Birdseye, Tom (reteller). Soap! Soap! Don't Forget the Soap!: An Appalachian Folktale. Illus. Andrew Glass. New York: Holiday House, 1993. A comical tale of a forgetful boy who gets confused about his errand when he repeats what each person along the road says to him. Birdseye heard his father tell "The Forgetful Boy" around the campfire and started telling it himself one day when he forgot a book he was going to read to his fifth grade class. Background, summary, reviews and two pictures at www.TomBirdseye.com. “Soap, Soap, Soap.” In Richard Chase. Grandfather Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1948, pp. 130-36. With small drawings by Berkeley Williams, Jr. The boy inadvertently insults a series of people who remind him that he has been sent to buy soap. The last woman takes pity on the dirty, crying boy and sends him on his way. His mother washes him in the creek and hangs him on the line to dry. Chase got the tale from James Taylor Adams, Dicey Adams, and others. Chase's notes link the tale with "Stupid Cries" in More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. “The Soap Tale.” Collected by Emory L. Hamilton from Mrs. Belle Kilgore, Mt. View, VA, 1940. James Taylor Adams Collection, JTA-2326. Full text in this web site. This version contains some crude language and does not show the boy's return home to his mother. "The Boy Who Was Sent for Soap." Collected by James Taylor Adams from Mrs. L. Kilgore, Big Laurel, VA, 1942. JTA-100. Full text in this web site. This short version contains a joke about swearing in front of the preacher and does not show the boy's return home to his mother. "Soap! Soap! Soap!" In Carol Lee Kindt and Linda Rockwell High. Once Upon a Mountain Tale: Eight Jack and Grandfather Tales. Lakeland, TN: Memphis Musicraft Publications, 1995. Accompanied by music and drawings with which children can make puppets and backdrops. “Soap, Soap, Soap.” Told by Rick Carson, Giggles and Ghosts. Audio cassette. Elizabethtown, KY: Alpha Recording, 1991. “Soap, Soap, Soap.” Adapted from Chase's Grandfather Tales by storyteller Barry McWilliams (Everett, WA). Full text online with an explanation of changes McWilliams made in the story. He added the moral, "Don't Forget where you are going and why you are going there!" (Other material on storytelling is also included in McWilliams' web site) “The Boy Who Was Sent for Soap.” Told to James Taylor Adams by Mrs. L. Kilgore, Big Laurel VA, 1942, who heard it from her grandmother, Mrs. Mary Morris. JTA-100. “Soap.” Collected by Richard Chase, Damascus, VA, 1941. James Taylor Adams Collection, JTA-3023. "The Soap Boy." In Leonard Roberts. South From Hell-fer-Sartin': Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales. U of KY Press, 1955. Rpt. Berea, KY: The Council of the Southern Mountains, 1964, p. 142. In a shorter version than most, the boy gets distracted when he stubs his toe and starts running around in circles saying, "Here I lost it, there I found it; here I lost it, there I found it." A man who tries to help him almost falls off his horse and says his stirrup is "slick as soap," thus reminding the boy that he is on his way to buy soap for his mother. See also: "Heart, Liver, and Lights." In Marie Campbell. Tales from the Cloud Walking Country. Indiana UP, 1958. Rpt. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2000, pp. 94-97. Told by Big Nelt (a big man who sang ballads and told old tales) in E. KY. When a farmer's boy is sent to buy heart, liver, and lights, his repetition of the words in order to remember them causes a man to slap him because the words remind the man of foul sights and smells at butchering time. A long series of encounters in which the boy is told to say something else and repeats it in the wrong context involves crops, a graveyard, fox hunting, a drunken husband, men fallen in a well, and a blind man who tells him to say "Nothing at all." In town the boy repeats the series of sayings, prompted by an angry butcher, but he can't go back far enough in his memory and has to return home, where he insults the farmer's wife by repeating the butcher's words "you're a fool." Next the forgetful boy catches the wrong fowl in the yard and they have a dinner so tough they can't chew it. The narrator says that when he worked for the miller, this story "learned me not to forget what I was told" (p. 97). Campbell (in notes to the book above, p. 256) identifies the tale as Type 325, What Should I Have Said (Done)? She cites Grimms' tale no. 143, "Going a-Traveling" (in which a poor youth tries to travel but keeps repeating the wrong things to people, and eventually has to crawl back to his mother, never to travel again) as well as variants from other places, including Ireland. Other comic tales about foolish people and behavior such as Jack and the Three Sillies, Foolish Jack, The Two Old Women's Bet "Don't be a Silly-Billy," in It happened in No-End Hollow, and You're Sure Silly, Billy!, both by May Justus. Last update: 05/08/2007 |
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