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3 books match the query 'Mules'
Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs
Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence FarmJimmye Hillman; Foreword by Robert Hass
University of Arizona Press, 2012
"It's in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear," writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman's insightful memoir. "Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they slip from the memory of the living."
To ensure that the world of Jimmye Hillman's childhood in Greene County, Mississippi during the Great Depression doesn't slip away, he has gathered together accounts of his family and the other people of Old Washington village. There are humorous stories of hog hunting and heart-wrenching tales of poverty set against a rural backdrop shaded by the local social, religious, and political climate of the time. Jimmye and his family were subsistence farmers out of bare-bones necessity, decades before discussions about sustainability made such practices laudable.
More than just childhood memories and a family saga, though, this book serves as a snapshot of the natural, historical, and linguistic details of the time and place. It is a remarkable record of Southern life. Observations loaded with detail uncover broader themes of work, family loyalty, and the politics of changing times.
Hillman, now eighty-eight, went on to a distinguished career as an economist specializing in agriculture. He realizes the importance of his story as an example of the cultural history of the Deep South but allows readers to discover the significance on their own by witnessing the lives of a colorful cast of characters. Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs is unique, a blend of humor and reflection, wisdom and sympathy—but it's also a hard-nosed look at the realities of living on a dirt farm in a vanished world.
Mule South to Tractor South
Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton SouthGeorge B. Ellenberg
University of Alabama Press, 2013
The adoption of the mule as the major agricultural resource in the American South and its later displacement by the mechanical tractor.
The author describes the adoption of the mule as the major agricultural resource in the American South and its later displacement by the mechanical tractor. After describing the surprising slowness of southern farmers to realize the superiority of the mule over the horse for agricultural labor, Ellenberg strives to capture the symbiosis that emerged between animal and man to illuminate why and how the mule became a standard feature in Southern folk culture.
Having been slow to adopt the mule, southern farmers were then reluctant to set it aside in favor of the tractor. Ellenberg describes the transformation as the tractor gradually displaced the mule and the role of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in this process.
The work not only becomes a survey of the development of southern agriculture as revealed through an examination of this premier work animal but also follows the emergence of the animal as a cultural icon, as it figures in southern literature, folklore, and music.
Of Mules and Mud
The Story of Alabama Folk Potter Jerry BrownJerry Brown, edited and with an introduction by Joey Brackner
University of Alabama Press, 2022
The life and times of Alabama folk potter Jerry Brown, as told in his own words
Born in 1942, Jerry Brown helped out in his father’s pottery shop as a young boy. There he learned the methods and techniques for making pottery in a family tradition dating back to the 1830s. His responsibilities included tending the mule that drove the mill that was used to mix clay (called “mud” by traditional potters). Business suffered as demand for stoneware churns, jugs, and chamber pots waned in the postwar years, and manufacture ceased following the deaths of Brown’s father and brother in the mid-1960s. Brown turned to logging for his livelihood, his skill with mules proving useful in working difficult and otherwise inaccessible terrain. In the early 1980s, he returned to the family trade and opened a new shop that relied on the same methods of production with which he had grown up, including a mule-powered mill for mixing clay and the use of a wood-fired rather than gas-fueled kiln.
Folklorist Joey Brackner met Brown in 1983, and the two quickly became close friends who collaborated together on a variety of documentary and educational projects in succeeding years—efforts that led to greater exposure, commercial success, and Brown’s recognition as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. For years, Brown spoke of the urge to write his life story, but he never set pen to paper. In 2015, Brackner took the initiative and interviewed Brown, recording his life story over the course of a weekend at Brown’s home. Of Mules and Mud is the result of that marathon interview session, conducted one year before Brown passed away.
Brackner has captured Jerry Brown’s life in his own words as recounted that weekend, lightly edited and elaborated. Of Mules and Mud is illustrated with photos from all phases of Brown’s life, including a color gallery of 28 photos of vessel forms made by Brown throughout his career that collectors of folk pottery will find invaluable.