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Going to Extremes by Joe McGinniss (review)

Working with material from the oral tradition can pose a double-bind for the folklorist. In pure and unvarnished form, songs and stories can be, particularly over a gap of generations, somewhat obscure to the modem reader despite their universal human qualities. Rewriting, on the other hand, can popularize the folk narrative to the point where it loses authenticity and becomes something known as “fakelore.” Roger Welsch has handled this problem rather neatly by presenting these stories collected during the WPA years in their original form and by providing access through a lucid introduction and notes attached to each tale. In this form, the book can be equally enjoyable and informative to the professional folklorist, the horse-lover and to the general reading public. As he observes in the introduction, the tales often lack the build-up and punchlines of the professional writer or raconteur, but they display a wealth of sly nuance and fetching detail that more than compensates for this. The tales collected from Lew Croughan which, more than those of any other teller, characterize this book, are gems of humor and wry under­ statement, displaying American folk-humor at its best. The jargon of horse-trading and early twentieth-century horselore is fascinating, yielding formulas for Plugging a Whistler, Paralyzing a Switcher, Gingering, Bishoping and The Straw and Stringhalt Trick. With its wellarranged and nicely-explained tales and the genuine essence and tang of horse-knowledge and rural character, this book will be equally at home on the shelves of a university library or in an apple-crate bookshelf nailed to the wall of a ranch bunkhouse.