2001: A Texas Folklore Odyssey Page: 17
xiii, 354 p. : ill., ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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"NOW YOU HEAR MY HORITI"
Thad Sitton
alter Prescott Webb argued in his book The Great Plains,
that when Anglo and African-American settlers
moved west beyond the tree line the frontier tricks of
the trade learned in eastern forests no longer worked. These new
"plainsmen," as they came to call themselves, had to learn new
ways of running stock, building houses, obtaining water, and fight-
ing Indians, once the trees ran out. Southern frontier society had
been a three-centuries-old adaptation to the great forests that ex-
tended from the coastal plains of South Carolina into East Texas,
a vast area Southerners sometimes referred to as "the big woods."
Although many historians have followed Webb's lead in rec-
ognizing the cultural transition from "backwoodsman" to "plains-
man," few scholars have used Webb's ideas to reinterpret Southern
frontier society as an intricate adaptation to the wooded environ-
ment, or have attempted to study the tricks of the trade of the
Southern backwoods lifestyle (McDonald and McWhiney, 1975;
Sitton, 1995a). Such "tricks" may seem like small things at first,
but as every good folklorist and social historian knows, some-
thing that seems trivial in the beginning may turn out to be con-
nected to many other matters and critical to a whole way of life.
Consider, for example, the cultural significance of the "blow-
ing horn" among the free-range stockmen of southeastern Texas.
Until stock laws required the fencing of hogs and cattle in the
early 1950s, many rural people in Polk, Tyler, Shelby, Sabine, Jas-
per, Newton, and Hardin Counties followed the old Southern prac-
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2001: A Texas Folklore Odyssey (Book)
This volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society "contains a sample of the research that members of the Society were doing at the turn of the millennium as represented at the 1998, 1999, and 2000 meetings." The volume covers "a wide variety of contemporary and historical topics," including baby lore, stories about notable women, stories about food and cooking, information about the Model T Ford, and more (inside front cover). The index begins on page 339.
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Abernethy, Francis Edward. 2001: A Texas Folklore Odyssey, book, 2001; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38303/m1/33/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.