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The Bourbon Street Musicians Review

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(More customer reviews)This is not really a childrens' book. It's dialect retelling makes it hard to understand just as the original Uncle Remus tales did a few generations ago. It is actually the story of four elderly outcasts from society whose friendship saves them. Together they can take care of each other and find that life is still good.

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Ozark Tales and Superstitions Review

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(More customer reviews)I gave this one two stars simply for the vague effort put into it. Overall the books is rather poorly written, source documentaiton is almost nonexsistent and to be quite frank, the writing style is beyond boring. Having lived here in the Ozarks for all of my life (well over 60 years) and having accomlished some modest research in this area myself, I was very, very disappointed in this work. Actually, I am not at all sure if this author ever lived here, or even visited. If you are interested in this area of study, I suggest "Ozark Magic and Folklore" by Vance Randolph. This is a older book, but well worth the search to find it. I Do not recommend this work.

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Phillip Steele has collected 26 stories in an attempt to preserve the rich lore indigenous to the Ozarks.

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Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South Review

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(More customer reviews)I found the book an exceptional window to the folklore and myth that makes up the South. If anyone has a desire to get in touch with some of the soul of the South a journey through Storytellers:Folktales and Legends from the South is truly worth while.

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Black Folktales Review

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(More customer reviews)The book I am reviewing is called Black Folktales, it is by Julius Lester and illustrated by Tom Feelings. This book falls under the category folktales and fairytales. Before I tell you more about the book let me say that the illustrations were amazing. Anyways, the book consisted of short stories about blacks in the south. There were stories about blacks on plantations and about god and how he created the world. Most of the stories were very good and interesting and most of them I enjoyed reading although there were a few mediocre stories mixed in too. The writers writing style I thought was very good. It definitely kept me entertained through out the whole book. There were some very funny stories in the book. there was one about a black man that was feared through out the land, and was supposed to die a couple of times but he kept escaping death, until St. Peter told god that this black man was supposed to have died thirty years ago. God immediately called the grim reaper who started complaining cause he hadn't gotten more the five minutes of sleep in the last two days. He started telling god that he needed some assistants, or else. Anyways I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

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Twelve remarkable folktales, culled from the black experience in Africa and America, are freshly retold in the thoroughly original voice of Julius Lester. Arranged by topic - Origins, Love, Heroes, and People - the tales combine universal themes and uncanny wisdom. Though some of these stories have been around for centuries and many were passed down by slaves, Julius Lester's urban expressiveness and Tom Feeling's spirited illustrations give them continued resonance for today's audience.

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Children of Strangers Review

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(More customer reviews)I think it is stupid to rate this book based on some misconceptions of how Mr Saxon viewed blacks or rural people. Saxon was regarded by anyone who knew him as very progressive in this regard if not a bit too paternalistic. One of the obituaries written of him at his passing referred to him as "friend toward black people".
The cane river plantation was Lyle Saxon's home away from home when he wasn't in his beloved New Orleans. Saxon had a great nostalgia for his days as a youth in a plantation just south of Baton rouge. He loved to relax there and did his most productive writing there. As an educated and cultured man living most of the time in New Orleans and hanging around people like Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner he probably would think of rural farm people as uncultured or less educated. I don't have a problem with that.
Saxon here provides an insightful story of plantation life from the inside looking out. He delves into the attitudes of Creoles and race and how they perceived the world. He was fully aware that while plantation life was a getaway and relaxation to him it was hard work for those who relied on it to live.
This is a well crafted piece thaqt is tight and well detailed and it should be it took him years write. Lyle Saxon is best known for his love of New Orleans especially his beloved view carrie and he was instrumental in popularizing it as a place for writers and artists. While Saxon lived most of his adult life in New Orleans most of his writings are about plantation life a subject very near and dear to him. Children of strangers is a seminal book of it's kind!
Other Saxon books about plantation life in Louisiana-Friends of joe Gilmour-Father Mississippi-Old Louisiana.
No writer loved Louisiana more or wrote about it better.

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The moving story of love in a Cane River community bound by race and class. Famie is a mulatto girl whose ancestors-free blacks-rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture. But on a Louisiana plantation in the 1920s, she is an outcast. An illicit love affair with a white landowner leaves her with a son. She dreams her son will be accepted into white society, but in her struggle to transcend race and class Famie must sacrifice the last links to her past.

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Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States Review

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(More customer reviews)If you grew up hearing older folks get together and swap wild stories, or if you have an academic interest in folklore, then this is for you! Essentially, the great Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston spent 1928 and 29 among rural Blacks in Florida and Alabama jotting down their folk tales and witty sayings. Being a Black Southerner herself gave her an insider's access that made her interviewees comfortable in sharing with her. The final manuscript, "Negro Folktales of the Gulf States" remained unpublished till now. Some of these tales were published in 1935 with a framework story of Miss Hurston's adventures among her interviewees entitled "Mules and Men." But here, the stories exist in their orignial, uncut form without a framework story. Once the modern reader becomes accustomed to the printed approximation of Southern African-American dialect, you can sit back and enjoy the folk wisdom and humorous tales. So imagine that Grandpa, Uncle Wille, and all the others are gathered around your porch with a pitcher of lemonade on a pleasant afternoon and enjoy this African-American equivalent to "Aesop's Fables" and "The Arabian Nights."

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Foxfire 11 Review

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(More customer reviews)I added this book to my father's collection of Foxfire books. The series is incredibly useful. I would highly recomend it to anyone who wants to learn more about basic living. It is clearly written and very entertaining. My dad finds many "projects" that he has already done ( being a hunter and living on a farm) but also it brings back many good memories of childhood when his family used to raise goats and such. I'd love to see more in the series.

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With this newest volume in the Foxfire series comes a wealth of the kind of folk wisdom and values of simple living that have made these volumes beloved bestsellers for the last three decades, with more than two million copies in print.In 1966, in the Appalachian Mountains of Northeast Georgia, Eliot Wigginton and his students founded a quarterly magazine that they named Foxfire, after a phosphorescent lichen. In 1972, several articles from the magazine were published in book form, and the acclaimed Foxfire series was born. Almost thirty years later, in this age of technology and cyber-living, the books teach a philosophy of simplicity in living that is truly enduring in its appeal. This new volume--Foxfire 11--celebrates the rituals and recipes of the Appalachian homeplace, including a one-hundred page section on herbal remedies, and segments about planting and growing a garden, preserving and pickling, smoking and salting, honey making, beekeeping, and fishing, as well as hundreds of the kind of spritied firsthand narrative accounts from Appalachian community members that exemplify the Foxfire style. Much more than "how-to" books, the Foxfire series is a publishing phenomenon and a way of life, teaching creative self-sufficiency, the art of natural remedies, home crafts, and other country folkways, fascinating to everyone interested in rediscovering the virtues of simple life.

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Foxfire 4 Review

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(More customer reviews)Being a native of rural Appalachia, we owe so much to Mr. Wiggington for the preservation of our culture. No other, in my knowledge has done so much. The entire seires of Foxfire books is a tribute to the plain, industrious, pragmatic, proud mountain ways that I so fondly recall from my childhood. Whether you are doing research, or simply trying to remember how granddaddy did it, these books are an excellent source of knowledge.

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Fiddle making, spring houses, horse trading, sassafras tea, berry buckets, gardening, and other affairs of plain living are the topics covered in this volume.

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Foxfire 8 Review

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(More customer reviews)The Foxfire series is the creation of English teacher Elliott Wiggington (Wig) who made it a point to have students participating in his program interview older folks to find out how they did things in everyday life. And even though this is the work of high school students, the writing is clear, concise, informative, and very readable. Good writing is good writing.
Each volume is like a time capsule, capturing the wisdom and know-how from individuals born around the turn of the 20th century. And while the focus is based around the inhabitants in and around Rabun County, Georgia, this information shows life as it was in America circa the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
In this eighth volume, the focus is on folk pottery -- how its made, the different styles, and interviews with the artists. Most interesting is the firing process and the history of the kiln. You'll also find information on mule swapping and chicken fighting.
After reading several of these volumes, I think what appealed to me most of all was the fact that these older folks in the 80s and 90s weren't viewed as forgotten relics of a bygone era. They were treated with respect and dignity, and their memories treated as the treasures that they indeed are. It's a shame nowadays that we don't have more publications like Foxfire that highlight the knowledge gained from our older population. So many folks in the 70s, 80s, and 90s sit alone at home, or nursing homes forgotten and alone. They are untapped resources of great stories and wisdom. Fortunately for us, the people at Foxfire realized the value of these individuals and preserved some of those stories for future generations to cherish and enjoy.
If you have an interest in 19th century knowlege and an appreciation or an interest in how things used to be, you cannot do without this series.

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Southern folk pottery from pug mills, ash glazes, and groundhog kilns to face jugs, churns and roosters; mule swapping, chicken fighting, and more are included in this eighth volume.

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Zora Neale Hurston : Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings : Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles (The Library of America, 75) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book and its companion from the library of america, have everything that Hurston wrote - except some unedited manuscripts, and some articles and short stories.
Her interest in language, folklore and ritual, and the cult of local color comes through in all of her works. The personalities and struggles, failures and victories of all of her characters become real for the reader.
She is writing earlier in the 20th century, when people were starting to buy radios and automobiles -- she saw a lot of the south, and north, rapidly transform into the beginnings of the consumer culture we know today.
When I read Hurston, it is like I feel an anxiety to preserve. I sense a underlying insight, that she probably had, that within a couple of generations, the rhythm of life would radically change.
I think she saw that a lot of the folk traditions and rituals in North America would disappear, so she did what she could to demonstrate a vibrant african american cultural life, as she knew it, and interpreted it.
The two collections of Hurston's work show the span of her writing, over her lifetime. These pieces reveal how many of her imagination and many of her themes and character-types evolve over the years.
I recommend the two volumes.

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Mules and Men (P.S.) Review

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(More customer reviews)Although she really was born in Georgia, Hurston considered Eatonville, Florida her hometown. She originally wrote this work as a play with Langston Hughes. They had planned to call it "Mule Bone," but the two had a falling out prior to staging the work. The theater world's loss was actually the literary and folklore world's gain, and this book is a terrific study of black folklore from Florida and Louisiana. The book has wonderful folktales and descriptions of rootwork, and once the reader becomes acclimated to Hurston's use of black English, it is a pleasure to read. Hurston provided rich commentary by embedding the texts into a narrative about doing fieldwork in the 1920s. It's worth noting that Hurston compressed the amount of fieldwork time in this book as she had spent much more time in Florida than she presents in this work. It's important to keep these types of literary devices in mind when reading her book as she includes lots of allusions, hidden meanings, and clever wordplays to develop fascinating commentary on folklore.

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Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America 1805-1935 (Studies in North American Indian History) Review

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(More customer reviews)This well researched text provides great insight into the Crow Indian culture. Beginning with earliest recorded written accounts, proceding through the forced move of the Crow, or Apslaloke, from historic homelands and concentrated on their modern day reservation, this is an excellent introduction or supplement to a basic understanding of this plains nation. There is a lot of first person quotes, good photo documentation and scholarly posings. The book concludes with a interesting analysis of Chief Plenty Coups presentation at the dedication of the tomb of the unknown soldier and it's meaning as representative of Native American society at that time.

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This history of the Crow Indians links their nineteenth-century nomadic life and their modern existence. The Crows not only withstood the dislocation and conquest visited on them after 1805, but acted in the midst of these events to construct a modern Indian community--a nation.Their efforts sustained the pride and strength reflected in Chief Plenty Coups' statement in 1925 that he did "not care at all what historians have to say about Crow Indians," as well as their community's faith in the beauty of its traditions and its inventions. Frederick E. Hoxie demonstrates that contact with outsiders drew the Crows together and tested their ability to adapt their traditions to new conditions.He emphasizes political life, but also describes changes in social relations, religious beliefs, and economic activities.His final chapter discusses the significance of the Crow experience for American history in general.

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