Professor of modern languages and folklorist with special interest in Appalachian dialect and folk music. Combs was born January 2, 1886, at Hazard, Perry County, Kentucky, and grew up in a large singing family in nearby Hindman in Knott County. In 1902, when Combs was sixteen years old, he attended the newly established Hindman Settlement School. The school’s founder, Katherine Pettit, took an interest in local balladry, and she noted a number of songs from the young Combs. These were eventually forwarded to Harvard University scholar George Lyman Kittredge, who included them in an article in the Journal of American Folklore in 1907. Thus, Combs contributed indirectly to one of the earliest published collections of folksongs from the Southern Uplands. In 1905 Combs entered Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. His contact there with Dr. Hubert Shearin led to joint publication of A Syllabus of Kentucky FolkSongs (1911). This was followed by The Kentucky Highlanders from a Native Mountaineer’s Viewfoint (1913), and in 1915 Combs edited an anthology of Kentucky poetry. From 1911 to 1918, Combs taught languages and literature at high schools and colleges in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Oklahoma. He also found opportunities to perform Kentucky folk music for sophisticated city audiences, using an Appalachianplucked dulcimer to accompany his lecture-recitals. Military service in World War I took Combs to Czechoslovakia (1920–1921) after which he returned to the United States to teach French and Spanish at West Virginia University (1922–1924). He next studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, taking his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1925 with a dissertation entitled Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis. Combs has most often been associated with Kentucky folksong study, yet he was equally passionate about the study of language. His facility with Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Old English, and Middle English was supplemented by an extensive knowledge of Old and Middle English literature. He was especially interested in showing connections between folk speech in America and earlier English forms, and he was an enthusiastic collector of locally created words and expressions. Combs eventually settled in Forth Worth, Texas, to teach at Texas Christian University. Although he maintained his interests in folk music, languages, and literature, he was largely outside the ken of folklorists until Wilgus contacted him in the late 1950s. Unfortunately, Combs died suddenly on June 2,1960, only a few days before Wilgus was to visit him to tape record the tunes of items in Combs’ ballad collection. Subsequently, Wilgus edited a long overdue English translation of Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis (Folk-Songs of the Southern United States), which apeared in the American Folklore Society’s Special Series in 1967. Combs was an individual whose insights reflected both the immediacy of his family roots and the mediating distance of scholarly analysis. As Wilgus later pointed out, Combs tended to be both defensive and self-critical when discussing his native Appalachian region. His scholarship reflected “sturdy common sense along with his intimate knowledge of…folk culture.” Combs is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas, and his ballad collection is housed at Berea College in Kentucky as part of the papers of D.K. Wilgus. Stephen Green
References
Combs, Josiah H. [1925] 1967. Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, ed. D.K.Wilgus. American Folklore Society Special Series. Austin: University of Texas Press. ——. 1960. The Highlander’s Music. Kentucky Folklore Record 6:108–122. Combs, Josiah, and Hubert Shearin. 1911. A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs. Lexington, KY: Transylvania. Kahn, Ed. 1960. Josiah H.Combs, 1886–1960. Kentucky Folklore Record 6:101–103. Wilgus, D.K. 1957. Leaders of Kentucky Folklore: Josiah H.Combs. Kentucky Folklore Record 3:67–69. ——. 1960. The Josiah H.Combs Collection of Songs and Rhymes. Kentucky Folklore Record 6:125–136.