From ghost stories, to advice on how to build a banjo, to tales from the early days of electricity — all these subjects, along with traditional music, are captured in the Tennessee State Parks Folklife Collection.
Recorded in the parks by trained folklorists in the late 1970s
and 80s
, the collection runs to roughly 1,300 hours. Roughly a fifth has now been digitized, and a portion of that is available through the Tennessee Virtual Archive (
TeVa
), run by the Tennessee State Archives and Library.
The material includes about 50 interviews that capture “how people lived during simpler times,” according to the archives.
“From hog killings to sorghum making to wash days to building railroads and banjos, the old ways of life in our communities have been passed down from generation to generation. Fortunately, these traditions of the past are not lost.”
By combing through, and taking cues from archives staffers, WPLN turned up examples like the cattle holler, heard above, from old-time musician and storyteller
Cayce Russell, of Lafayette, Tenn., northeast of Nashville.
In the recording, he demonstrates a traditional field holler that was used as a morning check-in among rural neighbors. The hollers would ring out from home to home.
“And if he answered that holler back, they knew he was alright. Then the next fella over there he’d holler, he’d hear him holler, and then next one and the next one and it went all around,” Russell told an interviewer in 1979.
But if someone did not answer, that was the sign to check on their well-being.
Bradley Hanson, director of folklife at the Tennessee Arts Commission, said hollers were also used to bring farm animals to the barn, or to call folks in for dinnertime.
“Field hollers or calls were unique to the farmer,” he said. “At social events, hollers often became a contest of whose might be the best, the loudest.”
Like so much in the folklife collection, the method was handed down in personal ways, often distinct to a region.
“Folklife is learned,” said archives conservator Carol Roberts. “It is not studied at school. It was learned from the generation before.”