The gift of the gab is alive and well in Kentucky.
For 50 years, William Lynwood Montell, a professor emeritus in folklore studies at Western Kentucky University, has recorded stories in the Bluegrass State from varied professions—doctors, lawyers, funeral-parlor operators, one-room school teachers. Each collection has become a “Tales From” title in a long-running collection of books from the University Press of Kentucky. Montell’s latest, Tales From Kentucky Sheriffs, is just out this month.
Sheriffs proved particularly forthcoming. To gather their accounts, the folklorist did what he has long done: He set out with his tape recorder in hand not just to workplaces and conventions but also county fairs, blueberry festivals, and other gatherings, and just bounded up and asked people to tell him about their lives.
For his sheriffs book, he learned all about the lawman’s life from characters with names like Peanut Gaines, Fuzzy Keesee, and Tuffy Snedegar. They recalled the good old days when an out-of-work young man could go to the sheriff’s office, ask for a job, and be out on the street the next day, deputy’s badge pinned to his chest.
There, with not a scrap of formal training under his gun belt, the new deputy was ready to confront perps of many varieties: runners of moonshine, marijuana, and methamphetamines; a drug addict who tries to hide, naked, in her clothes dryer; a fella who complains that the sheriff has arrived to arrest him too late to get him to the local lockup in time for dinner; a monster of a football player, deranged by LSD, driving a stolen milk truck the wrong way down an interstate; and drunken brawlers, of course, but sometimes they could be the sheriff’s own friends.
Montell says of his sources: “The stories they tell me are so important because they describe what local life was like”—specifically, what it was like for citizens who might not normally figure in history books. “I could care less writing about kings, queens, and presidents,” says the scholar, in what is clearly a much-practiced line.
The scholar is a native of Monroe County, in the state’s south. After working as a bank teller and a stint in the U.S. Navy, he enrolled at Western Kentucky University and got hooked on folklore during a course in his senior year. He went on to a doctorate at Indiana University and studied folklore, social and cultural history, and cultural geography. He then worked at Campbellsville College (now University), in his home state, before taking a job at Western Kentucky in 1969. He founded the institution’s folklore department in 1972, and until 1999 taught and did research there.
Montell found the oral history of his state to be fertile ground. To date, he has published 27 books with Kentucky.
Particularly since retiring, the oral historian has pumped out volumes at a rate of about three books every two years. For Tales From Kentucky Funeral Homes (2009), he collected the reminiscences of funeral-home directors and embalmers about the business of burying over the previous 50 years. They told of old burial practices, African-American funeral customs, funerals in snake-handling congregations, burial mix-ups, in-home embalming, fainting relatives, pallbearers falling into graves, and even of the old days when a funeral director might travel on a horse-drawn wagon to a remotely located corpse.
Just as informative and entertaining were Kentucky lawyers—their Tales From book appeared in 2003. One told Montell: “A woman was sitting on the witness stand, and the lawyer asked her, ‘Did you, or did you not, on the night of June 23rd have sex with a hippie on the back of a motorcycle in a peach orchard?’ She thought a few minutes, then said, ‘What was that date again?’”
The lawyers were not only funny; they were also forthcoming with insider details, such as how judges take to dogs wandering unwelcome into court.
Little wonder that Montell’s books have done well for the Kentucky press. They have brought in about $600,000 over the years, and all have sold over 1,000 copies. Some continue to sell more than 500 copies each year even a decade after publication. His best seller has been the lawyers volume, which has sold about 6,000 copies for around $80,000.
Mind you, far outstripping all the Tales From Kentucky titles have been Montell’s two books of ghost stories, which have moved over 20,000 copies, each. Their subject matter, says John P. Hussey, director of marketing and sales at Kentucky, snuck in under the press’s mandate to represent the local lore of the state. “Our regional publishing program is a little different from some university presses that might not take a title with the word ‘ghost’ in it,” he says. “It’s part of a folklore emphasis, for us.”
Montell puts it this way: “Ghost stories do have scary elements, naturally, but I love ghost stories because they begin by describing an old house, how many rooms are in it, and what kind of furniture, and then the weird personality of Uncle Joe or Auntie Jane.”
Not to preserve what he does would be to lose whole slabs of the state’s history, he says: “Historians used to say that folklore was the falsehood of history; but in reality it’s the history of 99.99 percent of the world’s population that never gets in the history books.
“The stories people tell me are so important because they describe what local life was like.”
He says such is the case, for example, when a sheriff tells him about not taking people to jail but instead buying them a burger to sober up, and dropping them at home.
Montell sees his mission as one of promoting a form of social equity: He says interviewees often exclaim “’You’re a university professor and you want to talk to me about these things?’
“By golly, that’s why I’m so proud of what I’ve done.”
So proud that, even at a still-youthful 80, he presses on with more volumes. His current projects are on preachers’ and nurses’ stories. While his books don’t come with much scholarly apparatus, they have made him something of a legend among folklorists. He has received many awards, including a 2001 Governor’s Arts Award in the folk heritage category.
Montell is also a publicist’s dream. Wherever he goes around the various reaches of the state—the rural, the Appalachian, the urban, the academic—he hauls boxes of his books to sell to any takers. And he similarly misses no opportunity to tell younger Kentuckians to get out from in front of televisions and computer screens and ask their grandmas and granddaddies to tell the old family stories.
They can always do what Montell did with his grandchildren: Take them camping in a cave and regale them with the tales his grandparents told him. “And,” he says, “by golly”—he uses the phrase often—“my grandchildren have not forgotten those stories.”
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