Bear Grease - Ep. 42: Where The Red Fern Grows (Part 1) - The Peculiar life of Wilson Rawls

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast we’re exploring a great work of American literature whose plot rides on a most-peculiar, but beloved pastime of rural America – coonhunting. We’re diving deep into the book “Where the Red Fern Grows” written by Woodrow Wilson Rawls. How did this unlikely author, a one-hit wonder some might say, with such a mysterious past make it into the ranks of the American literary giants? We’ll hear from Professor Sean Teuton of the University of Arkansas as we search out the national impact of the book. We’ll talk with Stewart Peterson who starred in the original 1974 movie produced by Walt Disney studios who actually met Wilson Rawls, and we’ll cut some hounds loose on a starry Ozark night with a man who's been devoted to Redbone hounds his whole life, Ronnie Smith of Northwest Arkansas. The ride is guaranteed to be wild as we search out when coonhunting did a 360-slam-dunk on mainstream culture and they loved it. You’re not going to want to miss this one, boys. This is going to be good!Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. You have this story at itself, right? This is a boy who likes to go on coon hunts. When it's your basic story, and you'd think, well, you know, okay, that's interesting. Let's read about it.

But then a great rider will tell a story with depth, meaning that when he goes in the cune hunt, he learns about how to behave, how to treat your fellow man, right? The pitfalls of lying and treachery, cunning and ambition and resilience. On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we're exploring a great work of American literature whose plot rides on a most peculiar but beloved pastime of rural America. Coon hunting. We're diving deep into the book Where the Red Fern Grows, written by Woodrow Wilson Rawls. How did this unlikely author, a one-hit wonder, some might say, with such a mysterious past,

make it into the ranks of American literary giants. We'll hear from Professor Sean Tutan as we search out the national impact of the book. We'll talk with Stuart Peterson, who starred in the original 1974 movie. It will cut some hounds loose on a starry Ozark Knight with a man who's been devoted to red bone hounds his whole life. The ride is guaranteed to be wild as we search out that one time when Coon Hunting did a three-six-six-eastern. slam dunk on mainstream culture, and they loved it. You're not going to want to miss this one, boys. My dad had red bones when I was just a little fella.

The first I remember, I was probably five or six. He had a three-legged dog that he called Bob. It was a red dog, and I'll tell you, that's a gun, short tree of cone. He outrunn most all the four-legged dogs. I never knew anything. Imagine if he'd had four-legged. Hell man. He probably wouldn't win worth a nickel, you know.

My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. One day I was down in the field, Papa had me chopping some weeds out of some young corn. Rowdy was with me. He was always with me. And I had the old book with me, and I'd read him page or two out of it two or three times that day, I guess. I don't know where the thought came from or the idea, but I do know that a million times in my life, I wish it hadn't to come around. But I thought, well, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could write a story like Call of the Wild?

I don't know where this came from. I talked to a lot of writers. But the more I thought about this, the more it got into my mind. And I first talked it over with Rowdy. I didn't have anyone else talk to. I asked him if he thought I could write a story like that. And I think he understood a little bit of what I said. and I know he did waggy's tail.

That was the voice of Woodrow Wilson Rawls, and I want to tell you an incredible story he's involved in. It's complex because our story, over the next two episodes, will weave in and out between real life and fiction, past and present, life and death, as it swoops in and out of the storylines of a book, a major motion picture, in people's lives. Like a winding Ozark Road,

going from holler to hilltop, our story has multiple characters, layers, and objectives. First, I'll want us to understand an obscure pastime of rural America, hunting raccoons with hounds, known far and wide as coon hunting. The sheer mention of it evokes warm, nostalgic responses in many, and often people can't even explain why. The story of coon hunting is deeply personal to me, but is something far from gone. Coon hunting is alive and well in the rural United States. Secondly, I want to explore how a story about this niche pastime found its way into the halls of American literary classics. This book about coon hunting, where the red fern grows, I'm sure you've heard of it.

It's been assigned reading in American schools from Los Angeles to New York City and everywhere in between since the late 1960s. I'm very interested in places where historical hunting traditions overflow into unlikely mainstream places like schools, works of literature, and Hollywood movies. The book has been made into two movies, the original in 1974 starring Stuart Peterson, and the other in 2003 starring Dave Matthews. Yep, the singer. It's pretty rare that our story, the hunter's story, is told in such pristine, tones that it creates widespread and undeniable affection for the hunter and the hunt.

I think there is something unusual going on here, and I want to trail it up. As we tell this big story, it'll require an understanding of the storyline of the book if you're not familiar with it. But I bet you are. Our curator will be Professor Sean Tutan of the University of Arkansas. He's a professor of English interested in the literature of the Ozarks, and on a larger scale, Native American literature, which, as it turns out, Wilson Rawls was a member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Here's Professor Tutan giving us the general outline of where the red fern grows. Hopefully, it doesn't make you cry. This is a story of a boy in the Ozarks who wants desperately to become a coon hunter.

And he pleads with his parents day and night in tears to get some dogs. They're very poor. They live in a little cabin on a piece of land, and the father works very hard, barely eke out a living for them. There is no school anywhere. And the boy, Billy, and his three little sisters are schooled at home by their mother, whom they call mama. Their only connection really with the outside world is a general store down the road run and owned by grandpa, their grandfather, who is a source of wisdom and advice. So finally, the boy just saves enough money on his own secretly, and Billy gets $50, which would be a lot of money in 1925. And with $50, he secretly makes a deal with his grandpa to purchase two red bone hounds.

And he waits weeks and weeks to hear about when they arrive. They're coming from Kentucky. And then finally, he hears that the hounds are ready to be picked up, and he secretly leaves the house in the middle of the night and walks 32 miles to the southwest to Talaqua. And there he gets to the depot and finally holds those puppies in his arms, and he's in tears. So he trains these dogs in a year or so, and they are fully eight. able to hunt coons. In the novel, there are two big moments of the hunt, and one of which is when

he gets challenged on a bet to get what is called the ghost coon and the Pritchard brothers, Rubin and Rainey, are not nice boys. They're dishonest. And they challenge Billy, and the grandpa's so offended, he tells Billy to accept the challenge against his better wishes. And that is on that terrible moment when they finally go to get the ghost coon. Billy discovers and the dogs discover the secret to the ghost coon's trick. He jumps off a tree branch and dumps it jives into a hollow post on a fence. So, rascally old ghost coon. So old Dan and Little Anne, the dogs, finally tree the ghost coon.

And who comes running up, but the Pritchard's blue tick hound. That's when the dogs get in a big fight. And Ruben says, I'm going to kill those dogs. And he grabs the axe and runs with it. And this is a moment we all remember is when Ruben falls on the axe. And it lodges in his stomach. And he dies right there in the ground. and to young readers

that's a very desperate, sad moment and it's complicated because there's nothing redeemable about the behavior of Rubin or Rainey and yet we feel a moment of compassion for them because they two are brothers and it's a very sad moment

and it's later on when Billy comes back and he leaves the hatchet in the tree and never takes it out, he said he doesn't want to want to hunt again after what he saw. He told his father and his father tried to go out there and make amends with the very strange family, the Pritchards

and he said all were very, very sad. in the novel, every novel functions on conflict. There has to be some kind of conflict, whether between people or the land, humans and the land. This novel has both of those conflicts, which makes it feel powerful. So at a very sad moment, a lesson about honesty, fairness, and loyalty, all that to play in that moment, and a notion of mortality and death, which foreshadows the eventual death of the hounds at the end of the novel. Then, of course, later on, Grandpa has saved money and used some of the money from Billy's wages from selling the furs. to participate in a competition where people from all over the country, the different states, are driving up for this coon hunting competition.

And he's now of local renown. He knows he gets more skins than any other boy, or man, for that matter. And then the three generations, grandpa, papa, who wasn't going to go because he was so busy, and Billy all get in the wagon and head up there, which is probably only about 20 miles away, but a world away for something. Yeah, that's a long wagon ride. So, and that's an exciting moment for any boy, and boy reader. three generations. You got your grandpa with it, your dad who's too busy to do anything. And here you are and your dogs. Yeah. So they have the great competition. In the competition, what happens is Anne wins a trophy for being the prettiest dog, right? Because that's what she's known for. It's not exactly aggressive, but she's smart and beautiful. Right. And then Dan is just ferocious and indomitable, you know, in the hunt. By them, they finally tree those four coons to win the trophy. There's an ice storm. Grandpa's broken an ankle.

and the dogs are like, and it's not supposed to be humorous, but it almost is, the dogs are so frozen with ice, they look like ghosts. Yeah. And they build a fire. They're always able to do that, right? It's as exciting as a reader when you're a boy that Billy can build a fire at any time. Yeah, yeah. He falls in the icy river, he builds a fire. Yeah.

He can do that. He's that competent in the woods. And so they win the two trophies, and they head for home. And then after that, after that moment, we have this terrible event of the Hellcat or the cougar that the dog's tree. and devil cat. Devil cat of the Ozarks. And the only way to redeem that story is that the dogs saved Billy's life. The devil cat was going to pounce on him.

So the novel really is about love at the heart of all of this. And it's the love between the two dogs, Dan and Ann. And so when Dan is torn up by the cougar, and then she dies on the porch, and the mother, again, the gracious mother, she tries to put his entrails back in his body and sew him up, and she watches them all off and everything, really understanding that kind of country life. It's kind of a world away from me.

And so's up, Dan, and he lies on the porch, and he does die. He lost too much blood. And then it gets the sadder moment, though, is when Anne dies at a broken heart. You know, as a kid, I mean, you're reading this part, and there's not a dry eye out there. Yeah. I mean, it's a real moment when a boy or a girl has to confront mortality. Yeah, yeah. You know, in death itself.

And it's a tender moment because Billy doesn't understand it. He tried to talk to his father about it, and his father consoles him by telling him, him that there's a reason for everything. There's design in the universe and purpose. And the original plan was Billy was going to stay behind and work with grandpa at the store. And now, because the dogs died and he would no longer be coon hunting, he could accompany the family when they went west. This is what Billy asks, is there a heaven where even dogs can go to hunt as they wish day and night? And he said, yes, that's where they're going to go. So when they're buried up on the hilltop, side by side, a red fur and grows between them. And there's a legend in the

novel. They say it's an old Indian legend. One time a boy, sister and a brother were walking in a blizzard and they both froze to death. And there's a chance that could be a reference to the Trail of Tears because a lot of Cherokee people did freeze to death when they walked that 950 miles from the east into Oklahoma. And there's at least a quarter of all Cherokees died in that terrible trek. Wow. And so if it's a reference to a little boy and little girl, maybe Cherokees, it's a way to redeem their lives and make it so that their lives meant something and they have purpose. Because now when the red fur grows, it's only, as they say, planted by an angel, and it's a, it's a fern that never dies. So it's sacred. So in that moment, this is a big theme in American literature,

is whether you're Native American or European American, you sanctify the land, and the land becomes sacred, because something happened on it. Either someone died and they're put in the ground, you know, or many people died, like Gettysburg. That's how we hollow ground. That's hollow ground. And you can't build on it, for example. So in that moment, when Dan and Ann are put in the ground, finally, you know, Billy has a place there and in the burial, a lasting place forever. And in the burial itself, the author says, or the narrator, that he buried his childhood there. He put it in the ground. And now he is now a man.

He hands the box of the winnings to his father without question, right? And I underline that novel saying, this is the moment he's become a man. Right? It's no longer about me. It's from my family. It's a really touching moment. And then when they're in the wagon and there's a fern up on the hillside and Dan and are in the ground. and he says, I left that land, the Ozarks, and I never returned.

In other words, he left his childhood. You're good. He's become a man now. To broaden our understanding, we need to take a step back. This book is autobiographical, meaning it's based on the life of the author, which makes it really interesting. Because we're about to learn some stuff about old Mr. Wilson Rawls that will make us scratch our heads. Let's talk about the beloved, peculiar, and unlikely author. Here's Professor Tutong.

Who was Wilson Rawls? What do you know about Wilson Rawls? Wilson Rawls was a writer and a writer unbelievably successful. If you consider the fact that at present, to date, his most famous novel, where the Redfern Grosz sold 6,754,308 copies, with two movies attempting to portray the novel. So in terms of books, like American literature books in this category, would that be, I mean, that sounds like a lot to me, six million copies. Is that super successful? That is very successful. It's still being printed today. It's still printed today. If you walk into any Barnes & Noble,

you go to the rack, he'll be on the rack with great novels like The Yearling or Charlotte's Web. Charlotte's Webb. Yeah. It's still a very much read novel. It's a very teachable novel, but it's certainly of deep scholarly interest. So when was he alive? See, he was born in 1913 and died in 1984, and the novel where the Redfern grows was published in 1961. So you think about it, he didn't really get to that novel until later in his life. Yeah.

And in the meantime, what did he do? Well, if this novel is considered to be autobiographical, he probably left Oklahoma or the Ozarks, as he prefers to call them, around almost maybe 14 years old, right, in 1927, I would say. So that's just around before the Great Depression. And as you know in the novel, if we're thinking autobiographically, his family's very poor and they leave in a wagon. It seems earlier than it is because they're so poor they can't afford an automobile. And that would have been very consistent with people living in this part of the world.

Yep. And his family was headed for California. You know, like another famous novel that takes off from Salasaw, the Grapes of Wrath. Okay. They're headed for California. The car breaks down in New Mexico, I believe Albuquerque, and the family never leaves. Okay. That happened in Grapes of Rath.

No, no, in Wilson Rawls' his life. Let's not get the two confused. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it true? He never came back to the Ozarks? Well, I think he made it back to Oklahoma because we know that he served two prison sentences in Oklahoma. No way. Yes. Wilson Rawls? Yes. It's crushing my dreams. Why did he go to prison? I don't know, but the third time he went to prison, it was in New Mexico. This is not a joke. I'm not being punked. It's unbelievable to me, really. And then, you know, he... Shocker, man. He eventually got jobs. He worked for the atomic internet. Energy Commission. Now, just in construction, but I think it might have been a higher level position. There's something in my mind as a scholar is kind of churning right now. Working for the Atomic

Energy Commission, living in a cabin on a lake in Idaho Falls, that's where he ends up. And that's when he first gets married and then he begins to write the novel. So after he'd been to prison? Yes. Wilson Rawls went to prison three times? The character and morals portraying the book make this a shocking discovery. When I went to to research his criminal background, I was thrown off by how hard the information was to locate. After talking more with Professor Tutan, I had to confirm the truth of this for myself, because 99% of the things written about Wilson Rawls say nothing about it. There is one tiny blurb on the internet on Wikipedia that talks about it. That's it.

Considering he was a children's author, pre-internet, when it was easy to hide stuff, It would have been pretty easy to hide it, and clearly wasn't something publishers or he wanted to highlight, which you can't blame him for that. But I had to confirm this for myself. Hello. My name's Clay. I am trying to find out if someone has been in prison in Oklahoma. Could you help me find out some information? I can get you over to record, and then they can look at them up for you.

Okay, great. That'd be great. Okay. One moment. It is not available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone. Press the pound key. God-gone it.

Hey, Sean. My name's Clay, and I'm trying to get some information on a man named Woodrow Wilson Rawls. He was born September 24th, 1913, and it's alleged that he serves some prison time in Oklahoma, and I'm just trying to confirm if that's true. He's deceased. if you could help me track that down. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

I was a bit nervous while I waited for the confirmation of Mr. Wilson's criminal record. Not because it really mattered, but all the social cues screamed that it couldn't be true. But it was. Here is the information that I found. When he was 20 years old in 1933, he served 18 months in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. for larceny of domestic fowls. That means he stole some chickens and went to prison. Man, that's a tough judge, I guess.

His second term in Oklahoma, we couldn't figure out what it was for. But I was able to find that on March 22nd, 1940, at the age of 27, he pleaded guilty to breaking and entering and burglary in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was sentenced to two to three years in the New Mexico State Penitentiary. The prison records say that he was 5'10 and a quarter. He weighed 148 pounds, had a vaccination scar on his left arm, and was a smoker. Wilson Woody Rawls, that's what they called him, was an unlikely best-selling author, and his personal story is wildly intriguing and redemptive.

He was one of six children born in the community of Scrapper in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, a fitting birthplace. He was educated by his mother, who was part Cherokee Indian. Indian, and as he recounted, when his school was finally opened, he had to wade across a river to get there, the Illinois River, which is in the book and movie. He was often tethered while crossing the river with a lariat rope around his waist so he wouldn't wash downstream. He went to school during the summer and only went for four years. As a young boy, he read the book Call of the Wild, which inspired him to want to be a writer. It was also during that time that he coon hunted with

this blue-tick hound, rowdy. Mr. Wilson and his family left the Ozarks of Oklahoma when he was in his early 20s. He would end up living in New Mexico, finally settled down in Idaho for a lot of his adult life, but he died in Wisconsin in 1984. He primarily worked in construction his whole life, wherever he went. Throughout his young adulthood, he would write multiple book manuscripts by hand, as many as six, they say, and some of it on paper sacks. He would later say the spelling was horrible and that the handwriting included no punctuation.

He kept the writing secret and was seemingly ashamed of his moonlighting passion. Before he got married at the age of 45 in 1958, it's believed that he burned many of his manuscripts. Yep, lit him on fire. It was only after he got married to his wife, Sophie, that he confessed his writing habits and she encouraged him to write. It is believed that Rawls quit his job, and in three weeks he rewrote the entire 35,000-word book where the Red Fern grows from memory. This would have most likely been in 1959. Sophie helped him edit the manuscript and submit it to a publisher. Mr. Wilson's story was originally published as a three-part series in 1961 in the Saturday Evening Post under the name The Hounds of Youth.

From this initial exposure, a publishing company picked up the book and published it under the name where the red fern grows without Mr. Wilson's input and it said that it broke his heart because he didn't think it would reach the children as effectively with that name. And this is what's wild. The book was not an immediate success. It wasn't until 1967, six years after the book was published, and decades after he originally wrote the first manuscript that he could, got his first break. Mr. Wilson was invited to speak at a children's book conference, a place that

ex-cons usually aren't invited. This was in Utah, and this would ignite a flame and open people's eyes to the mastery of his narrative. Mr. Wilson was in his mid-50s, a construction worker, and had never spoken in public before, and he almost didn't even go. After this conference, orders poured in for the book, and its hype spread like wildfire. And he would spend the final 20 years of his life before his passing in 1984, traveling to over 2,000 schools, making inspirational speeches to children,

encouraging them to read and explore writing. An ex-convict turned bestselling author turned children's motivational speaker is an unlikely but redemptive path. It's easy for me to believe that he wouldn't be too quick to talk talk about his past, which seems like he never did. Maybe his fictional story was his way to write the wrongs of his youth. It's pure speculation. Here's a clip from the Disney movie where the

Redfern grows. You're going to hear the young voice of a man that we're about to meet. Well, Billy, you better get gone and they'll be stirring soon. I'll be looking for a big cooonskin on the smokehouse wall in the morning. I taught you everything you know. Now we're going to see if your coon dogs or if you're not. All I'm asking is for you to treat Coon and I'll do the rest, okay? Go kid. I told you at the beginning of this about a man named Stuart Peterson

who played the protagonist Billy Coleman in the original 1974 movie Where the Red Fern Grows, which is by far the best movie. Love it. You got to watch it. I was able to go to Wyoming and meet Mr. Stewart now in his early 60s and hear the story firsthand from him because he met Wilson Rawls. He actually met him in Talaquahua, Oklahoma in the fall of 1973 on the movie set of where the Redfern grows. Here's Mr. Stewart. So while you were down there, you had the opportunity to meet Wilson Rawls. He came down on the set and was there for, oh, but I think he was probably there a week.

And so there were. What was he doing there? Was he? He came down to just observe and to see how things were going and what things looked like. Was he an old man then? Yeah, he would have been, you know, of course, 13, when people are over 65, anybody's old. Yeah. I think he would have probably been in his, he would have been probably in his late 60s, early 70s at that point.

You know, I was 13. And, and, but I just, I felt a real friendship. kinship to Wilson Rolls right off the bat. He was just that kind of a guy that he liked things that I like to do. When he talked and told me, I was fascinated by some of his stories, his real-life stories. So he spent some time with you. Yeah. I wanted to be hearing him tell, because he had a way with words to tell a story. What was he like? He was just a just a southern, just kind, just seemed to have a kind personality to me. but his interests just were right kind of down my line. He wanted to be outdoors all the time.

Did you know that he's been to prison? I didn't know. You've never heard that before? Uh-uh. Listen, Wilson Rawls served three terms in prison. Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah, I was...

It was when he was younger. I sensed that when I met him at my stage of life and his stage of life, he was past that to the extent that he was trying to make career. direction for the things that maybe. That's what's so interesting is it's autobiographical, but when you're a fiction writer, you can go back and make this story that's kind of about you, kind of the way you want it to be. Yeah. And so maybe he was going back in and kind of fixing his childhood.

I had never thought about that way, but the story, you know, was just chocked so full of character and Billy wrestling with God about stuff and all these little moral things going on, and then the boy dies. And, you know, I just assumed Wilson Rawls was just like lifelong, upstanding guy. And I was kind of surprised when I heard of. Yeah, I would have to say the same. I was surprised based on the fact that when I met him, I was immediately drawn to him just because there was a genuineness and kindness in his eyes that I never,

I wouldn't have ever expected, you know, of course, I believe there's people in jail that can fool you with their look in their eyes. But for the most part, it's just like for me looking in the horse's eyes. I can kind of have an idea of their disposition and their character from how they may be. I refer, and dad kind of, my dad always kind of alluded to this as I was growing up with him around horses. As if you'll look in their eyes, you can see a lot of what they may be in the future. But I also recognize that there are those horses that have had a wild-eyed look and down the road have changed, and people can do the same. Mr. Wilson has been gone for almost 40 years, but in one of the few recordings of him, he gave a speech called Dreams Can Come True. And lucky for us, we can listen to it, and in some small way, meet Mr. Wilson. Here is a short excerpt from a short excerpt from.

that speech, I think you'll pick up on what the young Stuart Peterson did back on that movie set. Now, before I go into this talk, there's a few things that I think we better get straightened out. I'm not a professional speaker, although there seem to be an awful lot of people trying to make one out of me. But I don't think I could be a professional speaker, even if I want. I'd have two strikes again me to begin with. One, my word vocabulary is practically zero, and I'm going to make a statement now that I don't know whether very many people

would have nerve enough to make at this kind of a setting, especially English teachers. You're going to hear more grammar mistakes in one speech today than you'll hear the rest of your life. I don't think this is altogether my fault. My mother said that I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I guess she must have been right. Now you're going to hear words today in my talk that some speakers may say they're not very appropriate words for a speaker to use,

but I don't care what other speakers has to say. They're the only kind of words that I know, the words that I grew up with is a boy. Words from the hills, the folklore word. You'll hear words like Mama and Papa Grandma and Grandpa These are the words that I grew up with And they're the only ones that I know how to use

I grew up in those hills on a little farm This farm has been deeded to my mother She's part Cherokee Back in the latter 1800s That's when the government chopped up the Cherokee strip And deeded it out in allotments To those who could lay claim to the Cherokee heritage My mother was part Cherokee.

I even have a roll number myself. I was the only boy in the family at that time, but I had a whole house full of sisters, five of them. I never had thought that was fair, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. And like most country boys in those days, I didn't have any boys to run around with or play with. Neighbors were few and far between,

and I was always alone. But the only friend I had was an old dog, and I couldn't play with my son. sisters, that was utterly impossible. You couldn't do that. I was interested in the outdoors, hunting and fishing, and I don't think I've ever had all of it I wanted in my life. The folklore word are the only words I know how to use, he said. His distinct, soothing Ozark draw are endearing and familiar to my ear. This speech is over an hour long, but I just wanted us to interface with his demeanor. The place of all.

authenticity from which Mr. Wilson wrote this book is what makes it special and unique. I still think it's odd that he never publicly addressed his past life. I would think it would have been a point of celebration and overcoming. Who knows? You can listen to the whole speech on a YouTube channel called Jim Treleese. Wilson Rawls Part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, it's called. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut.

And I help with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. If you're familiar with the original 1974 movie, you might have also recognized Wilson Raw's voice because he narrated parts of the movie. Nobody told me that. I just recognized it immediately.

Here's Professor Tuton giving us some insight into autobiographical scholarship and the Native American influence in the book. Sometimes it's fun to consider someone's life as a story or as its own work of fiction. And if you think of Wilson Rawls as this being the story of his confession or his being reformed, right? His gift to young men will be a novel about how to behave. Yeah. How to find an ethical life. There's some redemption inside of that, isn't it? Exactly. So, you know, don't be like the Pritchards. So how many other books did Wilson Rawls write? One other. Some were the monkeys. So he just wrote two books. Just two. He was not a prolific author. He was kind of a one-hit wonder. I think so, yeah. But, you know, I should also mention that Wilson Rawls was a Cherokee. Right. And it's very culturally interesting to see how important that culture was to him as an author.

And the way it plays out in a subtle manner in the novel. So it's one of the first scenes in the original movie from 1974. He mentions, he says, This land was given to my family because of the Cherokee blood that ran in my mother's veins. Opening scene. It sets it up. And from being from this part of the world, very much Native American to present still in Oklahoma to this day.

If you know a little bit about the culture or the Cherokee history, it becomes pretty clear that it plays a role in that novel. I mean, you know, Billy's referencing the Allotment Act of 1887. In the one hand, those who were progressive and sometimes a tribe would be split on whether to allot the land. Some believed it was a chance to finally make Native Americans yeoman farmers, learn the value of property, and prepare them for citizenship, which they did not formally receive until 1924. But they did under the Allotment Act in 1887. If you got your land allotted, you did become a U.S.S. the Native Americans on the reservations were not U.S. citizens until 1924. Is that what I heard you say?

Officially, for some, it was, like for example, a Navajo Nation was not allotted because the land was not arable. So I believe the Navajos weren't U.S. citizens until 1924 by birthright. Okay. Some say it has a reward for serving in World War I. You know, more Native Americans per capita serve in our wars than any other group. Wow. That's interesting. So that novel opens with this in the background there. The land's been allotted and, you know, the Billy and his family, have a little piece of land. And it kind of dramatizes the trouble that Native Americans had. They get this piece of land and now suddenly it's taxed.

It's in trust with the federal government. So they do this because they didn't believe Native Americans were competent. That was the term they used to own or sell their land unless they had a minimum of a quarter white blood. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So they're living on this land and that's up in the background, you know, and Paw Paw and Mama are trying to scrape by, you know, And if they don't pay their taxes, they're going to take their land.

Yeah. And that's almost foreshadowed in the novel. You recall when the Pritchards say, you can't get the Ghost Coon, and they lead them up to this house, and they say, and it's kind of eerie. I don't know how you feel about this. The land's kind of haunted because there's no house, but you can see there's these beautiful trees around something that might have been a house at one time. And there's this fence with the tall post where the Ghost Coon hides in the hollow center of that post. Yes. But the Pritchers say some Indians used to live here.

Oh. And it's kind of haunted because you think, well, what happened to them? Why did they leave their land? And it could have been. There's so much in the book, just little pieces like that that do such a great job of reflecting really what happened. It's all over the book. You can tell whoever, you know, if you didn't know Wilson Rawls, you didn't know this story, you'd read the book and you'd be like, this person did their research. Yeah, and we began with the biographical, shocking biographical material of Wilson Rawls.

But what it makes me ask is, where did he get this education? He said he had virtually no books in his home. You could see he was very poor. How did he manage to do this? I mean, he's a very good writer. Let's hear what Mr. Wilson has to say. During those three years that I bummed around all over the country, I kept writing, I couldn't quit.

Every chance I got, I'd write on something. And sometimes, she said I didn't have money enough to buy a writing paper with, but this writing had gotten such a hold on me that I wouldn't let anything stand in my way. I used to go around in the alleys and the strange little towns, and I take the brown paper sacks from the trash cans, and I'd cut the bottom of them out and spit them open, and I had a big sheet of paper.

Take the brown paper from box cars and cut it up into strips. I wrote a lot of stories on that old brown paper, but I was so ashamed of those stories and the writing. I couldn't spell anything. I can't do very good to this day. I couldn't punctuate any of it. I just write one line after the other. Wherever my voice broke, there was a dash.

There was no paragraph. It's just one line after the other. I have the old handwritten manuscripts. When I go to the schools, I take them with me sometime and show them to the kids. Try to prove to them what a man can do if he really wants to do it. The literary mechanisms used by Mr. Wilson are extraordinary, especially when you consider his background. I mean, this guy wrote this novel on brown paper sacks.

This should inspire us. It tells us that it's possible for the common man to rise above challenges and achieve purpose. I've gotten more questions. Professor Tutin, how is a book qualified as an American literary classic? What officially qualifies this? Is it the amount of books sold? Is there some way to scale the impact of a book on our culture? Or is it an assessment that's hard to put your finger on?

You just know it when you see it. That is a fine question. Now, copies sold could actually count against a work in its greatness. Really? Yes, it could be considered too popular. But, yeah, some novels can be considered too popular and not great literature. Nowadays, if you go into a bookstore, we don't see a fiction section separated from a literature section, right?

meaning that there's a notion of low art and high art, right? We really have worked against that. And now, think about it, if you think about someone looking right now on my bookshelf here, and I'm looking at Huckleberry Finn. And, you know, other great American writers are writing at the time, and they were looking east, people like Henry James. He would be an American, but set his novels in England. And then you had someone like Mark Twain come along,

who grew up on the Mississippi, and reflects on his early life on the Mississippi, and invents his character, Huck Finn, with this amazing vernacular that spends his time on the river in the woods, and suddenly we have a great work of American fiction. Now, Huck Finn actually did sell well, but was still considered very quickly to be a great work in American literature, because it gave voice to the uniqueness of American life, right, and the way people talked in and of itself, the vernacular, right? It was authentically American. Yes, there's that, so there's that

element. It occurs on American land. It expresses an American experience, even down to the voice, the color, the language, the way people dress and talk, and that's what makes it great. The other element that when we might think about what some makes something very literary and worthy of discussion and searching for meaning within it is it usually functions on a couple of different levels. You have the story at itself, right? This is a boy, you know, in Worth for and Grows. This is a boy who likes to go on koon hunts. It's your basic story.

And you'd think, well, you know, okay, that's interesting. Let's read about it. And you may see a book that just tells the, you know, the daily experiences of a boy on a kudun hunt. Right. And that probably wouldn't be that appealing to most people because they don't have that experience in their in their background right but then a great rider will tell a story with depth meaning that when he goes in the coon hunt he learns about how to behave how to treat your fellow man right the pitfalls of lying and treachery cunning and ambition and resilience all these these very important

values in the young man's character billy begins to to learn through his coon hunting so the novel is not just about coon hunting but certainly about the very notion of love itself i mean on page 243 in my book. I mean, this is when Mr. Kyle, it was the judge at the final competition. Right. And when he sees the way that Dan and Anne behaved toward each other, he says, Mr. Kyle says, it's a shame that people all over the world can't have that kind of love in their hearts, he said. There would be no wars, slaughter or murder, no greed or selfishness. It would be the kind of world that God wants us to have, a wonderful world. So there you know, I bought this new copy so I could write in it. Hey, listen, I have the exact same phrase.

underlined in my book. And just moments like that. And this is one of most explicit moments when Wilson Rawls wants to really let you know the depth of the story and the importance of it. But other times he's very subtle. And so what makes it a classic is its depth. Yes.

And its connection to anybody. You don't have to be a coon hunter. And it would be very easy to say that 99.9% of people that love this book and have read it have never and will never go Coon Hunter. in their life. But they receive value and meaning from this and connection to it.

That's what makes it a classic, I guess. As a kid and into my adulthood, I thought where the Redfern grows was a regional phenomenon because I grew up within a couple hours of Talaquah, Oklahoma, where the book was based. I was completely

oblivious to the wide-reaching impact of the book. Just in the last year, I've encountered multiple people from far away in foreign places to me like California that have said they were impacted by the book. I was shocked they'd ever heard of it. Here's my friend Andreas Atayi. He's a video producer at Meat Eater and he loves the book. Andreas, so you read this book as a kid? Why was this book meaningful to you? There's so many reasons. I think growing up in Orange County, California, one of the big ones was the connection it brought to immediate nature.

When I was growing up, there was still farmland, there was still space, but a lot of it was disappearing very quickly. But the thing that there wasn't a lot of in suburbia was the freedom, like young adults urine, right? Like that freedom that the character, protagonist has, it's like we all experience that as adolescent children. However, he actually got that freedom. We don't have that as much anymore, but seeing the protagonist's, do that, that's fantastic. The fact that Billy was able at 12 to like save $50 and 19 whatever the Depression era, it's insane.

Imagine how much money that is. And just all on his own, like that is freedom. Like removing the Ozarks from this, like, I don't even think that we need this book to be in the Ozarks. But this is a different kind of freedom that resonates so nicely, especially when you're in school. And we were, we had to read this book. It's a...

Really. So this was assigned reading in. Orange County, California. Yeah, not just Orange County. Like, my wife read it in Lakeport, California, which is 10 and a half hours north of Orange County. If you think about it, it's pretty wild that a book about hunting raccoons with hounds is required reading in some of America's most urban areas.

Honestly, as a group of people concerned about the future of hunting, we can look to this as a pattern. Wilson Rawls masterfully combined the human story with hunting. He humanized the Coon Hunter and made him relevant. I just can't get away from Wilson Rawls. When I first started making this podcast, I planned to talk about him for like five minutes, but his story just keeps interjecting itself into the relevance of our discussion. Here's Professor Tutong.

So when someone writes an autobiographical novel, so it's fiction, so it's technically not a true story, but it reflects a true story. How much of this do we know would have come from Wilson's life? We're kind of just guessing, assuming? Yeah, and it's an error in scholarship to assume that the fiction is an exact representation

of the author's life. But it's thoroughly acceptable to speculate and look into the biographical material. It's called biographical scholarship where we look into the life of the person to try to find elements of that person's life in the fiction to illuminate meaning. So we know that Wilson Rawls, for example, didn't have sibling dogs. He had,

he believed he had one blue tick house. One blue tick. Yeah. But he didn't have redbone hounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, that's the one part of the story that I bet isn't true. I bet Wilson Rawls dog wasn't as good as old and little land. Yeah. Right. Because if I could go back and rewrite my childhood history of coon hunting, my dogs would be better than they actually were. You see, and that's the genius of fiction. It's your world. I just, I wrote a novel. I'm trying to get published. And once you go down that rabbit hole into fiction, I mean, it's, it's become so, such a work of pleasure because it's your world. Do you get to paint the picture you want painting? Whatever you want. And there's something you want to correct from your childhood. You can. You

can get the dog you wanted. Yeah. And the reason they're red bone hounds and not a blue-tick hound, I believe, is because they match the color of the red fern that grows between them on the dead. I'll be darn. See, there's a pretty strong literary move from someone who wasn't trained in literature. Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. My next question was going to be, why did he not go with blue ticks? Because I know coon hunters, and coon hunters like their breeds of dogs,

and it's hard to break somebody away from whatever they get attached to. So I was really surprised to hear that he had a blue tick, and he went with Redbone in the book. Redbone hounds, you say? I want to introduce you to a real redbone man.

Hello. What are you doing? How are you doing, man? I don't sleep, man. Yeah. It has been a while. We just kind of kicking around. This is my mom's. This is where I raised. Okay.

Of course, moms long gone. This is where you grew up. That's where I grew up. Our first house was, well, the first one's where I live. Okay. And we moved in 58 up to that building out there. Okay. And it broke down to 60s and then they built this one.

But anyway. Oh, we're darned. What's your name, buddy? Brantley. Brentley. I'm Clay. Good to meet you, buddy. And that's my grandson, Brankley.

Man, is that a real curious skin cap right there? Look, you know. there, dude. Yeah. That's handsome. I'll tell you, it's awesome. This is my friend Ronnie Smith and his grandson, Rentley. We found ourselves at a beautiful fork in the road where I want to

bring us back into modern times. We've got to understand a bit about coon hunting and redbone hounds to understand this full picture. So far, we've talked about Wilson Rawls and the impact of his book. But I want to plan us down in the life of a real

modern American coon hunter. And if anybody qualifies, it's Mr. Ronnie. And we're going on a coon hunt. So this is your home place. This is your farm. My, yes, sir. And my grandfather was born about right down in this holler right here. And they lost this place that went out of the family during the Depression. And I was fortunate enough to be able to buy it back in 1992. and it's like coming home you know but this is part of the original if they come in on a stolen horse or not

I don't know but this is where my my grandfather was born and raised yep man what a beautiful night it is a beautiful night it's a half moon where the stars are glowing Sawyer tell me about these dogs

well this is this is Liza Jane right here and she's 11 years old she's a grand night champion she's pretty good dog Treat a lot of coons with her and the other ones he's an eight-year-old male. I don't know if he's won anything in the competitions or not, but I just got him three or four months ago. I've been trained quite a few coons with him. Yeah. We're just going to send him down the road, they do this. Yeah. There should be quite a coon. I don't hunt this one.

I said hopefully they'll tree a cone, but we're going to have a good time even if they don't. We'll cut them loose. Oh, yeah. Ready? Yeah. Let them go. Sawyer is Ronnie's youngest son. We've found. We've got to go. Sallier is Ronnie's youngest son. We've Cut the dogs loose into the starry Ozark night, undoubtedly no different than many nights that Wilson Rawls would have hunted less than 50 miles away. We're standing in the dark listening for dogs. Did you hear a dog bark? He's right up here on the field, sir.

Yeah, I heard one of those there. Hearing? Yeah, that's him. That's awesome. One of them's lies. They might have a tree to coon. He just barks a lot. Eliza don't bark for no reason.

You got him trained. Yes, sir. He does. Better than me. They'll get that one treeed where they're at, I'm sure. I figured there'd be a few around this pond. I've been seeing a few around here when I've been around here at night. They found a coon, I think.

I don't know if you can hear it, but we were hearing dogs off. How far you think they are? 25, 300 yards. Yeah, just kind of some... We're listening for them. They've struck it. struck it and trailing a little bit. Not too hot, though, is it?

Not too hot. Before we go to the dogs, I want to learn a bit about Mr. Ronnie's connection to coon hunting and redbone hounds, because these two things created the unlikely architecture by which Wilson Rawls put himself among the literary greats of American fiction. This is myself and Mr. Ronnie back at the house. So, Mr. Ronnie, how long have you had redbones? My first one I was about probably my dad had red bones when I was just a little fella.

The first I remember, I was probably five or six. He had a three-legged dog that he called Bob. It was a red dog, and I'll tell you, that's a long gun, short tree of cone. He outrun most of all the four-legged dogs. I never knew anything. Imagine if he'd had four legs. Oh, man. He probably wouldn't win worth the nickel, you know.

So your dad started hunting red bones. What time period would that have been? That would have been, oh, in the early 60s. Early 60s, huh? And we meat hunted and hide hunted, you know. Yeah. We ate some coons and sometimes glad to have it, you know. Yeah.

Things were a little poorer here in Northwest Arkansas in those days. So you grew up right here on this farm? I'm within a half a mile of where I was born. How long has your family been coon hunting that you can track? My dad told me the story before I was born that the first raccoon that they ever seen in this county people come from my. I was around to see it. Well, whoever treeed that coon, I couldn't say who. They may have shot it out with tree.

I don't know. There weren't any coons here. That would have been when he was a young man in the, I suppose, early 50s. So your grandson is sitting here with us, and you said he's a fifth generation. My grandpa was a hide hunter, but it was possums and skunks. There wasn't any coons here. And maybe a bobcat once in a while, you know. So that was, and he done that with ham.

Then my dad and, of course, myself and my boys. And then there's my grandson. So he'd be the fifth generation that I know of. Yeah. All pretty much right here on this spot. And so y'all have hunted red bones. Well, we've had a few others, and I've handled in some U.K.C. night hunts in the World Championships and things, I've handled some different breeds of dogs for friends of mine.

Yeah. But my mainstay has always been red dogs. If you were trying to describe the different breeds of dogs to people that had no context for hounds. Would there be anything that would stand out to you about red bones that would be different

than another breed? They're pleasing to the eye. They're a beautiful dog to look at. Right. But, you know, we hunt them for the tree and abilities and the natural-born

instincts in these dogs. And they're eager to please and not quite as hard-headed as some of them, you know, maybe an old plot hound or something like this. Easy now.

He's ribbing me about hunting plot hounds. That's what Coon hunters do. do to each other. You know, they're just born natural tree dogs. Yeah. If you're hunting tree-minded game, you better have something that'll, it don't matter how fast he is if he won't stay there until you get there. You know, would you agree with me in saying that of the six or seven breeds of UKC registered tree dogs, tree hounds, they're all going to kind of do the same thing. A lot of it is aesthetics.

It's kind of like, what kind of truck do you want to drive? You want to drive a Chevrolet, a GMC, a Dodge? I mean, is that about right? It's about right. But the types of hound have changed in 40 years. We used to have a cold trailing dog with a superb nose that could, man, you'd think of a bloodhound. They could trail a coon two days old, seems like, you know, and have the coon most of the

time. But today's dogs, for the most part, are not that way. Tell me why back in the day you would have needed a dog like that and why today's dogs are different. Well, it goes back to how we started out here that there weren't any coons in this county. Coon hides got up to, I can remember, $48, which was a tremendous amount of money, and that was the early to middle 70s. And you didn't go every night and tree five coons.

You might go tonight and tree a coon, and you might skip five nights trying, you know. Yeah. So if you had to have a son of a gun that didn't get fooled too easy, you know, a coon would tap tree, you know, would run up the tree and jump and different things. and the old hounds that I had would check that tree. Today's dogs don't check. They roll up to that tree and close their eyes, and they just forget everything except let's wait until they get here.

Okay, so when the coons were scarce, and when we were meat and hide hunting. You needed a different time. You had to take advantage of every track that you got. So if your dogs found a coon, if it was old, you wanted them to find it. So why are they like they are today? Well, they've just bred them up to be a little, what I call hot. hot-nosed, there's such an emphasis in the night hunts.

And night hunts is a big deal. And that's a competition hunt. Night hunt in the competition. You get extra points to be the first dog tree, and you're being able to declare that dog tree. So when it come around the tree and you know, you get more points, people figured out a way to speed that up a little bit. Maybe they mixed a little this or mixed a little different breeds in there.

Who knows? There's all kinds of stories. But that was the reasoning behind it. So they wanted a dog that would lock onto a tree quicker. But I guess the thing even behind that is now we have a ton of coons. A ton of coons. I found over time that dogs seem to miss tree a lot more coons now than they did in those days. Because they checked harder and maybe the coons don't run as hard.

I don't know. But it doesn't seem to be quite as difficult as it did as a young fellow. To just get out in tree of coon. Just get out in tree of coon, you know. I keep going back to the question of why is coon hunting so culturally iconic, especially in the South and Midwest. Why was Wilson Rawls imprinted so deeply by it? I think it's a complex answer. It's that we interact with the world at night. It's man's connection to a dog. It's the adventure. But I think a lot of it has to do with what Mr. Ronnie has alluded

to. There was a time when a good hound was extremely valuable. He said in the middle 1970s, About the time the original movie came out, Coon hides went for as high as $48 per hide in the commercial fur markets. Raccoon hides are used all over the world for fur jackets, trim on jackets, and hats. Fur stuff is really cool, and I think it's coming back into fashion. To put that number of $48 into perspective, minimum wage was $2.30 an hour in 1975. Treen one prime coon would be equivalent to working over 20 hours at minimum wage,

and I don't know about you hillbillies, but that sounds like a good way for a hillbilly like me to make money. A good hound was extremely valuable, especially to a poor family, and that monetary value built a deep cultural value to tree in a coon, which is what we still have to this day. Though Coon hides are of little monetary value, today. Usually a high is worth less than $5, but the imprint of the days of great value is still

alive. It's a cultural artifact. When I was in high school in Western Arkansas, I once remember driving my Chevy S-10 4x4 pickup to the Walmart parking lot and meeting a fur buyer who was making his way through our town. I brought him eight case-skinned frozen Coon hides in, not ironically, Walmart These coons have been treed by my blue-tick hound named Thunder, who was not very good. The buyer looked at the hides and commented on the dog sign on them, meaning they'd been chewed on a little bit, and he said, I'll give you $8 a hide. And I absolutely agreed. I've never in my life been more proud of $64.

I can't recall what I did with it, but the cash was meaningful. After listening to the Hounds Trail of Coon, Mr. Ronnie and Brintley finally say lies to Jane is treed. We jump in the truck to get a little closer. Things are a bit different since Billy Coleman hunted in these hills. You guarantee she's got a coon, you said? Oh, man. I like that confidence. I bet, I bet $52.

You bet $52 she's got a coon? Yeah. All right, let's go see. boy, den tree for sure. You know there, baby. Liza Jane is barking at the base of a dead hollow tree. It's what we call a den tree. Billy Coleman would have cut it down,

but Mr. Ronnie is happy just petting his dog and calling it good. The raccoon won. Brentley and I call our bet a draw. We both knew it wasn't a real bet, and we didn't shake on it. I continued to be amazed at the response that humanity gives us, someone who's humble and authentic. This humility I speak of covers the real-life Wilson Rawls

and his fictional character, Billy Coleman. Secondly, I'm amazed that a coon hunting story has been so widely read and accepted by society at large. This story transcends human experience and personal history, and people can't help but love it. I'm not sure how to take Wilson Rawls not talking about his checkered past, and perhaps he did in the way. and it's just not recorded.

It's encouraging to think that he found a way to move past the character flaws of his youth. Perhaps Billy Coleman's character is who he wished he'd been as a young man. And in this creative way, perhaps he righted the wrong by leaving such a strong deposit of character in the form of this timeless story that won't be snuffed out by time. When I think about American hunting, which is deeply personal to me, I realize even more how it's a part of our collective American story. It's part of our identity. And there are ideologies that are currently interested in snuffing out in many parts of our hunting lifestyle,

including hunting with dogs, which is often a target of anti-hunting sentiment. And I'll pound the table and declare that if our ability to hunt with hounds is stripped away from us, that part of our humanity is also being stripped away. And you'd think we'd realize by now that that's not good for anybody. It's my hope that this series will be a celebration of a literary masterpiece portraying rural America that made it into the mainstream. On this episode, we've introduced Professor Sean Tutan, Stuart Peterson, and Ronnie Smith. In part two of this series, we're going to get deeper into the book,

and we'll hear about Mr. Stewart's experience as a lot. a rising childhood actor and why he quit. And we'll learn more about the nuts and bolts of coon hunting with Mr. Ronnie. It's guaranteed to be good and insightful. It sure was for me. Thanks so much for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our podcast with friend and foe. And hey, those Bear Grease hats that everybody loves are finally back in stock on the

meat eater website. So go get them. And hey, that Black Panther Believer hat is on the website too. You can check that out at the meat eater.com. And hey, we'll hear you next week on the render talking about all this stuff. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win. a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen

to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps game calls. dot com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and

getting action. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.