Folklore from the American West and Midwest

Abstract

should be mentioned in some detail, namely the distinction between the style of delivery used for recitations and that employed for other types of spoken folklore. As evidenced by Horace Crandell's selections and the poems of Van Holyoak, the reciter is aiming for exact recall of a text, whereas a joke teller such as Ray Lum or a folktale narrator like Jim Daniels or Son House is recalling not so much a word-for-word text as the skeletal elements of a story that can then be fleshed out with details, and thereby converted into a dramatic performance. It is the ability to transform such plots into something more than the bare bones that separates the good narrator from the poor one. Because the reciter's role is more that of rote recall than of innovation, his performances have a more mechanical feeling. Of course, all of these remarks concerning delivery and style are open to question and cannot be answered adequately until more work is done on these aspects of spoken folklore. These five records provide some good material with which one can begin exploring the topic, particularly because they are all so well annotated.