TO

      MISSISSIPPI RIVER FOLKLORE

      by Patricia Tersi

          Here, with all the warmth of personal experience and flavor of old times, are the flowing movement, humor and color of life "on the River." Here are over a hundred and fifty years of folk lore and stories of the river.

          These are true stories taken from A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore edited by B.A. Botkin , 1955, dating back to before the civil war and during the civil war.

          This book is 620 pages of pure delightful, humorous reading and I could not possibly put it all on my page,so I will take some of the humor and insert it for all of you to enjoy.

          To pay due respect to all the hard work that obviously went into the publishing this, I dedicated this page to the author, B.A. Botkin.

    THE HUNTING AND FISHING STORIES OF BOB HUNTER

          Bob Hooter, a great grandson of Mike Hooter and legendary Delta character... is naturally an expert on the difficult art of coon hunting.

          THE BEST COON AND POSSUM DOG

          Another one of Bob's prize dogs was a hound that he called the best coon and possum dog in Mississippi. All he had to do was to show the dog a board, and the dog would go off and find a possum of coon whose hide would fit the board. This saved Bob the trouble of hunting up a board to fit a hide, and he never had to worry about the quality of the possum or coon skin.
          One day, though, the dog disappeared and when he had been missing for three days, took to the woods himself to see if he could find any trace of the faithful animal. After hours of searching, he found the dog, so worn out and exhausted that Bob had to carry him home in his arms. The incident puzzled Bob for awhile, but he finally figured it out. His wife had left the ironing board out, leaning against the back porch, and the dog saw it and went into the woods and wore himself out trying to find a possum or coon with a hide big enough to fit the ironing board.

          BATTLING THE BOLL WEAVIL

          Bob was telling the boys down at the barbershop why he had laidby his cotton crop so early in the summer.
          "One night I heard a big noise in my back yard and got up to see what it was all about. A big boll weavil had a little one across the wood block and was giving it a beating with an ax handle because it couldn't strip more than one row of cotton at a time. I figgured then and there that I'd better hand it all over to them, or they might take it out on me."

          My Home Page - Come with me back to Ireland
          Cajun Country- Down on the Bayou
          Planet Earth - Alternative Energy
          God Bless America - Home of the Brave
          Greenville Mississippi - The Delta
          Happy Groundhog Day - About Groundhogs
          Beautiful Dixie - Songs of Dixie

          Back to Dixie
          Are you from Dixie
          The Birth of the Blues
          My Cajun Bayou Page
          Waitin' For The Robert E. Lee

          All graphics and page content Copyright © Patricia Tersi 1997 - 2007