Cante fables are folktales told partly in spoken prose and partly in song or verse. Cante comes from the Latin word cantus, meaning a song or chant. Western scholars trace the term to the epic poetry of medieval France, but examples of these fables can be found around the world. They were orally transmitted for generations before folklorists began to record them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the United States, cante fables in the English tradition have been documented from the rural South and Midwest to urban Philadelphia.
Cante fables use prose to tell the story, incorporating song or verse to highlight important information. Verse sections of cante fables typically include magical elements such as spells and charms, animal dialogue, and riddles. The switch from prose to verse calls the listener’s attention to a switch from the ordinary to the supernatural. For example, in a cante fable recorded in Kentucky, an old witch searching for a little girl who had escaped her cottage chants “Cowel [sic] o’mine, cowel o’mine, Have you ever seen a maid o’mine, With a wig and a wag and a long leather bag, Who stold all the money I ever had?” The witch repeats this refrain to a sheep, a horse, and a mill, all of which respond. Storytellers also use verse at the beginning and end of a cante fable, signifying the separation of the tale from everyday life and suspending the normal bounds of reality. In this respect, verse functions the same as “Once upon a time” and “The end” for listeners.
Combining verse and prose in one tale is a common technique used by storytellers in many parts of the world. African, European, Indian, and Middle Eastern folkloric traditions all include examples of cante fables. The most familiar examples of non-Western cante tales is the inclusion of several in One Thousand and One Nights, otherwise known to American readers as Arabian Nights. It is impossible to trace all of the cante fable traditions to a common root, and in all likelihood the form arose independently in each of these locales. Storytellers may have introduced elements of singing or chanting to their tales in ancient times for embellishment or to add interest to repetitive sections.
The term cante fable first appeared in the eighteenth-century manuscript entitled Aucassin et Nicolette, an epic romance written in alternating sections of prose and verse. Scholars believe the tale originated centuries earlier in late medieval France based on its comparability to chansons de geste, or early epic poems performed as songs, and French novels of the same period. The second-to-last line of Aucassin et Nicolette includes the word cantefable to describe its presentation style, meaning song-and-say, or sung and told. English-speaking folklorists adopted the word as cante fable, using it to describe folktales presented in prose-verse form.
Because of Aucassin et Nicolette, folklorists associate European cante fables with the ballads of the Middle Ages, though they disagree over their exact connection. In late-medieval Europe, minstrels, or traveling performers, composed ballads to entertain the nobility. These song-tales were often epic in nature, recounting legends and important episodes of history. Minstrels usually played an instrument to accompany their stories. The difference between ballads and archaic cante fables is that ballads were composed entirely of verse, rather than only partially. One interpretation of the cante fable-ballad connection is that cante fables were a much older form of storytelling from which both ballads and prose folktales branched out. Another is that cante fables, prose folktales, and folksongs were all ancient forms of storytelling that medieval minstrels elaborated upon to create their epic ballads. Yet another perspective considers the cante fable as a degeneration of the high-medieval ballad.
The debate over the origins of cante fables arose in the early twentieth century as American folklorists began to encounter modern examples of this type of folktale in the southeastern United States. The most important folklorist to work on American cante fables was Herbert Halpert (1911–2000). Halpert began his career as part of a government initiative called the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. The New Deal aimed at providing work for Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s; the WPA commissioned scholars to record the folktales, songs, and art of Americans across the country, generating the Archive of American Folk Song in the process. Halpert’s first work was conducted in New York City, but he was soon dispatched to the South to record rural Appalachian folktales.
Halpert collected folktales and songs in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia for the Folk Arts Committee of the WPA. This research provided the foundation for his career. He began to publish articles about Appalachian folklore, specifically the cante fables he encountered, in the 1940s. These articles can be found in the annals of American folklore journals such as Midwest Folklore, Southern Folklore Quarterly, and the Journal of American Folklore. His work inspired other American folklorists to look for cante fables in the South and beyond.
The cante fables that twentieth-century folklorists recorded in the rural United States came from England and Scotland. They had been passed down orally for generations. They often featured bawdy elements and slang language told in the regional accent of the storyteller. These stylistic components stood out in contrast to the formal Aucassin et Nicolette, leading some scholars to criticize them as decayed or degenerated forms of the cante fable. But the more folklorists researched the cante fables of the United States, the more they moved away from this interpretation. Cante fables derived from the British tradition were recorded in New Jersey, Indiana, and Newfoundland, Canada. They shared attributes of vernacular speech and behavior with the Appalachian tales. The stigma applied to American cante fables as products of rural, isolated Southern communities lifted.
The next major addition to the study of American cante fables came from folklorist Roger D. Abrahams (1933–), who studied urban African American folklore. Collecting tales in Philadelphia, Abrahams documented examples of cante fables used in Uncle Remus tales and popular jokes among African Americans. Similar to the Appalachian cante fables, these contained vulgar subject matter and language. Abrahams used the similarity of these jokes to ones recorded in England and Jamaica to argue against the interpretation of American cante fables as decayed forms.
Recently, children’s author Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) republished a collection of African American folktales, many in cante fable form, that were originally collected by Martha Strudwick Young (1862–1941). Young collected tales from African Americans in Alabama around the turn of the twentieth century. Young herself did not identify cante fables in her collection, as she completed her work before the term was commonly used among folklorists. But her stories, retold by Hamilton, have reclaimed cante fables from the realm of adult jokes without losing the vernacular dialect that so often characterizes these tales.
Nina M. Schreiner
See also American Folklore Society (AFS); Ballad; European Sources; Folklore and Folktales; Storytelling; Uncle Remus
Further Reading
Abrahams, Roger D. 2009. Deep Down in the Jungle: Black American Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia, 3rd ed. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.
Dorson, Richard M. 1964. Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Halpert, Herbert. 1996. Folktales of Newfoundland: The Resilience of the Oral Tradition. New York: Routledge.
Halpert, Herbert. 2002. Folklore, an Emerging Discipline: Selected Essays of Herbert Halpert, edited by Martin Lovelace, Paul Smith, and J. D. A. Widdowson. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Hamilton, Virginia. 1996. When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing: The Adventures of Bruh Sparrow, Sis Wren and Their Friends. New York: Scholastic.
Nicolaisen, W. F. H. 1997. “The Cante Fable in Occidental Folk Narrative.” In Prosimetrum: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, edited by Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl. Suffolk: D. S. Brewer.
Sturges, Robert S. 2015. Aucassin and Nicolette: A Facing-Page Edition and Translation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.