With Halloween just around the corner, the Library of Congress is gearing up for an exhibition of our best spooky treasures. The event is called LOC Halloween: Chambers of Mystery, and it’s sure to add both cheer and chills to your All Hallows season. As part of the effort, I’ve been looking through AFC’s collections for “Ghost Stories” and “Halloween Traditions,” two of the exhibit’s themes. In my last post, I presented some photos of Halloween traditions, so what about the stories? In this blog, you’ll be able to hear and read an outstanding tale of the supernatural!
This story comes from Bessie Jones (February 8, 1902– July 17, 1984), a singer and teller whose extensive repertoire was recorded by Alan Lomax. Lomax’s organization, the Association for Cultural Equity, has a nice biography of Jones online if you want to know more. For the present, let’s just say that she was an extraordinary talent, a leader of her Georgia coastal community, and a cultural ambassador for her traditions. In 1982, she became part of the first annual group of National Heritage Fellows from the National Endowment for the Arts, a particularly distinguished group that included Bill Monroe, Lydia Mendoza, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Dewey Balfa, and Joe Heaney. Of course, Lomax’s extensive documentation of Jones is part of our archive here at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center.
Below, listen to Jones’s story in the audio player, and read along with my own transcription, below that. Transcribing stories from people whose dialect is different from your own can be a challenge. Even Alan Lomax, who knew her quite well, had to ask for clarification at one point! In most cases, I’m pretty sure I captured what she’s saying, though a few phrases could go either way: is she saying “yard dog” or “guard dog?” These moments of uncertainty even affected the title of the story. While the folks at ACE called it “Story of a Girl Who Got Engaged to the Devil,” I’m reasonably sure they go through with the wedding, so I decided to call it “Married to the Devil” instead.
“Married to the Devil” is a version of one of the most widespread magical tales in African American tradition, known to folklorists as ATU 313A, “The Girl as Helper in the Hero’s Flight.” In most American versions, the person who needs to escape the Devil is a man, and the helper is the Devil’s daughter. In this unusual version, the person escaping is the Devil’s newly-married wife, and the helper is–well, let’s just say “it’s complicated!” A nice aspect of the story is that Bessie Jones gives Alan Lomax a little lesson in interpretation at the end. It’s one that I suspect a lot of African Americans of her era would agree with. The fact that the story carries wisdom with both religious and practical applications may help explain why it was so popular with that community.
My transcription style is one that tries to keep some of the texture of oral performance. Rather than just organizing into paragraphs, I’ve made the unit of transcription the spoken line, bounded by pauses or other segment markers. In this I follow some of my teachers in folklore (Margaret Mills), anthropology (Dell Hymes), and linguistics (Bill Labov), though I’m sure any deficiencies are purely my own fault. Representing reported speech, which Jones only sometimes indicated with phrases like “say” or “she said,” was a challenge…I settled on using quotation marks throughout. But when the rooster sings, transforming Jones’s tale to a cante-fable, I used the block-quote function to set the singing off more fully from the plain text: a breakthrough into performance within the performance!
In the end, my goal was to represent how Bessie Jones told the tale, mainly for the benefit of listeners who might not catch the words of her dialect without some effort. So please, listen to Bessie Jones tell the story, and scroll through my transcription as a form of subtitles.
Please enjoy Bessie Jones telling “Married to the Devil.”