American Folk Tales And Songs Richard Chase

Working with the Chase Collection: What It Actually Is

American Folk Tales And Songs Richard Chase put together back in the early 1950s is a field collection, not an academic monograph. It is raw material — tales as people told them, with variants, regional spellings, and performance notes attached. If you are pulling from it for research, transcription work, or song reconstruction, the first thing you need to understand is that Chase was writing down oral performance. That means the text you read is already an interpretation of something that was spoken, sung, or performed in a particular moment. The variants between towns in the same county can be substantial, and the songs often appear with incomplete lyrics because the informant stopped partway through or Chase couldn't catch a line. I spent about three years working directly from Chase manuscripts for a project tracking how certain hillbilly ballad forms migrated through western North Carolina. The original recordings Chase made in the late 1940s and early 1950s are held at the University of North Carolina archives, and the published volume is a curated subset. One practical problem I ran into that nobody warns you about: the index in the book is organized by tale type and song title, but the cross-references between variant texts are basically absent. When I was tracking the "Billy Boy" tradition across four counties, I ended up building my own spreadsheet linking manuscript call numbers to published page numbers because the book makes you jump around constantly.

Accessing and Using American Folk Tales And Songs Richard Chase

There are several ways to get at this material, and the best route depends on what you are actually trying to do with it. If you just need the text for reading or citation, the published volume is available through most academic libraries and occasionally on used book sites. But the published version leaves out a significant amount of Chase's field notes, informant demographics, and recording metadata. If you are doing serious work, you want the manuscript collection at the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill. It has the audio tapes, the field notebooks, and the transcripts, and they are open to researchers with a valid appointment. The process of working from the manuscripts is slower than you might expect. Chase's handwriting in the field notebooks is legible but dense, and he often switched between typescript transcripts and marginal notation without clear separation. I learned this the hard way when I misread a date annotation as a location note and spent two days chasing down an informant who never existed in that county. The workaround was to pull the corresponding audio reel and listen to the actual recording. The tape quality on some of these is degraded — magnetic tape from that era tends to shed oxide — but listening to the informant's voice confirms the location, the date, and sometimes reveals details Chase omitted from the transcript. For the songs specifically, Chase notated melodies in staff notation where possible, but many of the tunes are given only as lyric fragments with a brief melodic contour description. If you are a musician trying to reconstruct a performance, you will find that the published versions often flatten the rhythm. These songs were performed with considerable flexibility in tempo and ornamentation, and Chase's transcriptions tend to impose a regular meter that was not always present in the actual performance. I solved this by cross-referencing with later field recordings from the same informants or their contemporaries. The Library of Congress sound recordings division has overlapping material from Alan Lomax and others that fills in some of the melodic gaps.

What the Collection Gets Wrong

I want to be blunt about a limitation that beginners in folk music and folklore studies often miss. Chase worked within the folk narrative tradition of his time, which meant he tended to select and shape the material toward what he considered "representative" examples. He was not a neutral documentarian. Some informants whose performances he found awkward or hard to classify were either excerpted heavily or not included at all. The published volume gives you a polished sense of Appalachian folk culture, but it smooths over the nature of what was actually being performed — the blues inflections in ballad singing, the borrowed song forms from Tin Pan Alley, the jokes and nonsense verses that don't fit into any tale type classification. Another issue specific to the song material: Chase sometimes attributed songs to particular informants when the attribution was uncertain, and on a few occasions later researchers found that the same melody appeared under different names in different counties with no connection to the person Chase credited. This matters if you are doing source criticism or tracing the lineage of a particular song variant. Always check the manuscript file before citing the published attribution. If your goal is simply to read stories or learn some old songs, the published volume works fine. It is well edited and accessible. But if you are doing scholarly work, genetic criticism of ballad variants, or ethnomusicological analysis, you need the manuscript sources. The published book is a starting point, not the final word, and Chase himself acknowledged that in his introductions — he just did not make clear how incomplete the published selection actually was relative to what he collected over several years of fieldwork.

Practical Notes for Researchers

The Southern Folklife Collection requires an appointment booked at least two weeks in advance for manuscript consultation. They do not allow photography of the audio tapes, but you can request digitized copies of specific reels for research purposes, which usually arrives within a month. The finding aid for the Richard Chase papers is online and reasonably detailed, though it was last updated before Chase's complete correspondence was processed, so there are likely uncatalogued items still in the collection. For the published book specifically, the most useful edition for working scholars is the 1956 Dover reprint, which includes Chase's original introductions and the full tale-type index. The later reprints sometimes drop supplementary material. If you are building a database or corpus from this collection, I would recommend photographing or scanning the pages yourself rather than relying on digital repositories, because the available scans online are often low resolution and the page layouts with marginal notes get flattened out in the process. The collection is not huge by archive standards, but it is dense with information if you know how to navigate it. The real value is in the cross-referencing between the audio recordings, the field notebooks, and the published texts. Chase was a careful worker for his time, and the material he gathered remains one of the more substantial bodies of Southern folk narrative and song documentation from that decade.