THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: Bad History
INTERVIEW WITH: Joyce Gibson Roach (Tape 1 of 1)
DATE: 3 March 2000
PLACE: Austin, Texas
INTERVIEWER: Sarah Massey
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
M: My name is Sarah Massey, with the Institute of Texan Cultures, and today is Friday, March 3, 2000, and I'm in Austin, Texas, with Joyce Gibson Roach, and I'm here to interview her on the Bad History Project. Joyce, I want to start with: do you consider yourself a historian?
R: Yes and no. Wish I could give you a clear cut answer to that. I consider myself a Folk Historian. And quote - real historians very often do not count Folk Historians in - as a division or as a piece of the regular - or the regular historical writer. I am a Folklorist. And part of Folklore - it contains many elements - but Folk History is a part of that. So, yes, I am a Folk Historian, whether I be allowed in other doors or not is not my problem.
M: Tell me a little bit more about how you're defining Folk History or Folk Historian.
R: All right.
M: How you're making that distinction.
R: A - I know it's difficult to address - I knew you were Joyce Gibson Roach 2
going to ask that.
M: That's okay.
R: But it's difficult for me to address, but a Folk Historian is first of all a Folklorist. And I think I'd have to give you a definition of what a Folklorist is, if that's all right with you.
M: Uh-huh. Sure. Sure.
R: I've even made some notes in order to do that. But for one thing Folklore is considered all that falls between the cracks of history. It's - somebody else has said, "Oh, it's a bunch of stuff about dead people in the olden days." Which is a pretty good definition. Of course the dictionary has a good feel for that: they simply say it's the beliefs, customs and habits that are passed down through oral tradition. And it's been the name applied to traditional verbal materials and social rituals that have been handed down solely or at least primarily, by word of mouth and by example rather than in written form. And it continues to flourish, so the dictionary definition says: best in communities where few if any people can read or write. And it includes other things such as legends, superstitions, songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, spells, nursery rhymes, pseudo-scientific lore about weather, plants and animals, customary activities at births, marriages, and deaths and traditional dances and forms of drama which are performed onJoyce Gibson Roach 3
holidays or at communal gatherings. But it's important to know in this definition that elements of Folklore have at
R: all times entered into sophisticated written literature. And I would say that certainly history is part of that as well as other kinds of literature. But I think...my own definition is that Folklore is the ways and means committee. It's all the ways that a culture has of accomplishing its life: Folk make, Folk do, Folk think, Folk believe, Folk speak, Folk be, and the means used to accomplish that life. And Folklore exists on a lot of levels, but one of the distinctions or one of the portions of that and that is Folk History. And I may want to give you a definition, if you don't mind now, of what Folk History is.
M: Sure, go ahead.
R: That's important.
M: Just go slow.
R: Okay. Am I going too fast?
M: Yes.
R: Okay. Folk History allows citizens and settlers to tell their own stories according to their own understanding of events and personages and interpret life and times filtered through that same personal understanding in accordance with their particular vision of truth. Historical fact then, I say, is used to embellish Folk Joyce Gibson Roach 4
History, rather than the other way around, which is the usual case. You have historians who will give the facts and present the evidence and then they'll use as sort of a
R: catchall, they'll use a little Folklore to sort of hook you in and make it interesting enough to get...[inaudible]. They do this in textbooks even in high school and college level too. But I say that it is the other way around, that the Folk are the ones who use historical fact the way they want to. And of course such of...history of this nature is always intensely personal. Sometimes it agrees with the facts found in the history books and sometimes not. But historical accounts from the Folk are often centered on their own family; they are very, very personal: who we were and where we came from and why and how we got here and how we got by, what we did and how we did it and how the family fits into historical time and place and what, that make of some great event then is Folk History. And it is often more readable and enjoyable than the facts themselves. And just because the Folk are telling it, it's not reason to presume that it is wrong. It isn't wrong; it's how the Folk felt about it and how the Folk fit into it, facts behind it. Usually they do get some of the facts right and they ought not be dubbed windy old liars, at least not all of them should be, although there certainly is a classification known as the windy old liars. But I don't count Folk Joyce Gibson Roach 5
Historians in that realm. But they simply make something terribly, terribly personal of history, and what can be wrong with that? And what can be wrong with trying to fit your family, yourself, your community into what went on.
M: Yeah.
R: At the Alamo. Or what went on anywhere else.
M: Yeah. How did you see it?
R: How did you see it? And we more and more, thank goodness, thanks really to the revisionist historians and thanks to outsiders quote, "outsiders", like you Sarah, even to come in and say, "Look, these are the stories that have been told forever and ever and ever and somebody says they are not so. They are not true. Somebody says they are. Somebody says they are bad history.
M: Yeah.
R: Or they're good history. And yet when you come in and re-examine and begin to look around and you begin to muddy the waters and you begin to root out stories that nobody ever heard of because they thought the story had been told...
M: Yeah.
R: And you get into those Folk sources. And then very often you find something rich and new and worthy of changing our notions about what history is, even institutions as time honored as the Alamo.Joyce Gibson Roach 6
M: Yeah. You do do research then?
R: Yes. Of course, I do. I probably do it in - I use maybe different sources, but certainly - and the research is always done with a good source of information. Always start there, always start with the facts - these are the facts and R: this is the way it is and this is the way it was. And then you find, of course then, that there's not just one set of facts, that there always...and from substantial historians. There are more sets of facts than that. Then you can move back and find out - but what did my family think about that? what did somebody else's family think about that? what did the old Widow Brown have to say about that? Or whatever your source is. You know you can do that. I'm fond of quoting C.L. Sonnichsen...is certainly my source of all the good information I'll ever have in my life, came from Leland Sonnichsen. And one of the best essays he ever wrote is called the Poetry of History. And he takes on that idea that poetry...that history should have no poetry to it; history should not...history should be the facts and nothing else but the facts. And if it's readable and if it is enjoyable and if it brings happiness, then it's suspect. Of course, this was prevalent thirty years ago. I'm not sure it hasn't changed so much. But he quotes Eugene Manlove Rhodes, who was, of course, a Western writer in New Mexico. And Rhodes said, in short story form, he Joyce Gibson Roach 7
said, "You know, it takes at least three facts before you can call it the truth and all those three facts may differ." But he couched it in terms of this, "When you're building a fence it takes at least three fence posts before you can call it a fence. You put one fence post down, how are you going to know which way you want the fence to go? You've
R: got to add at least two more posts on it before you can say, we are building a fence." And this is a fence and this is the fact. And he makes that point; he said, "You know, we...you can't just call one set of facts the truth - they're facts but they're not necessarily the truth. And grassroots history which is what Sonnichsen specialized in. That's what he called himself, a grassroots historian, with the idea that you've got to research all those facts and discover that they're not necessarily the truth till you take them all together, and that the truth is made up of black and white, right and wrong, this viewpoint and that viewpoint.
M: You mentioned revisionist historians, is there such a thing as revisionist folklorists?
R: No. No, that...at least now you may get someone else to tell you that. You may get someone else that'll say, "Oh, yes." No, I think that's what folklorists do - they've been revising all the time. They never take...they never look as accepted - facts - something that you can't find outJoyce Gibson Roach 8
more about, more truth that you can't find out more of. And just at this time when revisionist historians come along and made everybody mad - myself included at first - and now then I'm marching in line, you know. I think because of the new truths they reveal, I think it came along at a time when we've had what has amounted to a Southwest Renaissance, a Western Renaissance, a Renaissance of all things of the
R: past, nostalgia, and looking back at old times and old ways. And, you know, even to the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the architecture we build, it's still part of that grand design. And as a consequence, folklore has taken on new meaning and has become more respectable.
M: Yeah.
R: And that always surprises me a little in that it was always respectable to me, but I was very much aware - especially in historical circles - that, well, it's nice, the folklorists are nice people and we pat them on the head and some of them even have PhDs, you know, but that still doesn't mean that what they're doing is as worthy as...
M: Yeah.
R: Pure history.
M: Yeah, it's kind of second class citizens.
R: That's right. And it's changed, it's...you know, it's changing. I saw that you know we're as busy as any historians, which is nice, which is nice to know. But a lotJoyce Gibson Roach 9
of ours still is suspect because it's so much fun to listen to. It is so enjoyable. There's laughter; there's, you know, there's serious purpose, and yet there's real joy in it. And...
M: If it's fun it can't be accurate.
R: That's right. It's got to be suspect if it's fun in that way. But I...your question was really on my mind in this; you can tell I've thought seriously about it and done R: some research on it.
M: Good.
R: Furthermore, reading into my favorite source, C.L. Sonnichsen. But you asked...you really put me on the spot and made me think when you said, What is bad history?" I had to define what good history is first, which is what I've tried to do.
M: Yeah.
R: And to some degree. But let me tell you what he has to say about what good history is. He...and I'm going to have to check my notes here before I can figure out where I want to go with it. In fact, I'm going to look at his book because I've marked some things and have tried to think about it. But mostly this comes from an article of his called The Poetry of History. And he makes the statement that those who write history - good, readable history - don't ever get lost in the facts. And that history is as Joyce Gibson Roach 10
much telling as it is fact and it can be...even has to do with feeling. And he mentions - page marks now...
M: That's okay.
R: He talks about the fact that poets make you feel, that that's poets...poetry is filled with feeling; the language they use causes feeling. And he mentioned that this can be brought home to the historian. He said, "After all, a historian is a human being too. And he has deep feelings. In fact, he is a historian most probably because he has
R: them. He begins his career because he enjoys looking through the windows of the past. He is curious about the deeds and passions of men and women who are now dust and ashes. He loves the drums and trumpets of long ago. The armies of Napoleon march before him again. The Towers of Babylon rise once more. The white-topped wagons creep and strain on the Santa Fe Trail." And then he mentions that "many people who are not in history - in the history business - feel - have feelings too - all ancestor worshippers, genealogy, genealogist, heraldry buffs, the Sons and Daughters of The American Revolution; in other words, the ordinary human beings - folklorists to name a few. feel the poetry of the past. And biographers and literary antiquarians know the sensation to some degree. Even devotees of the Ally Oop comic strip are fascinated by Oop's time travels. Collectors and relic hunters of all Joyce Gibson Roach 11
varieties are part of the picture. If any of these things seem true or important to us, if we are capable of excitement about anything at all, to that extent we are all potential poets." Then he goes on to say - "that the sad part of it is the tendency of these fine feelings to evaporate as soon as the budding historian moves into his chosen path. In a few years he is likely to become dull and dry and a weariness unto student flesh. And one asks oneself, why are there so many bright young faces in the graduate seminar and so few bright old faces in the history R: conventions?" And his answer is "that we get caught up in the machinery of our business. Wordsworth's ideas about childhood and maturity apply here. We come into the world, he says, trailing clouds of glory. But with the passage of time the glory disappears." And he mentions too - "that the historians' training is partly to blame, the demand for objectivity and for precise documentation begins to squeeze out the young scholars' joy in his work and thought. His imagination must be handcuffed; he cannot even make a tiny joke or play on words; he must avoid the first person, thus making sure that the historian is left out of history. It is as if Moses had brought down a historian's commandment from Mt. Sinai, Be Thou Dull." And then he continues, "the consequences of living in this academic straightjacket begin to appear when the historian mistakes facts for truths. Joyce Gibson Roach 12
Truth is the sum of many facts, but in this case the whole is more than the sum of its parts; truth is the forest and facts are the trees which keep us from seeing it." I think those remarks are excellent in saying what history is.
M: Good. Good.
R: He continues by saying that we need..."this negative behavior is our need for security. Historians need to be secure and they need to be secure from criticism. And we trade our freedom for it. We know what can happen to us if we are caught in an error. And anyone who has attended a historical convention and seen an established scholar make
R: mincemeat of a junior member of the guild knows how much blood a man can still lose - can lose and still live. Hell has no fury like an authority on military histories who catches a young scholar quartering the wrong unit at Fort Bowie in 1877. Scholars may be gentle kindly men in most of their relationships of their lives, but when they are patrolling the boundaries of their little kingdoms they shoot trespassers first and ask questions later. Consequently the budding historian often finds himself in the position of the man in the parable who had one talent and he buried it for safekeeping." I think all those...
M: Yeah. That's good.
R: I think all those remarks talk about what good history is. But here is... Joyce Gibson Roach 13
M: As we are now surrounded here at this conference by all of these scholars, yes.
R: That's right. But the best...his best definition is this, I think. He said, "professional historians need to remember and to teach that bricks alone do not make a building. An architect is needed to make something out of the bricks. Someone is needed to assemble the facts according to design, to try to understand what they mean. Most historical writers have to be content with making contributions to history, but some can be historians. For these chosen few, history is as much feeling as facts, and they can pass the feeling on to others; they can teach the
R: rest of us to enjoy history and not be ashamed of our reactions. They resemble Sir Sidney Phillips trying to find a way to say what he felt, 'Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.' You will note that Sidney's muse did not say, "Look in thy...[inaudible] Manual. The muse of history does not say such a thing either. What she does say to those who will stop to listen is, Call no man historian unless he makes you feel." And so to answer your question about what is bad history - bad history is that history which does not allow you to feel or make you feel. And that's what bad history is. And so, as a consequence, I would never label...I would never label any sort of historical endeavor - all the way from genealogy if that's Joyce Gibson Roach 14
your thing...
M: Yeah. Yeah.
R: But particularly folklore. I could never label that bad history if it makes us feel. And part of feeling is being able to laugh.
M: Yeah.
R: As much as any thing else. Certainly being able to cry. That's part of it too.
M: How did you get started in this - in folklore?
R: In folklore? When I was at TCU I had a professor by the name of Mabel Major who was of the J. Frank Dobie era. And she taught a course called Life and Literature of the Southwest, which was being taught only at the University of R: Texas by Dobie and a few others. And she taught that course - this was in the '50s and she was sort of at the end of teaching that course, about to retire - and I simply took a course from her that was, I think, Shakespeare. I took Shakespeare and Browning from her and never had a chance to take that course, but got started in a master's program in English literature and settled on my thesis which was Chaucer - some Chaucer studies. And then had her course and just became really, really good friends, and she took me in 1963 to a meeting of The Texas Institute of Letters. I know now it was because Mabel needed a ride. Mabel was old and she looked to students, to different ones that she really Joyce Gibson Roach 15
liked and who liked her...
M: Yeah.
R: ...To take her places and so... And my husband and I would take her. And she adored Claude, because he was a great strapping man and she did loved to be seen about with a man. And...but in the process of that, the trade off for that was that she took me under her wing. The next year she took me to my first meeting, in 1964, of The Texas Folklore Society, and I've never missed a year since. I may have missed parts of meetings but... And she said to me that she knew of my background in a small West Texas town and a ranching culture and she said, "I don't know why you are so taken with Shakespeare and Browning, and I don't know why you are so enamoured of what goes on in the rest of the
R: world." She said, "You obviously want to write." I think maybe a thought I didn't have fully blown at that moment and she said, "Why don't you look in your own backyard and why don't you write there? Because what is there and what you know about it is going to be more important than anything you find out about the world." And I suppose that's rather exhilarating when you have an esteemed scholar and professor to take you seriously and to say, "Look, this is what you need to be doing - educate yourself certainly, you certainly need an education. "I certainly had a long way to go. I was a scruffy little girlJoyce Gibson Roach 16
from a West Texas town who didn't know anything.
M: Yeah.
R: And the whole world was, you know, new to me. And I asked her, I said, "Why is it...why is it that you're interested in me? What is it, you know. I've had Shakespeare from you, I've had Browning from you, I've had all these things - you've opened my horizons so much."
M: Uh-huh.
R: And she said - she laughed - she said, "You said something to me one time that..." She said, "I really decided to take you on and to polish you up, Joyce." She said, "You had read something..." I had read something - I don't know what it was, I certainly don't remember - about Shakespeare, one of his plays, and she said, "You came to me and said, 'I feel that nobody ever read this before; I'm the R: first person to read this ever. Nobody's ever read this but me, and he wrote this...he's writing this just for me and nobody else, Mabel." And she said, "I knew then if you felt that way about those things that you needed to take a real hard look at what you had in your own backyard. What a rich bounty you had, coming from five generations of Texans, coming from the folk background that I came from." And of course she never made that sound like a dirty word.
M: Yeah.
R: That I was from a folk background and, of course, I Joyce Gibson Roach 17
have always been proud of it. But at that time maybe not everybody was. And anyway, it sort of...the friendship developed from there, and she guided my efforts. But the main thing was that she took me to the Folklore Society, and it wasn't long before I wanted to give a paper too. I felt like I had something to say. Oh, how poor those first papers were. They were terrible, you know. But I was...the point, too, was that I was writing, Sarah.
M: Yeah.
R: And I was writing about something that I knew about personally. And that was a mighty long answer I gave you.
M: No, no.
R: You didn't need to hear...[inaudible]
M: And then how did you branch into the history part of that? You were in English background...
R: English background, yes.
M: You were writing about your home area...
R: Well...or at least things that were particular to that, you know, folk culture; not necessarily my family or area but things particular to folk culture. And then I met Dr. C.L. Sonnichsen in 1971, when Dr. James Lee asked me to write a...one of those pamphlets or monographs for the ...[inaudible] Company who was doing a Western writer series. And he said, "Would you write about C.L. Sonnichsen? You know who he is?" And I said, "No, I don't know who he Joyce Gibson Roach 18
is." He said, "Well, he lives in El Paso and he's taught at UT-EP for forty years, and do you want to do a monograph?" And I thought certainly I want to do a monograph on him. You know, it was a chance to write, it was the first time anybody had invited me to write anything. And so I went out to El Paso and met Leland and fell instantly in love with him and under his spell. And he took me on much as Mabel... Mabel did. And I did the monograph on him and which... [inaudible] went out of business and cancelled their contract. But anyway, it was done with...[inaudible], the ...[inaudible] writers later. But I simply opened up and expressed myself to him about - I'm sure, knowing me, with great passion about what I wanted to write about, and he said, "Then let's do that." And looked at the first chapter of a book, the first book I did that had any credibility or writing I did, called "The Cowgirls", and it was an article. And I'd submitted it somewhere. And he said, "Let me look R: at it, so you don't make a fool of yourself, Joyce." And I said, "Okay, Leland." And so anyway he took it and looked at it and he said, "Oh, yeah, you've got a book here; nobody's ever written about ranch women and cowgirls as folk heroes, folk heroines, from that point of view - the myth, the female myth." He said, "Nobody's ever done that before; you are in new territory. You write that book; you send me every chapter, you show me how you want to lay it out." AndJoyce Gibson Roach 19
I did. He said, "You're right on. Send me every chapter and I'm going to edit every single chapter of this for you." He said, "I don't mean...I'm not talking about fixing it," he said, "to see if you're on the right track." And he did that. Can you imagine someone of his stature, taking me on? And, of course, I became acquainted with him as a grassroots historian. And he looked at it and saved me some terrible stupidity - in the way of, you know, wrong thinking I was going through. Other than that he didn't...I don't mean he polished it or anything like that. But anyway, then it was published. But he said, "You need to belong, you need to get yourself - Folklore Society is fine - you need to go to Historical Society meetings; you need to, you know , all these things feed you, Joyce; all these things feed what you want to do."
M: Yeah. Yeah.
R: So anyway I started coming - really as a member of the Folklore Society - started coming to Texas State Historical R: because they always did joint sessions. And then got involved in no way except giving papers and, again, it sort of happened that way. And now I belong to Western Writers of America, which is certainly not a historical group, believe you me; it is a group a writers of mainly fiction writers. And, you know, the rest is history.
M: You are teaching now. And...are you teaching? Joyce Gibson Roach 20
R: I'm not teaching now. I stopped teaching in the spring of '97 at TCU, and I taught there for about nineteen - come on in - from 1984 till '97 just as adjunct, part-time faculty.
M: Uh-huh.
R: And TCU did, as far as I'm concerned, the English Department did a remarkable thing, in that I taught - I taught...[inaudible] whatever, you know; I didn't like to and they didn't make me very long, or didn't even ask me to very long, but I taught some survey courses in American literature - Early American literature, and in English literature. But then they started using me for specialty classes and the chairman of the department said, "Will you teach Western novels?" He had arranged the course. And, of course, Universities whether they are private or state universities, don't want people teaching for them who don't have their PhDs, unless they are specialists in some way. And I'd never asked to teach full-time for them; I was content to teach and write for them part-time. But Dr. Fred ...[inaudible], who developed the Western Novel course, he said that I don't want to teach this, I'm busy being chair and I'm doing other things, I want you to teach this, and he turned that course over to me, and said, "This is the way I teach it, but you teach it any way you want to." And so I taught Western Novel and then Dr. Neal Daniel took over as Joyce Gibson Roach 21
Chair and he said - he let met teach Folklore, of course, one time. And then Life and Literature of the Southwest was really getting, you know, important again, and he said, "Will you take that course and revive it from the '50s when Mabel Major taught it to you?" And I just leaped at the chance. And it was...how good that Department was to me, to turn things over to me and to teach any way I wanted to. And, in a way that the University couldn't argue about that. And they said, "Okay you've got...you have somebody better? You have some expert that can come in and teach this?" Well, there weren't any because nobody was particularly... maybe some were interested but they had a lot of catching up to do.
M: How...when you were doing those courses, how were you integrating history into that?
R: I taught it always as from the perspective of American Studies. And that is that if you don't know the history of a period that the novel takes place in...
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 1
SIDE 2
M: You were saying that if you don't know the history...
R: Yeah. If you don't know the history of time and place, then what good...what's the point of teaching literature? I think...of course, I came from the school that you just taught the literature. It didn't make much difference Joyce Gibson Roach 22
whether you knew...
M: Yes.
R: Of course, that went by the boards a long time ago. All...I think any professor worth their salt now is going to approach it from what was going on historically - that sort of thing. Maybe on a graduate level they presume you know all those things, but anyway, I couldn't teach it any other way, except that it had to have the history welded to whatever you were teaching, otherwise it didn't make any sense.
M: Uh-huh.
R: And of course, it was Western history and Texas history because those are the pieces that I was teaching.
M: Yes.
R: And I moved certainly...I came from that era where folklore and history were Anglo folklore and history, even if it was in Texas or West Texas or whatever.
M: Um-huh.
R: And I didn't tarry there long. In that...especially in R: the folklore area because I was early-trained from folklorists that, you know, if it's multi-cultural you've got to pay real close attention to Black folklore and Hispanic folklore and you better have more than a nodding acquaintance with it or don't call yourself a folklorist. And nobody ever said I had to call myself a folklorist but IJoyce Gibson Roach 23
had to embrace that label, but I thought - oh, no. And I'm not too...I'm not as skilled as I should be with Hispanic folklore, because in many ways that's a more closed door to Anglos than you might suspect, in that they have... But Black folklore was not a closed door, they were, you know... and there was a time when some of us - because we had so few Black folk interested - that, you know, we did readings in dialects, we sang songs, we did all of that, you know, and I've got a large body of Black folk songs that...under my belt. And I...
M: Yeah.
R: All of it. I'm off the subject of what your question was.
M: Part of the, yeah, part of the Mexican tradition of folklore is the language issue, that that was...
R: That's right.
M: Because it's oral and it would have been passed in Spanish.
R: That's right.
M: And to get into that you've got to be able to deal with M: the languages as well as the culture and everything else.
R: That's right. You do. And there are folklorists who...of course, Spanish was very much a part of - Anglos - very much a part of their background, and it was not mine. Joyce Gibson Roach 24
I have a nice...I have a nice accent and I read well, but I don't know what I've said. And I certainly do not speak the language. And it occurred to me at a fairly early age - I thought, don't go there; that's not fair, you know, to get...unless you speak the language fluently, don't go there.
M: Yeah.
R: That's not your territory. And a Black dialect or anything goes on with that, that's a different story. But as you say, the language is a barrier. And I felt that it would be insulting for me to take on, you know, to take on the mantle of knowing anything much about...
M: Let me...usually, typically I ask in terms of bad history. I'm going to ask you, though, what are you seeing in your students or in your exposure - the things that you read, that you would define as bad folklore then?
R: I can't say that there is any bad folklore. Sorry, I wish I could say, well, this is wrong...
M: Yeah.
R: And that the word folklore...you have a new generation taking over now and a new focus and it's called "popular
R: culture."
M: Okay.
R: And it is the same kind of thing. I guess if one definition of folklore was that it was a bunch of stuff Joyce Gibson Roach 25
about dead people in the past and maybe popular culture is a bunch present stuff about people who are very much alive.
M: Yeah.
R: And maybe that's the difference. I don't know that that's even a good difference.
M: Yeah.
R: It's just something funny to say, perhaps, about it. But it may or may not be telling. But folklore, certainly, you can just enjoy folklore and collect it and never do anything with it.
M: Uh-huh.
R: And so you can't say that's good or bad. But even when you write about it and you reveal it you certainly have some substance there, you're trying to interpret...
M: Uh-huh.
R: ...the facts of folklore, you're trying to help people understand, other than just report on it without any comment. But in that regard, any time you're trying to help people understand, that's not bad folklore.
M: Uh-huh.
R: And you're...what you're having to report on is sometimes bad; you're having to report on...or you're having R: to study the drug culture; you're having to study some really negative...
M: ...Subjects areas.Joyce Gibson Roach 26
R: Or be interested in some really negative things. Even in the area of folk music...oh, some of that, some of the lyrics of published songs, you know, I don't want to name groups - don't know any groups to name 'cause I'm not into that stuff - but the really negative nature of some of the singing groups today...
M: Uh-huh.
R: Pop music is just awful, you know, that it extols all sorts of vices. You can't say that's good. You just can't say that it is good. But at the same time those who report on it - that doesn't make them bad folklorists because they're reporting on it and trying to make some sense of it or trying to reveal, or trying to, as historians, reveal the roots of it.
M: Uh-huh.
R: What gave rise to it, all those kinds of things.
M: Uh-huh.
R: Of course, in folk music is a specialized area of folk - of folklore and the people who are interested in folk music may not know a hoot about any other area.
M: I'm trying to think of what attracted me to you. I mean, I got to know you through your writing and I was trying...I mean, for me...I mean I clearly said, "This woman R: is good; this is good.
R: Thank you.Joyce Gibson Roach 27
M: And it goes back to that, though, is that when I read your stories...
R: They were fiction, you read my fiction...[inaudible].
M: Yeah. And there was feeling and...[inaudible], they have feeling in them and they were expressive in a way that was...it was your command and use of the language, it was the English training that you had had and your ability to create visual images with words. And so that, I don't know that...I don't think that may be the distinction between good and bad folklore, but it...well, it...[inaudible] different than good and bad history in the sense that good and bad history is based upon scholarship and commands of the facts and accurate facts, and good and bad folklore may be your ability to express yourself in a way that captures the imagery and the feelings. Because...
R: Well, maybe, too...what you first - and I thank you for all your compliments, thank you Sarah. The fact that anyone would even read my work and understand it, that's a high compliment to any writer - for someone to read it. But it's a matter of taking - with the folklore - it's a matter of taking folk materials and everyone of my pieces are not a thing in the world but folk culture and folklore, but taken into the area of fiction where you must have characters speak and act and be and do...
M: Yeah.Joyce Gibson Roach 28
R: ...whatever their particular folklore called on them, you know, to do. And an awful lot of my things have to do with religion, have to do with folk religion.
M: Uh-huh.
R: Or at least - not necessarily folk religion - but the practice of religion in the past - both the bad parts of it and the good parts of it. And...but taking folk materials and turning them into fiction is what I do. And it's really all I want to do. I know other writers - all writers - you should know your niche and you should know your audience and it didn't take me long to find that. And what you're talking about has to do with voice - being able to express in your writing what they...
M: Yeah.
R: ...would have said of...and in a way, and in the way that they speak.
M: If you were giving advice to students today who were at a crossroads in terms of thinking about their future and looking toward where they might go - into folklore or history or, you know, literature - what kinds of advice would you give to them?
R: I'd say, "Go into all three." Not to go into one area and leave the other two behind. And I've had...I have had four students, over a teaching career and a part-time teaching career, remember that...who have said to me, "You Joyce Gibson Roach 29
R: have impacted my life; you have changed the direction I was going." Now, that's not many. You think...
M: Yeah.
R: You think about how many students that a full-time person, a career person, professor, how many lives they touched - hundreds! And I've only, you know...so I'm not bragging, there are only four who've told me that personally. And I said...and I thought about what they were doing: one is - finished a thesis, ought to be writing a PhD, but is in love with teaching; one is editing and publishing a horse racing magazine, one is in the book publishing business as an editor; and one is, as a folklorist, she's not necessarily studying folklore, but she's...she works for the zoo and it has to do with the animals. And I look at those four people and I think, "I can't imagine what I've said to you that would have sent you necessarily into those areas."
M: Yeah.
R: You know, what about the teaching? But I think it has to do more than anything else...but again, the advice I would give someone is that you really ought to get in touch with yourself and find out what kind of a folk you are. Because we are all folk.
M: Yeah.
R: You know, if you scratch far enough, we may be...we may Joyce Gibson Roach 30
be sophisticated folk; there may be those who reject...
M: Yeah.
R: ...their background, perhaps. I think probably most people reject part of it, but I wouldn't tell them to go into any area no matter what they wanted to do and forget who they were and forget how much of there is in the world, no matter what your job - even if you sit in front of a computer and do that kind of work all day, how much joy there is in knowing about the world and how you find out about the world if not through the folklore, the history.
M: Yeah.
R: And the literature. So, you see, you can't...with me I can't separate the three.
M: Yeah. I guess I always - when I give advice - I always say, follow your passion.
R: ...[inaudible]
M: If you don't have passion...
R: For some people, that's right.
M: ...walk away, walk away.
R: And I would have to tell you that that's the one area that I feel most fortunate in. I look around at other people - other women, okay, not just people, but other women my age - and I think, "Have you never had a passion for anything? That's the only thing that divides you from me that I can tell, but you don't seem to have any real Joyce Gibson Roach 31
consuming passion for...[inaudible] anything - whatever it is." Mine is writing. And how fortunate to have lived long R: enough...
M: To be doing what...
R: ...to be doing what I want to do. And to still keep doing what I want to do, with no regard or pressure for... well, but is somebody noticing what I'm doing? Am I important to the larger world? And of historical scholarship? Or folklore? Or literature? Or writing? Am I important? You know. And I think, "No, that doesn't have anything to do with your passion. It sure feeds it."
M: Boy, it feeds it.
R: I'll say that, you know; I can't deny that. You know, a little praise will certainly fuel whatever it is that you want to do. But...and that's what I looked at even in young people - do you really have a passion for what you want to do, knowing that it isn't going to make you a buck; it isn't going to change anyone's life but yours. And there again, my own children, I look at that, especially my daughter who from the time she was in the third grade, she said, "Mother, they're asking, what is it I want to do?" It's called Career Training...
M: Yeah. Yeah.
R: ...that you give children. She said, "I don't know what I want to do. What am I going to write?" I said, Joyce Gibson Roach 32
"Well, what am I going to tell her to write down," and I said, "Well, I don't have an answer for that for you." I said, "You'll do whatever you want to do and you'll know R: when that time comes."
M: Yeah.
R: And then the same thing was asked of her in the eighth grade and then in high school before she got out. She said, "I still don't know what I want to do." You know, I said, "It's all right dear; they'll want to know if people want to be teachers, doctors, lawyers." I said, "They're after that, you know, or you want to be a maintenance man or you want to be... They want you to have an idea in mind of what you want to be in life no matter how low or high or in the middle."
M: Yeah.
R: Don't know. Went through college. She said, "I still don't know what it is that...they keep saying you've got to major in something." And I said, "I'm sorry." I was never any help to her. I said, "I'm sorry they're asking you that, you know, because if you don't..." And they wouldn't let her take a general studies, you know, liberal arts, they didn't have such a thing. And I have to decide. I said, "Well, again, Delight, you don't have a passion yet, but maybe, you know, it will come." And she decided to major in communications after changing her major twice, in Joyce Gibson Roach 33
communications. And then went back and got a master's in communications and said at the end of that, they said, "But what do you want to do?" And she came again. And we talked about...[inaudible]. And I said, "Let me tell you the
R: "answer to that now: anything you want to do. There is the answer to the question. It doesn't really matter since you didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, something that requires specific training at a young...at an early time, you know."
M: Yeah.
R: And I said, "Do whatever you want to do." And she said, in her own way, "Thank you." And that's exactly what she's done. It's exactly what she wants to do. The world is her oyster and she's trained and qualified and prepared, she writes, she speaks, and so she's discovered the truth of that.
M: Oh, that's wonderful. That's a great story.
R: Well, I don't know that it is a great story.
M: It is. It is.
R: But that's what I tell my students.
M: Oh, yeah.
R: I don't care, you know, but whatever it is, feel deeply about it. And as I said, we go back to what is bad history - bad history is that which does not make you feel.
M: Yeah. Yeah.Joyce Gibson Roach 34
R: If it makes you feel, it is good history.
M: Thank you.
R: You're welcome.
M: That's good.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2.