A Great Read: The Folk-Chain of Memory
Donald Davidson first wrote of the “folk-chain” in his 1927 poem “Hermitage”
(Folk-Chain) – Donald Davidson first wrote “folk-chain” in his 1927 poem “Hermitage,” and later spoke of the “folk-chain of memory” in his 1966 lecture “The Center That Holds: Southern Literature & The Oldtime Religion.” These words had to wait another eighteen years before finding their way into print in Southern Partisan magazine in 1984.
Memory Older Than the Rememberer
In “Hermitage,” Donald Davidson knew memory was something older than remembrance, deeper than nostalgia. The modern mind, obsessed with self, treats memory as a private affair, locked in the vault of “lived experience.” Davidson knew better and what men forget. How memory passes not through books but through blood. Through hands that work the same soil across generations. Through family reunions at state parks. It lives in the way Grandfathers teach boys to read tomorrow’s rain in today’s clouds, in the recipes never written down, in voices rising from porch swings as the sun surrenders.
This memory he writes of dwells beyond the sanctioned narratives of consensus historians. The folk-chain he called it. Not history written by the victors but memory carried by the survivors. The South Davidson knew lived by this chain of memory, each generation taking…
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