| As a folklorist and a student of literature, I am always looking for connections---patterns, as Henry Glassie would put it---that link oral traditions and the written word, constantly applying my knowledge of verbal folklore, such as the Child ballads, folktales, and jokes, to my understanding of literary works. Byron Herbert Reece's poetry and prose draws directly from traditional ballad forms---the old mountain "love songs" such as those catalogued by Child and later popularized on radio and in the folk revival movement. Reece's style and craft echo various genres of oral traditions. Reece's biography and his own ideas and thoughts on the ballad suggest that he learned much of what he knew of poetry from the ballads sung by family and neighbors in the Choestoe Valley, just south of Blairsville, Georgia.;Yet, these elements do not merely function as stylistic embellishment or to bring authenticity to the story---here, the folklore is the story. Unlike many writers who have utilized folklore in their work, Reece maintains intimacy with his community and its traditions throughout his life. Reece's work not only reads like folklore, but functions like folklore as well. As with the oral forms of Reece's community, Reece's works express the values, fears, anxieties, hopes, and worldview of himself and the people he held most dear. Here, Reece is performer; his audience, his readers. Here, literature is an evolutionary stage of folklore, not a separate entity borrowing from folk genres.;This dissertation examines the relationship between Reece's literature and the folklore of his native Appalachians, analyzing the thin space between literature and folklore. By tracing the patterns shared by Reece's work and the living traditions of his native Choestoe, we gain a perspective on Reece in which the author and his poetry and prose serve as a bridge between two spheres---oral tradition and literature---and reminds us of the organic nature of communication and the intrinsic human need to tell a story, regardless of the means by which it is narrated. |
