When I was an undergraduate English major at Lincoln Memorial University, I took a class in Appalachian literature. One of the books we read for that course was Lee Smith’s Oral History. By definition, oral history is a study of the past relayed through the spoken, not the written, word. The transcriptions then are written down for posterity.
Not too long ago at a KARM store I came across an interesting book. Our Appalachia, published by the University Press of Kentucky, is an oral history written by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg. It was the term “oral history” on the book’s front cover that “jerked my ‘tention”, as old-timers used to say. The 1977 copyrighted book (my version is the 1988 reprint) includes photographs by Donald R. Anderson, a man worth a Google search.
As I have been reading this book, I have marked pages with yellow sticky notes that have items that I find interesting. One thing I learned is that cats didn’t always fare so well in the past in Kentucky’s Appalachia.
One gentleman recounts that when he was growing up men and boys would clear land in the winter for spring crops. Meanwhile, the women would gather and have quilting bees. He noted that there would be many teenage girls at the quiltings. At day’s end the young men and ladies would “shake the cat”. The less enlightened might think this was some form of dance, but not so. In Jim Byrd’s words:

Four girls—one at each corner—would get a hold of that quilt and another one would throw the cat in, and they got to shaking it as hard as they could shake and whichever one that cat jumped toward was going to get married first. That’s a fact, there’s no joke to that. It happened all over this country at the workings. (p. 20)

Mr. Byrd went on to relate that his father had a homemade instrument called a “’hump banjer”’. Mr. Byrd said his father would kill a cat and tan the hide to make the banjo head. This was a major source of the music for dances that celebrated the end of hard days of shucking corn (pp. 20-21).
My wife rescued our Precious Kitty from near starvation fourteen years ago this May. Probably as a result of her near demise, the cat has never purred. She first came to love my wife, and only during the past year has she also partially become my lap cat. Poor Precious would probably not have survived many years in the days of quilting bees and corn shuckings in the Commonwealth’s Appalachia.
A good point made by the book is that the residents of early Appalachia survived by banding together to complete necessary tasks to ensure survival. The entertainment that ended an evening of hard work was something of a “payment” friends and neighbors provided one another, as very little money was available. In earlier times, money wouldn’t have been of much use anyway—most mountaineers used their talents to make things to trade for the things they couldn’t buy or make themselves.
Entertainment often came unexpectedly and accidentally. What could be funnier than a politician who got so busy “handing out pies and shaking hands and hugging necks on election day that he had his own pie “two thirds eat up and someone called [his] attention that [he] was eating the paper plate.” (p. 29)
This same politician said a woman asked him at another election how he was doing. He replied he was hot and bothered. She replied that he was doing better than she, for she was hot and not being bothered. (p. 29)
It is said that when an elderly person dies that an encyclopedia is lost. When we are young, the stories of the past, even if they are interesting, don’t have the urgency of meaning that they have in later life. How I wish I could remember more of Aunt Lidia’s stories; the tidbits of family history from my aunts, siblings and mother; the things Dad used to say that I “could mark down in my little black book”. Little as we realize it, our present is the next generation’s past. It’s time for us to tell our stories before time chips the edges of our memories. Even if our record albums of memories are a little scratched, perhaps they will still be like the old George Jones song, “Ragged but Right”.
Until next time, enjoy these tidbits from the email world.

The important thing to remember is that I'm probably going to forget. --unknown

We don't grow older; we grow riper. --Pablo Picasso

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened. --Jenifer Yane

I'm so old that my blood type is discontinued. --Bill Dana

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. --Mark Twain

Survival Tip:
If you get lost in the woods,
start talking about politics
and someone will show up
to argue with you.

History is not there for us to like or dislike.
It is there for us to learn from it.
And if it offends you, even better…
because then you are less likely to repeat it.
It is not anyone’s to erase…
it belongs to all of us.

I believe we need an election day, not an election month.
--Louisiana State Senator John Kennedy