Folklore

The example of folklore that I chose to examine for this assignment is the farmers daughter joke that is found on page 236 of Farm: A multimodal reader. This joke is about a farmers daughter that wants to sleep with a man that is visiting the farm. The man won't do anything with her because he was running for county sheriff and didn't want anything making it so he wouldn't win. Then, she goes out to the barn and lets the bull in to the cows while they are in heat so they could mate and the bull doesn't want anything to do with the cows. She gets upset and asks the bull if he is running for county sheriff too.

This is an example of oral folklore. In the story, there are a lot of uhs and ums, that indicate the story was told to someone who wrote it down exactly as they heard. There is even a time when a listener interjects into the story. 

This example of folklore helps us understand farming more because it deals with the fact that farmers daughters were shown more as objects to look at than as hard workers like their mothers. Once those daughters got married they were shown more as hardworking homesteaders. 

Another thing that this joke shows us is how common it was for children to be helping with the chores. While her family slept, the girl went out to tend to the cattle, which included letting the bull in with the cows. She was understandably upset that the bull would not breed with the cows because the cows were her family’s livelihood. If they didn’t have calves, they wouldn’t have means to live.

The people that made up this joke knew that farmers daughters were known mostly as objects and they also knew that everyone would understand the frustration of having a bull that didn’t want to produce.