Jim Brown

Published on July 31, 2015

Photo of Jim Brown "So you have to...build a Cherokee-style basket from scratch - identify river cane, cut your river cane, split your river cane, make your strips of river cane, dye your river cane, pick out your pattern, learn to weave the basket."

Transcript

JIM BROWN: I came down in December of 1970 with my wife. Came down, to, was
from Central East Tennessee. Hit the floodplain across Decatur and Athens, we
thought well that was too flat, too much sky, we can't live down here and then
we got, as we came toward Cullman, that Appalachian ridge, "Well maybe we can do
this sort of thing" so interviewed and accepted and moved down here in June
1971. I was into this cultural nationalism behind European, modern European
national experiences and I'm discovering Alabama. You know, I'd come to Alabama
scared to death of George Wallace and I got to know Alabama kind of below the
level of state politics. I got out in the countryside. My first full year would
have been January of '72 and I was just so busy with creating courses I didn't
do it, but the very second Jan Term, I offered Grimms to Hitler sort of
presentation on, kind of, the course morphed over the years, kind of a regular
sequence every two or three years: a third orature, a third a material folk
culture, a third folk music and each of them with an experiential, hands-on
learning to do, paired up with the lecture. If you just are saying something to
somebody and they're listening to it, that's a very passive sort of education
but if you can actually experience, do something to experience it in an activity
to experience it, it would set that education and bring it alive much more than
anything else. You had orature, or you know, oral folk literature, or more
precisely orature. You have to memorize some child ballad. Do an oral history
with someone generations older than you, hopefully in the family, hopefully from
a more rural time. It’s getting harder and harder to do with this generation.
We're more and more removed from the mass rural roots. In terms of material folk
culture, you know, we're reading about the survival of the bark canoe, we're
reading about the cane basket, or the Indian basketry, the Cherokee women who
tried to hold their disintegrating culture together with basketry, but, so you
have to make, build a Cherokee-style basket from scratch, identify river cane ,
cut your river cane, split your river cane, make your strips of river cane, dye
your river cane, pick out your pattern, learn to weave the basket. We'll go
watch some Indian basket makers do this, over at Choctaw, Mississippi or maybe
up in Cherokee, depending on the year we did this. Do it yourself. Watch the
unfolding character spring, draw every week, draw, start out with a tulip poplar
bud, draw that bud, watch it color up, every year, watch it start to open,
little folded leaves that kind of spin around, watch 5 or 7 leaves and then here
comes the bloom and then think about, go down the river and let’s, when the
poplar tree’s in bloom, when the tulip poplar's in full bloom, let's go down
to the river and see if the red horse are on the bed because that's the old
folkway, that's the old folk calendar for doing it, so become conscious of the
natural world around you and what that does, in that course more than any other
course I teach, it makes for an intense learning environment. The student is
much more motivated and I think the education is more lasting.

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Date	2015-06-08
Interviewer	Evan Musgraves
Interviewee	Jim Brown
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Collection	STORI Collection
Accession	SUHist/Faculty/003