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I was in for a surprise, more ways than one, when I signed up for Dr. Leonard Roberts’ Mythology class my senior year at Pikeville College in 1969.  I realized I’d just wasted five dollars on Edith Hamilton’s fat text when I walked into the classroom and saw all the chairs shoved up against the wall and Dr. Roberts plugging in a hi-fi.  As chairman of the English department, he was using executive privilege when he announced that he was going to teach folk dancing and call it Mythology.  The author of  Old Greasy Beard didn’t care if Aphrodite rose from the sea wearing a whale-bone corset, we were going to do the Virginia Reel.

Two weeks later, when the class was kicking up dust to “Cotton-eyed Joe,” my partner, a 200-pound phys-ed major from Bumble Bee, Arkansas, dropped out of line and demanded an audience with Dr. Roberts.  Presenting two enormous bruised and trod-upon feet for scrutiny, she said if she ever had to dance with the likes of me again, she was dropping the class.  She might even sue the school for damages. 

Looking over his glasses and rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Dr. Roberts said he would look into it, but this was the first time he’d ever had such a complaint in a Mythology class. 

Leonard Roberts taught English and folklore at Pikeville College for fifteen years, starting in 1968.  His resume included various teaching and administrative positions at Piedmont College, Union College, Morehead State College and West Virginia Wesleyan.  He had served as president of both the West Virginia Folklore Society and the National Folk Festival.  By 1969, when I was his student, he had just published his fifth book, Old Greasy Beard and founded The Appalachian Studies Center, publishing Twigs, the college literary journal, and the works of other writers under the Hilltop Editions imprint.  

He was a tall stout-featured man who looked as though he’d be more comfortable wearing a pair of bib overalls than a suit and tie.  When not standing before a chalk board explaining the origin of some old British ballad and maybe humming a verse of “Bonny Barbara Allan,” he might be found in his little office elbow deep in books and papers.  Peek inside and you would probably see him pecking away on his old Royal manual, a sly grin twitching at the corners of his mouth as if he’d just thought of something funny, such as one of those tall tales he’d heard from the Couch brothers over on Pine Mountain.

Catch him at the right time and he’d like as not start in on “The One-Eyed Giant” or “The Devil’s Big Toe,” get ticked about half-way through and start laughing and slapping his knee, coughing and wheezing and turning red in the face.  You would want to get up and give him a good thump on the back but you were laughing too hard yourself to do it.  Dr. Roberts wouldn’t have it any other way.    

Leonard Roberts was born in a log house January 28, 1912 at Toler Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky.  He was the seventh of eleven children.  Even as a child he was busy laying the foundation for what would become his life’s work.  Gether Irick, his best friend in grade school, described his companion as “a great talker.”  In the 1983 Leonard Roberts memorial issue of Pike County Kentucky Historical  Papers the former Kentucky legislator remembers walking to and from the one-room school on Toler Creek listening to a young boy’s disquisitions on “experiences, events, happenings and tales which he mostly picked up from listening to his country friends and neighbors.”  

Ever the adventurer, Roberts was 18 when he dropped out of high school after one year to join the army.  While stationed in Hawaii, he nurtured an interest in music and became a saxophonist and clarinetist in the 21st infantry.  After returning home he earned money playing in dance bands at night, and was able to finish high school in two years.   

With diplomas in hand, the companions Leonard and Gether surprised their parents with a decision to become hoboes for a while and see what adventures lay beyond the hills of Eastern Kentucky.  Hopping a southbound freight train in Pikeville, they rode the rails for days, hiding in box cars and among sewer pipes, winding up in Tennessee near the Georgia border, dead broke, cold and half-starved.  With nothing to swallow but their pride, they prevailed upon the sympathy of local farmers for an occasional meal. Neither were they above entering a cornfield at a convenient hour and harvesting a few tender ears for roasting. 

Finally, with their bellies full of experience, if nothing else, the two came home the same way they left.  In Irick’s words, “It was time to get an education and make something of ourselves.” 

Roberts enrolled in the work study program at Berea College, graduating in 1939 with a BA in English and music.  Once more his musical ability paid off.  He landed a job at Jackson City School in Breathitt County organizing a band and teaching English.  Three years later he left the mountains again.  With an unfinished novel as part of his luggage, he traveled to the University of Iowa.  After graduating with a Master’s degree in English, he returned to Berea to teach English in the Foundation School of Berea.  While collecting folk tales from his students as part of their assignments, he became so enthused he followed them home to gather more stories from their parents, grandparents and neighbors.  Home was the territory south of Hell-fer-Sartin Creek, a part of Perry County Roberts describes as “one of the most isolated sections in the eastern Kentucky hills.”  

After five years of lugging a tape recorder across the  ridges and hollers of Big Leatherwood, Troublesome Creek and Kingdom Come to the sagging porches and fire-lit living rooms of the McDanielses and Halcombs, Roberts amassed a hefty manuscript, one that bristled with Jack tales, haint tales, “Arshman” anecdotes and stories of giants, robbers and witches, tales that were traceable to the “Old County” and told in the colorful dialect and idiom of the eastern Kentucky mountains.  

After spending a summer at Indiana University learning how to classify the collection, he returned to Berea to complete what would become his dissertation for a doctorate in folklore at the University of Kentucky, the first to be awarded by the institution in that field.  The revised and annotated manuscript, titled South from Hell-fer-Sartin, was published in 1955 by the University of Kentucky Press.  It was Roberts’ debut as a serious American folklorist. 

In addition to scholarly articles and stories published in Tennessee Folklore Bulletin, Midwest Folklore, Southern Folklore Quarterly, Mountain Life and Work, and others, Roberts authored eight books.  In order of publication they are as follows: 

I Bought Me a Dog (1954)

South from Hell-fer-Sartin (1955)  

Nippy and the Yankee Doodle (1958)

Up Cutshin & Down Greasy: Folkways of a Kentucky Mountain Family (1959)

Old Greasy Beard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap (1969)

The McCoys: Their Story (1976)

In the Pine: Selected Kentucky Folksongs (1978)

Sang Branch Settlers: (1980)

Up Cutshin & Down Greasy is arguably Roberts most important work.  The four years he spent interviewing and recording the stories of the Couch family of Pine Mountain has resulted in more than a collection of folktales and songs.  The book is a record of the tellers themselves, a family living on the edge of modern civilization.  It is a story of a Kentucky community who, as late as the 1950s, were plowing fields with a mule, working in unsafe coal mines for 18 dollars a day, reading by an oil lamp, making moonshine–and telling stories by the light of a coal fire.      

At 71, Leonard W. Roberts was regarded as one of the foremost folklorists in America.  The publication of Sang Branch Settlers three years before had set the standard for folklorists worldwide.  He had earned the respect of the serious scholar and the love of the general reader.  

He had many more classes to meet and a lot more stories to tell when he was killed in an automobile accident at Stanville, Kentucky, April 29, 1983.  He left behind his wife Edith, daughters Margaret, Sue, Lynneda and Rita, and thousands of readers and admirers.  In the words of his friend, humorist and UK professor Loyal Jones, “He was an original man, whose like we shall not see again.”   

   
It was toward the end of the semester in 1969 and I was sweating it, grade-wise, in Dr. Roberts’ Mythology, aka Folk Dancing class.  I figured the jig was up when he called me into his office one afternoon.  “Mr. Compton,” he said,  “everybody knows you can’t dance a lick and you’re dangerous, to boot, but I’m going to give you an “A” in my…Mythology class.  Your unique footwork is not to be ignored.  You have added some new and innovating steps to the Hungarian Polka.”

Contributor – Gayle Compton

Jim Couch, His Family Story: An Excerpt

Putney, a stringtown along the winding Cumberland River, grew around the old seat of one of the largest sawmills in eastern Kentucky.  I can remember well the day I came over from Pine Mountain School to find Jim Couch, a storyteller from back on the headwaters of the Kentucky River, who was said to know all the stories of the clan of tellers and ballad singers.  The houses became thicker along the blacktop, and soon I could see the chimneys of the Intermountain Lumber and Coal Company pouring out acrid smoke on the wind.  The level bottoms along the Poor Fork of the Cumberland were covered with acres of lumber stacks.  After some inquiry I found where Jim lived and stopped by the road.  His home was propped on a hillside in a small drain.  I saw three working men on the lower porch and heard the cry of playing children in the lower yard behind a paling fence.  I hallooed from the slat gate.  A friendly response came from one of the men sitting in a low chair.  He was black as a minstrel from his hard-toed shoes to his mining cap. 

I entered the yard and clambered up the steps to the end of the porch.  Two of the men (I later learned they were Jim’s brothers Alex and Harrison) rose, and after speaking to me, they went to their homes below the road.  The seated man waved a black hand to a split bottom chair, where I sat facing him.  “Been over to Cutshin Creek,” I began, “saw your sister Mandy.  She tells me you know a lot of stories–know all the stories of the family.”

From Up Cutshin & Down Greasy

The Animals and the Robbers

One time they’s a donkey, and an old woman and old man owned it.  They said it was gettin’ too old to work and they’s goin’ to kill it.  So it heard’em and it went and broke the stable door down and started down the road.  And it met a rooster.  That rooster was crowin’, and he said “Rooster, why do you crow?”

He said, “Well, they said they’s goin’ to kill me, said I was too old to keep around the farm.”

He said, “Well, come with me and they won’t kill ye.”

So they went on and they met a cat.  And that cat was meawin’.  And they said, “Cat, why do you meaw?”

He said, “Well, they’s goin’  to kill me, I was too old to catch mice.”

He said, “Well, come and go with me and they won’t kill ye.”

They went and they met a dog, and that dog was barkin’.  They said, “Dog, what makes you bark?”

He said, they said they’s goin’ to kill me, said I was too old to watch cows.”

They said, “Come and go with me and they won’t kill ye.”

They went.  And they laid down by a big tree when it come dark.  The rooster flew up in the tree and the rest of them laid down there.  The rooster looked way off and seed three lights.  And he hollered and said, “Well,” said, “I see three robbers way yonder, countin’ their money,” said, “le’s go and get us something to eat.”

They all got up and went there and that donkey put his feet on the winder, the dog got on that donkey’s back, and the chicken got on the dog’s back, and the cat got on the rooster’s back.  And they started makin’ noise. The donkey was brayin’, and the dog was barking’ and the cat was meawin’ and the rooster crowin’.  They run them robbers out.  And they all went in there, and the cat got under the stove and the dog got behind the door and the rooster flew up in a tree and that donkey got under the floor.  

One of them men said he was goin’ to go back in the house and see what it was.  He got in the house and started to punch the fire up and that cat scratched him.  He started to run out the door and the dog bit him.  Got out there and the donkey kicked him in the road.  The rooster was up in the tree sayin’, “Cock-a-doodle-do.”

He went back and told them, said they’s a witch under the stove scratched him, and said they’s a giant grabbed him and pinched him, and said they’s something kicked him in the road, and said they’s something else sayin’: 

Cock-a-doodle-do

Let me kick him too!

From South from Hell-fer-Sartin

The Devil and God Counting Souls

Wash Freeman and Mose Powers lived way back in the mountains on a branch of the Cumberland River called Cotton’s Creek.  They were great buddies and both liked their corn likker.  In fact, they liked it so well that they made their own. 

They just didn’t make their own whiskey but made enough extra to sell their friends and neighbors.  But their moonshine still was well hidden in a laurel and ivy thicket and the revenuers didn’t bother trying to find it.

So they lived a happy and contented life till the day they took a big jug of corn squeezins and climbed over a fence into a graveyard.  

They drunk and laughed and sung and just had a good time in general.  After a while the jug was emptied and by that time both of them was too drunk to move.  So they lay down and went right to sleep in the graveyard.

While they were asleep two boys came by and stopped to gather some walnuts which had fallen from a tree just outside the fence.  They piled them all up but two that rolled inside the fence and then set down to divide them.

One boy would take a walnut and say, “I’ll take this one.” 

The other boy would take one and say, “I’ll take this one.”

While they were dividing the walnuts, Wash waked up and heard them say, “I’ll take this one.”

“I’ll take that one.” 

He poked Mose in the ribs, “Mose, Mose, wake up.”

“What’s the matter, Wash?” said Mose sitting up.

“Listen Mose,” whispered Wash.  “We’ve slept too long and it’s Judgment Day. Don’t you hear God and the Devil dividing the people?”  

They kept quiet and listened, hoping they would be overlooked.  But soon one of the voices said, “Well that’s the last one.”

“No,” said the other voice, “you forgot the two inside the graveyard.  “I’ll go right now and get both of them.” 

That was all Wash and Mose needed to hear.  They jumped to their feet and such a little thing as a fence didn’t slow them down.  No, siree, they cleared the top rail with several inches to spare and never stopped running till they were way out in the ivy thicket.

“What scared me the most, Mose,” Wash said, “was I couldn’t tell which was coming after me, God or the Devil.  From the way I’ve been living I don’t hardly believe it was God.  But from now on I’m a changed man, Mose.  I’m a changed man.” 

From Old Greasybeard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap

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