ABSTRACT
In the family of western Maine loggers and woodcarvers, homemakers and knitters whom I first met in 1975, storytelling can erupt at just about any time and in just about any place. Stories about work in this mountain region, stories about carving and knitting, and stories about relatives and townspeople—the Richards tell them all. The family is the “social base” of folklore, as Karen Baldwin reminded us in 1975; it is that “first folk group, the group in which important primary folkloric socialization takes place and individual aesthetic preference patterns for folkloric exchange are set.” 1 Exploring a family as a site of tradition also allows us to see how interwoven stories become, since stories from different workplaces get told at home, and they mix with stories from the town, from the wider family, and from a family member's own personal experiences. Because of this mixture, William Wilson—writing of his mother's tales—counsels us to think of one story in relation to all the other stories in a family: “Really to understand one of these stories, then, one has to have heard them all and has to bring to the telling of a single story the countless associations formed from hearing all the stories.” 2 Listening in on a family storytelling session also teaches how the intimacy of a home setting influences the way a story gets told. Finally, my presence as a willing listener with—and without—a tape recorder also makes itself felt in these stories. So, all these elements combine—occupation, region, family, outsider story collector—to influence the way a story gets told. We see this rich melding happen in the Richard family.
