Kentucky Six - Text
Subject is a 38 years old Caucasian male recorded by Rinda Frye on 4/23/2000. He was born in Shelbyville, KY but moved to Bethlehem, a town nearby in Henry County, in the northwestern part of the state between Louisville and Cincinnati. He has lived in Florida and Los Angeles as an adult but has returned to Kentucky in recent years where he attends college. He "corrects" much of his speech in his reading of the Rainbow Passage, but speaks in a strong country dialect when telling his childhood stories of life on the farm. Edited by Paul Meier 10.13.00. Running time 00:04:43.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I guess you could say I was raised as a farm boy. I grew up on a farm, small rural area. I guess my closest friends were a mile away. Did have’s a couple friends though I saw some as a child every now and then they would come over. Moanly—Mainly, I remember uh feeding the pigs, getting hay, cutting wood, feeding the chickens, getting the chicken eggs outta there, I hated that, chickens would always wanta peck ya when you was trying to get the eggs. I didn't like that ‘specially if they were setting to raise the little chickens—you’d have the whole pile of eggs under our hen and uh she wouldn’t even want ya to touch ‘em. Then uh slopping the pigs, of course, that that was always bad. We used to go to the closest elementary school and after all the kid’s meals that they ate that day they’d put all the food into buckets for us and we would bring five gallon buckets out to the farm and I would feed ‘em to the pigs at night. And the horses, I remember the horses a lot I really loved horses, they were really great. Horses were almost like people if you had them to do go do whatever there chore was a time or two they could do it by themselves. Mainly, I remember when we was cutting cedar logs we used to cut these logs and I would hook up the horses you would have a doubletree, that's what it's called, so you could hook two horses together then they would go to one chain to pull the logs. I used to ride on this double tree it reminded me like I was uh in a chariot or something I felt like I was ya know like in the ancient times riding in a chariot out through the woods, it felt really great. And like I said the horses were so smart that after a few trips they could go for a half mile or a mile on their own and you would just have one person to hook them up on one end where the trees were and the other at your other end where the wagon was and the horses would do all the work for you. They would just go back and forth. All you had to do was hook them up and no one would have to be with them. They were really smart. We had a horse called Joe, O- Jo we called him, and Roney. I think O-Jo would probably been hurt before we got him because he was really scared when we first got him and if you rattled wire around him he would jump and stuff we felt like someone had probably beat him with barbed wire but he grew out of that and he became our best horse but he still was destined to die. He uh got shot. Some people were visiting a neighbor of ours one day this guy that had just gotten out of prison and he got a gun and shot our horse and he shot him and killed him. And that was the end of Joe and this was a really great horse. And then uh what else was growing up on the farm, the farm was filled with a lot of good things, though, that was the sad thing. But the good things way outweighed the sad things that happened. We'd go hunting at night and spend all night hunting and then the dogs would get lost and spend most of the time the hunting would be hunting the dogs, the no good dogs of course. The good dogs always would come back every night but the no good dogs would be hunting raccoon but they would decide they wanted to chase a deer and deers run really fast so your dog goes miles away in one night so your like looking for three or four days at a time to try and find your dog. And that was most of what hunting turned into being hunting the dogs instead of hunting the animal. And then uh back to the pigs. The pigs were nasty, like I said, but they had the best meat ya know we fresh coat our farm animals the chickens and the pigs and the pigs I was always the one who wound up doing the killing and I would shoot them but the way you shoot them you make a cross between their ears and their eyes and right in the center point is where you shoot that way the pig there's no pain, It just goes down. It shot it right in the brain instead. Then we would cut we would hang them up and gut them and then scald them in these big pans. And uh I know it sounds all horrid to whoever may be listening to this but it is the way its really done and I don't do it anymore I go to the store and buy my food now but I remember the last thing I ever killed was a a rabbit. I was a really great shot. I was really good with a rifle. My brother he knew I didn't want to hunt anymore so he bet me one day that I couldn't shoot this rabbit It was like a hundred fifty yards away, of course I hit it killed it just fell over. That's the last animal I ever killed. It's like I don't wanna kill animals no more. Even though it was so much of my existence, and our food we weren't just hunting animals for trophies, we ate them. You know, this was real existence. And but I just didn't want to do it no more. It's like I would rather find some way to make the money and buy it at the store and not have to go through the killing your supposed to, killing your own animals. Even though the meat, I believe, is better it’s more fresh and it does have a lot better taste I rather go to the store….
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY KEVIN SCHUERING 30 March 2008 , UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR SANDRA LINDBERG