Charles L. Perdue, Jr.

I came to the academic study of folklore by a somewhat peculiar route. My mother was a traditional ballad singer and I grew up singing her songs, learning others, having my head filled and my behavior guided by traditional stories, proverbs, riddles, superstitions, and other forms of folklore. Years later after service in the Army Security Agency during the Korean War, and marriage to Nan, I attended the University of California, Berkeley, and majored in geology. I worked seven years as a geologist in Washington D.C., but found myself more of a bureaucratic "paper pusher" than a geologist and I turned what had become a time consuming hobby for both myself and Nan into a career by returning to graduate school and getting a Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. In the fall of 1971 I began teaching at the University of Virginia.

Since the early 1970s when Nan and I began working on a history of the people displaced by Shenandoah National Park our interests have moved more toward ethnohistory, the politics of culture, and New Deal cultural programs in Virginia.

The field collection of folklore and the interviewing Nan and I have done in connection with our study of the Shenandoah National Park removals have led us to a deeper interest in life histories, both as an aid to our work and as a very effective teaching method in our ongoing attempts to give students some sort of field experience while at the University of Virginia.

Specializations

The politics of culture, traditional music and narrative of the American South, New Deal cultural programs in Virginia.

Co-director of Kevin Barry Perdue Archive of Traditional Cultures

Courses Taught

Ethnohistory: Research and Methods, Life History and Oral History, Folklore in America.

Selected Publications

• 2001- Pigsfoot Jelly and Persimmon Beer: Foodways from Virginia's Writer's Project. (ed.) Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press
• 1998 - Wrote the entry on James Taylor Adams for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Vol. 1.
• 1998 - (with Nancy J. Martin-Perdue) Consulted on and appeared in the Video: "The Iris Still Blooms," produced by Maria Hess at WVPT-TV, Harrisonburg, Virginia. Premiered September 16, 1998.
• 1997 - (with Nancy J. Martin-Perdue) "Talk About Trouble: Documentation of Virginia Culture." In Documenting Cultural Diversity in the Resurgent American South. Publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Edited by Margaret R. Dittemore and Fred J. Hay.
• 1996 - (with Nancy J. Martin-Perdue). "Talk About Trouble": A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. This book won the National Oral History Association's award for the outstanding book using oral history in 1997.
• 1995 - "What Made Little Sister Die?": The Core Aesthetic and Personal Culture of a Traditional Singer," Western Folklore, Vol. 54, No. 2 (April 1995), pp. 141-163.
• 1992 - Pigsfoot Jelly & Persimmon Beer: Foodways from the Virginia Writers' Project. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City Press.
• 1992 - Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
• 1991 - (with Nancy J. Martin-Perdue). 'To Build a Wall Around These Mountains' : The Displaced People of Shenandoah. Magazine of Albemarle County History 49:48-71.
• 1991 - Gruver Meadows: Anatomy of a Murder Ballad. Folklore and Folklife in Virginia 4:59-65.
• 1987 - Outwitting the Devil: Jack Tales from Wise County Virginia. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City Press.