New York Folklore Quarterly: Volume XX, No. 4—Country People and Yankee Storytellers

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NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. XX, No. 4, December, 1964

COUNTRY PEOPLE AND YANKEE STORYTELLERS:
NEW HAMPSHIRE LOCAL ANECDOTES
by Ben A. Botkin

The following anecdotes are reprinted from the revised edition of Ben Botkin’s A Treasury of New England Folklore, published November 25 by Crown Publishers, Inc. They are part of a group of over 40 local tales that Mr. Botkin recorded in Alstead, South Acworth and Walpole, New Hampshire, in February, 1964. In a new Introduction to his book, Botkin has this to say about local anecdotes and their tellers:

ONE OF the richest veins of New England folk story and folksay is the body of local anecdotes kept alive in the oral tradition of every community. Bring a group of oldtimers together and ask them for old stories or stories of old times and an apparently inexhaustible flow of reminiscence and anecdote is released. One item suggests another and a single name recalls an entire cycle of stories built around a person who has become legendary. Typical story openings are: “There was a man by the name of —— that lived in ——.” “Years ago there was a man in —— who ——.” “It was back in the days when ——." “When I was a youngster ——.” “When my grandfather was a young man ——.” “It seems that my father ——.”

Such references to time and place are part of the actual or supposed historicity of the anecdote, since the local anecdote, unlike the folktale proper, is a story told as true and to be believed. Its larger truth, however, is its truth to human nature and, at the same time, to local color, flavor, folkways, and idiom. But like all stories, the local anecdote is told primarily because it is a good story well told. In addition, it takes on a folk quality from the oral and vernacular style and a traditional quality from the fact that it is told over and over by more than one person and sometimes the same story is related about more than one person (as it becomes attached to different individuals possessing the same trait)....

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NOTE: The New York Folklore Society Newsletter and New York Folklore Journal were replaced by Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore which debuted in December, 2000.

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