In the summer of 1952, a young graduate student named Ray B. Browne left the University of California, Los Angeles, to conduct folkloric research in rural Alabama. Farmers there told Browne that a few decades earlier, you couldn’t stand outside your barn without hearing half a dozen farmers hollerin’ at each other across the fields. Browne, who later became famous for pioneering the study of pop culture at the university level, chronicled his trip in A Journal of American Folklore, where he wrote that the “holler” was both functional and…
