Jonesboro, Tennessee
What is hot and stuffy, perfectly happy, and has 400 wildly
clapping hands?
Answer: The 200-plus early birds who crammed themselves into
the local Methodist Church here recently for a sample of the story telling to
come at the Fifth Annual National Storytelling Festival. For one weekend a year
this 1,700-strong community is the “world” capital of the tall tale.
The audience itself was astonishingly ecumenical; on my left
were the vice-president of the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) and the
founding director of the Southern Folklore Association; on my right, two public
librarians from Santa Rosa, California; in front of me, backpacking hippies
from Oneonta, New York.
What, one might well ask, has such heterogeneity in common?
Simple: a flair for natural foods. Folk tales are the home-baked loaves of our
Wonder Bread era.
Another riddle: What has 600 umbrellas, a collective look of
pure contentment, and doesn’t want to miss a thing?
Answer: The augmented crowd of folktale hearers on the main
rainy day of the festival. They gathered casually at “Swappin’ Place,” a
tented-over area where anyone with a tale to tell could try it out on an
audience, which alternately thrilled at the skills of a score of professional
storytellers and scrunched sympathetically at the tyros who were trying out
their acts—off, off, off Broadway.
Within the space of a drizzly half-hour, I relished Doc
McConnell’s complex fib about boys who couldn’t go into town till they built
two miles of fence, cutting corners by putting frozen snakes into the ground
for posts (all went swimmingly until the Tuesday thaw!); a young woman’s tale
about an oyster fisherman off Long Island in the winter of 1977; North Carolina
librarian Jackie Torrence’s traditional East African tale about the limits of
bravery, which she ended with a positively levitating group chant of “Down By
the Riverside.” The easy give and take between the skilled and the neophyte,
the compete absence of competitiveness, the sheer collaborative joy in one
another’s well-doings, were to me a parable of American openness I have been
mulling over since.
Demographically, the biggest surprise to me was the high
incidence of elementary schoolteachers and librarians. Richard Chase, the
wintry yet magically warm doyen of the professional tale-telling fraternity (an
inept term since there were so many first-rate female storytellers there too),
came early to the festival so he could visit the town’s Boone Elementary
School.
The popular conception of the tall tale spinner is the
twinkly-eyed backwoods farmer. Only North Carolinians Stan and Ray Hicks, who
farm in the western part of the state, seemed to fit this image.
My favorites of the festival were the winsome duo of Barbara
Freeman and Connie Regan. Never have your National Endowment for the Arts
dollars been better invested. I can hardly wait to see them in a whole concert.
The next day, Barbara Freeman rolled us helplessly in the clay-floored aisles with
her cautionary tale about getting peanut butter off the roof of your mouth
“wiff a thpoon.” It sticks in your mind, that kind of nonsense.
Where did this all come from? (I’m glad you asked, because
it’s a tallish tale in itself.) Once upon a time there was a slightly (make
that hugely) dissatisfied English teacher at nearby Johnson City’s Science Hall
High School. His name was Jimmy Neil Smith. He was taking his journalism class
to an out-of-town conference—the kind that is supposed to broaden the students’
horizons but which is really set up to keep English teachers of a certain kind
from going bonkers.
On the car radio they heard a Mississippi tale teller. They
were enchanted. “Teacher,” they said, “why don’t we have a bunch of those funny
folks come to Johnson City?” “I was hoping you would want that,” their teacher
replied.
That was in 1973. One thing led to another, and in a triumph
of American volunteerism, the National Association for the Preservation and
Perpetuation of Storytelling was born and the Tennessee Arts Commission primed
its pumps with a modest subvention.
This year, however, the association was proudly, if somewhat
shakily, on its own for the first time. Mr. Smith guessed that at 400
admissions ($10 for the weekend) it would break even. It got its numbers.
The group’s plans are a plausible mix of utopianism and
practicality. Knowing they do not stand a chance against the maxibudgeted state
universities with their huge staffs and roving collectors, Mr. Smith’s bunch
decided to go audio-visual. They have six staff members and immense reserves of
goodwill, which seem to be expanding exponentially. For instance the University
of Tennessee (Knoxville) video staffers were there on their own time, audio
taping the festival for the association’s “archive”—a homely cluster of
second-floor offices next to a Jonesboro laundromat. For $3 you can get a tape
of the highlights of the storytelling festival. Write the librarian (another
defected English teacher), Brad Harrell, Box 112, Jonesboro, TN 37659.
Riddle: Who is 50, completely ignorant of folklore, yet
already planning to attend next year’s festival?
From The Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 15, 1977
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