A Texas Folktale Version of "Get up and Bar the Door"
[Footnotes moved to the end- not proofed. Footnote 3 is missing I've inserted in logical place.]
A Texas Folktale Version of "Get up and Bar the Door" (Child 275)
by Ed Kahn
Western Folklore, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Jul., 1960), pp. 169-171
A Texas Folktale Version of "Get Up and Bar the Door" (Child 275)
ED KAHN
IN 1951 GENE E. MOROKOFF compiled a list of Child ballads that have complete or partial folktale parallels.[1] Of the seven ballads with complete parallels which Morokoff lists, I became especially interested in "Get Up and Bar the Door" (Child 275) and its folktale parallel (Mt. 1351).
Although neither the tale nor the ballad has gained very great popularity, the tale has ranged from India, through the western Orient (Arabia and Persia), and Europe, to the United States, and goes back, in a literary version at least, to the second century B.C. [2] As is generally the case with ballad analogues of folktales, the currency of this ballad is even more limited, being reported only occasionally from England, Scotland, and the eastern and southeastern parts of the United States. [3]
In the spring of 1958 Wayland D. Hand played a recording of the ballad to his class in American Folklore. After class, one of his students, Clark Taylor of Waco, Texas, indicated that he had heard a story along the same line as the ballad, and later recorded it for the UCLA Folklore Archives. Taylor learned his fine version of Mt. 1351 from Curtis Thomason, a man in his early fifties, also of Waco. Taylor began:
It was in the evening...about six years ago. We'd been workin' pretty hard at the Scout Ranch up near home, and Mr. Thomason, the fellow that told the story, had been goofin' off some and everybody was kiddin' him. We were all kinda tellin' stories, and he said "Some of you folks think I'm lazy, well, I ain't sayin' you're wrong, but seems to me I hearded tell about some folks that was a lot lazier than I am. There was an old man and his wife that lived over near Killeen, and they was so lazy they wouldn't even swat the flies off their face in the summertime.
"Well, I suppose it was around the last part of October and the old man was sittin' at the table a-whittlin' and his wife was makin' corn bread. Along came the Blue Northern, and I tell you that was sure cold. And the old man, he set there and he started shakin', and his rhumatiz started actin' up, and his wife was gettin' a little cold too--you could tell that. But neither one of them did nothin' 'cause the door was open. Finally the old man said 'Woman, go shut that door.' And the woman said 'I ain't agonna do it. I got my corn bread to make. You can shut it yourself. It's you're the one that's all fired cold.'
"But the old man, he wasn't about to move cause he's tired. So they started hagglin'. Pretty soon the woman was pretty close to bein' through with her (work) and she knowed if she didn't do somethin' quick she wasn't gonna' have nothin' to do and there's no reason for her not closin' the door. Well, she said, 'I tell you what, the first person that says somethin's (J 2511) gonna have to go over and shut the door.'
"Well, the old man wasn't much for talkin' anyway seein' as how it took up so much energy, so he said, 'Alright.' Well, the old woman got through with her corn bread and she sat down at the table and they just set and look at each other, and the old man he's turnin' blue he's so cold, and the woman, she's a-shakin' like she's goin' to have the dry heaves.
"Well, evenin' come and the snow was a blowin' in the door. Along the road come a couple of hobos and they saw the light on inside. They said, 'Let's go in here and see if we can't get some grub.' But neither of them said nothin'. They just kinda looked at them like 'Why don't you go away?' "But the hobo said, 'Well now, what's this?' And the hobo said, 'I sure am hungry, y'all got somethin' to eat?' And the old woman just looked at them mighty fiercelike, but didn't do nothin'. So they went over to the stove and they got some beans, and some a that corn bread and they ate it. The old man, he looked mighty hungry, and the woman looked mighty upset too, but they didn't do nothin'. And when the hobo said 'You know, you sure do have a purty wife,' an' he said, 'I think I'm gonna kiss 'er,' the old woman started screachin' back in her seat an lookin' like she's gonna say somethin' any minute. An' the husband didn't look too happy neither. But the old guy come over with his whiskers and he gave her a great big fat kiss, and the old man just looked on.
"'Bout this time, the other hobo had been lookin' around the house, and said, 'Looky here what I found under the bed. I found a whole big jug of corn whiskey.' An' the other guy said 'Oh, did you? Well let's have us a drink.' "At this, the old man jumped up, an' his eyes were just a-flashin' daggers, and he said, 'Alrighty, you can eat my dinner and you can kiss my wife, but I'll be darned if you gonna drink my whiskey too.' "The old woman just looked at him and said 'All right, you silly idjut, you gotta go close the door now.' "
After telling this version of the tale, Taylor said that the tale was directed against a man and his wife who lived in Bell County, Texas, on the banks of the Brazos. He said that people who live on the banks of the Brazos are locally referred to as "sandy lappers," meaning lazy people.
Aside from the fullness of this version, it is interesting because it is told within a partial frame. Whereas the narrator in this version uses the tale as proof that he isn't really lazy, in many of the earlier versions from India to Europe, the story appears within a frame of a number of men arguing which is the laziest, the winner using this tale for proof of his own laziness.
It is interesting to note that this version of the tale would seem to be the first indication of the existence of either the tale or the ballad in the state of Texas. Taylor said that he had never heard the ballad. From the limited distribution of the ballad and tale in this country, it is difficult to say whether both have independent histories, or whether the ballad inspired the tale. It is obvious that the tale did not inspire the ballad in this country because of the similarity of text in Britain and the United States. It would seem, judging from printed versions of both ballad and tale, that the ballad, even in its limited occurrence, is much more abundant than the tale. On the basis of these facts, we might ask whether the tale in Texas might not have had its origin from the ballad.
Though collected versions would seem rare, it is possible that the currency of both the tale and the ballad is wider than generally recognized, because this ballad-tale has doubtless been overlooked along with a whole body of bawdy and obscene material. Among taletellers, this tale often is referred to as the "worst" of all tales. [4] The ballad, too, is found in bawdy and obscene versions, as is mentioned by Randolph. [5]
We should be happy to receive other versions of either tale or ballad, in acceptable, bawdy, or obscene versions.
University of California, Los Angeles
Footnotes:
1 Morokoff, "Whole Tale Parallels of the Child Ballads as Cited by Child or Given in FFC 74," Journal of American Folklore, LXIV (1951), 203-2006.
2 W. Norman Brown, "The Silence Wager Stories: Their Origin and Their Diffusion," American Journal of Philology, XLIII (1922), 289-317.
3 For a bibliography of the published versions of the ballad in the United States see Tristram P. Coffin's The British Traditional Ballad in North America, Philadelphia, 1950, p. 145. For an indication of the published versions of the folktale, see Elizabeth B. Greenleaf and Grace Y. Mansfield's Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), p. 42. Ernest W. Baughman's A Comparative Study of the Folktales of England and America gives no bibliography for this tale in America.
4 I have heard a bawdy version of this tale from Martin Strauss, of Los Angeles, and heard of other bawdy versions from William Hugh Jansen. Branford P. Millar in "The American Ballad List-1952," Southern Folklore Quarterly, XVII (1953), 163, indicates that he may have heard a bawdy version of this tale in western New York.
5 See the notes to this ballad in Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs (4 vols., Columbia, Mo., 1946-1950), I, 186.