Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes

Tales from Kentucky Funeral HomesWilliam Lynwood Montell

In Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes, William Lynwood Montell gives voice to funeral home directors and embalmers across Kentucky, collecting their stories, both humorous and touching, to reveal an insider perspective of the business of death over the past fifty years. The stories provide glimpses of the lives of funeral workers, family-run funeral homes, and old-time burial practices and funeral customs, including those unique to the African American community. The book also includes tales of mistakes, miscues, and other recollections that reveal the humorous side of a normally solemn experience.

Engagingly told by funeral directors across the state, the stories provide vivid portraits of funeral workers and the families they serve as well as moving descriptions of funeral services and grieving relatives. Other stories are humorous, including one memorable account in which a man's funeral is upstaged by a tug of war between two widows (one a long-estranged but still legal spouse, the other a common law wife) and the peace brokered by a man whom the storyteller calls "the Kissinger of the bunch."

The majority of the stories take place in recent history, but some take the reader back to a period when funeral directors used horse-drawn wagons to reach secluded areas and conducted in-home embalmings. From long-winded preachers and fainting relatives to snake-handling funerals and pallbearers falling into graves, the accounts collected in Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes offer a surprising firsthand record of the history and culture of death in Kentucky.

William Lynwood Montell, professor emeritus of folk studies at Western Kentucky University, is the author of many books, including Tales from Kentucky Lawyers and Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky.