Sheila Riley

Publication Date

8-1986

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Lynwood Montell, Camilla Collins, David Lee

Comments

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Original department Modern Languages & Intercultural Studies

Degree Program

Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

An artifact is an object produced or shaped by human workmanship, indicative of the minds and lives that selected and molded it for their use. People’s lives are artifacts which harbor intangible thoughts and emotions which present themselves in the stores people tell and in the beliefs they pass on. An individual’s life as artifact incorporates oral and material aspects of culture which are chosen and reworked to fit personal repertoires and lifestyles. A life history is the examination of a life, a biography of past and present and everyday living, of thoughts and settings, and of people and feelings that have belonged to one individual. This thesis presents an oral life history of Mona Baldwin of Owenton, Kentucky.

A number of folklore genres, namely, folk beliefs, oral traditional narratives, and personal experience narratives, combine to form a unique repertoire that is Mona Baldwin’s alone. Personal experience narratives encompassing events and people in her life are especially valuable to this life history, as they include childhood incidents, work experiences, supernatural encounters, and accounts of relationships with people. Personal experience narratives embodying traditional aspects of form, style, and function provide the closest first-hand oral accounts. Informal and structured interviews conducted with Mona Bladwin (“Mam Ma”) between 1978 and 1985 indicate her natural storytelling abilities.

Chapter One, “It Was Home Down There,” explores Mam Ma’s early family life in a household of women in the mountains of Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland region in the early 1900s. Influenced greatly by her grandmother, Mam Ma retained through her life the beliefs, stories, and folkways taught to her by this family matriarch.

At age fifteen in 1927, Mam Ma moved to the northern Kentucky farming community of Owenton with her sister and father. She married Hensley Baldwin, who became a tenant farmer between 1930 and 1950 in Long Ridge, Kentucky. Chapter Two, “Setting Up Housekeeping,” details their daily farm and family life in the Depression and post-Depression years.

In 1950, the Baldwins purchased five acres in Owenton, and the next ten years were spent making gradual improvements to a three-room shack which evolved into a home. Chapter Three, “The Evolution of a Home,” traces year by year (from 1950 to 1983) developments and changes in their house and in their lives. It also provides a glimpse at one woman’s aesthetic regarding her house and yard.

Mam Ma’s lifestyle reflects simple traditional values and the importance of family, church, and community. Chapter Four, “’These Shoes Have Carried Me’: Mam Ma’s Life in Retrospect,” reviews visits back to Tennessee in the 1940s and details her experiences and impressions of a 1982 trip to the Forbus-Pall Mall, Tennessee, area.

A final overview of the oral life history concludes that Mam Ma’s narratives both chronicle her life and may be considered and appreciated as stories, and the themes present in the stories are also the themes of her life.

Disciplines

Anthropology | Arts and Humanities | Folklore | History | Oral History | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Women's History

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