Folk Wisdom

In the earliest phase of my career I worked as a folklorist in Middle Tennessee. My first assignment was documenting traditional basket makers and the surrounding culture. It took a while but I finally started to realize that the important thing about basketry or any other folk tradition was not the artifact (the basket) itself, but the community that grew with it. Looking at the white oak basketry tradition in Cannon County, Tennessee led me to understand community mores, gender roles, and issues of class, ethnicity and family. Basketry allowed me to work with a community of adaptable, hard-working individuals who farmed hardscrabble soil, and developed a close-knit community of individuals who valued family, religion, and tradition. The stories they told revealed this information. All I had to do was listen.

White oak basketry led me to interact with a group of people I’ll always treasure, and who I may have never know otherwise. Over several years I interviewed a dozen makers as many times, and the stories I got from those oral histories taught me more about people and communities than any schooling I ever had. This remains true today. People are the experts of their own lives. We need to look to these experts to tell their own narratives while they are alive. Their life and breath fill their personal stories better than any writer, historian, or storyteller ever could.