Biographical Note
Joseph Sargent Hall (1906-1992) was a linguist and folklorist who conducted fieldwork in the Great Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee and North Carolina. In 1937 he was hired by the National Park Service to document the speech and culture of residents being removed from their property for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Between 1939 and 1941 he returned to conduct his own research, creating recordings of the region's dialect, singing, and local customs. In 1942, he published a dissertation on the phonetics of Smoky Mountain English for his PhD in Linguistics from Columbia University. In the 1950s he returned to the Great Smoky Mountain region to continue recording residents playing traditional music, discussing folk medicine and witchlore, and telling folk tales.