Assessment of the extent and function of folklore in Stuart's writing is a task made relatively easy because of his time and place. His writing career has coincided with development of academic folklore studies in major universities, and some aspects of Kentucky folklore have been collected and analyzed more carefully than those of some other regions, making it possible to compare field-collected data with an author's rendition. In addition, Stuart has been remarkably cooperative with investigators of his life and works, freely responding to inquiries and sometimes volunteering information to aid them in their studies. The fact that a considerable portion of his writing has been in some way autobiographical has been useful to the folklorist in that it cues the investigator to specific inquiries. Stuart's forthright responses facilitate separation of fact from fiction in a way that has not often been possible in such investigations.

For the purpose of this discussion Archer Taylor's succinct definition of folklore is most useful: "Folklore is the material that is handed on by tradition, either by word of mouth or by custom and practice" [Pacific Spectator, Vol. 2, 1948]. This covers a wide range of material. What is handed on by word of mouth may be a traditional folktale, a family legend, a home-town joke, a riddle, a proverb, a superstition, or a remedy. It would include country dance calls, songs, weather prediction formulas, game rhymes, taunts, and nicknames. Running through all these and other kinds of word-of-mouth traditions is the language itself, a regional dialect of American English characterized by traditional vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax. Folklore handed on by custom and practice rather than by word of mouth includes ways of doing or of making things such as patchwork quilts, log houses, oak-split baskets, and sorghum molasses. It includes the ordinary life of people who learn by tradition most of their domestic activities—animal care, fanning methods, food preservation, hunting, fishing, and recreation. Most of these nonlinguistic kinds of folklore, especially those dealing with material culture, are called folklife.

Even the most casual reader of Stuart's works will recognize immediately that all the examples listed above occur in his writing, and once reminded of the scope of folklore and folklife, the perceptive reader should be able to add to the list. An extensive catalog of specific songs, tales, beliefs, and practices abstracted from Stuart's works would not be as useful as a comment on how they serve the writer's purpose and how their use fits into some general ideas about American literature, and thus by inference how their use defines one aspect of Stuart's role as an American writer.

A convenient category for initial examination is the smallest expressive unit, the word. Stuart's use of folk speech has been mentioned by many writers, and it received careful attention in Mary Washington (Clarke), "Folklore of the Cumberlands as Reflected in the Writings of Jesse Stuart" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1960), and most particularly in articles by the same author in Southern Folklore Quarterly: "Jesse Stuart's Writings Preserve Passing Folk Idiom" (September 1964), and "Proverbs, Proverbial Phrases, and Proverbial Comparisons in the Writings of Jesse Stuart" (September 1965). In these articles Mary Clarke checked a large catalog of folk idiom abstracted from Stuart's work against regional word lists, Standard references works, her personal field collecting in Stuart's general culture area, and finally with Stuart himself. The end result is a reliable assessment whereby one can answer such questions as these: Is this an authentic example of regional speech, or just a "folksy" coinage? Is this a traditionally used proverbial comparison, or did Stuart invent it? Is this ancient proverb a part of folk usage in Greenup County, or has it been transplanted there by the author? Is this colorful exaggeration presented as it is commonly uttered by the folk, or has the author improved upon what he has heard?

Stuart uses authentic regional dialect, faithfully rendering his time and place, combining his knowledge of life with imagination to create a unique literary expression. This would seem inevitable in the light of his lifelong ties with the rural areas of his nativity and his choice of that setting for most of his fiction. Most of his characters are drawn from direct observation, sometimes lacking even the mask of a fictional name, and their speech is the speech Stuart has heard and used all his life. Although the reader who is unfamiliar with authentic Kentucky hill speech may feel that a rendition is exaggerated, careful examination suggests that Stuart's recollection and rendition are reliable, and that exaggeration, where it does occur, is a device employed for dramatic or comic purposes. In any case, he has usually avoided the gross errors of "eye" dialect characterized by misspelling and overworked archaisms that flawed the work of many earlier regional writers, especially those self-conscious local colorists described by Calvin Brown [in his foreword to Yesterday in the Hills by Floyd C. Watkins and Hubert Watkins, 1973] as almost always "sentimentalists on an intellectual slumming tour," whose characters "are mere puppets being put through antics that will illustrate the regional idiosyncrasies." Brown went on to say that such writing is "always condescendingly genteel, and usually smugly and offensively so." Stuart is most emphatically not of this stripe, for he is also one of his own principal characters, many of the others being his family and neighbors. Their folklife is his, as he recalls it and lives it. Where he does describe the expressions and antics of a "low-down trashy set" is in the light of the values and judgments of a regional culture rather than in the mode of condescending gentility. The wisdom and worth of some of his relatively uneducated hill people is not diminished by their use of folk speech; similarly, the shoddy character of some of his better-educated townsmen is not concealed by their use of "standard" English.

Stuart's use of brief traditional formulas is a significant aid in characterization as well as a means of reinforcing a sense of a time and a place. Some of these are sayings or expressions of traditional wisdom upon which characters act or upon which they judge an event. Stuart uses the expressions as they occur in actual oral tradition instead of correcting them to make them conform to scriptures or other literary sources. Consider these examples drawn at random from his writing: "Everything has a season." "Every man must have his Judas." "You can't larn an old dog new tricks." "Killin two birds with one stone." "When you dance you got to pay the fiddler." His proverbial comparisons are similarly apt for character, situation, and setting: "like a fox when he goes to get chickens," "rough as a gritter," "tough as a hickory," "slick as a meatskin," and "clean as a hound-dog's tooth."

Omens, or tokens, as many folk call them, are similarly functional in that they faithfully portray traditional beliefs about foreknowledge. In addition, they may establish tension, tone, and foreshadowing:

I got uneasy when a whippoorwill
Came on the porch last night. That is a sign
Death takes one of the house.

Birdlore, dreamlore, and similar ancient devices for folk prognostication survive as an active element in the folk community, and they sometimes surface in the context of the oral tale, another kind of folklore Stuart uses freely. His use of the folktale is a rewarding subject for the investigating folklorist. Here one finds a range from direct use of an identifiable local legend to so skillful a fabrication that it sends the investigator to his library in a futile effort to document it. Some contemporary folklorists find it useful to distinguish between transcriptive folklore and functional folklore in a writer's works. They label transcriptive the tale, song, or other expression which is entertaining or instructive on its own merits and appears, therefore, virtually unchanged as it exists in oral tradition. The writer merely creates a situation in which it can be presented. The flimsy frame of an old man answering the questions of a little boy in the works of Joel Chandler Harris is an example of this device, and the reworked folktales the old man tells illustrate the transcriptive use of folklore.

Functional use of folklore is more subtle. Here the folkloric expression or the allusion to it is subordinated to a specific literary requirement such as the development of character or setting. The tale-telling bent of two fictional characters reveals how functional the folktale is in Stuart's writing.

Old Op Akers is the herb-gathering yarnspinner in The Good Spirit of Laurel Ridge (1953). He is familiar with the old legends of the area, has a firm conviction that there are ghosts (or sperets) about, and participates in the whole range of folklife on the ridge. When he and his daughter Lucretia hear foxhounds in the distance, he identifies them and predicts the development of the chase: "'That's Penny Shelton's horn,' Op told her, a note of excitement in his voice. 'The fox hunters are on Laurel Ridge tonight.'" Op explains that the horn sounded at Six Hickories, the location of a fox den. He identifies the barking of Penny's Blue Boy, a cold trailer. "He's a-takin' that fox toward Wince Leffard Gap. . . . Lissen fer more hounds to open up! Every fox hunter on Laurel Ridge'll let his hounds loose."

As other hounds join the chase he identifies them. He tells where the fox is, where it will go. "He'll come up Shinglemill Hollow, up the fox path from the old pasture field, and cross the ridge right out yander. I know the way foxes run here. Lissen to the music of them barkin' hounds."

This interlude of foxhunting on an April night is but one of many kinds of folklife worked into a novel whose central character is a walking encyclopedia of folklore. Op chews on a piece of calamus root he carries in his pocket as faithfully as some city dwellers carry a tin of aspirin. He gathers medicinal plants and digs their roots. He relates the legend of a Civil War skirmish with Morgan's Raiders. Above all, he tells tales—ghost tales and tall tales about fishing and hunting. The first one in the novel is the ubiquitous tale of the vanishing hitchhiker, highly localized by old Op, and set in an earlier period. "One Sunday, back when Teddy Roosevelt was President, old Doc Burton drove his two-hoss surrey out Laurel Ridge to see Mort Doore who got blood pizen from runnin' a rusty nail in his foot." Op goes on to recount how a young couple, closely described, hitched a ride with Doc Burton on his return trip, how Doc, busy with his team on the downgrade, hardly noticed that the young couple had stopped talking to him, and how he discovered with shock that only the armload of flowers the girl had been carrying remained in the back seat. The ghostly couple were later identified as local people who had drowned while swimming at Sandy Falls.

Although Op tells several kinds of tales, the ghost tale is most useful in this novel because it ties in with a mysterious "ghost" on Laurel Ridge—which finally turns out to be a living person. Old Op reports on so many beliefs, practices, and local happenings that one is inclined to think of him as a kind of Appalachian Uncle Remus, a fictional creation used for presentation of transcriptive folklore. The book is a novel, however, and it does have a plot. Examination of its folklore and folklife content shows that it is largely functional in the sense that it serves to enhance characterization, make vivid the setting, and advance the plot.

Stuart injects a subtle ambiguity into his presentation of Op Akers as a naïve backwoodsman who is completely comfortable with his belief in ghosts. Old Op drives off city intruders who claim they are not superstitious by telling them hair-raising tales about snakes and ghosts. It is never quite clear whether he is being merely ingenuous or crafty, in the time-honored American tradition of the countryman getting the best of "sophisticated" urbanites. In any case, the situation is traditional in both oral and written literature, as much an expression of American folklore as the exploits of Mike Fink.

Another narrator, Grandpa Tussie, exhibits a different repertoire. The fact that Taps for Private Tussie (1943) was winner of the 1943 Thomas Jefferson Southern Award and a selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club is more than casually related to the fact that its pages are replete with folk speech, folk beliefs, folklife, and snatches of folksong and folk narration. Grandpa Tussie, addicted to the "gravy train" of relief grub and afflicted with an incurable aversion to work, tells whoppers. He can stop patting his foot to the tune of Uncle George's magic fiddle and tell a tall tale about lumbering in Michigan on cue: "'Tell Sid about your train ride in Michigan, Press,' Grandma said, wheezin on her long pipestem. 'I got on a train in Michigan,' Grandpa said. 'Traveled two days and nights through the timber. Never saw a town. Never saw anybody but the people on the train. We only stopped for water and coal. We passed through timber tracts where the trees were big around the butts as sixty-gallon mash barrels.'"

Whether the tales Op Akers and Grandpa Tussie tell in their respective novels are identifiable as traditional oral narratives or are creations of the author does not alter their folkloric role. The fact is that Stuart, intimately familiar with long, windy yarns, first-person hunting and fishing whoppers, legends, and scary ghost stories in oral tradition, has created two believable folk types, each one presented as a raconteur. The distinctive functional aspect of their renditions is that their narrations help to maintain tone and theme as well as to extend characterization. Old Op is a gentle recluse, a healer and believer. His tales, even if gross exaggerations, are presented in a positive way, reflecting the author's approval of his creation. Grandpa Tussie's repertoire gives more emphasis to tall tales rendered in keeping with an entirely different kind of characterization and in a very different kind of novel. The Good Spirit is a gentle romance; Taps is a "Dogpatch" style caricature of the welfare syndrome, a comedy containing a considerable element of satire.

As The Road to Xanadu so profoundly illustrates, a prolific, spontaneous writer soaks up many impressions and recombines them in manifold and sometimes marvelous ways. Examination of Stuart's works suggests that he freely combines a rich heritage of folklore with his literary education in a variety of creative moods, and that he rarely makes a conscious effort to use folklore as a special focus. He does, however, use a good tale or custom as a springboard for a composition. Two short stories, "Rain on Tanyard Hollow" and "Frog-Trouncin' Contest" (both in Tales from the Plum Grove Hills), are illustrative.

"Rain on Tanyard Hollow" is Stuart's adaptation of a tale type widely known in oral tradition. Essentially, the tale concerns a man who buys or prays for a change of weather and gets more than he bargained for. Maritime versions of the tale involve the superstitious belief that a becalmed sailor can buy wind by tossing a coin overboard. This act usually brings on a storm rather than a beneficial breeze, whereupon the sailor observes that a smaller purchase would have been in order. A dry-land version has the farmer pray for rain, get a gullywasher, then observe that a more modest prayer would have been better. Stuart uses this theme, having Pappie get down on his knees in the dried-up strawberry patch and utter a mighty prayer for rain. Because his wife has taunted him about his faith, he overreaches, praying for a storm. "Send rain, Lord, that will wash gully-ditches in this strawberry patch big enough to bury a mule in."

Pappie gets exactly what he prays for. Lightning splits big oak trees and chickens go to roost in the midday gloom. The resulting flood washes away the corn crop and sends mud and rocks into the house. So fearful is the thunder "rollin' like tater wagons across the sky" that a flock of visiting relatives who have been eating Pappie out of house and home pray for relief and promise the Lord they will leave Tanyard Hollow and never return if they survive.

Surveying the damage, Pappie can see the bright side: "'It wasn't the brazen images of snakes,' Pappie said, 'that done all of this. Tanyard Hollow is washed clean of most of its topsoil and lost a lot of its trees. But it got rid of a lot of its rubbish and it's a more fitten place to live.'"

The "brazen image of snakes" refers to the black snakes Pappie had hung on the rail fence before his prayer. This was in response to the folk belief that hanging up a dead snake will bring rain. The black snakes failed to produce, but prayer did, hence the "brazen images," an example of the hillman's familiar use of biblical allusion.

"Rain on Tanyard Hollow" is clearly an expanded and highly localized rendition of a folktale. Stuart weaves in the weather superstition involving snakes, and he skillfully keeps it before his readers by using numerous snake-associated images throughout the story. He adds the locustlike flock of relatives who have squatted in Tanyard Hollow. He also introduces the conflict between husband and wife (the pesky relatives are her kin), with special focus on her objection to his hanging up dead snakes and her taunting him for his lack of faith. The point of view is effective in that the observer-narrator is Tracey, a young son, who nervously responds to Pappie's prayer by saying, "I don't want to wish you any bad luck, but I hope you don't get all you ast for."

Folklore here includes the folktale itself, regional speech, beliefs, regional life-style, and the hillman's ambiguous involvement with fundamentalist religion and superstition. The folktale itself, sometimes only a paragraph-length anecdote with a punch line such as "A quarter's worth would have been enough," is just one element of the mixture that bears Stuart's hallmark for humorous effect—exaggeration and incongruity.

These are the same elements that elevate an almost forgotten cruel pastime to a mock epic struggle in "Frog-Trouncing Contest." In this instance the curious survival of cruelty to frogs or toads provides the seed of the story. Mary Clarke, field collecting in Stuart's Big Sandy region, found informants who recalled frog trouncing. The activity involves fastening a frog to one end of a plank balanced over a fulcrum, then hitting the other end of the plank to bounce the frog high into the air—with fatal results for the frog, of course. Survival of this custom is a curiosity in that the practice has been verified as far back as Elizabethan England.

As he does in "Rain on Tanyard Hollow," Stuart uses the folk activity as a seed from which the short story can grow. Instead of a dimly remembered activity, frog trouncin' in the story becomes a tournament-style annual contest with training, defending champions, elimination, and judges. In the well-worn folk tradition of youngest-best, the least favored nephew manages to win the contest by training for it secretly and using a special mallet (also in the folk tradition of a remarkable weapon) to deliver the winning blow. The preparation of the mallet appears to involve some borrowing from Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," another story that depends in part on folklore. In Stuart's story the mallet instead of a frog is secretly filled with lead shot.

Folklore in Stuart's fiction cannot be fully evaluated by merely cataloging the songs, tales, beliefs, regional lexicon, or other specific elements. Cataloging can be an instructive exercise for an undergraduate student learning to use the library tools of folklore research, but merely to label a song fragment by a Child number or to tag a narrative passage with a Thompson motif number is a classroom exercise rather than an evaluation. A knowledge of field-collected folklore materials is, of course, essential, just as biographical knowledge of Stuart will reveal his authentic "insider" view of the culture. Equally important, his mode of comic exaggeration must be taken into account, so that the critic can avoid the error of assuming that there really is or was a frog-trouncing day in Greenup County.

Beyond those elements of folklore that can be cataloged, however, there is a matrix that holds them together which is fully as traditional as a folksong or a folktale, yet too diffuse to be neatly abstracted and verified on a checklist. This omnipresent element is the collective folkways that produce stereotyped values, attitudes, and responses. Some of the best folklore in Stuart's writing is his evocation of the matrix rather than specific bits of folklore embedded in it.

"Testimony of Trees" (Clearing in the Sky) provides a good example. The story is about a land dispute in which a man in the hills tries to cheat a neighbor out of his land by misrepresenting an old deed. An aggressive land hog can take advantage of the fact that old "meets and bounds" deeds were often inaccurate, that the calls were to such impermanent or movable markers as trees and rocks. Stuart's resolution of this simple conflict is to have the put-upon landowner call in Uncle Mel, an ancient and woodswise timber cutter. Uncle Mel studies the deed, having the boy narrator in the story read the difficult words for him, then goes to the seventy-year-old property line and verifies the blaze on each tree left standing. He chops into each old blaze scar with his keen double-bitted ax, then counts the annual growth rings to discover the age of the scar. In each instance the scar is seventy years old; the original survey line is verified, and the land hog is foiled.

"Testimony of Trees" is a very short story with a simple linear development to the resolution of an unambiguous conflict. Except for regional dialect the story contains none of the "genres" of folklore. But it is as fully charged with the lore of the hill people as anything Stuart has written.

Rural Kentuckians love politics and courthouse jockeying. They are also perennially concerned about property lines, easements, and access. It may seem odd that old boundary disputes can carry on from one generation to another, sometimes leading to bloodshed or chronic enmity between neighbors, especially if the matter can be settled by the simple expedient of an official survey. But a licensed, impartial surveyor's services are expensive, a luxury beyond the means of many impoverished hill folk, who have trouble enough paying their taxes. The old disputes go on to such a degree that long, quasi-legal narrations recounting the complicated histories of land transactions become a part of the oral literature of a neighborhood.

"Testimony of Trees" capitalizes on this more general aspect of the folklife of rural Kentucky. Despite the improbable accuracy of Uncle Mel's dendrochronology, the hillman's wary attitude toward his property lines is faithfully revealed. "Hell's Acre" is similarly based on a property dispute, though much overdrawn in its "battle" scenes. As the title suggests, the dispute involves only one acre of land, but the attitude of the belligerents is no less fierce than if the disputed land were a thousand acres. "I jest decided powder and lead was cheaper than lawyers' fees and court costs. That's the reason we've been fighting another ten years fer that acre of land."

The short story "Uncle Casper" takes its title from the name of a half-educated, windy old ex-preacher, exteacher, candidate for political office. He is a folk type, a man of words, the talkative center of attention beside the pot-bellied stove in the country store, the oral historian in the courthouse square, the ambulatory archive of folk medicine, kinship, natural history, and scriptural interpretation. Finding a young man old enough to vote, Uncle Casper launches into a series of narrations. One of these is his recollection of watching a black snake in mortal combat with a rattlesnake. The black snake killed the big rattler ("Twenty-seven rattlers and nine buttons"), apparently with the restorative aid of a medicinal weed. "The black snake took out of there and run out and bit him off a little chew of a weed. Munched it in his flat jaws like a rabbit munches clover."

As he rambles on, Uncle Casper recalls encountering a huge rattlesnake "big as a cow's leg" while digging ginseng with Chuck, a companion. The two men tried to hold the snake to draw its fangs, but it "shot a stream of pizen from the gall bladder through the fang" into Chuck's eye. Uncle Casper took a big chew of "taste-bud tobacco," worked up a mouthful of tobacco juice, and squirted it into Chuck's eye. "He squalled a little, but I knowed it was a case of life or death."

This reminds Uncle Casper of the time he was cutting dry poles for firewood. In an encounter with a racer which struck at his throat, he drove the snake into a knothole in a sourwood pole. "It stuck its head out and licked its tongue out at me. I thought 'Old Boy, I'll fix you.' So I climbs up the pole with a wooden glut in my hand and drove it down in the hole with a stick." A year later, cutting wood on the same hillside, he recalled the trapped snake, chopped down the sourwood, and "out popped that snake poor as Job's turkey. I could a-counted its ribs if I'd had time." The snake remembered him, wrapped itself around his leg "like a rope around a well windlass." Uncle Casper had to get his wife's aid to save himself. "Liz just reached down with that butcher knife and she cut that snake into ten pieces. It was wropped around my ankle five times if I am right." Liz saved Uncle Casper, but when her baby was born it was marked with the prints of a black racer over its heart.

Uncle Casper's narratives continue in the story, but these portions are particularly suitable for further illustration of Stuart's use of folklore. The general matrix of folklife forms a kind of backdrop in a mildly satiric story about politics at the grassroots level. Embedded in the rambling recollections are elements of two traveling anecdotes about snakes. The fact that snake tales turn up regularly in conversations of country people seems inevitable in a state having a large population of timber rattlesnakes and copperheads. There is a traditional way of describing snakes—usually by girth, and usually by anatomical comparison. Hence "big as my wrist," "big as my arm," or "big as my leg" are customary. Uncle Casper's black snake in combat with a rattlesnake was "bigger than a baby's leg," and the rattlesnake in the ginseng patch was "big as a cow's leg." Also, it is customary to count the rattles and always add the "button" in reporting the size of a rattlesnake. Stuart allows Uncle Casper a little exaggeration: "Twenty-seven rattlers and nine buttons."

The tale about a weed-chewing snake is traditional. Ordinarily the victorious snake is nonpoisonous, and its victory over the copperhead or rattlesnake is attributed to the curative power of a nearby plant. A more elaborate version of the tale has a human observer become the victim of snakebite, whereupon he uses the same weed to effect a miraculous cure.

The mortally dangerous constricting power of a nonpoisonous snake in Kentucky exists only in folk imagination. The motif occurs in oral narratives in various contexts, one of which has the snake get under the long skirts of a woman and coil about her waist. This titillating version then presents a dilemma for a black servant. Dare he lift his mistress's skirts to save her life? Stuart used the basic folk motif of the potentially lethal constrictor in a highly original piece of creative writing, a capsule example of his multilevel adaptation of folklore for literary purposes.

This sampling of folkloric elements in Stuart's works reveals the variety of both the folklore and the ways in which it serves the author's literary purposes. It reveals also the naturalness of the use of traditional materials by an "insider" in the culture. Certainly Stuart is not condescendingly genteel, and he is not on an intellectual slumming tour. He is, rather, the kind of American author some nineteenth-century critics, especially Emerson and Whitman, were calling for when they stressed the American experience in terms of strongly local, natural language rather than effete borrowing from cultivated European expression. They extolled the American workman close to the soil or the frontier rather than the aristocrat insulated from grassroots experience and expression. Development of authentic American literature, they felt, must come from the vigor of the folk experience, necessarily local, idiomatic, and relatively independent of refined antecedent models. Such writing is enhanced by accurate use of regional folklore. Partly as a result of his familiarity with the folklore and folklife of his region, Stuart has added a strong, original voice to the main thrust of American literature.