George Washington Harris was an East Tennessee regionalist author whose comic writing was admired by Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, Hamlin Garland, and Robert Penn Warren. However, Harris’s crude tales elicited some controversy, since many of his stories centered around the character of Sut Lovingood were considered objectionable by mid-nineteenth-century standards. Even so, Harris’s stories remain timeless examples of Appalachian literary humor.
Harris was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, in 1814, but at five years of age his family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee. It was in Tennessee where Harris would find inspiration for his tales in the daily lives of the inhabitants of the Appalachian foothills. In Knoxville, he became a metalworker and steamboat captain, the earnings of which allowed him to purchase 375 acres of farmland in Blount County at the gateway of the Great Smoky Mountains. His character Sut Lovingood’s manners and dialect are grounded in the rural personages, practices, and expressions of this area.
In 1839, Harris began submitting political articles to the Knoxville Argus in support of Southern secession. Four years later, Harris began contributing “sporting epistles” to William T. Porter’s New York Spirit of the Times. His first important piece of literary work, a sketch titled “The Knob Dance—A Tennessee Frolic,” describing life in the Tennessee hills with attention to local color and dialect, appeared in the Spirit in 1845. However, Harris’s principal means of living came from his employment as superintendent at the Holston Glass Works beginning in 1849, which gave him enough income to support his burgeoning writing career. More importantly, while at Holston, he met Sut Miller, who became the model for Sut Lovingood.
Harris submitted his first “Sut” story, “Sut Lovingood’s Daddy ‘Acting Horse’” to the Spirit in 1854. The tale continues Harris’s attention to local color and dialect as demonstrated in the earlier “Knob Dance,” but the tale is more violent and grotesque than the less forceful descriptions of the “Knob Dance.” By 1858 Harris had further developed the characters of the Lovingood family and had introduced Sicily Burns, the object of Sut’s rather crude affections.
The most immediately striking aspect of Harris’s style is the Appalachian dialect in which he writes. Harris’s characters’ speech is composed in such a way as to seem alien to the reader. A goal of dialect writing is to imitate, as closely as possible, regional speech patterns, both in the sounds of the words (phonetics) and the expressions used (idioms and syntactic convolutions). A dialect writer records what he or she observes through the ear and the eye; thus, a heightened degree of realism is attained, approaching social, if not historical, documentary:
Hit am on orful thing, George, tu be a natral born durn’d fool. Yu’se never ’sperienced hit pussonally, hev yu? Hits made pow’fully agin our famerly, am all owin tu dad. I orter bust my head open agin a bluff ove rocks, an’ jis’ wud du hit, ef I warnt a cussed coward. All my yearthly ’pendence is in these yere laings—d’ye see ’em? Ef they don’t fail, I may turn human, sum day, that is sorter human, enuf tu be a Squire ur a school cummisiner.
Much of the character of Harris’s stories would be lost without the rough musical cadence of the Appalachian dialect. This element is often lost on readers who fail to take the time to carefully sound out Harris’s language. Also, speaking the language of Sut in Sut’s rhythms and expression immerses the reader in the character’s frame of mind. The tale captivates readers’ senses in the way only a skilled dialect writer can accomplish. The narrative voice becomes an actual voice, the reader’s voice.
Harris’s central theme in the Sut Lovingood tales became clear as the character developed. Sut is driven by an intense desire for freedom and is opposed to forms of social restraints, such as religion and law. The declining economy of the South in the years leading up to the Civil War helps explain Harris’s, and Sut’s, rejection of social controls.
Knoxville at this time was divided between Confederate and Union sympathies. Harris, a secessionist, left Knoxville for pro-Confederate Nashville, where he contributed three anti-Lincoln sketches to the Nashville Union & American. When Union troops arrived in Nashville in 1862, Harris and his family fled the city, and Harris lived and worked throughout the duration of the Civil War in several Southern cities. After the war, Harris continued writing anti-Republican and anti-Northern newspaper sketches.
In 1867 Harris compiled a selection of revised Sut Lovingood tales into a collection titled Sut Lovingood, Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” Warped and Wove for Public Wear. Harris’s revision highlights his picaresque style and his focus on characterization. Harris’s characters are propelled by their own energies rather than by the necessities of plot construction. The Yarns suggests a work, in style and especially in tone, at odds with the cultural refinement and high-toned mannerisms of Victorian literature.
Harris’s wife died in 1867, and in October 1869 Harris remarried and settled in Decatur, Alabama, having bought the right-of-way for the Wills Valley Railroad. While on railroad business, Harris traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, with his new manuscript, High Times and Hard Times, to plan for its publication. On the return trip, Harris suddenly took ill and died on the train, reportedly whispering one word, “poison,” before his death. The doctor at the scene attributed the death to apoplexy; however, the attending physician noted no apparent signs of poisoning and no autopsy was ordered. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Harris’s death were never resolved. One theory suggests he was poisoned by members of a rival political faction. Historians have concluded that more likely he succumbed to natural causes.
Bill Scalia
See also Folklore and Folktales; Twain, Mark; Yarns, Yarn-spinning
Further Reading
Caron, James E., and M. Thomas Inge, eds. 1996. Sut Lovingood’s Nat’ral Born Yarnspinner: Essays on George Washington Harris. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Harris, George Washington. 2009. Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool.” Warped and Wove for Public Wear. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harris, George Washington. 2012. Sut Lovingood Travels with Old Abe Lincoln, edited by M. Thomas Inge. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing.
Harris, George Washington. 2014. High Times and Hard Times, edited by M. Thomas Inge. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Prince, Stephen K. 2014. Stories of the South: Race and Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Harris, George Washington—Primary Document
George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood (1867)
George Washington Harris was Appalachia’s answer to Mark Twain. His stories contained frontier humor at its best: dry and witty, while thoroughly unsophisticated. Sut Lovingood featured in nearly all of his writings as epitomizing the independent and often crude spirit of the backwoods. The tales, even in their own day, were considered colorful. None of the prejudices of mid-nineteenth-century America were left out: nativism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Masonry, and racism. Adding to the authenticity of his stories, Harris wrote in the unmistakable Appalachian dialect. After the Civil War, Harris used his status as a writer to lead the opposition to Reconstruction in his home city of Knoxville, Tennessee.
THE SNAKE-BIT IRISHMAN
“Sum three ur four clever fellers frum Knoxville fix’d tharselves up fur a camp hunt ove a cupple ove weeks out yere, an’ they met up wif me, an’ pinted out two kaigs tied across a muel’s back, an’ told me tu smell at the bunghole. I follered em wifout ara halter. We camp’t jist tuther side that high pint yu see yander, an wer gittin on fust rate, killin lots ove deer an’ sich like, when wun nite here cum that cussed Irishman, wif a bundil ontu the aind ove a stick, an’ jis’ tuck up boardin wif us, never so much es even lookin tu see ef he wer welcum. He et, an’ drunk, an’ slep’t thar, es cumfortabil es ef he own’d this country, an’ wer the sassyest, meddelsumest, mos’ imperdint son ove a digging-mersheen I ever seed, allers ’sceptin a young suckit rider, ur a duck-laig’d Jew. Sez Jedge Alexander tu me:
“‘Sut, ef yu’ll manage tu run that raskil off frum yere I’ll gin ye par ove boots.’
“Sez I, jumpin tu my feet, ‘I’ll du hit, durn’d ef I don’t! jis’ wait till nite.’
“‘Now,’ sez the kind-hearted Jedge, ‘Sut, yu mustn’t hurt the poor feller, mine that; but I want him skared away frum this camp.’
“Sez I, ‘All the hurtin he’ll git will cum frum skeer. I won’t hurt him, but I specks that skeer may du hit; me sperience (An’ hits sum on the nater an’ workin ove skeers) is, Jedge, that the hurtin cumin outen a big ripe skeer, jis’ can’t be beat on top ove this yeath, enyhow. Hoss-whips, yaller jackits, an’ fire, haint nowhar. Yu wants him skeer’d clean away frum this camp. Now s’pose I happens tu put in a leetle too much powder, an’ skeer him plum outen the United States—what then?’
“Sed he, larfin, ‘I won’t indite yu; jis’ go ahead, Sut.’
“I fix’d things.
“Well, nite cum an’ arter we hed lay down, Irish stole hissef anuther suck outen the barlm ove life kaig, an’ cum an’ jis’ rooted his way in atween me an’ Jim, an’ fix’d hissef fur a big sleep, went at hit imejuntly, an’ sot up a system ove the infunelest soun ever blown outen a human nose. The cussed allfired ole poshole digger snored in Irish!
“Now I hed cut off ni ontu about nine foot ove gut, frum the offal ove a big buck what we kill’d that day, an’ I tied the ainds wif twine, tu keep in the truck what wer intu hit, an’ sunk hit in the krick, so es tu hev hit good cold. I ris up rite keerful, put on the Judge’s spurs, got me a long black thorn, an’ greazed hit wif hog’s fat outen the skillet. I fotch the gut up frum the krick, an’ wer ready tu begin the sponsibil work I hed on han. The tater-eater hed a hole inter the sitten down part ove his britches, an’ his shut tail hed cum outen hit tug it sum fresh ar. I ried wun aind ove that orful gut tite an’ fas’ tu the ole coarse shut-tail, an’ quiled up the gut nice an’ snake-like, clost tu him es he lay. I lay’d down agin, an’ reached down my han wif the black-thorn in hit till I got in stickin distance ove his starn. I felt fur a saft place, an’ jis’ socked in the thorn about a inch, four ur five times, ’bout es fas’ es a ho’net ken sting when he hesn’t much time tu spar, an’ a big job oeve stingin tu du sumwhar else. Every time I socked it that thorn, I raked him up an’ down the shins wif them Mexican spurs. I hearn them rattilin ontu his shin-bones like bucksot in a bottil, an’ I wer a-hollerin—yu cud hearn me a mile—‘snake! Snake! Big snake! Oh, lordy! Oh, lordee! A big copper-headed black rattil-snake is crawlin up my britcheds, up bof laigs, an’ is a-tyin hissef intu a double bow-knot roun my body. Help! Lordee, oh!’
“The rest on ’em hed the hint, an’ all wer shoutin ‘Snake! Snake! Big Snake!’ es I did. Now hits not onreasonabil tu tell that this hurtin an’ noise woke Paddy pruty eshenshully all over, an’ all et onst tu.
“He slaped down his hans each side ove hissef tu help ’im tu rise, an’ laid one ove ’em flat ontu the nice cold quile ove gut. He went ofen that pallet an’ outen that camp jis’ like a sparer-hawk starts tu fly frum the soun ove shot-gun, an’ he lit twenty foot out in the dark, a-straitnin out that gut ontil the string on the hindmos’ aind snapped like ontu a ’cussion cap. Es he went, his words wer—‘Holy mither ove Jayzus!’ an’ he sot inter runnin in a sirkil ove about fifty yards thru the brush, roun an’ aroun the camp, a-makin meny surjestshuns, an prayers, an’ uther dierbolical souns. ‘Shute the long divil! Shute ove vees, but don’t aim et his head! Och Shint Patherick! Oh, Howly Vargin! Can’t nun ove yees ketch ’im? Shop him! Och howly wather! How swate he’s a-bitin! I tel yees he’s got me by me bottom, an’ he’s a-mendin his hoult! Praist, praist, pope, praist! Howly wather! Praist, och, och! Fitch me a cross—a big cross! Bring me me mades, me bades! The divil’s own son is a-aitin in strait fur me kedneys.’”
Source: Harris, George Washington. Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool” Warped and Wove for Public Wear. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald Publishers, 1867.