Loyal Jones

We were going down the road, and we came to this house. There was a little boy standing by the road just crying and crying. We stopped, and we heard the biggest racket you ever heard up in the house. “What’s the matter, son?” “Why, Maw and Paw are up there fightin’.” “Who is your Paw, son?” “Well, that’s what they are fightin’ over.”Brimming with ballads, stories, riddles, tall tales, and great good humor, My Curious and Jocular Heroes pays homage to four people who guided and inspired Loyal Jones’s own study of Appalachian culture. His sharp-eyed portraits introduce a new generation to Bascom Lunsford, the pioneer behind the “memory collections” of song and story at Columbia University and the Library of Congress; the Sorbonne-educated collector and performer Josiah H. Combs; Cratis D. Williams, the legendary father of Appalachian studies; and the folklorist and master storyteller Leonard W. Roberts. Throughout, Jones highlights the tales, songs, jokes, and other collected nuggets that define the breadth of each man’s research and repertoire.

We were going down the road, and we came to this house. There was a little boy standing by the road just crying and crying. We stopped, and we heard the biggest racket you ever heard up in the house. “What’s the matter, son?” “Why, Maw and Paw are up there fightin’.” “Who is your Paw, son?” “Well, that’s what they are fightin’ over.”Brimming with ballads, stories, riddles, tall tales, and great good humor, My Curious and Jocular Heroes pays homage to four people who guided and inspired Loyal Jones’s own study of Appalachian culture. His sharp-eyed portraits introduce a new generation to Bascom Lunsford, the pioneer behind the “memory collections” of song and story at Columbia University and the Library of Congress; the Sorbonne-educated collector and performer Josiah H. Combs; Cratis D. Williams, the legendary father of Appalachian studies; and the folklorist and master storyteller Leonard W. Roberts. Throughout, Jones highlights the tales, songs, jokes, and other collected nuggets that define the breadth of each man’s research and repertoire.

Q: Is he afraid of work? A: No, he can lie down beside it and go to sleep.This volume is an encyclopedia of the many country music performers who made comedy a central part of their careers. Loyal Jones offers an informative biographical sketch of each performer and many entries include a sample of the artist's humor, a recording history, and amusing anecdotal tidbits. Starting with vaudeville and radio barn dance figures like the Skillet Lickers and the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, Jones moves on to the regulars on Hee Haw and the Grand Old Opry and present-day comedians from the Austin Lounge Lizards to Jeff Foxworthy. Jones's introductory essay discusses such topics as stock comic figures, venues for comedic performance, and benchmark performers. Throughout the volume, he places each performer squarely in the context of the country music community, its performing traditions, and each artist's place in the larger cultural milieu.

Sometimes laughter is the best medicine. In the midst of all that may bother us--crime, drugs, poisons in the water, poor health--people still take time to make each other laugh. If you listen on the street corners, in the cafes, at the kitchen tables of America, you'll hear people telling funny stories and jokes. Hometown humor helps pull us through. In this book, Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler have gathered the best of America's hometown humor. The selections range from one-liners ("My wife's cooking was so bad, the flies got together to mend the screens") to epigrams ("To do good is noble, but to tell others to do good is also noble and a lot less trouble"), to longer stories (like the one about why the Devil tried to give Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart back to St. Peter after they were assigned to his place). Contributors include regular folks, as well as celebrities like Sarah Ophelia Cannon (a.k.a. Minnie Pearl), Tom T. Hall, John Ed McConnell, the late Sen. Sam J. Ervin, and the nine students of the Clinton County Elementary School in Clinton County, Kentucky.

As you chuckle through these tales you find the thread of self-effacing, good-natured warmth that characterizes Appalachia. -Southern LivingFrom the people of the Appalachian Mountains comes a special brand of humor: dry, colorful and earthy, aimed sometimes at the hillbilly's own foibles, but often at the outside world's pretenses, too. As longtime fans of and contributors to Appalachian lore, Jones and Wheeler collected the material for this popular and timeless volume at the Festival of Appalachian Humor sponsored by the Appalachian Center at Berea College. Includes jokes and yarns on such topics as hunting, lawyers and doctors, alcohol, and religion, along with essays on the nature and origins of humor. This hilarious collection based in Appalachia America will teach readers the importance of resourcefulness, trustworthiness and respect.

Appalachian humor can be dry, colorful, and earthy. The chapters vary greatly ranging from topics of Love and Marriage; Schools, Religion; Lawyers; Mountaineers and the Law; Animals and Hunting; Mountaineers and City Folks; Health and Medicine; and Rural Life. In Curing the Cross-Eyed Mule, songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler and folklorist Loyal Jones have combined to give you the biggest serving of Appalachian mountain humor since their bestselling Laughter in Appalachia.

The phenomenal success of Laughter in Appalachia, Loyal Jones' and Billy Edd Wheeler's first collection of humor (now in its twelfth printing), says something about the importance of humor in our lives, and the talent Jones and Wheeler have in finding the best of it. More Laughter in Appalachia, their fourth collection of Southern mountain humor, may well be their funniest and most comprehensive collection to date. Packed with humorous jokes, anecdotes, poems, riddles, and song, not to mention a nineteenth-century sermon a backwoods political speech, and a comical arrest warrant, this collection is thick with artifacts of Southern wit. Whether you are interested in humor as part of our cultural heritage or you just want a good laugh, you will find this mountain of Southern humor heartwarming and sidesplitting.

This surprisingly reverent collection of religious humor pokes less at the message than at the messenger. Gentle enough to give your preacher, clean enough to use in the pulpit, this volume is nonetheless sharp enough to drive home its point that the clergyman does well to serve rather than be served. Gathered by Loyal Jones, whose scholarship has concentrated on both religion and humor, this collection cuts across denominational and ideological lines to focus on the foibles of the pastor and the human side of serving God. St. Peter jokes, mock sermons, church bulletin misprints, and age-old denominational rivalries--all are here, delightfully illustrated in pen and ink by Wendell Hall.

It is said that Bascom Lamar Lunsford would "cross hell on a rotten rail to get a folk song" -- his Southern highlands folk-song compilations now constitute one of the largest collections of its kind in the Library of Congress -- but he did much more than acquire songs. He preserved and promoted the Appalachian mountain tradition for generations of people, founding in 1928 the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, an annual event that has shaped America's festival movement. Loyal Jones pens a lively biography of a man considered to be Appalachian music royalty. He also includes a "Lunsford Sampler" of ballads, songs, hymns, tales, and anecdotes, plus a discography of his recordings.

Never have so many missionaries been sent to save so many Christians as is the case in the Southern Uplands. The area has long been perceived by American Christians in contradictory ways: on the one hand, as an unchurched area with people who have little religion or an inadequate faith; on the other, as part of the Bible Belt, packed with small breakaway fundamentalist churches and wild-eyed believers. In Faith and Meaning, one of Appalachian religion's most eloquent spokesmen reveals a people devoted to and thoughtful about their religion, and profoundly influenced by it. Loyal Jones's three decades of conversations and interviews, supplemented by documents such as sermons, testimonies, and articles of faith, articulate Southern Upland views on basic issues of the human condition-faith, God, the world, the Word, and the devil-as well as on community issues such as racial integration and women in the church. In their own voices these people describe their beliefs, their churches, and their lives, exposing a deep conviction tempered with humanity and humor.

A collection of true stories gathered from the Southern Appalachian people, this book echoes the folkways and values of another era. Published in 1974, the stories collected in ... A Right Good People were originally published in the Charlotte Observer, the largest newspaper in the Carolinas in the 1970s. These stories were written with the intention of illustrating the heritage of the Appalachian people and letting them speak about their culture and traditions for themselves.