Folk Travelers: Ballads, Tales and Talk Page: 20
261 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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FOLK TRAVELERS
Midwest are familiar. Transpositions or analogies of this sort often
bob up in folk interpretations of natural phenomena. It will be noted
that a sustained neck-twisting is also the mainspring of the well-
worn folklore "Western" about the burrowing owl. The burrowing
owl, by the way, doesn't burrow, but merely avails himself of the
burrowing activities of his roommate. This is another instance of the
careless, don't-give-a-damn acceptance of the obvious, and of the non
sequitur. The bird dives into a burrow, doesn't he? Ergo, he is a
burrowing bird.
However, all your analyses of folk-thinking, your condescending
exposure of its innocent tricks, its naive assumptions, its faulty obser-
vations, and its jumping at conclusions, fail to wean us away from it.
Fact is, we're not ready to be weaned. The pap is pleasant and often
nourishing to the very sciences which repudiate it. Particularly, as
the machine more and more dominates our lives and an all-pervasive
technology forces our thinking into stern mathematical patterns, do
we find pleasant relief in the wild freedom of the old brain-tracks,
grooved long, long ago, a heritage from the primitive - from the
Neanderthal or Java man, for that matter - who in turn took his
thought-patterns from animal progenitors. "For we are indeed one
with Nature; her genetic fibres run through all our being; our physi-
cal organs connect us with millions of years of her history; our
minds are full of immemorial paths of pre-human existence."
The superhighways, motorcars, jet planes, and prospects of space
travel really intensify the pleasure of winding along neighborhood
roads, or of following footpaths or even animals trails in the, alas,
too few wilderness areas now left our sadly devastated domain. Just
so the mind likes to follow along the old trails of primitive thinking,
coursed on still dimmer ones of animal thinking. Especially in
natural-history folklore do we like the diversity, the non sequiturs,
the aimless meanderings, the dallyings, and those sudden juxtaposi-
tions of incongruous ideas which constitute the soul of much of its
humor. It's like parking the car at last to get out of the dizzy traffic
and away from the glare of an undeviating highway, in order to
wander off into the woods with nowhere to go and no set time to
return.
With this trail-theory in mind we shall examine other instances20
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Folk Travelers: Ballads, Tales and Talk (Book)
This volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society contains popular folklore of Texas and Mexico, including traveling anecdotes, folk ballads, folklore in natural history, as well as information about black and white magic, Western animals, and cattle brands. The index begins on page 259.
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Texas Folklore Society. Folk Travelers: Ballads, Tales and Talk, book, 1953; Dallas, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38314/m1/26/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.