Singers and Storytellers Page: 19
v, 298 p. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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STORYTELLERS I HAVE KNOWN
Children. A bright student in a very bright class of mine at
the University of Texas was named Leeper Gay, brother to a
successful and respectable lawyer-but Leeper never intended
to be either successful or respectable. A theme he wrote me
was about a man looking for the Lost San Saba Mine. Then he
introduced me to Wes Burton.
Wes must have been toward fifty years old at the time and
lived with his parents in South Austin, across the Colorado
River from the main areas of culture and self-righteousness. His
father, who had been a Confederate soldier and a trail driver,
had a bully story on the origin of that sad ballad, "When the
Work's All Done This Fall." His sister Pinkie, corpulent and
blind, played an organ and sang ballads going back to the
eighteenth century and beyond. What with singing and with
taletelling, sometimes it would be two o'clock in the morning
before I got home from a visit to the Burtons.
They had a ghost in the yard, had seen him on several
occasions. He belonged to a man who had been killed in the
kitchen, and Mrs. Burton said they couldn't scrub his blood out
of the floor. They tried to show "the damned spots" to me, but
I couldn't see them.
Wes was a blacksmith turned mechanic; he would work a
few months and get money enough to stake himself and some
fellow-dreamer for a long hunt for what he called Los Almagres
Mine-another name for the Lost San Saba, or Lost Bowie.
One time he brought in some kind of ore that he was melting
in an iron pot over a wood fire out in the yard when I got to
the Burton house. He had extracted about a tablespoonful of it
and didn't know what it was. He knew very well it wasn't silver.
"Wes," I said, "I'll just take it over to the University and
get the Geology Department to analyze it. It won't cost
you anything."
"That's fine," he agreed.
After staying and enjoying myself for maybe two hours, I
said, "Well, I'll take that ore now."19
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Singers and Storytellers (Book)
Collection of popular folklore of Texas, including personal anecdotes about storytellers and singers, as well as folk songs, myths, and ghost stories. The index begins on page 295.
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Boatright, Mody C. Singers and Storytellers, book, 1961; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc67655/m1/25/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.