- 44-—
There is no such thing
as a group without its
folklore. Students have
their folklore, farmers
have theirs, factory
workers have theirs,
lawyers have theirs.
— Roger Welsch
Nebraska folklorist
--»f -
Writing what was never written
Nebraska folklore: It’s been told for years and years and years...
By Alan Phelps
Behind signs reading “Absolutely
No Visitors” and “Beware of Dogs”
lives a man known to many as
Captain Nebraska. --—
Roger Welsch, famous around the
country for his “Postcards from Nebraska”
segment on CBS’s “Sunday Morning with
Charles Kurault” program, lives and
breathes folklore. And what he calls the
“ugly signs” that keep mobs of fans from
the front yard of his small Dannebrog
farm attest to the national popularity of
the Nebraska stories he tells.
“There’s always an almost embarrassed
effort to say, oh yeah, well, we’re just as
good as New York — look at the art we’ve
piled up along the Interstate,” he said,
dressed in his trademark bib overalls.
“The fact of the matter is, there’s also
very rich culture going on all the time.”
Welsch is one of a growing number of
people who have taken interest in what
they call the folklore of Nebraska: stories,
songs, memories and traditions not com
municated by the printed page, but passed
on first hand from one person to another
and one generation to the next.
Welsch calls folklore the part of cul
ture that is transmitted informally, pri
marily by word of mouth.
“It can be written on the back of an
envelope, like a recipe for peanut butter
cookies,” he said. “It can be done by ex
ample, so that if you learn how to make
peanut butter cookies from your mother,
she doesn’t tell you to put the fork cross
ways across the top, you’ll see her do that
and know it’s part of peanut butter cook
ies, to cross the top with your fork —
that’s just part of what you do.”
To many Nebraskans who have watched
his show, read his books or laughed at his
tall tales or “Plains lies,” Welsch defines
folklore in this state. And through his
national exposure, Welsch has helped to
make these stories popular throughout
America.
Welsch said that as a language major
at the University of Nebraska in the
1950s, he was fasci nated by the literature
ofthe Romantic period ofthe 1800s, when
writers first became interested in the
folklore.
The European interest in folk tales,
songs and the like was spurred during
that era by the publication of the Grimm
Brothers’ collections of fairy tales in
Germany between 1815 and 1835. The
word “folklore” itself was coined in 1846.
Welsch said that although researchers
of the time didn’t realize that folklore
existed in every part of a society, they
recognized the vast library of folklore in
the lower, illiterate classes.
“Whatever they (the lower classes)
knew, they had acquired by informal
means — by watching other people, by
hearing the stories, by learning the songs,
by going to wedding dances.”
Welsch said that because he was from
German-Russian stock, he identified with
the folklore of the lower class.
“My people had no elite culture — they
were migrant laborers,” he said. Although
his ancestors didn’t have the learned
poets, classical musicians and trained
philosophers of the upper class, Welsch
said he knew they had culture.
“It just wasn’t the elitist culture that
was being dealt with at the university,”
he said. “So you can imagine how attrac
tive folklore was for me, from my back
ground.
“I was just intoxicated with it. I went
crazy with it, loved it.”
Welsch was not the first person to
be affected by the desire to learn
more about Nebraskan folklore.
Louise Pound, an English pro
fessor at the University of Nebraska, is
most often credited with beginning the
process of gathering the songs and stories
of Nebraska legends. Before her death in
1958, Pound taught at the university for
50 years and is recognized as one of the
state’s greatest writers.
Pound was involved with the Ameri
can Folklore Society and first became
interested in collecting Nebraskan folk
lore at the suggestion of one of her col
leagues at the University of Missouri.
In about 1905, she started collecting
folk songs from around the state, such as
“In the Summer of’60" and “I Want to be
a Cowboy.” Pound’s first book on the
subject, “Folk songs of Nebraska and the
Central West: A Syllabus,” was published
in 1915.
A year after her death, a book of her
folklore essays and speeches was pub
lished by the University of Nebraska Press.
Aptly titled “Nebraska Folklore,” the book
has become a text on the subject.
Pound’s chief test for inclusion of an
item was “that it has lived in the folk
mouth and has persisted for a fair num
ber of years.” Thus, a song or tale pub
lished in a book could still be folklore if it
had existed for some time in the oral
tradition before publication.
“Chiefly,” Pound said of the stories she
collected, “they were learned in child
hood or youth in the East, the South, the
North, or in the Old World, and were then
brought by immigration to the Middle
West”
The most intensive effort to collect
the folklore of Nebraska was the
Federal Writers’ Project in the
latter part of the 1930s. The FWP
was a division of the Works Progress
Administration, established in 1935 under
the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act
to create jobs for victims of the Great
Depression.
Tales, songs, memories and traditional
practices were all included in the collec
tions. Between May of 1937 and Decem
ber of 1940 the FWP distributed a series
of 30 pamphlets, collected and edited by
FWP workers, in mimeographed form to
schools across Nebraska.
The pamphlets were meant to be chap
ters in a future book, but the World War
intervened and the book was never nub
lished.
FWP officials justified their efforts to
collect stories and songs by saying Ne
braska’s pioneers were dying off and
history had to be preserved, but Welsch
said those claims were more of an excuse
than a reason. He said that during the
’30s, Americans fell back on their “ro
mantic nationalism.”
“What happens very oflen, when a
country is in trouble, there’s almost an
inevitable movement called romantic
nationalism,” he said. “You try to justify
who it is you are with some kind of
national pride — we’re Americans, be
cause this is what America’s about, by
God — and here we were in desperate
trouble in the ’30s.”
America was able to gain inspiration
during the Depression by looking back on
its proud pioneer past, Welsch said.
He said the government could “say to
people who have been struggling in the
’30s, we’ve been struggling a long time,
and pioneers struggled too, and here’s
what they did — they sang and they told
stories, they made apple pies out of gra
ham crackers,” he said. “It sort of makes
you feel better.”
Welsch said the same reasons
folklore was popular in the ’30s
make it Nebraska’s brand of
folklore popular today.
“This country’s in trouble,” he said.
“What I’ve been saying and believe to be
true, is there’s a new romanticism grow
ing in America, too.”
The people of the East like to listen to
Midwestern folklore, Welsch said, be
cause of its inherent purity that nowa
days seems to be slipping away from the
rest of the country.
Welsch said that, for instance, there
was a time when a character in a play or
book could be demonstrated to be inno
cent and dumb simply by being from the
Midwest, but those times were changing.
“To some extent that still exists, but
that’s fading fast,” he said. In some ways,
he said, such characters were not simply
dumb, but also the heroes, because they
were seen to bring to the degenerate East
the purity of Nebraska.
“Garrison Keillor is successful because
he talks about the small town good life,
