Willard Watson And His Oral Narratives: An Analysis With Edited Texts

Willard Watson of Deep Gap has become well-known as a craftsman and raconteur in his community and as far beyond as the CBS program "On the Road With Charles Kuralt." Willard's homespun wisdom, stories, and dialect are worthy of examination and preservation. I began this process in January 1984 by recording Willard in his workshop, where he told stories while he worked on fashioning his toys out of wood. I was fortunate enough to find two tapes of him recorded by his niece, Nancy Watson, in the early 1970's. The appendices that follow the text in this thesis are transcriptions of the tapes of Nancy Watson and myself.