One of my main tasks after the summer is over will be to start creating story sets at Diigo by adding Chase or Parsons tags to the parallel stories. Because I like the Gullah story of the Alligator and the Jaybird so much, I went ahead and put it in a set already, since it goes with the Harris story about Brer Fox and Jack Sparrow:
Chase 19.
And I'll be starting off with the Chase and Parsons numbers (from the Antilles) book, because those are the most useful ways to triangulate. Enough already with the motif and tale types; they were not built to facilitate my purposes, and I have no interest in shaping my process to fit those contraints. Just as Perry was the most useful starting point for Aesop (even though he left me down for the post-classical era), Chase and Parsons will get me going with the project of looking for African stories in the Americas.
What's nice about the Chase number is that it gets me to Baer, who provides pretty good references (especially to Klipple and Flowers), and then using Parsons' Antilles book, I also get references because of the notes she adds to the stories in Volume 3. Dorson is also really good about notes, although it is frustrating that I only have one of his books that I can freely use with a CC-license; probably I need to come up with a system for summarizing Dorson for references and bibliography the way I am summarizing Baer.
And eventually I will tackle that brilliant book by William Bascom; I wonder how many of the Harris stories I will find in his project. That is really going to be the motherlode of bibliography, but I am waiting before I work systematically through the earlier sources before I plunge into the things I will learn from his book. YAY BOOKS!
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