In Memoriam: W. K. McNeil 1940-2005

Abstract

William McNeil?Bill to his friends, W. K. to his professional audience, and Dr. James Withers to readers of his re? search notes for the privately printed Eat Beans, They Make You Astute (1988)?was born near Canton, North Carolina, on 13 August 1940. As a child he developed a lifelong love of reading, and in his teens he found plenty of time to pursue this passion while bedridden with rheumatic fever for more than a year. During that period of rest and recuperation, Bill read everything he could get his hands on, includ? ing a set of encyclopedias, which probably did as much as anything to contribute to his legendary encyclopedic mind. In his youth he also fell in love with music, especially country songs, as he encountered Appalachian songs and ballads firsthand from local musicians. After high school graduation Bill studied history at CarsonNewman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where he received a B.A. degree in 1962. As a graduate student at Oklahoma State University he became especially interested in American regional history, the history of the American frontier, and the history of science. In 1964, while still a student at Oklahoma State, he published the first of his many articles: Confederate Treaties in Indian Territory appeared in Chronicles of Oklahoma under the byline Kinneth McNeil. By 1966 Bill had completed most of the work for a Ph.D. in history at Oklahoma State, but that year he worked as a VISTA volunteer in Knox County, Kentucky, which gave him a break from library research and put him back in touch with the Appalachian oral traditions he had learned to love and respect during his childhood. At the same time he discovered a fairly new graduate program?founded just two years earlier, in 1964?in American folklife at Cooperstown, New York. Since the New York State Historical Association co-sponsored the program with the State University of New York at Oneonta, the folklife program did not seem too far afield from Bill's interest in history. He found the program especially attractive because it would allow him to combine historical research with fieldwork and apply his training in history to the study of traditional groups and genres; consequently, Bill left Oklahoma State and enrolled in the Cooperstown M.A. program in American