' it burns mah eyes like mace,
Hence mah wife is surely wearin'
now her godforsaken face,
So I'll need a further drank
afore I step into that place!
-- an' uhn added shot uh whiskey
jus' may bring mah soul tuh grace.

Yeh, all night, I been out drankin,
thus mah head's as thick as clay,
So I 'spec' mah woman's waitin',
got them high-tone words tuh say,
Sure I need that extra drank
tuh help me on this judgment day!
-- now, that partin' shot uh whiskey,
may it warsh mah sins away.

Maybe if I just keep on writing such antigogglin' songs, I can create my own durgenal Ozark dialect, but I shall have to face my tetchous wife to do so.

Jeffery is a professor at Kyung Hee University and can be reached through his blog, Gypsy Scholar, at gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com -- Ed.

As for those who prefer not to reach me at my blog . . . well, too late now for regrets, but you can leave a comment expressing your dissatisfaction and informing me just how wrong I am -- a point that my Expat Living column will deal with next week, by the way.

Stay tuned...

Ozark Wordlist

Hillbilly Hot Dawgs?

Well, hit's right distink...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Okay, here's the long-promised post offering the Ozark hillbilly wordlist that has had all of you on the edge of your seats. That's "seats" as in "chairs," not "bottoms," for bottoms don't seem to have edges. Not that I'm an expert in the shape of bottoms...

But let's drop the human anatomy angle on impossibly axe-sharp asses, and move to the more humane etymology of possibly Anglo-Saxon asp-sharp sass expressed in Vance Randolph's imagined hillbilly monologue as an implicit retort to H.L. Mencken's claim that the American language has no dialects:

Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an' biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin' o' mother-wit, an' he aint nothin' on'y a tie-whackin' sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an' his least chaps a-bustin' out middles down in ol' man Price's bottom t'other ev'nin', a-whoopin' an' a-blaggardin' an' a-spewin' ambeer all over each an' ever', whilst thet 'ar pore susy hippoed woman o' hisn was a-pickin' boogers out'n her yeller tags, an' a-scrunchin' cheenches on th' punch'on 'ith a antiganglin' noodle-hook. D'reckly Lee he come a-junin' in all narvish-like an' tetchous, an rid th' pore ol' trollop a bug-huntin' -- jes' plum bodacious hipped an' ruinated her. They never did have nothin' on'y jes' a heap o' poke sallat an' a passel o' these hyar hog-mollies, but he must a got hisse'f a bait o' vittles some'ers, 'cause come can'le-light he geared up his ol' piedy cribber an' lit a shuck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol' durgen -- he should orter be bored fer th' simples! (Vance Randolph, "Is There an Ozark Dialect?" American Speech, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Feb., 1929), pp. 203-204)

What are we to make of this? As I admitted a couple of days ago, it goes beyond even my hillbilly ken in many of its particulars. However, Randolph has exaggerated a bit for effect by thickening the monologue with obscure expressions, making the Ozark 'dialect' appear even more distinct from standard American English than it probably was. But is it even a distinct dialect? Randolph doesn't define dialect in his article (not that I recall, but please correct me if I've misremembered), and I do wonder if Ozark hillbilly speech was different enough from the more general speech patterns of the American South to be distinctly Ozarkian. At the very least, this Ozark way of speaking would be a form of English shared with the Appalachian way of speaking.

Anyway, here's the wordlist, which I've made as complete as I could in the interest of perfect clarity. Some of these, even I couldn't find or recall, but a few readers might know. Other words will seem utterly obvious, and you might wonder why I bothered to include them, but keep in mind that I have an international readership (or like to pretend that I do):

a-blaggardin' = blaggarding: present participle, "misbehaving(?)" (cf."blackguard"?)

a-bustin' out = busting out: present participle, "hurrying"

aint = ain't: negative verbal contraction: "am not, is not, are not"

a-junin' = juning: present participle, "(?)"

allus: adverb, "always"

ambeer: noun, "Saliva colored by tobacco chewed or held in the mouth; tobacco juice"

an': conjunction, "and"

antiganglin': present participle, cf. antigoddle (antigoggle): verb, "to pursue a zigzag course" (Randolph, "A Fourth Ozark Word List," American Speech, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Feb., 1933), p. 47)

'ar: adverb, "there"

as all git-out: adverb "utterly, entirely"

a-spewin' = spewing: present participle, "spitting forcefully"

a-whoopin' = whooping: present participle, "crying out in loud whoops" (whoop = "a loud cry of exultation or excitement")

bait: noun, "plentiful amount"

biddable: adjective, "following directions or obeying commands; docile."

bodacious: adverb, "outright, unmistakably"

boogers: noun, "pests as chiggers and ticks, fleas, bedbugs, and lice" (Jeffrey K. Barnes, "Arkansas Arthropods in History and Folklore," University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum)

bored: past participle, "insulted or imposed upon" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

bottom: noun, "bottom land"

can'le-light" noun, "candlelight = evening"

cheenches: noun, "bedbugs" (Jeffrey K. Barnes, "Arkansas Arthropods in History and Folklore," University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum)

clever: adjective, "generous or accommodating" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

cribber: noun, "a horse that has the habit of cribbing" (i.e., "a vicious habit of a horse; crib-biting. The horse lays hold of the crib or manger with his teeth and draws air into the stomach with a grunting sound")

danged: past participle, "euphemism for damned"

d'reckly: adverb, "directly, i.e., immediately (or soon thereafter)"

durgen: adjective, "countrified or old-fashioned" (Randolph and Nancy Clemens, "A Fifth Ozark Word List," American Speech, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec., 1936), pp. 315)

each an' ever': pronoun, "each other"

feller: noun, "fellow"

fer: preposition, "for"

geared up: past participle, "readied, prepared"

hipped: past participle, "(?)" [UPDATE: An anonymous reader has informed me of the following: "hipped" means exasperated, "put out", discountenanced. eg: "Brother, you look hipped -- is something amiss?" I notice Patrick O'Brian's characters used this word in the 18th century diction of the Aubrey-Maturin novels set in the era of the Napoleonic wars."]

hippoed: past participle, "hypocondriacally ill" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

hisn: possessive pronoun, "his" (from "his one"?)

hisse'f: reflexive pronoun, "himself"

hog-mollies: noun, "mostly North American freshwater fishes with a thick-lipped mouth for feeding by suction; related to carps"

hyar: adverb, "here"

'ith: preposition, "with"

jes': adverb, "just"

lit a shuck, fr. light a shuck: verb phrase, "to depart in haste" (Randolph, "A Third Ozark Word List," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Oct., 1929), p. 19)

middles: adverb(?), "in the middle of(?)"

mother-wit: noun, "common sense"

nary: adverb, "not any"

narvish-like: adjective, "nervous-like"

noodle-hook: noun, "fish hook(?)"

noways: adverb, "anyway"

o': preposition, "of"

ol': adjective, "old"

orter: modal verb, "ought to"

out'n: prepositional expression, "out of"

passel: noun, "A large quantity or group"

piedy = pied(?): adjective, "patchy in color; splotched or piebald"

plum: adverb, "completely"

poke = pokeweed: noun, "a tall North American plant (Phytolacca americana) having small white flowers, blackish-red berries clustered on long drooping racemes, and a poisonous root"

pore: adjective, "poor"

punch'on = puncheon: noun, "a type of wooden floor made from split logs" (Andrew Kuntz, The Fiddler's Companion (cf. "Everybody to the Puncheon"))

right: adverb, "completely, entirely"

sallat: noun, "salad"

scrunchin': present participle, "crushing"

seed: preterite, "saw"

sheer-crapper: noun, "sharecropper"

simples: noun(?), "stupidity(?)"

smidgin': noun, "a very small amount"

some'ers: adverb, "somewhere"

susy: adjective, "hopelessly inferior, and at the same time ludicrously complacent or conceited" (Vance Randolph, "A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms," American Speech, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Dec., 1928), pp. 116-117)

tags: noun, "ears(?)"

tetchous: adjective, " easily irritated or made angry; short-tempered; peevish, irritable; testy: tetchy"

thet: demonstrative adjective, "that"

th': definite article, "the"

tie-whackin': present participle, "cutting railroad ties as one's job(?)"

trollop: noun, "a restless woman, a gad- about" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

vittles: noun, "victuals = food"

work-brickel: adjective, "industrious"

yeller: adjective, "yellow"

Well, there they are, as promised -- and a lot more work it was than I'd expected, so I hope that my Herculean labors were not in vain.

Test next Tuesday...

"Is There an Ozark Dialect?"

Vance Randolph

Folklorist of the Ozarks

(Image from University of Arkansas Libraries)

In the February 1929 issue of American Speech (Volume 4, Number 3, page 203-204), Vance Randolph poses a question that is -- for me -- very interesting: "Is There an Ozark Dialect?"

He asks because he has noted that H.L. Mencken, in his influential book The American Language (New York, 1921), in chapter 5 on "The General Character of American English," had claimed:

There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation -- a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr -- but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech. But the common speech is everywhere the same, and its uniform vagaries take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.

Randolph's choice of Mencken was not simply due to Mencken's prominence as an expert on the 'American' language. Mencken was also an outspoken critic of American boobies and leveled his satiric wit at the 'fundamentalists' populating places like the Ozarks. Randolph, although not from the Ozarks, had married into an Ozark family, fallen in love with the region, and taken it upon himself to defend the 'uniqueness' of its inhabitants.

In 1929, therefore, having spent some years crisscrossing the region, seeking out its more isolated locales, he published his article, merely two pages, asking "Is There an Ozark Dialect?" As a way of answering his own question, he composed the following monologue of what an old 'residenter' of "the more isolated parts of the Ozark highlands" might say:

Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an' biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin' o' mother-wit, an' he aint nothin' on'y a tie-whackin' sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an' his least chaps a-bustin' out middles down in ol' man Price's bottom t'other ev'nin', a-whoopin' an' a-blaggardin' an' a-spewin' ambeer all over each an' ever', whilst thet 'ar pore susy hippoed woman o' hisn was a-pickin' boogers out'n her yeller tags, an' a-scrunchin' cheenches on th' punch'on 'ith a antiganglin' noodle-hook. D'reckly Lee he come a-junin' in all narvish-like an' tetchous, an rid th' pore ol' trollop a bug-huntin' -- jes' plum bodacious hipped an' ruinated her. They never did have nothin' on'y jes' a heap o' poke sallat an' a passel o' these hyar hog-mollies, but he must a got hisse'f a bait o' vittles some'ers, 'cause come can'le-light he geared up his ol' piedy cribber an' lit a shuck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol' durgen -- he should orter be bored fer th' simples!

Now, I gotta admit that this 'dialect' is beyond my 'ken' in some of its details (and Randolph has exaggerated a bit for didactic purposes), but in the general tenor, I can follow it, for my Granma Hodges and 'Granpa' Archie -- the man that she married after losing my Granpa Hodges to a tree-felling accident -- both spoke something like this.

Actually, I recall a point that Randolph doesn't thematize. Both Nora Hodges Dillinger and Archie Dillinger, who came from isolated parts of Fulton County and lived together on a farm at the end of a dirt road, used the inflected form "ye" for "you" in much of their speech. For example, they might say something like:

If I'd knowed y'as a-gon' ter do thet, I'd a-tol' ye not ter do it.

Translation (if required for some):

"If I'd known you were going to do that, I'd have told you not to do it."

Granma Hodges was born in 1895, and Archie in 1899 -- if I rightly recall. My kinfolk might correct me if they happen across this post, but I'm reasonably sure that those two could have spoken this sentence.

As for the long monologue from Randolph, a little glossary might help, so I'll attempt to supply one tomorrow if I have time. I might not be able to that soon, for I'm off on a two-day retreat with the other Kyung Hee University faculty and won't return until tomorrow evening (i.e., Friday evening, August 24th, 2007, Seoul time).

Meanwhile, amuse yourselves identifying (or guessing at) word meanings...

Finding Myself Lost in Translation...

Pennywinkle

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm in the middle of writing another paper, rushing to finish it before the semester's onset some two weeks from now. Perhaps a few readers interested in archaic English words will find the following two paragraphs worth their time:

While I was still in high school, my grandmother once showed me an article in the Arkansas Gazette claiming that some hillbilly folks in the isolated Boston Mountain region of the Ozarks still spoke Elizabethan English. I imagined them speaking like characters in a Shakespearean play or even like the Lord himself in the King James Bible. That did not seem too improbable to me, for on Sundays, I heard unlettered hillbillies pray spontaneously in the sacred tongue of King James, and get it grammatically correct! I have come to doubt, however, that anybody in the Ozarks was speaking Elizabethan English and using "thee" and "thou" in their day-to-day lives. Probably, the Boston Mountain folks were simply using a somewhat more archaic Ozark dialect than the rest of us hillbillies. The Gazette was likely doing what many newspapers do with their reports of scholarly findings. They were getting it somewhat wrong. But they were right that much of the vocabulary was archaic, for the well-known folklorist Vance Randolph had been publishing on this phenomenon since the 1920s. In the article "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," published in the journal American Speech in 1930, Randolph and Patti Sankee noted a large number of words used by Ozark hillbillies in archaic senses. They tell us that:

Only the other day one of our neighbors remarked that he admired a flood which had ruined his crops -- meaning simply that it astonished or surprised him. (Randolph and Sankee, American Speech, Volume 5, Number 5, June 1930, p. 424)

Randolph and Sankee go on to note that tourists would smile at such expressions but that "Milton and his contemporaries used the word in exactly the same sense," and they cite Paradise Lost 2.678ff, the passage wherein Satan, confronted by his equal in power, Death, shows no fear but does show surprise: "Th' undaunted Fiend what this might be admir'd, / Admir'd, not fear'd." I never noticed this archaic sense of "admire" in my dealings with Ozark kith and kin, nor did I ever hear "bore" used in the sense of "to insult," and I had (oddly enough) forgotten hearing "disremember" for "to forget" until reminded by this article (Randolph and Sankee, 425), but I do recall hearing "argufy" for "argue" (Randolph and Sankee, 424) and "ruinate" for "ruin" (Randolph and Sankee, 428), and many a time, I have heard "puny" in the sense of "sickly" (Randolph and Sankee, 426-427), and I have also heard "pinnywinkle" but had no idea what it was until reading Randolph and Sankee's article, which informs me that it refers to a freshwater snail and that the word goes back to the Old English word "pine-winkle" (Randolph and Sankee, 427), this very old word having somehow survived attraction from the far more commonly used "periwinkle" to this very day. The Oxford English Dictionary tends to confirm this, noting that the dialect form "pennywinkle" perhaps stems from the Old English "pinewincle" (OED Compact Edition, Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2136).

In fact, the OED does rather more than this, albeit rather obliquely. It uses the dialect form "pennywinkle" to infer the probable form of the original Old English word. Here is the OED entry for periwinkle:

Known in this form only from 16th c.; but OE had in the same sense a word variously read (in pl.) pinewinclan and winewinclan (owing to confusion of the letters p and p = w). The MSS. favor the latter, which may however be a scribal error, as pinewincle would explain the 16th c. literary, and mod. dial. forms. (OED Compact Edition, Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2136)

Allow me to clarify this point. The standard form for this word meaning "fresh-water snail" is periwinkle. This has been the form since the 16th century, when the word with this meaning first appears in manuscripts. Of course the other word periwinkle, meaning the flower of the genus Vinca, goes back to about 1000 but has a different etymology and is irrelevant for our present investigation, aside from the possibility that the word for the flower influenced the spelling of the word for the snail (OED Compact Edition, Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2136). Be that as it may, the word pennywinkle is extant in the Ozark dialect of English even today, and its continued existence in dialects of English is used to infer that pinewinclan was perhaps the original Old English form despite the somewhat stronger Old English manuscript evidence for winewinclan.

These two paragraphs are from the middle of a paper that I'm trying to keep short because it's intended for use as a presentation this fall at a Medieval and Early Modern English conference on translation, which also explains the obsession with archaic words.

Now, back to writing this paper...