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/ North Carolina State Library 1/ • 11"1 I • I JUL Y~l964 ,,,, VOLUME XII NUMBER H CAROLINA FOLKLORE ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON Editor ., a CONTENTS ... Page "BLACK EYE, THE INTELLIGENT BIRD DOG," AND OTHER HUMOROUS~ STORIES AS TOLD BY JOE D. CURRIN, fv'10rtho D. Currin and Barbera C. Smetzer •••••.••.•.•••..•••.•••••••••• MOUNTAIN MEDICINE, Lillian Mayfield Wright •••••••• • ••• t 7 NOTES ON NORTH CAROLINA PROVERBS IN NORTH CAROLINA FOLK- ' LORE, I, 26-27, Archer Taylor • 13 THE DUKE FOLKLORE MEETING ••••••• 14 MEETING OF THE FOLKLORE SOCIETY ON DECEMBER 6, 1963 •• 15 SOME FIFTIETH-ANNIVERSARY GREETINGS •••••••••• 17 AMERICAN LEGENDS (Announcement), Richard M. Dorson and Wayland D. Hand ••••••••••••••••••• 21 I KNEW FRANK C. BROWN, W. Amos Abrams ••••••••••••• 22 FIFTY YEARS OF MEETINGS AND PROGRAMS OF THE NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE SOCIETY, Joseph D. Clark •••••••••••••••••• 27 A Publication of THE NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE SOCIETY and THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE COUNCIL Chapel Hill NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE Every reader is invited to submit items or manuscripts for publication, preferably of the length of those in this issue. Subscriptions, other business communications, and contributions should be sent to Arthur Palmer Hudson Editor of North Carolina Folklore The University of North Carolina 710 Greenwood Road Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Annual subscription, $2 for adults, $1 for students (including membership in The North Carolina Folklore Society). Price of this number, $1. THE NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE SOCIETY Holgei: O. Nygard, Durham, President Philip H. Kennedy, Chapel Hill, 1 Vice-President Joan /lltoser, Brevard, 2 Vice-President Mrs. S. R. Prince, Reidsville, 3 Vice-President A. P. Hudson, Chapel Hil I , Secretary-Treasurer The North Carolina Folklore Society was organized in 1913, to encourage the collection, study, and publication of North Carolina Folklore. It is affiliated with the American Folklore Society. THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE COUNCIL Arthur Palmer Hudson, Chapel Hill, Chainnan Isaac G. Greer, Chapel Hill,~ Chainnan Manly Wade Wellman, Chapel Hill, Secretary The Folklore Cauncil was organized in September, 1935, to promote the cooperation and coordination of all those interested in folklore, and to encourage the collection and preserva­ tion, the study and interpretation, and the active perpetuation and dissemination of all phases of folklore. "BLACK EYE, THE INTELLIGENT BIRD DOG," AND OTHER HUMOROUS STORIES AS TOLD BY JOE D. CURRIN Recorded, Transcribed, and Edited by Martha D. Currin and Barbara C. Smetzer (The folktales included in this article were collected by Barbara Smetzer in the winter of 1961 for use in an Indiana University folklore course. Mrs. Smetzer, a niece of the narrator, received her master's degree in Folklore from Indiana University in 1963. (Martha Currin, who is a junior at Angier High School, wrote the biography of her father in 1963 when she used the tale texts as a basis for her English literature term paper. (Originally recorded on a tape machine, the folktales have been transcribed literally, and the following texts are in the exact words used by the storyteller.) Biography of Informant My father, Josiah Daniel Currin, was the middle child of a family of seven. He was barn to the A. B. Currlns on June 15, 1909, in Apex, North Carolina. As a young bay Joe was the mischievous one who always played pranks on the three younger children, Frances, Bab, and Hank, but ran to the three older ones, Billie, Buck, and Gladys, when he was in trouble. My grandfather was a tobacco man. Joe loved to go with his daddy to the warehouses and country stores and listen to the men talk and tell tales. That is where he first became interested in storytelling. Around the old stoves in the middle or back of the stores, the men would con­ verse. Joe sat quietly and I istened, planning on how he would retell the story to his friends the next day. In 1919 the Currin family moved to Angier (Hamett County), and Joe attended the local school. A well-I iked student, he was famous for wasting class time. He would start telling tall tales in order to get the teacher off the subject. One night, when he was in the sixth grade, Joe told "Tar River" on the school stoge for the first time; it was a tremendous success, and Angier has loved the story ever since. After graduation from h lgh school, Joe enrolled at the Univers lty o( North Coro I Ina, but because of his father's death he could not attend. Instead, he went to Massey Business College in Richmond, Virginia, and at the age of seventeen he became an employee of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company. He still holds the job of tobacco buyer for this company and also owns several farms near Angier. In 1935 he married Wiley Doris Stout, a third-grade schoolteacher, and I, Martha Daniel Currin, was barn to them in 1947. My father ls active in the community affairs of Angier and Hamett County. As a member of the Angier Baptist Church, the school board, and the Kiwanis Club, he is often called upon to be master of ceremonies or guest speaker at a banquet or meeting. One Sunday when the preacher was out of town, Daddy delivered the sermon at church. After the service an elder deacon cane up to him and said, "Joe, I think you missed your calling I" As for hobbies, his favorite pastime is "tinkering. 11 He takes old scraps of motors, lumber, tin, and whatnot and makes odd contraptions which eventually prove to be useful. He does not have much equipment, but he uses everything for a purpose. Once he made a large lawn­ mower by attaching three small ones. His special invention, the "thingamajig," picks up leaves. It is made of a motor, some lumber, and bicycle wheels. One day he startled every­ one in Angier by riding downtown on one of these machines to do an em:md. What a sight it was to see him chugging along, making turn signals with his hand and stopping at stop lights while perched atop his contraption I Dad especially likes lawm,owers, and our neighbors run to him when their machines break down. If something is broken, he does not stop until he fixes it. He takes pride in his in­ ventions and sometimes spends days in his workshop. When he is tinkering he never wears his good clothes, and people say he can look the most ragged of anybody. He has his own little , . world with his gadgets, and he gets so wrapped up in them that he sometimes hardly knows what is going on in the rest of the world. He is always busy. My father's other hobbies are hunting and fishing. He has a pond onhis farm land where he relaxes and fishes. During the hunting season he hunts for quail in the fields and woods around Angier. Through the years he has owned several bird dogs, and one of the most famous was Blackeye, about whom he tells a tall tale. In fact, many of his tales center around hunt­ ing and fishing experiences. All of my dad's stories are humorous, and his style of storytelling makes them even funnier. He always sits with one leg crossed, his foot swinging, and his head nodding slightly. He waves his hands and does a lot of pantomiming, but never smiles. As the climax of the story approaches, his voice gets louder and louder. His sense of timing is exceptional, and he knows just when to say a line and how long to pause between lines. Dad's style of storytelling and his mannerisms and appearance seem to be influenced by two famous types of American character - the vaudeville comedian and the western cowboy. From the vaudevillian he has inherited that perfect sense of timing and delivery so characteristic of comedians like Jack Benny and Bob Hope. Physically he bears a resemblance to Gary Cooper. His face is lean and lined with wrinkles. His eyes are deep brown and sharp, so that even when his face is Immobile, his eyes are moving quickly about. He Is tall and lanky and walks with a slow, rolling gait. Imagine Gary Cooper telling Jack Benny jokes in a dry Southern drawl, and you have a good picture of Joe Currin telling a tal I tale. Tale Texts Hunting and Fishing Tales Blackeye, the Intelligent Bird Dog Now, I th ink right much of this one's true. 'Course you 're too young to really appreciate it because it was 'way back before your day, but years and years ago in this community we used to do a lot of quail shooting, or hunting, rather. Didn't do much shooting back then be­ cause they didn't have too many guns. But we used to have horses that we'd ride quail hunting, and we had a net, and each side of the net would run out for forty or fifty yards to make kind of a wing on each side, and then in the middle would be kind of a pocket that you could catch the birds In. I don't know whether you've ever been around quail much or not, but quail never would run from a horse. I mean by that, they wouldn't fly - they would run. But the people back then used to take the horses out and just like a dog they'd hunt for awhile to see if they could find a covey of quail. When once they found the covey of quail, then they put up the net not too far away. Had somebody of course heppin' them, and they put up the net and they'd take this horse and they'd keep maneuvering the quail towards that net until they finally got into the edge of the wing of the net.

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