In addition to reminiscences of trapping and hunting in the Big Bend of West Texas during the 1920s and 1930s, this Texas Folklore Society Publication includes a heretofore unpublished outdoors sketch by J. Frank Dobie on deer hunting and a piece by Bertha McKee Dobie on Frank s interest in grasses. Elmer Kelton, Joyce Roach, and Robert Flynn take a humorous look at their work and hometowns, and Kenneth Davis tells tales of souls departing their bodies. There are essays on the bounty of the tables of the earlier settlers, and the state s ethnic heritages through the German Volksfest in...

The Society had its beginnings at the A&M-Texas football game in 1909. John Avery Lomax, a forty-two-year-old A&M English teacher from Harvard and Leonidas Warren Payne, a thirty-six year old UT English professor and linguist, met to discuss establishing a folklore society, as had been suggested by George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard. The announced purpose of the society was to collect and make known to the public songs and ballads, superstitions, signs and omens, cures and peculiar customs, legends, dialects, games, plays, and dances, and riddles and proverbs.

This is the best of the Society's papers over the past three yearsfrom lynchings to "el ""pato" boat building; from sunbonnets to hammered dulcimers; from jokes about droughts and lawyers to tales of folk, gospel and blues music; from gravemarkers to bottle trees, and more."

This volume collects the best known or most representative or the most classically Texas traditional songs set in a social and historical framework.

This is an exploration of Texas women and the conflicting images and myths that have grown up about them. The Texas Folklore Society offers these accounts, written by a variety of authors, about the women who have shaped Texas history with their accomplishments and character. Included are Emily Morgan, Belle Starr, Elizabet Ney, and Miriam Ferguson, among others.

The second volume to the Texas Folklore Society history covers from the McCarthy era to the end of the wild and woolly sixties. Includes the publishing history of the TFS books, anecdotes about the gatherings of the Society (including Hermes Nye starting the tradition of the hootenanny at Texas Folklore Society meetings in 1956), and the emphasis on singing beginning at Society gatherings.
The Texas Folklore Society was thirty-five years old in 1944, having come into existence under the hands of John Avery Lomax and Leonidas Warren Payne in 1909. J. Frank Dobie held the reins of the...

Juneteenth Texas, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society #LIV, received a San Antonio Conservation Society award for the preservation of historic buildings, objects and places relating to the history of Texas and its natural beauty and all that is admirably distinctive of our state, and to educate the public with knowledge of our inherited regional values.

In this Texas Folklore Society publication there are essays on teaching folklore for students How I Define Folklore for My Students, Toward a Definition of Folk Culture, Beginning Within: Teaching Folklore the Easy Way, Folklore Fieldwork on the Internet, and others. Essays illustrating folklore are also included, such as The Honored Dead: The Ritual of Police Burial, Gang Graffiti, Rail Tales: Some Are True, Dance Halls of East Texas, The Oil Field Camp, Tex-Mex Dialect or Gidget Goes to Acuna, and more."

You won t find molded plastic, mass-produced items in this Texas Folklore Society Publication. These are folk toys, made from natural or available materials, whatever is handy or can be scrounged. The folks who make them are amateurs of varying degrees, from the ten-year-old hammering together a skate scooter or box kite to the doting grandparent sewing doll clothes or whittling paired giraffes for a Noah s Ark. "Texas Toys and Games" combines both how-to descriptions and reminiscences.
Folk games encompass guessing, gambling, and counting games; physically competitive games of chase,...

This collection of essays from the 1970s describes the customs, traditions, songs, and stories by which future anthropologists will analyze that decade. The rodeos and chain letters and bumper stickers, Neiman Marcus, and fat stock shows, gospel conventions, and underground newspapers, CB radios and university ghosts, backwoods beer busts and the folklore of marijuana, Jack Ruby and the Kennedy assassination. This publication also looks at zydeco, Western Swing, gospel music, Texas country music, and the rise of redneck rock by such writers as Joseph Lomax, Guy Logsdon, Bill Malone, and Jan...