The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History

". . . 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.


 

William Lynwood Montell (1931–2023) was professor of folk studies at Western Kentucky University. A distinguished interpreter of the folk customs in the Upper Cumberland, his twenty-eight books include Ghosts Along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills; A Study in Oral History; and Don’t Go Up Kettle Creek: Verbal Legacy of the Upper Cumberland. He was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and received the Kentucky Governor's Arts Award in Folk Heritage.