Taken from the CD “A Tour of Southern Ghosts”
Copyright 2000 Art Station
Used by permission

Sound Design by Henry Howard

Photography by Craig and Connie Dominey

-Craig

Directed by Craig Dominey

Told by John Gentile

Sound Design by Henry Howard

Photography by Craig and Connie Dominey

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was one of the programs under the New Deal that helped give government jobs to thousands of unemployed Americans during this time. The FWP was part of this program and, at its height, hired over 6,000 unemployed writers, both novices and experienced, at a modest salary of $20 per week. Many famous writers were employed by this program, including Saul Bellow, John Cheever and Zora Neale Hurston.

The FWP writers were originally hired to produce a series of state guidebooks, which would later become classics of Americana. The Folklore Unit of the FWP was specifically instructed to collect “life histories” from a wide variety of Americans from all walks of like. The everyday stories of stone cutters, department store clerks, painters, textile workers, farmers and many others were recorded for future publication. The government hoped that this project would provide the nation with a symbol of multi-cultural strength.

 In 1938, the Folklore Unit was placed under the direction of Benjamin Botkin. Concerned with the rise of fascism in Europe, Botkin felt that the folklore project was very important in that it could help foster tolerance between Americans of different backgrounds. He instructed his writers to conduct one-on-one interviews with their subjects, and to do everything they could to make their subjects feel important and, consequently, speak freely.

Although many of these writers were amateurs when it came to collecting folklore, they soon learned their skills on the job. Without the benefit of latter-day tape recorders, the writers reconstructed the life histories they collected from notes and memory. Botkin encouraged them to listen for characteristic speech patterns and vernacular language. From 1938-1942, the writers documented traditional statements, expressions, songs, essays and stories from across the country.

The American South was seen as particularly fertile ground for folklore. The South was still a largely rural and agricultural region back then, and had not had its “old ways” buried under large cities and so-called “artificial civilization.” Botkin found that the South’s black population, mountaineers and poor whites were the main sources of folklore, and was impressed with the amount of good storytelling and singing he heard during his travels. He particularly credited the friendliness and camaraderie between natives and visitors for the wealth of storytelling material.

The FWP was not without it’s critics, however. Academic folklorists considered the FWP folklore collection to be undependable, since it was collected by amateurs. Detractors of the Roosevelt administration considered the WPA program as a whole to be wasteful, slow and excessive (they joked that WPA stood for “We Piddle Around”). Some congressional leaders even believed that the folklore collections were Communist propaganda.

When World War II broke out, the FWP came to an abrupt halt, and most of the folklore collection was left unpublished. The vast piles of records lay virtually unnoticed in the Library of Congress until recently. The Internet, in particular, has made many of these life history manuscripts more accessible to the public.

For more information on the Federal Writers’ Project and the New Deal, check out these sites:

American Life Histories
Part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory series, this excellent site features life history manuscripts from the FWP, as well as historical information on the program itself.

New Deal Network
A project of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (FERI), this site is a research and teaching resource devoted to the public works and arts projects of the New Deal.

Directed by Craig Dominey

Told by Evelyn McCray

Music by Barbara Panter

Sound Design by Henry Howard

Photography by Jon Kownacki

“In my family, like a lot of families in south Alabama, (the elders) would warn us from danger by telling us tales. We’d be warned, ‘Don’t play on the train track at night, or the headless conductor would get us,’ and ‘Don’t play near the river at night or the Swamp-boogie would et ya.’ Of course these tales were designed so we wouldn’t get drowned or be hit by a train. These tales would mostly do the trick – not only because they were scary, but mostly because they had a bit of truth about them. The fact that a train really beheaded a conductor or that children have been known to disappear while playing by the river at night would fuel these tales.

The tale of the Click-bok tree has its origin in an Alabama River town called Camden. The story goes that a slave got his hands on some gold and hid it in a tree that was six paces from the big house. When he returned after the Civil War (around 1870), that same tree was now eighteen paces from the house. How can this be? Trees don’t get up and walk – or do they?”

Lester “Mudbone” Thomas has been a professional storyteller since 1994. All his stories spring from family ghost story sessions during power failures. Lester is a computer engineer/ex-standup comic and lives with his wife and three children in Atlanta, GA.

Directed by Craig Dominey

Illustrations by Thomas Bird IV

Sound Design by Henry Howard

Special thanks to August House for allowing us to use this story.

Photography by Rachel Vickers

Additional Sound Design by Henry Howard