American Talkers: Expressive Styles and Occupational Choice

STANDING ABOVE A GATHERED CROWD on a muddy carnival midway, a side show talker shouts, See Fat Alice from Dallas / It takes ten men to hug her and a box car to lug her; traveling through city streets in a horsedrawn cart laden with fruit, a Baltimore Arabber1 cries, I got ripe watermelons / Got 'em red to the rind / Just as sweet as honey / And fresh off the vine; standing on a wooden platform and waving a pen set in the air, a flea market pitchman declares, This pen writes in French, in English / Why you can write in any language with this very same pen; holding up a set of mixing bowls at an estate sale, an auctioneer chants, I'm bid five, now who'll give ten ten ten / I'll say it again now who'll give ten? The bally of the carnival talker, the cry of the street peddler, the spiel of the pitchman, and the chant of the auctioneer related forms of verbal art. Each is the most expressive feature of an event whose main activity is buying and selling. All four have in common an artistic performance intended to elicit an aesthetic response; yet, they also designed to help achieve the practical goal of selling a product at a good price to a large number of customers. Street cries, auction chants, and the spiels of talkers and pitchmen all part of the expressive language of the street and market. Their imagery, strategies, and styles have striking similarities and share certain stylistic features with other genres of the marketplace. Historically, their practitioners have often operated as part of a larger community of itinerant tradesmen and have moved easily between these lines of work. Mikhail Bakhtin notes that in the Medieval and Renaissance marketplace all performances shared the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness, and familiarity and that the forms of the marketplace are so closely interwoven that it is difficult to trace a dividing line, and no wonder, since the barkers and vendors of drugs were also actors in performances at the fair (1968:153). Similarly, in American streets and markets carnival talkers often double as pitchmen and frequently perform as auctioneers and street criers in the course of their careers. Similar skills and selling strategies make this movement a natural one. All of these figures use their voices to sell and try to focus the attention of customers