The Grateful Dead Folktale: Questions?

The next SurLaLune title soon to be released is The Grateful Dead Tales From Around the World. This is a departure for SurLaLune and myself in many ways. For one, this is the first tale collection not supported by an annotated tale on the SurLaLune site for the past several years. I am debating putting the tale up on the site because it is a rather complicated one to offer up for annotation. It can be done, of course, but choosing a definitive tale is problematic to start and then the challenges build from there.

My query here is this: I will be posting about Grateful Dead folktales in the coming weeks with the book's release and wanted to know what you, the loyal SurLaLune readers, know and want to know about Grateful Dead tales, ATU 505 (and other types too). These days I realize most people hear the term and think of the band and Deadheads--if they are even aware of the band, which the younger generations today are fairly oblivious to in my experience--but this is a folktale with a history stretching back millenia with virtually nothing in common with a rock band other than the name the group got from the tale.

To be honest, I would fail a listening quiz of the band's music--I could place the era and maybe successfully guess the band, but I think I could only be definite for one actual song and even then I wouldn't bet my last dollar on my answer. That is not my area of interest although I am always curious about how folklore is absorbed by all forms of popular culture or subculture. So that is not where my studies and the new book's focus goes AT ALL. One brief band reference in the first paragraph of the introduction to prove I know the band exists and that is all. Didn't want readers thinking I was completely oblivious to that cultural touchpoint. I'm not.

I started the book and have worked on it in fits and bounds since 2010 when I discovered The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story by Gordon Hall Gerould while researching Twelve Dancing Princesses Tales From Around the World. I started out knowing virtually nothing about the tale and have learned more than I ever expected or planned when I started collecting variants and reading and reading and reading. I was just going to collect some tales and offer them up in a book. But familiarity has bred affection for the tale, something I expect now after editing so many books and a website, as well as a fascination with how it has traveled through the centuries to us today. So I kept researching and growing the book into the 828 pages it is now. And that's after cuts of material.

My new book shares the text of Gerould's book and then offers about 50 variants of the tale in full text as well as other scholarship and information on the tale type which is itself rather complicated, in the way Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast are complicated, not sticking to one tale type for everyone's convenience. I miss simple, but I think I am in the wrong field for that.

And if you aren't interested in Grateful Dead folklore, I hope to spark an interest. It really is fascinating, I promise. So stay tuned and keep reading. There are hopefully some interesting surprises in store for folklore lovers. After all, I never expected to edit a book about the tale and now I have. And I don't do that unless I find enough to keep myself interested long enough to complete a book.

Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Crisis Magazine (A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity) recently published an article touting the virtues of Hans Christian Andersen's works. From Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Mitchell Kalpakgian:

Proverbs, folk tales, and fairy tales provide a great source of the world’s accumulated wisdom and perennial philosophy. To read Andersen’s fairy tales is to rediscover the adventure of the human story, to experience the sweet taste of goodness, and to marvel at the miraculous nature of reality. In “The Travelling Companion” Anderson portrays good works as forgotten actions done for their own sake and left behind, yet these humble deeds to strangers in remote places performed in the darkness of the night or the silence of a church assume the nature of hidden buried seeds that have a fruitful, potent quality that produces an unforeseen abundance.

A good deed is a travelling companion, a powerful seed, a mysterious power that never really dies or remains unacknowledged even though the sower of these actions never thinks about them as deserving of recognition or rewards. As Andersen shows, the most momentous, surprising boons of good fortune can often be traced to these forgotten deeds of a pure heart. In the story poor John parts with his last $50 to prevent two vindictive rogues from violating the dead body of a man who never paid them his debt. In a lonely, obscure place John pays the debt and performs his simple good deed for a dead man who cannot even say thank you—only to discover later that the dead man is no more dead than a buried seed or the remembered past.

Click through to read the entire article. My favorite part is the discussion of some less popular HCA tales as well as the unexpected source of the article. I had to share the Travelling Companion excerpt here since it is also a Grateful Dead tale, a collection I hope to have out by the end of the year.