Cratis Williams Papers

Cratis Dearl Williams grew up in rural Lawrence County, Kentucky, where he began to study the speech, tales and songs of mountain folk, and taught in a one-room school. He became known for his presentations of Appalachian singing styles and dialects. His first wife (m. 1937), Sylvia Graham, came from the same area and attended both Berea Academy and Morehead State Teachers College (BA, 1937). A poet and teacher, her health was fragile. In 1942 Sylvia was diagnosed with tuberculosis and entered a sanatorium in Beckley, WV, where she later died. Williams went on to build a distinguished career at Appalachian State Teacher's College (now Appalachian State University) in Boone, North Carolina, as a teacher, scholar and administrator. His second marriage (1949) was to Elizabeth Lingefelt; the couple had two children. His books include: Ballads and Songs (1937), The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction (1966), William H. Vaughan: A Better Man than I Ever Wanted to Be (1985), Southern Mountain Speech (1992), I Become a Teacher: A Memoir of One-Room School Life in Eastern Kentucky (1995) and Tales from Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia (2003).