The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History

By William Lynwood Montell

Book Overview

". . . a new and long needed departure in American historiography. . . . This is in every way an impressive book. It contains detailed accounts of the informants, tables of folklore motifs, genealogical charts, a prologue and epilogue explaining authoritatively the hypotheses of oral traditional history, and handsome photographs of the Coe Ridge area."
--Richard M. Dorson, Journal of American History
"Lynwood Montell has written an invaluable book for all those interested in the use of oral tradition as a tool in the reconstruction of history. . . . This is a book worthy of being on any folklorist's shelf."
--Richard A. Reuss, Journal of American Folklore
Few Black groups in the United States carry with them the romance, the gripping history, the pathos, the indestructible spirit of the Coe Ridge colony during its ninety years of existence. Founded by a family of freedmen after the Civil War, the Coe colony produced a people who fought fiercely to defend their lives and property; the isolated community became a refuge for white women banned from their own society, a stronghold of moonshiners and bootleggers, and a battleground for feuds.
In addition to telling an unusual story, The Saga of Coe Ridge stands as a work of seminal importance for the study of local history. Facing a dearth of written sources, the author reconstructs the past of the community from tape-recorded interviews with former members, their descendants, and their white neighbors. Dr. Montell identifies universal folklore elements in the narratives and judiciously corroborates verbal accounts with relevant printed and manuscript records.
Historians will find here an exemplar for future studies. For historians of Black America, the work is particularly valuable, because it provides the direction toward other histories of similar Black groups and suggests a method of obtaining and presenting these histories before the sources are scattered beyond retrieval.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870493159
• ISBN13: 9780870493157
• Release Date: July 1981
• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

This Book is a Classic

This book is a classic of Kentucky history. It is the first book I know of that methodically uses folklore sources to write history, rather than the usual method of being tied to written documents like a dog on a string. If you are interested in going beyond the book, and of finding out how people in Kentucky actually thought about themselves and the world around them here is a good place to start. This is excellent reading and will show you some interesting possibilities for historical research and writing you may have never thought about before.

Folklore and Oral History

Montell uses oral sources and folklore to reconstruct the history of a small African-American community in Kentucky. The book provides a permanent record of a vanished town, and it is an important foundation for contemporary interest in rural black communities. The book includes interesting discussions of ways to use oral sources when doing historical research, and the author provides useful ways to ascertain the validity and usefulness of these types of resources. His methodology includes ways to assess the historical accuracy of various stories, and the book also demonstrates how to interpret less verifiable stories to gain an understanding of social attitudes and cultural values that emerge in storytelling traditions. This is an especially interesting resource for discovering ways to integrate oral history with folklore study. (But it isn't about Appalachia.)

An intriquing study of Appalachian Folklore and Oral History

Montell's book The Saga of Coe Ridge, A Study in Oral History, highlights local Kentucky and Appalachian history, telling a fascinating story about a 90 year old African American settlement in SW Kentucky. Montel uses oral histories and local folklore to integrate and document actual commmunity and historical sources and events, providing an intriquing story as well as an excellent example of how to incorporate qualitative interviews into both an entertaining and academic text.Montel uses the art of oral history to entertain and educate within a historically accurate framework, showing the often overlooked history of Black Appalachians and their history after the Civil War to the present.