In the late 1930’s, a young Californian named Joseph Hall was invited by the park service to come to the Smokies and record it’s people.
“Because he was a linguist, he was interested in documenting the speech of the people of the Great Smoky Mountains,” says Dr. Ted Olson of East Tennessee State University’s Appalachian Studies Department.
“They were just on the eve of kind of being asked to leave their ancestral homes and farms to make the park. Joseph Hall realized that somebody need to document the speech patterns, the sayings the phrases of the people of the Smokies and took it upon himself to do so. ”
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