Talk: Family, Music, and Dinners

Collected by Patrick A. Todd Transcribed by Nathaniel Lucy Told by Phydella Gilbert Hogan Fayetteville, Arkansas January, 1960 Reel 329 Talk: Family, Music and Dinners Phydella Gilbert Hogan: Everybody from cousins to uncles to anyone that ever remotely connected with the family'd be there. And we'd play the banjo, the fiddle, and guitar, and we sang and a couple of the cousins had an harmonica, a jew's harp. We danced, that is we danced by ourselves. We didn't have any regular dancers or anything, we didn't believe in that. Patrick Todd: You had folk games? Hogan: We had folk games and played out in the woods and we got into meanness and old turkey runs under the house on Thanksgiving, I can remember that, and we were cooped under the house for about two hours and nobody could hear us because they's making so much racket upstairs, everybody laughing and talking. We kids always had to wait to eat dinner. The old people had to eat first. And the old men would sit there and they would tell story after story after story and drank cup after cup after cup of coffee. We nearly starved to death waiting for them to get through and when they'd leave the table, all the best pieces of chicken was gone. All the hot dishes were gone. But we still ate like we were starved anyway because there was everything under the sun on the tables. Took 'em two or three days to prepare the food I know. We went about 30 miles in a wagon most of the time. Lately, we went in an old Model T truck. And sometimes, the road would be so bad we'd have to unload down the creek and walk up to the house. . . . we'd put a table outside on the hillside. Course it ran up against the hill and it was always slanted and we'd roll down the hill. And after dinner, we played all kinds of games. . . . to hunt chinkypins [chinquapins]. It was always in October when we'd have family reunion. Todd: What's this chinkypin?Hogan: You'd never heard of chinkypins? Oh you've missed half of life. They come in a big burr about three inches across and it's stick you like everything. You'd have to stomp on it first then the little nuts come out, they look like a hazelnut and they're real good. Todd: I never heard them called chinkypins. That's a new one. Hogan: . . . They're good. We used to gather them. We thought they were better than walnuts or hickory nuts or anything. And we'd get a black . . . And we just went down to the creek and skipped rocks across the water and once . . . playhouse. The boys, they just loved to help us build it and thet'd like to tear it down. They'd have a "cyclone" and tear it down. But this particular time we had rocks and logs and built tables and chairs and everything. My sister decided she wanted plush chairs. What could we use for plush? So my cousin went and gathered great arms full of cedar. And he put it all over and said, "Now you have your plush chairs." My sister had on a little thin dress and anklets. She sat down on the cedar. (laughs). . . swore he never knew it would stain . . . loved every bit of it. Todd: It said something in the book about this, uh, literary societies and things like that. Did you ever? Hogan: No, I didn't. That was before my time. I didn't get to do that. We had ours at the schoolhouse, mostly for Christmas programs and Halloween programs. We had one teacher who should have taught dramatics, she was the best I ever saw. Every child was in something. The dumbest child had his part and he learned it. But if anyone dropped out, me and my sister, either one, had to take the place because we always memorized everyone's part. We sang at all of them. Todd: Do you remember anything you sang at those particular little things like that? Hogan: Oh, no, not right off hand. No. In the Christmas programs we always sang "Silent Night" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" and all the old songs. Hogan: My older brother and sister, they lived around War Eagle and the woods was real thick, the trees were close together. So they played . . . And they walked from tree to tree. And they kept Mother scared half to death all the time. They didn't buildtree houses, but they climbed as high as they could go and then they would swing across to the other tree. Every once in a while they'd give a yell and I guess if anybody heard them they thought they killed someone. They thought they were doing the Tarzan yell. And there was a big grape vine that swung out over a real deep place in the river. Dad went down one day to see about the kids and there they were, swinging on this rock and grape vine right out across this real deep hole of water. And he didn't think any of them could swim. My little brother dived, er, fell off the vine into water and Dad started peeling his clothes. "The boy can't even swim." And before he got his clothes off Buck came up, snorted the water out of his nose and swam away like a duck. (laughs) Todd:. . . Hogan: Now Buck had been swimming a long time. Dad just didn't know it. He wasn't very old. Just about seven or eight years old and he didn't even know if he could swim.Funding for digitization provided by the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Happy Hollow Foundation