Boatright, Mody Coggin (1896–1970). Encyclopedia of American Folklore

Folklorist. A nativeTexan educated inTexas (B.A. from West Texas State Teachers College, M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas), Mody Boatright spent his entire career in Texas as a teacher of English. After brief appointments at West Texas State Teachers College and Sul Ross State Teachers College, he became an instructor at the University of Texas in 1926; he retired from there forty-three years later, having served in all academic ranks and as department head. He served as secretary-editor of the Texas Folklore Society from 1943 to 1964, succeeding his friend and colleague J.Frank Dobie. He was elected a Fellow of both the American Folklore Society and of the Texas Folklore Society. A lifetime spent in Texas did not make Boatright parochial or narrow in oudook, even though he focused his folklore research on Texas topics, including cowboys and pioneers (Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps [1934] and Folk Laughter on the American Frontier [1949]). His most important work dealt with the folklore of oil prospecting and production (Folklore of the Oil Industry [1963], Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields [1945]), and with collaborator William A.Owens he wrote Tales from the Derrick Floor (1970), a pioneering piece of oral history. His best-known work, however, is his groundbreaking essay The Family Saga (1958), in which he defined and described this distinctive narrative genre. Sylvia Ann Grider

References

Boatright, Mody. 1958. The Family Saga and Other Phases of American Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Speck, Ernest B., ed. 1973. Mody Boatright, Folklorist: A Collection of Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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