Here I’ve placed three folktales that, as far as I know, have not been collected in Kentucky—yet! While I’ve usually been able to tell you who collected a story, and often who the collector heard it from, and sometimes even who that person reported hearing it from, it would be a falsehood for me to claim all the Kentucky tales in this book were transmitted orally, and only orally, before various collectors heard them and recorded them or wrote them down. Some probably do come from long-thriving oral traditions within individual families. Others were probably read, then told, and eventually became a story passed along orally. It would also be a falsehood for me to claim the tales had never been told outside of Kentucky. I called them Kentucky tales in this book because they were all collected in Kentucky.
Because I tell stories all over my home state (in 99 of the 120 counties so far), it is possible that a story from this section might be heard when I tell it, or even read in this book, and then told and retold at home or at school to listeners who then tell and retell it to others. Eventually the story could become a tale heard so often it is well-known and comfortably retold by some Kentuckian in the future. Such a tale might even be retold over enough time that the memory of it once being read in a book or of it once being heard from a stranger who called herself a professional storyteller is long forgotten. And maybe in that distant future, a folktale collector will hear the story and classify it as a Kentucky folktale.
For now, here are simply three more stories I love to tell and thought you might enjoy reading and reading about. You’ll find another fairy tale—this one even has fairies as characters. You’ll find a folktale handed down in a family and then sent to me through the U.S. Postal Service. And lastly, you’ll find a pourquoi tale—a story explaining how something came to be—that is also an animal tale and a trickster tale.