Mrs. George Palmer
SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE TO LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION
Mrs. George Palmer was 65 years old when recorded in 1939. She was from Cataloochee, in Haywood County, North Carolina and had three to four years of formal education in her lifetime.
[transcripption copyrigh Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed, 2017]
How to build a turkey pen, you just build a square pen out of ten-foot fence rails, and when you get the wall built, you, you build it up about, oh about three feet high, and then you cover the, the pen a- over with fence rails laid close together all over, and then you go out back a distance from the pen and start a trench, shallow at first, and the deeper you go, get under the rail of the pen, why it’s deep so enough for a turkey to walk under the bottom rail, see, but the trench then sloped out up from the middle of the pen, and a turkey walks through there and they get inside this pen, they raise up and see where they’re at, they get so excited that they don’t notice the hole down there to go out back outside.
-----
One day Turkey George Palmer and another man went up on the mountain, cattle hunting really was what they was out for, but they uh saw some turkeys, and he shot one through the brush and he just cut its throat, it wen-, fell and, and went fal-, a-rolling and tumbling, floun-, flouncing down the mountain, he told that fellow who was with him to “catch it, John” and he took after it, had a main race down there till the turkey flopped up agin a big log and couldn’t get over it, and there they caught it.