Many folksongs and ballads have been recorded by commercial singers, but just as many art songs and popular songs have been taken up in folk tradition and passed on by word of mouth and varied according to the memory and need of the singers. See how she wobbles from side to side. They differ in the time and place of setting and in characters. Only among Native Americans is myth yet a living form in the United States. In less remote time, ranging from ancient oral history to within living memory, legend deals with the lives and acts of renowned people, such as George Washington's throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac or Davy Crockett's hunting prowess.
Many small towns have legends of extraordinary people, sometimes as lowly as town drunkards.
Local legends of extraordinary land forms and town names abound in the Ozarks. They are fiction, although good Ozark story tellers always look their audiences right in the eye and perform the stories as though they were reaching far back into their memories for the true details, just as they actually happened. Folk tales are realistic in that they are set in the present and often in a specific place and deal with characters who are like us or, except for divine grace and a good upbringing, could be us. Ozarks folk tales, even off-color ones, often are moralistic. Five examples, four of them variants of stories Chaucer put in print and one of them a variant of a Shakespearean story, all collected in the Ozarks by Vance Randolph, are analyzed in this issue by Donald Holliday.