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The Devil Went Down to Georgia
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16646 |
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CULTURE
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10 / 1989 |
2,942 Words |
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John A. Burrison
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The art of the spoken word--whether manifested in conversation, political and legal oratory, preaching, or storytelling--seems to have always been cultivated in the American South. Traditional storytelling is still a vital part of southern life, both as a form of entertainment and a means of passing the community's values and knowledge of the past from one generation to the next. The older, rural-based, and distinctly regional folktale repertoire is displaced, however, by stories of more recent vintage as influences from urban and suburban society take hold in the South.
The following folktales are a sample of that older tradition. They were collected by my folklore students and are housed in the Georgia Folklore Archives at Georgia State University. Transcribed verbatim from tape recordings, with features of informal and regional speech left intact to enhance appreciation of these stories as oral literature, they are included in Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South, a collection to be published this fall. Although the 260 stories in the book represent the six states of the lower Southeast, those selected here are all from narrators living in Georgia and are unified by the character of the Devil. There is, nevertheless, considerable variety in the types of tales even in this small sampling.
"Escape from the Devil" is a supernatural legend embodying literal belief in Satan, a real figure to fundamentalists of the Bible Belt. It also contains an implied moral about drinking. "Granddaddy Glenn and the Devil" is another family story with a lesson, in this case about fishing on Sunday, but the less-than-serious tone--especially the concluding tall-tale contest--makes it more an amusing anecdote than a belief tale. "Jack and the Revenuers" relates to a cycle of Appalachian "Jack Tales," Americanized fairy tales evidently brought mainly from Ulster by eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish immigrants. Inspired by the moonshining subculture, this narrative, in which the Devil is a supporting character rather than the antagonist, has never before been reported. "The Devil and the Lord Dividing Souls" hinges on mistaken identity, in which both master and servant foolishly misinterpret the sounds of thieves dividing their loot. This version from the Afro-American tradition has been grafted onto a cycle of tales about Old Master and his favorite slave John, but the story harks back to medieval England and is one of the oldest folktales circulating in the South.
It could be argued that the Devil in these stories personifies the pitfalls inherent in the human conditions, sometimes avoidable through intelligence and courage. The most persistent thematic thread running though Storytellers is the hard times of earlier days and the heroic act of sheer survival. This unromantic view of the past, however fictiously expressed in these stories, is decidedly rooted in historical reality. Adding to the general hardships and vicissitudes of farming--the common experience of many Southerners--were the oppression of life under slavery and, later, institutionalized segregation; the disruption and defeat of the Civil War and its traumatic aftermath, Reconstruction; the ruination of the region's chief cash crop by the cotton-boll weevil; and the desperate years of the Great Depression, through which most of the storytellers lived. But encounters with the forces of darkness can be bearable, even enlightening, with the proper preparation and attitude. Perhaps that is what these stories--and indeed, much of the world's best literature--are
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