"One Thing about Your Granddad. He Never Lied. He Just Told Stories": The Importance of Family Narratives to Ethnic and Regional Studies

Abstract

Important and coherent centers for what is ethnic, what is regional, in the literatures and cultures of Americans can be found in private, unassuming space and time and folk tradition. Like other folk groups, families have well-developed, traditionally persistent and artistically recreative bodies of oral narrations as well as their own proverb forms and folk speech, rhymes and rituals, folk poetry, music and song. Families generate and transmit jokes and anecdotes, homilies and hero legends and whole fictions which celebrate and tell of current and historic circumstances; aspirations, failed and realized; and exploits of the famous, infamous and ordinary among their kin and kind. Indeed, the entire life cycle of the family is framed in narrative performance.1 Families will mark funeral and reunion gatherings in some quiet or clatterful corner of traded and topped reminiscences about a deceased member. All the while storytelling turns on the lamentable drunkenness, or the remarkable cheerfulness, or the uncompromising honesty of the dead kinsman, he is remembered alive by the surviving family. His very words are part of the dramatically performed dialogues which carry the action of the tales. He is, in these circumstances, still counted a member of the group, at the same time that the tales about him serve to reintegrate, entertain and console his remaining relatives.2 When my maternal, Scotch-Irish, upper-Appalachian Solley kin gather in late summer for their central Pennsylvania Church of the Brethren homecoming and family reunion, the after-dinner storying often reiterates and explicates the tandem Solley family traits of stubbornness and York State Yankee ingenuity. Invariably, my grandad, Leo Solley, is remembered, once again alive, and often more contrary than a mines mule by his younger brother, Roscoe, who connects contrariness and cleverness won out.