Collector of Appalachian tales, ballads, legends, and family traditions. Roberts was born
in a log house on Toler Creek, Floyd County, Kentucky, the seventh of eleven children.
At the age of eighteen, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army, he had completed one year of
high school. He returned home from three years in Hawaii, completed high school in two
years, and enrolled at Berea College, where he set a state record for the javelin throw.
Eager to become a novelist like Jesse Stuart, he accepted an unsolicited scholarship to the
Iowa Writer’s Workshop, offered apparently upon the recommendation of his college
roommate Lawrence Edward Bowling, already enrolled in the program. His M.A. thesis
was a novel with autobiographical elements, about a teacher in eastern Kentucky. At
Iowa he studied Shakespeare and Milton under Visiting Professor Hardin Craig, who
invited him to the University of North Carolina, an invitation he was able to accept when
his teaching for the Army took him to Chapel Hill in 1944. There he seems to have met
Stith Thompson and William Hugh Jansen, both then at Indiana University.
He enrolled at Indiana in 1948 and followed Jansen to Kentucky the next year. His
1953 dissertation, published in 1955 as South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain
Folktales, established him as the leading American Märchen (fairy tale) and folktale
collector. This book was followed by Old Greasybeard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap
(1969), his collection of ballads and folksongs titled In thePine (1978), and the
monumental Sang Branch Settlers: Folksongs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family
(1974). In the latter work, which documented the oral history, folklife, and interconnected
traditions of the Couch family of Hardin County, Roberts anticipated the focus on
acquisition, performance, and context found in the next generation of American folklife
scholars. His massive legend collection, unpublished because he had not yet decided how
to organize the material and he hoped that a definitive typology might be forthcoming
from the work of Wayland D.Hand, resides with his other papers in the Southern
Appalachian Archive at Hitchins Library at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky.
Roberts taught at secondary schools, including Pine Mountain, and at small mountain
colleges—Brevard, Piedmont, Union, Morehead, West Virginia Wesleyan, and finally
Pikeville College, less than 10 miles from his birthplace. There he established the
Appalachian Studies Center and the Pikeville College Press—both dismantled after his
death—and he de-voted his attention to genealogical studies, to the work of the Kentucky
Place Name Survey, and to publishing local historians. Roberts served from 1964 to 1968
as vice president and then president of the National Folk Festival Association. All of his
life he functioned as musician, dance caller, and storyteller. He developed his signature
story, “Raglif Jaglif Tetartlif Pole,” from the version of his Aunt Columbia Roberts,
learned while he was collecting for his dissertation in 1950.
Roberts died in the Floyd County in which he was born. A coal company gravel truck
hit his pickup as he was pulling onto Route 23 from the Mare Creek road on which he
lived, killing him instantly.
William Bernard McCarthy
References
Leonard Ward Roberts. 1987. Appalachian Heritage (Special Memorial Issue) (15) 2.
McCarthy, William. 1994. What Jack Learned at School: Leonard Roberts. In Jack in Two Worlds:
Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, pp. 168–202.