First, let’s set aside “The Devil went down to Georgia”: this is based on common European folk motifs of the devil playing fiddle and fiddle competitions. I wouldn’t call this a tall tale since it draws upon legendary (stories generally told to be believed) material rather than the tall tale/extraordinary lies. You’re right that it includes an element of exaggeration, but this is common in stories about the devil, and it’s a bit different from the classic tall tale.

Then there is the question of whether the tall tale is the exclusive or at least proper domain of vagrants. I doubt this. Instead, I suspect that we are seeing were traveling homeless men who often lived by their wits, when many won whatever they could in life by being glib and by being great storytellers.

The tall tale/extraordinary lie is widespread internationally, but it is particularly known in American folk culture – and especially in the West. In January, I submitted a book manuscript that deals with this topic (tentatively titled, Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West). A few excerpts may serve us to understand the context and nature of deceit in American folklore and storytelling/humor (I have not reproduced all the citations):

At the outset, it is important to acknowledge that deception is not unique to western or even American folklore. It enjoys a time-honored place in international traditions. The tall tale, for example, can be found in the writings of the Greek authority, Plutarch (ca. 46-119), who described a remote place where the temperature can become so cold that words freeze and cannot be heard until they thaw in spring. More recently, in 1528, a similar story of the exaggerated effect of frozen words appeared in Count Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Ludicrous exaggeration has long been a device in both oral and written narratives. [endnote: Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature, 11-12; Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature: “Motif X1623.2.1: Lie: frozen words thaw out in the spring”; E. Cobham Brewer, “Frozen Words,” Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell and Company, 1898); W. F. Garrett-Petts and Donald Lawrence, “Thawing the Frozen Image/Word: Vernacular Postmodern Aesthetics,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 31:1 (March 1998) 143-78; see a similar account about words in Virginia City being blown away so that people blocks away heard them: Emrich, It’s an Old West Custom, 274-75.]

One of the more famous examples of hyperbolic stories was the late eighteenth-century classic by Hanover-born Rudolf Erich Raspe (ca. 1736-1794), who first published his Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia in 1786. His book was based on the exaggerated accounts of a real person, Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen (1720-1797). Despite having a life of adventure, including fighting in the Russo-Turkish War (1735-1739), he nevertheless inflated his experiences.

Raspe found inspiration in Münchhausen’s embellishments, and he subsequently overstated the accounts, exaggerating the exaggerations, while also adding new adventures. With Raspe’s eloquent pen, his fictional Munchausen fought a gigantic crocodile, twice journeyed to the moon, survived escapades underwater within and outside a whale, rode a half horse, and traveled on a cannonball through the air. The stories became literary tall tales, the object of humor because of their absurdity. With the publication of Raspe’s book, Münchhausen was furious at the mockery and threatened a lawsuit. The fictious adventures of Baron Munchausen set a high bar for those who would seek humor in overstatement, but many rose to the challenge.

While living in London, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote a letter to The Public Advertiser, describing American sheep as being so thick with wool, that farmers had to use four-wheeled wagons to carry their heavy tails. Franklin’s portrait of a remarkable America had many other astounding features including whales leaping up Niagara Falls, a sight which, “is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.” The correspondence was in answer to another note, likely also penned by Franklin who was using the names, “The Spectator,” and “The Traveller” for an epistolary feud of his own making. The letters offered an opportunity to address misconceptions and to exhibit aspects of the American colonies. Most of all, it was a chance for Franklin to demonstrate that Americans could join the ranks of Raspe and others when it came to the entertaining use of exaggeration.

Franklin’s foray into the tall tale underscores a fundamental truth about the expression of deceit as humor: stories that rely on absurd exaggeration have deep roots in Europe, but it would soon become a natural realm to explore in North America. What follows underscores that while the genre was not unique to the West, the tall tale became essential to the region’s folklore. As author Richard Erdoes commented in his collections of tales from the West, “The essence of American legends, particularly of western tales, is exaggeration. Nowhere else in the world can one find boastful grandiloquence like this…. In western tales everything is larger than life, blown up out of all proportions.” Indeed, the tall tale is popularly associated with the Wild West even though it is widespread elsewhere. …

The tall tale is distinct from yet another deceit-based folk tradition, that of the absurd or “burlesque” lie, a falsehood that was typically brief. Carolyn Brown notes the similarities shared by tall tales and these “unplotted whoppers.” She notes that they are like tall tales except they are not presented as narratives, and she suggests that they could as easily be called “tall lying.”

One of the best Nevada manifestations of the lie as a type of trickery comes in the form of the Sazerac Lying Club described by the writer, Fred H. Hart. Working as the editor of the Reese River Reveille in central Nevada’s mining town of Austin, he invented the club in 1873: it is not clear if the club existed or if it was itself a deception. Indeed, it is possible that what began as a hoax in turn inspired the creation of a real Lying Club. Hart described the organization as meeting in the Sazerac Saloon in Austin. There, members competed, attempting to outdo one another in the telling of outlandish narratives, thereby winning the title, “Monumental Liar of America.” Those who were so acclaimed were given a small gold hatchet that could be worn on one’s lapel. [endnote: Fred H. Hart, The Sazerac Lying Club: A Nevada Book (San Francisco: Henry Keller and Company, 1878); G. Grant Loomis, “The Tale Tales of Dan De Quille,” California Folklore Quarterly, 5:1 (January 1946) 26-71; Emrich, It’s an Old West Custom, 285.]

Lying clubs have existed elsewhere in the nation and indeed in the world, but as is the case with tall tales and the hoax, it would be difficult to find a place where deceit has been more essential to a body of folklore than in the West. Austin’s Sazerac Lying Club and the honorary title, “Monumental Liar” fit early Nevada so well that the institution was apparently borrowed and came into practice in Virginia City, where Monumental Lies became the fashion. ...

Deceit was a currency exploited in early Nevada humor and storytelling. Nevertheless, there is some irony, perhaps, in the reputation that the West has for the tall tale since the region’s brand of deception was far more diverse. Of course, a good storyteller could expand an outlandish lies into a tall tale, but journalistic hoaxes also expressed the regional appreciation for deceit. In addition, there were practical jokes, yet another celebrated aspect of trickery embedded in early Nevada folklore. What Carolyn Brown stated for the tall tale in her classic study of the genre can be applied to all these folkloric manifestations of deception: Whether hoax, tall tale, burlesque lie, or practical joke, these played out in “an atmosphere in which the line between fact and fiction is hazy and the manipulation of that boundary is a source of humor.” [endnote: Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature, 9.]

The diverse expressions of deceit-related folklore in the West are a reminder that not all tradition consists of elaborate narratives. Compendiums of the folklore of the “Wild West” typically include an assortment of “tall tales,” for that is what often comes to mind for many when the subject of folklore of the West is raised. While the tall tale played an important role beneath the umbrella the region’s traditions, many other aspects of culture were there as well.