{"id":14270,"date":"2024-07-26T06:46:54","date_gmt":"2024-07-26T10:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/?p=14270"},"modified":"2024-07-26T06:46:54","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T10:46:54","slug":"chuck-and-nan-perdue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/chuck-and-nan-perdue\/","title":{"rendered":"Chuck and Nan Perdue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oct. 8, 2007– Charles Perdue is a storyteller, a farmer’s son, mechanic, cryptographer, folk singer and geologist who documents the lives of working people not unlike himself. His work will continue to benefit the University and the study of folklore and music for years to come.
Because Perdue\u2019s interests defy the tidy compartments of the University, he simply carved out a singular niche on Grounds \u2014 one part anthropology department, one part English.
Perdue\u2019s friend and colleague in the English department, Raymond Nelson, said, \u201cChuck has always puzzled people. Where do you put him?\u201d
Throughout his professional life, Perdue\u2019s consuming interest has been the lives of others \u2014 their stories, customs and songs. In particular, he has sought to document the lives of rural working people. When he isn\u2019t recording oral histories on his own, he is compiling and editing records and interviews from other sources: narratives on the lives of Virginia slaves, Depression-era workers, dispossessed mountain folk.
\u201cWhen I first knew him, I think he was attending a black congregation up there near Culpeper and listening to the music,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cThat takes quite a bit of doing. It\u2019s a matter of going there for a long period of time and sitting aside and behaving. But he had done that and recorded some of the music.\u201d
An Ivy League-educated professor studying the lives of Depression-era poor or the worship habits of Southern African-Americans could easily have resulted in something full of saccharin and starch.
But Perdue is not a typical Ivy League-educated professor. As he said, he \u201ccame in with the Depression\u201d and spent his childhood on a Georgia farm. \u201cMy mother sang ballads and folk songs, and I grew up being rocked to sleep with the ballad about the murder of Mary Phagan, which may account for my twisted personality.\u201d
Even as a boy, Perdue felt that he didn\u2019t fit in. \u201cSee, if you\u2019re too smart, or not smart enough, you\u2019re a behavior problem,\u201d he said. \u201cI was too smart. I was always getting into trouble.\u201d
When Perdue graduated from high school, he faced stiff competition for jobs. \u201cI got out in \u201947, which more or less coincided with about 10 million servicemen having been released from all the services, filling every damn job in the country.\u201d
Perdue worked at a grocery store, rebuilt carburetors and \u201cone thing or another tried to figure out some way of making some money.\u201d
At a military college in Georgia, Perdue soon found his earliest calling: troublemaker. \u201cI set a record for walking off more hours of guard report for various incendiary offenses \u2014 conduct unbecoming a cadet, failure to salute an officer, goose-stepping in ranks. I couldn\u2019t stand it. I goofed off.
“I shouldn\u2019t have been in college. I wasn\u2019t ready for that. So I had the good sense not to go back.\u201d
Perdue ended up working as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army Security Agency in California, where he later attended Santa Rosa Junior College. This time, college focused Perdue\u2019s intellect and turned the youthful mischief-maker into something of an iconoclast. He also met his future wife and collaborator, Nancy Martin, at Santa Rosa.
\u201cI walked into French class, and Nan was sitting in there, and I decided that was it. All I had to do was get a date with her. Never asked her to marry me, just told her we were going to, and I guess she agreed.\u201d
Nan and Chuck \u2014 rarely mentioned separately and then never called doctors or professors or even Nancy and Charles. It is always Nan and Chuck, and they are as much professional colleagues as husband and wife.
\u201cI think that seems to be a key to both of them,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cThey live their interests. It\u2019s not something they sit down at night and write down. It\u2019s their work. It\u2019s their lives. That\u2019s why it can\u2019t be Charles Perdue and Nancy Perdue; it\u2019s Chuck and Nan. They\u2019re inseparable.\u201d
Nan and Chuck married and moved in 1955 to University of California-Berkeley, where he earned a degree in geology. The young couple began singing in the local folk-music coffee houses. \u201cThe Kingston trio recorded \u2018Tom Dooley.\u2019 Nan and I heard it and said, \u2018We can do that.\u2019\u201d Perdue called their performing \u201cgood therapy.\u201d Soon they were holding \u201ctherapy\u201d sessions at legendary venues like the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles and the Ash Grove in Hollywood.
The world\u2019s only husband-and-wife-geologist-folk-singing duo soon found themselves in Washington, D.C., where Perdue worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. Perdue founded the Washington Folklore Society, while once again he and Nan were playing in clubs and living rooms in the metro area.
One of Perdue\u2019s greatest collaborations began as a chance encounter. In 1964, he had stopped at a service station in Fairfax, Va., and ran into a musician named John Jackson.
\u201cJackson was holding a guitar, so I said, \u2018Do you play that thing?\u2019 He said, \u2018Yeah, I can hit a couple of chords.\u2019\u201d Perdue asked him to hit a few, and the man played \u201cCandy Man,\u201d legendary bluesman Mississippi John Hurt\u2019s signature song. Jackson went on to become a blues great. Nan and Chuck introduced him to the world, acting as his unofficial managers and promoters. They also became his close friends.
After Perdue completed his Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, he drew the attention of U.Va. English department professor and chairman E.D. Hirsch, who was interested in socio-linguistics, then a new field of theory being taught at Perdue\u2019s alma mater.
Perdue said, \u201cI had just come from Penn and could rattle off all the latest, hot bibliography and stuff that was happening. Hirsch hired me on the spot. I didn\u2019t send in a vita. I didn\u2019t interview with anybody else in the English department.\u201d
Nelson remembers there being some concerns about where to put Perdue, but Hirsch was clearly impressed. Nelson recalls Hirsch saying, \u201cWe\u2019ll worry about where to put him later. Let\u2019s just get him here.\u201d
The University was fortunate to get him. Perdue has been a prolific writer and a wise teacher. His books, \u201cTalk about Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression,\u201d \u201cPigsfoot Jelly & Persimmon Beer: Foodways from the Virginia Writers\u2019 Project\u201d and \u201cWeevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves,\u201d are considered classics and standard issue in history, anthropology and folklore classes.
The University was also fortunate to get Nan Martin-Perdue in the bargain. When Chuck came aboard in 1971, appointments for professor\u2019s spouses were considered nepotism. (Today, the practice is commonplace). Over the years, Nan served as a de facto scholar-in-residence for the University, although she received no salary and no pension.
In 1980, the Perdues established the Kevin Barry Perdue Folklore Archive at the University. Named for their son who died in 1979, the archive is a collection of folk songs, histories and documents from the Depression-era Virginia Writer\u2019s Project.
\u201cTalk about Trouble,\u201d which they co-edited, won the National Oral History Association Award for best book on oral history for 1997. It consists of oral histories recorded by members of the Virginia Writer\u2019s Project, which Chuck and Nan discovered hidden in the Virginia State Archives. By copying them, they saved these narratives from imminent disintegration due to age, moisture and acidic ink.
Edward D.C. Campbell Jr., editor of the Virginia state library\u2019s Virginia Cavalcade history journal, said, \u201c\u2018Talk about Trouble\u2019 is a remarkably moving testimonial. No other first-person collection reveals as much about how ordinary Virginians, and by extension Southerners and other Americans, confronted the palpable threats raised every day by the Great Depression.\u201d
While Perdue\u2019s writing established his scholarly reputation, Nelson believes that teaching has been an equally important part of Perdue\u2019s legacy. \u201cThe really dangerous thing about academics is they get very lofty in their interests and concerns, but Chuck\u2019s very earthy. He teaches people to be curious and that\u2019s the best thing you can teach someone.\u201d
Perdue\u2019s earthy beginnings and his own curiosity have taken him from a Georgia dirt farm to legendary folk clubs, to the University of Pennsylvania and finally to the University. In \u201cTalk about Trouble,\u201d Chuck and Nan wrote, \u201cLife as an academic in a university setting was not, then, among the options either [editor] recognized as desirable or thought to be attainable. But both editors were also products of the same changing cultural values and rising expectations with regards to higher education that affected so many of the people interviewed as part of the New Deal life history projects in Virginia.\u201d
The lives of the ex-slaves and Depression-era workers Perdue wrote about were much like his own. Sometimes \u2014 like folk songs and blues \u2014 out of the chaos and struggle of individual lives, something unique and artful emerges.
\u2014 Written by Tim Arnold<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[108,122,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-108","category-anthropology","category-uva"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14272,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14270\/revisions\/14272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}