1. By “kitchen table storyteller” I’m talking about telling stories around a kitchen table or in some other informal setting. In addition, the listeners generally have not gathered for the purpose of hearing stories, but the storytelling has sprung from the ongoing conversation. The type of storytelling for which I am paid is not kitchen table storytelling, but “platform storytelling.” My storytelling has usually been arranged by a presenter (for example: a festival artistic director, a librarian, a teacher) who has hired me to tell stories at a specific place to listeners the presenter has gathered for the purpose of hearing stories. Just as kitchen table storytelling does not always happen with a teller sitting at a kitchen table, platform storytelling does not always happen with a teller standing on a platform. These terms “kitchen table storytelling” and “platform storytelling” are also used by others to talk about different types of storytelling situations with different degrees of formality; however, not all users describe the terms the same way I have.
2. National Endowment for the Arts website: “The folk and traditional arts, which include music, crafts, dance, storytelling, and others, are those that are learned as part of the cultural life of a community whose members share a common ethnic heritage, language, religion, occupation, or geographic region. These traditions are shaped by the aesthetics and values of a shared culture and are passed from generation to generation, most often within family and community through observation, conversation, and practice.” By contrast, most of the stories I tell are not stories that have been passed down in my family over the generations, nor did I grow up hearing these stories from others around me. In addition, most of my storytelling training has come from other professional storytellers through workshops they’ve offered and through their presentations at various storytelling conferences. While we may share a common occupation, professional storytellers do not traditionally work side by side, transmitting storytelling knowledge and skills as an integral part of our typical workdays.
3. The Captain Kangaroo television show ran on CBS from 1955 to 1984. The books I recall Captain Kangaroo (portrayed by Robert Keeshan) reading were all published before Captain Kangaroo began—Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House in 1942 and her Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel in 1939; Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale in 1938.
4. Yes, Mary June—I used both names in school. In my predominately Catholic community, many girls were named Mary after the Blessed Virgin Mary, so we all either used middle names or double names at school.
5. Many teachers today share the belief that it is important for students to learn to speak before groups and have opportunities to develop listening and audience skills; however, most teaching today is driven by assessment. By that I mean that what can be, and is, assessed becomes what is taught. It takes time to allow every child in a classroom to speak in front of peers, and assessing speaking ability does not lend itself to standardized testing. While speaking and listening skills are indeed often included in curriculums, school and individual teacher success is measured primarily through standardized assessments. Therefore, when time is short and assessment stakes are high, what is taught must match what will be assessed by state and national standardized tests.
6. Barbara Freeman and Connie Regan-Blake each began telling stories in the early 1970s. For twenty years, from 1975 to 1995, they traveled the world as The Folktellers, a storytelling duo. Since 1995 both Barbara and Connie have established solo storytelling careers. Learn more about Barbara at barbarastoryteller@gmail.com, Connie at www.storywindow.com. I had heard of them before the conference because they had been featured on the cover of a School Library Journal issue while I was in library school, but I had not sought out an opportunity to hear them tell prior to the conference.
7. For more information about the impact of my studies with Laura Simms, see note 4 in “Little Ripen Pear” and the commentary after “Kate Crackernuts.” Learn more about Laura Simms at www.laurasimms.com.
1. When telling this story for Kentucky audiences, I usually interject a bit of directional information, “and if you wanted to go there from here, you would just. . . .” Kentucky has 120 counties, so we Kentuckians tend to talk in terms of counties, especially when talking about rural areas.
2. No, I do not have a photographic memory, but I do have my appointment calendars from previous years, where on December 19, 1990, I wrote “go to Lonnie & Roberta’s to tell ‘Stormwalker’ around 5:00 or 5:30 p.m.”
3. In 1991, August House published The Walking Trees and Other Scary Stories by Roberta Simpson Brown. Roberta titled her story “Storm Walker”—two words; however, when I heard the story, I heard the single word, “Stormwalker.” The Walking Trees was Roberta’s first book. Learn more about Roberta Simpson Brown, and about the ten books she has written, at www.robertasimpsonbrown.com.
4. Storytelling World Awards, presented yearly since 1995, are juried awards presented to Winner and Honor recipients in seven categories. Another CD of mine, Sisters All . . . and One Troll was awarded a 2007 Winner Storytelling World Award in Category 6: Storytelling Recordings. Learn more about Storytelling World Awards at www.storytellingworld.com.
5. Kentucky Crafted: The Market is produced by the Kentucky Craft Marketing Program, a division of the Kentucky Arts Council. The Market includes days for buyers from retail stores throughout the country, followed by two open to the public days. Traditional, folk, and contemporary craft exhibitors are juried in the Kentucky Craft Marketing Program. Two-dimensional artists are juried through the Kentucky Arts Council. Performing artists are selected from the juried Kentucky Arts Council’s Performing Arts on Tour Directory, and their recordings, along with books from Kentucky Arts Council Fellowship Artists and from Kentucky publishers, are also available. In addition, The Market offers specialty food products with the Kentucky Proud Program of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. Learn more about Kentucky Crafted: The Market at www.kycraft.ky.gov.
1. In 1867, for about $120,000, William S. Culbertson built his three-story, twenty-five-room home. With its hand-painted ceilings, carved rosewood staircase, and marble fireplaces, his home reflected his affluence. After his death in 1892, the mansion and its contents were sold. A series of owners painted over the ornate ceilings and boarded up rooms. Since 1985 this annual event, rated a “Top 10 Halloween Haunted House” by USA Today in 1991, generates funds to restore the mansion to its Victorian glory. Culbertson Mansion State Historic Site is a part of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Division of the Department of Natural Resources.
2. Henson, Tragedy at Devil’s Hollow, 107–108.
3. Hiser, Quare Do’s in Appalachia, 164–168.
4. Henson, Tragedy at Devil’s Hollow, 107.
5. Ibid., 108.
6. Hiser, Quare Do’s in Appalachia, 164–168. Hiser also wrote: “My sister Grace E. Jones told me the story of ‘The Wedding Ring’ which took place in Breathitt County about 1862, the old lady was Mrs. Polly Daingey McIntosh, telling the tale in 1918, in Owsley County.”
7. Murray (n.d.) confirms what I had been casually told by the curator.
8. Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 1:537–538, 3:29–30.
9. Report of the Adjunct General of the State of Indiana, 4:550–551, 6:302–304. This report includes the residences of soldiers and the muster dates of the specific companies.
10. Hiser used Polly Daingey (also spelled Daingy) McIntosh and John McIntosh (Quare Do’s in Appalachia, 164, 165). Henson used Josephine Tyler and George Thomas (Tragedy at Devil’s Hollow, 107).
11. Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 1:538, 3:29.
12. Ibid., 1:458.
13. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of Rebellion, 3:1147.
1. If you are thinking, chopping cotton? In Kentucky? I can tell you that surprised me too, but I do know that cotton has been grown in southwestern Kentucky, so it is possible to be sent to “chop out the cotton” in Kentucky. The mention of “chopping cotton” was in the version of the story from Billie Jean Fields (see additional information in the commentary), and I elected to keep it in my retelling.
2. This is the first of many, many references you will see to Leonard Roberts in this book. Leonard Roberts was a Kentucky scholar, teacher, folklorist, and storyteller to whom all Kentuckians interested in storytelling owe a great debt. Upon his death, his family donated his work to Berea College (in Berea, Kentucky), where today the Leonard Roberts Collection is part of the Southern Appalachian Archives, housed in the Hutchins Library. The Leonard Roberts Collection is one of the most important archives of sound recordings and manuscripts of traditional storytelling in the entire United States. For Roberts’s field recordings, I’ve provided complete call numbers. (Each begins with LR OR.) Call numbers are not assigned to individual manuscripts within the collection. To learn more about Leonard Roberts and his work, including a complete bibliography, please see the Leonard Roberts memorial issue of Appalachian Heritage 15 (spring 1987): 4–65. Carl Lindahl, a scholar and folklorist, is currently writing a book tentatively titled One Time: The Kentucky Mountain Folktale World of Leonard Roberts.
3. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “The Family,” from Billie Jean Fields of Martin County, Kentucky, 1970. Sound recordings LR OR 024, Track 3, “Candy Doll,” from Mary Day, and LR OR 024, Track 4, “Candy Doll,” from Margie Day, both recorded at Polls Creek, Leslie County, Kentucky, on October 15, 1952.
4. Roberts, “The Candy Doll,” I Bought Me a Dog, n.p.
5. Ibid., n.p.
6. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, LR OR 024, Track 4, “Candy Doll.”
7. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, LR OR 024, Track 3, “Candy Doll.”
8. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “The Family.”
9. Parkhurst, The August House Book of Scary Stories, 22–26.
10. Gorham, email correspondence with the author, September 2, 2010.
11. Ibid., April 19, 2011.
12. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 36. In his book, The Singer of Tales, Lord includes several comments about the nature of oral tradition and the relationship between oral tradition and fixed text. He writes: “. . . if the printed text is read to an already accomplished oral poet, its effect is the same as if the poet were listening to another singer. The song books spoil the oral character of the tradition only when the singer believes that they are the way in which the song should be presented. The song books may spread a song to regions where the song has not hitherto been sung; in this respect they are like a migrant singer. But they can spoil a tradition only when the singers themselves have already been spoiled by the concept of a fixed text” (79). Later in the book he says, “Those singers who accept the idea of a fixed text are lost to oral traditional process. This means death to oral tradition and the rise of a generation of ‘singers’ who are reproducers rather than re-creators” (137). He concludes: “The change has been from stability of essential story, which is the goal of oral tradition, to stability of text, of the exact words of the story” (138).
13. Gorham, email correspondence with the author, April 19, 2011.
14. Ibid.
15. Since 2003, Linda has met monthly with her coaching group, fellow storytellers Donna Dettman and Sue Black. They usually meet for five to six hours. At the beginning of each session, they allow time for relaxing and catching up. Then, when they begin working, they are focused. First they discuss everyone’s priorities. A schedule is set that usually allows each teller an equal amount of time. Occasionally, when needed, they allot extra time to those who may have upcoming projects that need extra attention.
Topics they have tackled over the years include: creating, coaching, developing, refining, and presenting stories; editing written work for publication; crafting keynote speeches and workshop presentations; planning, editing, and designing CDs; and developing marketing materials and websites. The coaching sessions also serve as a time to relax and share the trials and tribulations of storytelling as a profession. The group always breaks for lunch and sometimes, in celebration of their hard work, they share a glass of wine at the end of the day.
Linda, Donna, and Sue stress that getting the right mix of skills and personalities in a coaching group is important. Participants must feel comfortable and safe, and there must be a shared respect for each person’s work.
16. Gorham, email correspondence with the author, April 19, 2011.
17. Ibid., September 3, 2010.
18. Ibid., April 19, 2011.
19. Learn more about Linda Gorham and her work at www.LindaGorham.com.
1. Sierra writes, “. . . in 1910, Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne published a catalog of tale types that today remains the standard system for folktales of European and East Indian origin. Each tale type is basically a plot type, and is assigned both a number and a standard title, for example, Tale type 510A Cinderella. American folklorist Stith Thompson revised Aarne’s work and translated it into English as The Types of the Folktale” (34).
Hans-Jörg Uther created a more recent revision of Aarne’s and Thompson’s work, thus ATU stands for Aarne, Thompson, Uther. When I have been able to find a tale type, I note it for you at the beginning of the story commentary. Many folktale collections will contain an appendix listing the stories included by tale type. To learn which tale types are included in this book, see the index.
Why, as a storyteller, do I care about tale types? Many indexes of folktales, Ashliman’s A Guide to Folktales in the English Language for example, are arranged by tale type. Once I know the tale type of a story I’m interested in learning more about, I can use such indexes to locate variants of the story from a wide variety of sources and cultures. Reading multiple variants often provides me with more insight to a story than I can glean from any single version.
2. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College. For details on all ten versions, see table 1, “Little Ripen Pear” Comparison Chart. It includes the storytellers’ names and the call numbers for the field recordings or the notation “manuscript” for each version.
3. From 1983 to 1987, while living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I studied voice with Gordon Van Ry. My goal was not so much to learn to sing as it was to improve my vocal stamina. I chose to work with Mr. Van Ry because he had worked not just with singers, but also with lawyers and others who wanted to improve their speaking voices and with folks in need of vocal rehabilitation. From Mr. Van Ry I learned the importance of vocal warm ups and proper breath support for speaking and singing, which has served me well over my storytelling career. Yes, working with him improved my singing, but the singing was a means to an end, not the goal of our work together.
4. Trust me, if I knew exactly who to credit with this idea, I would. My memory says I was first introduced to it by Laura Simms, a storyteller who has been an important storytelling teacher for me. However, I have heard this idea stated nearly this same way in almost every storytelling workshop I’ve ever attended.
I do know it was Laura Simms who introduced me to a wide variety of ways of learning a story, as opposed to a focus on word memorization. Laura also introduced me to Howard Gardner’s work with multiple intelligences when I first studied with her at her 1983 storytelling residency. Working with Laura changed how I go about learning stories and influenced how I help others learn to tell stories now. At Laura’s yearly storytelling residencies, each participant focuses on a single story throughout the week-long residency. I studied with her from 1983 to 1986, in 1988, and again in 2007, when I devoted the week to grappling with “Little Ripen Pear.”
Learn more about Laura Simms at www.laurasimms.com.
5. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 209. Boyd contends the draw storytelling has for humans stems not just from a love of narrative, but from evolutionary adaptations: “. . . we have evolved to engage in art and in storytelling because of the survival advantages they offer our species. Art prepares minds for open-ended learning and creativity; fiction specifically improves our social cognition and our thinking beyond the here and now.”
Birch and Heckler express a similar idea: “The evolution of the opposable thumb on the human hand allowed us to grasp, to wield, to manipulate devices both delicately and powerfully. Perhaps stories are a mental opposable thumb, allowing humans to grasp something in their minds—to turn it around, to view it from many angles, to reshape it, and to hurl it even into the farthest reaches of the unconscious” (11).
1. Nora M. Lewis Collection, Southern Appalachian Archives, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky, Tale 31c, “Flannel Mouth.”
2. I have been unable to verify which relative told me this. A number of years passed between that conversation and my decision to write this book. In the interim, the relatives I could recall by name from our brief conversation had either died or suffered disease-related memory loss.
3. Jack D. Lewis, M.D., correspondence with the author, August 2003.
4. Nora Morgan Lewis Collection, Southern Appalachian Archives, Berea College, Tale 31c, “Flannel Mouth.” Lewis first wrote out the title as “How She Paid Her Debt,” then marked it out and replaced it with “Flannel Mouth.”
1. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “The Blue Light.” Handwritten notes clearly establish that the story before this one, “The Unwilling House,” comes from Mrs. Dicie Hurley of Majestic, Kentucky, and the story after this one, “Blue Beard,” comes from Mrs. E. McClanahan of Freeburn, Kentucky. “The Blue Light” begins on the same page as “The Unwilling House” and ends on the same page as “Blue Beard.” Mrs. Hurley’s name is written at the top of “The Unwilling House” and Mrs. McClanahan’s name is written at the top of “Blue Beard.” Because this tale is such a close variant of “Blue Beard,” I’m inclined to believe Roberts collected it from Mrs. Dicie Hurley, not Mrs. McClanahan, but I cannot be sure.
2. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College. On sound recording LR OR O24, Track 2, recorded by Roberts at Polls Creek, Leslie County, Kentucky, on October 15, 1952, Chrisley Day states the story title as “The Three Girls and an Old Man.” On the transcript of Day’s telling, the title is given as “The Bad Old Man.”
3. WOW (Working on Our Work) Storytelling Weekends were small group storytelling coaching retreat-style events I co-facilitated with Cynthia Changaris from 2001–2011 at her Storyteller’s Riverhouse Bed and Breakfast in Bethlehem, Indiana. At each of the thirty-four WOW Weekends four to ten storytellers from as far away as Florida and the Dakotas gathered as peers to coach each other. During WOW Weekends participants worked on developing stories for telling, storytelling workshops, marketing materials, or other matters related to the art of storytelling, with each participant guaranteed a one-hour turn to put the intelligence of the full group to work in service to whatever that storyteller wanted the group’s help with.
Cynthia and I participated in the weekend as equal participants, not head coaches. While we did act as facilitators by helping participants use a formal response process, we also each took our own one-hour turns to receive help with our work. We used a five-step response process based on the story coaching techniques developed by storyteller Doug Lipman (see The Storytelling Coach) and the critical response process developed by dancer Liz Lerman (see “Towards a Process for Critical Response”). Learn more about Doug Lipman at www.storydynamics.com. Learn more about Liz Lerman and the book she wrote with John Borstel about the Critical Response Process at http://danceexchange.org/projects/critical-response-process/.
What set WOW Weekends apart from other storytelling coaching sessions was that we ignored conventional wisdom that all tellers participating in a mutual coaching session needed to already know each other and be at about the same level of telling experience and expertise. Instead we brought strangers together, including relatively new storytellers and storytellers with years of professional experience. Their common bond was a love of storytelling and a desire to give and receive help to strengthen their work. Shared meals and lodging generated the comfort level needed. We treated participants and their work confidentially, and asked all participants to do the same. While new storytellers sometimes worried they had nothing to contribute, they soon understood that the more experienced tellers wanted to create works with audience appeal. When new tellers recounted their experiences as listeners to works in progress, they provided valuable information.
While I can’t reveal names or specific projects worked on, I can state that work in progress at WOW Weekends wound up in at least three published books and on at least two award-winning CDs. No, we did not keep statistics to track what happened to the participants and their work—those are just results I happen to know about. In addition to working on “The Blue Light” at a WOW Weekend, I also worked on other stories in this book, “Flannel Mouth,” “The Gingerbread Boy,” and “Kate Crackernuts,” when I was first developing my retellings. At our final WOW Weekend in February 2011, participants read and commented on drafts from this book during my one-hour turn.
4. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “The Blue Light.”
1. Montell, Ghosts Along the Cumberland, 187–190. Lynwood Montell taught at Western Kentucky University from 1969 to 1999 and is the author over twenty books of Kentucky folklore. You can learn more about his work at http://www.wku.edu/Dept/Academic/AHSS/cms/lynwood-montell.
2. Benjamin, email correspondence with the author, January 27, 2010.
1. Livo and Rietz, Storytelling, 251.
2. Sierra, Storytellers’ Research Guide, 4.
3. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, untitled manuscript. In 1959, Mrs. Madelyn McKamy from Greenup County, Kentucky, reported that the way to put a finishing touch on a tall tale was to say, “Now, everybody that believes this, stand on your right eyebrow.”
1. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, untitled manuscript. Jean Singleton of Knott County, Kentucky, reported a version in 1961. In that version Will is hunting and a wounded bear attacks with mouth wide open. Evelyn Gooding of Pineville, Bell County, Kentucky, collected a version from Mayme Dean (also of Pineville) during the 1955–1956 school year. Curtis Sams of Bell County, Kentucky, collected a version from seventy-six-year-old S. D. Sams of Girdler, Knox County, Kentucky, in 1957. Zora S. Lovitt from Williamsburg in Whitley County, Kentucky, attributed a first-person version collected in 1957 to eighty-five-year-old Frank Kedd, also of Whitley County, who Lovitt reports was known as “The Great Prevaricator.” None of the reported versions features Daniel Boone, and in all versions the encounter takes place on the ground, not in a tree.
1. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “The Bushel of Corn,” collected by J. D. Calton, n.d.
1. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “Half Pint,” collected by Walton T. Saylor from Charlie Day, 1956.
2. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, manuscript, “Tall Tale,” collected by Lena Ratliff from Boon Hall, 1960.
3. This was the Florida Storytelling Association StoryCamp 2004 at Eckert College, in St. Petersburg, Florida. Learn more about the organization and its events at www.flstory.org.
1. Thompson, telephone interview with the author, February 17, 2010.
2. Clarke and Clarke, The Harvest and the Reapers, 98.
3. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, untitled manuscript, from Cleadia Hall, 1956.
4. Thompson, telephone interview with the author, February 17, 2010.
1. Reading? Yes, that’s what you are doing; however, when I tell the story, of course, I say “hearing.” Should you happen to read this story aloud, “hearing” would be a better word choice for your audience, too. All in all, I’ve tried to make very few changes between these written versions and what I say when I’m telling. Sometimes more words or different words strike me as taking better care of my audience—in this case, you, a reader.
2. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, untitled manuscript, collected by Euphemia Epperson, 1957. The turtle story is part of a longer untitled tall tale collected by Epperson in Harlan County, Kentucky. A handwritten note on the Epperson manuscript reads: “This was reported to me by one of the evening loafers.” In Epperson’s retelling she uses Ted Middleton, an attendant at the Baxter Service Station, as the narrator whose telling is prompted by three small boys walking by with a turtle they had caught. When one loafer comments, “That’s the biggest turtle I ever saw,” Middleton responds with his tall tale. To read a published version of this story, see: “The Tale of the Big Turkle,” in Roberts, Old Greasybeard, 36–41, 180 (notes).
Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, untitled manuscript, collected by Charles Patton, 1959. A second giant turtle story in the Leonard Roberts Collection tells of a sheep-stealing turtle. The narrator kills it with a hog rifle and stores forty bushels of seed corn in the shell. In 1959, Charles Patton of Floyd County, Kentucky, reported collecting this story and two more tall tales from “my uncle who had heard them from an old Sloan man from Caney Creek when he was a boy. The old man would come through Knott and Floyd County selling herbs” (Patton untitled manuscript).
3. While I have no doubt that I read a reference to this smart dog story in a book, I have been unsuccessful in locating that publication. However, I can verify the tale is in Kentucky folklore because three Kentucky-collected versions are in the Leonard Roberts Collection at Berea College: Charles A. Blair of Letcher County, Kentucky, reported the version “Tall Tales: A Real Hunting Dog” in 1961. William Ace of Leslie County, Kentucky, collected a version (untitled manuscript) in 1957 from Henery Gibson. Elizabeth L. Dye of Knox County, Kentucky, collected the version “A Good Hunting Dog” from Johnie Miracle in 1955.
4. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, Epperson manuscript.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Tale Talk, a monthly gathering of storytellers in the Louisville area, has met monthly for over twenty years now. Participants are welcome to tell old favorites, new work, or be supportive listeners for others’ tellings.
9. Folklorists have identified the split dog story as tale type 1889L, one of many tales known collectively as Munchausen tales. For more information on the mix of folk and literary heritage of Munchausen tales, see Ashliman, A Guide to Folktales in the English Language, 300.
10. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, untitled manuscript. In 1960, Dorothy Major from Greenup County, Kentucky, collected a version from Marquita Dunaway, age eighteen, also from South Shore, Greenup County (untitled manuscript).
In the Appalachian Sound Archives, see LR OR 012, Track 15, Dewey Adams recorded by Leonard Roberts in Perry County, Kentucky. For a published version of Adams’s telling, see: Roberts, “The Split Dog,” South From Hell-fer-Sartin, 145, 262 (notes).
11. The Meade County Fair takes place every summer. It probably evolved from the Meade County school fairs my parents (Robert F. Hamilton Jr. and Martha Jane Hager Hamilton, both born in 1930) remember attending during their childhoods. Those events featured students from each school marching in parade and being judged for their parade presentation. There were academic competitions, livestock competitions, bicycle races, a small carnival ride area, and more. My parents recall the Meade County school fairs taking place on the grounds of what was once Brandenburg High School, near the corner of Bland and West Broadway in Brandenburg, Kentucky.
During my childhood (I was born in 1952), we attended the fair every summer. I looked forward to catching up with friends I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. In my memory the Meade County Fair always took place in Brandenburg, Kentucky, the same location as today (the northeast corner of the intersection of Highways 1692 and 1051; for locals that’s Fairgrounds Road and Brandenburg By-pass). I don’t recall how long the fair ran when I was young, but today the Meade County Fair is an eight-day event with over 45,000 paid admissions. (This in a county with a population of 28,602 in the 2010 census.) The 2010 fair featured a parade (no unaccompanied pets allowed), entertainment shows including a Community Gospel Sing, and competitions galore—beauty pageants, a talent contest, baby shows, livestock shows, tractor pulls, demolition derbies (even a lawn mower demolition derby), a Rook tournament, 4-H and FFA events, a Guitar Hero contest, a 5K race and other athletic events, a cornhole tournament, and exhibits where judges awarded prizes for fruits and vegetables, field crops and forages, plants and flowers, fine arts, cooking, canning, sewing, knitting, quilting, and much, much more. Learn more, including upcoming Meade County Fair dates, at www.meadecountyfair.com.
12. I’m not talking about raising and lowering of the theatrical fourth wall. Instead I’m referring to something more akin to meta-narration and narration. The theatrical fourth wall is already down in the telling of a story.
1. Lindahl, American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress, 1:lii.
1. Spellings vary. I’ve seen “Sody Sallyraytus” (Chase, Grandfather Tales, 75–80), “Sody Saleratus” (Tashjian, Juba This and Juba That, 55–59), and “Sody Sallyrytus” (MacDonald, Twenty Tellable Tales, 79–89). I’ve spelled it like I pronounce it.
2. Roberts, Old Greasybeard, 44–47.
3. Roberts, South From Hell-fer-Sartin, 155–156.
4. Ibid., 157–158.
5. Roberts, Sang Branch Settlers, 256–257.
6. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College. For details on all eight versions, see table 2, “The Enormous Bear” Comparison Chart. It includes the storytellers’ names and the call numbers for Roberts’s field recordings. To learn more about Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship, see http://www.berea.edu/hutchinslibrary/specialcollections/amfp/amfp.asp.
7. To learn more about Barbara Freeman and Connie Regan-Blake, see note 6 in the Introduction.
8. Ed Stivender has told stories professionally since 1977. Learn more about Ed by contacting Storyclan@aol.com.
9. Chase, Grandfather Tales, 75–80.
10. Ibid., vii. “In this book I have taken a free hand in the re-telling. I have put each tale together from different versions, and from my own experience in telling them. I have told the tales to all kinds of listeners, old and young; and only then, after many tellings, written them down.”
11. Chase, Grandfather Tales, 235. Chase notes the tale was collected from “Kena Adams of Wise County, Virginia.”
12. Chase, Grandfather Tales, vii.
13. Davis, Telling Your Own Stories, 76–83.
1. Campbell, Tales from the Cloud Walking Country, 198–200.
2. Ibid., 261.
3. Ashliman, A Guide to Folktales in the English Language, 175.
4. Campbell, Tales from the Cloud Walking Country, 199.
5. Ibid., 200.
1. Black, interview with the author, January 2009 and January 2011.
1. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, LR OR 003, Track 3, “The Princess That Could Not Cry,” collected from Agnes Valentine, 1949.
2. DeSpain, Thirty-Three Multicultural Tales to Tell, 47–49, 122 (notes).
1. Ashliman lists over fifty different variants.
Ruth Stotter’s book, The Golden Axe, includes the full text of thirty-three variants, summaries of seventeen more, plus summaries of another six in her notes on the other tales.
In my own artist-in-residence work for the Kentucky Arts Council, I have found the underlying pattern in tale type 480 is so strong that, once exposed to several variants, even young elementary school students are capable of creating original stories using the folktale plot type as a base.
2. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College. Stand-alone versions collected by Roberts include: LR OR 002, Track 6, “Rawhead and Bloody Bones,” recorded from Jane Muncy, age eleven, from Leslie County, who heard stories from her grandmother, recorded in October 1949; LR OR 016, Track 7, “Rawhead and Bloody Bones,” recorded from Patricia McCoy, age eighteen, from Leslie County, who heard it from her grandmother, recorded in May 1950; LR OR 028, Track 3, “To the End of the World,” recorded from Dave Couch in 1952 near Putney, Harlan County, Kentucky.
The segments where the girls encounter the rawhead and bloody bones at the well are included in multiple versions of a longer story, LR OR 056, Track 15, “Rushy Coat,” recorded from Rachel Williams by Leonard Roberts, and in additional manuscripts collected by students of Leonard Roberts. One version, “Russia Coat,” was collected from Margaret Mosley by Elizabeth Lee Dye, in Knox County, Kentucky, in 1955. Four versions were collected by Gerald Syme of Knox County, Kentucky, in 1958: (1) “Rusha Coat,” collected by Gerald Syme (his source is not given); (2) “Rusha Coat,” told by Margaret Mosley and written down by Geneva Mosley; (3) “Rushy Coat,” collected by Gerald Syme from Mary Hannah Marcum; and (4) “Rusha Coat,” “told to Georgia Williams by her mother Mrs. George Williams” (note at beginning of the story) and/or “told by Rachel Williams most of this recorded from Mrs. Miracle, Trosper, [Knox County] KY” (note at end of story).
3. Nora Morgan Lewis Collection, Berea College, Tale 32e, “Rawhead and Bloody Bones.” Nora Morgan Lewis was an aunt of Jane Muncy, from whom Leonard Roberts recorded a version of the tale, cited above. Jane Muncy reported hearing many stories from her grandmother, Nora Morgan Lewis’s mother. Notes at the end of the Lewis manuscript state, “It is a story passed down from many generations and told to the children, especially at family gatherings and events such as July 4th or Christmas.”
To learn more about the storytelling traditions in the family of Jane Muncy and Nora Morgan Lewis, see works by folklorist Carl Lindahl listed in the bibliography. Lindahl’s book in progress about the life and work of Leonard Roberts, tentatively titled One Time: The Kentucky Mountain Folktale World of Leonard Roberts, will also contain information about Nora Morgan Lewis and Jane Muncy.
4. The rawhead and bloody bones characters from the well are sometimes called bloody heads, sometimes bloody skeletons, but the visual image is consistently of a raw, bloodied head and bones, except in the Couch version, where this role is played by little foxes laying in the road. Many people also use “rawhead and bloody bones” as synonymous with the “boogyman” that will get you if you don’t behave. Before encountering the phrase in this story, that was the only way I’d heard it used. However, the rawhead and bloody bones in this story struck me as powerful but—as voiced by the various recorded storytellers—not especially terrifying or even threatening.
5. Leonard Roberts Collection, Berea College, LR OR 016, Track 7, “Rawhead and Bloody Bones,” recorded from Patricia McCoy, age eighteen, from Hyden, Leslie County, Kentucky.
1. Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, 258 (source note), 198–202 (“Kate Crackernuts”).
2. Lang, “English and Scottish Fairy Tales,” 289–312 (“The Story of Kate Crackernuts,” 299–301).
3. Dallas Morning News, “Jury Convicts Mom of Hiring Hit Man in Cheerleader Case,” September 4, 1991; Kennedy, “Cheerleader’s Mother Guilty in Murder Plot,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1991; Koidin, “ ‘Cheerleader Mom’ Freed After Serving Six Months,” Texas News, March 1, 1997.
4. See the note 4 in “Little Ripen Pear” for information on Laura Simms.
5. Candy Kopperud heard “Kate Crackernuts” at a two-day storytelling course she coordinated and co-taught with me at Palmer Public Library in 2001. Participants had received copies of my outline, time line, and map in advance as examples for their own workshop preparations. At the end of the course, they wanted to hear the story told.
6. The mother was not jailed the entire time. Koidin reported that the mother “served six months of a 10-year sentence” and “initially was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1991. That conviction was overturned when it was discovered a juror was on probation.” Smith reports, “On September 9, 1996, a month before her second trial was to begin, she pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.”
1. Umang Badhwar, correspondence with the author. The story arrived as one note in a packet of thank you notes from the Thompson students given to me by her teacher, Mrs. Frona Foner. A subsequent letter from Umang Badhwar to me is postmarked May 19, 1986.
2. Mohanty, “What God Allows Is for Man’s Good,” Folk Tales of Orissa, 84–86. Folk Tales of Orissa is the fourth volume in a twenty-volume series of folk tale collections from various places and people of India, published by Sterling Publishers.
3. Mohanty footnotes Savaras as “An aboriginal tribe of Orissa. The Savaras are great hunters” (85).
4. Mohanty, Folk Tales of Orissa, 13.
5. Email correspondence with Umang Badhwar, November 20, 2011.
6. The version of the story I received in the mail from Umang and reprint in this book, was her translation of the story from her first language, Hindi, into her second language, English. She not only translated the story when she was thirteen, but she also retold it simply so I would be able to grasp the basic plot.
7. Phone call with Umang Badhwar, November 27, 2011.
8. Umang Badhwar explained her understanding of the story in a phone call with me on November 27, 2011. She also observed that whenever she tells the story to her brother’s children, she always begins with wording like, “Once upon a time there was a king in India,” and then she describes the grandeur of his palace so her listeners will know he is truly a powerful and wealthy king.
9. Email correspondence with Umang Badhwar, November 20, 2011.
10. According to family genealogy records, my first ancestor to die in Kentucky was George Edelen, born in Maryland in 1760 and died in Kentucky in 1809. The first to be born in Kentucky was Nelson Claycomb, born 1811 to parents born in Virginia. The last to be born outside the United States was either Daniel Foushee, born in France in 1775, or his son William Foushee, a great-great-great-great-great grandparent, who was born 1795 in an unknown place and died in Kentucky in 1860. In addition to strong Kentucky ties, I also have strong ancestral ties within Meade County and neighboring Breckinridge County. I must go back to my great-great grandparents to find an ancestor who was not born in one of those two counties.
11. Lane, Picturing the Rose, 9.
1. MacDonald, The Storyteller’s Sourcebook, 285.
2. One print variant of the tale I suspect I had read and barely recalled that long ago day was “The Counting of the Crocodiles,” in Courlander, The Tiger’s Whisker, 87–89. This version is a Japanese folktale. Courlander refers to other Asian variants in his notes.
Another was “Why Rabbit Has a Short Tail,” in Leach, How the People Sang the Mountains Up, 69. In her notes Leach cites A. H. Fauset, Negro Tales From the South, published in 1925, and discusses other variants.
I suspect these are the variants I had read because these sources were part of the folktale collection in the children’s department of the Grand Rapids Public Library.
3. “One, two buckle my shoe” is in #385 in Opie and Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 333. They cite many sources from the 1800s and state the rhyme was in use as early as 1780 in Wrentham, Massachusetts. Versions described include counting going up to twenty and thirty.
4. My first audiocassette, The Winter Wife and Other Stories, recorded in 1988, included both “Rabbit and the Alligators” and “Jeff Rides the Rides,” told in the Family Tales and Personal Narratives section of this book. I later released “Rabbit and the Alligators” on my CD Alligators, Bees, and Surprise, Oh My! Folktales Revived! a compilation of several previously recorded tales from my early audiocassettes. The CD won a 2010 Honor Title Storytelling World Award in the Storytelling Recordings category.
1. Montell, Don’t Go Up Kettle Creek, 8.
2. Lee, “Folk Narrative,” 337.
3. I understand that the story is not the same as the experience. While the experience is actually lived, the story of the experience is created or made up. Even though transforming an experience into a story may involve embellishment or reshaping, the resulting story is still essentially true. In my family, when we say, “You made that up,” in response to something we’ve just heard, we mean the person is not telling the truth, but is instead attempting deception.
1. Uncle Sammy went to Flaherty Elementary, in Meade County, Kentucky.
1. To learn more about the Meade County Fair, see note 11 from “Some Dog” or visit www.meadecountyfair.com. Also, the fair does not take place in August, but in July. In the telling, Jeff’s annoying us from April to August simply sounds better than his annoying us from April to July.
2. I recorded this story on my first audiocassette, The Winter Wife and Other Stories, in 1988. I recorded it a second time for my Some Dog and Other Kentucky Wonders CD in 2001. It ran five seconds shorter the second time around, and no, I haven’t attempted to figure out what changed!
3. This is not the only story Jeff used in his vocal music classroom. Early in each school year Jeff also told his students about the time he, our other brothers, and our father were in the tobacco barn, stripping tobacco, and Daddy asked them how they would manage to run the farm if he died. Jeff replied that he would climb the silo so he could see what other nearby farmers were doing, and the next day he would do that. Of course, climbing a silo has nothing to do with singing, so his students thought they were just being entertained instead of working when he told that story in chorus class. However, in a chorus it is very important to listen to those singing around you. After a student missed a chorus class, all Jeff needed to say was “climb the silo” and the returning student knew to listen to other singers in the same vocal section to learn missed material.
1. The story appeared on my CD Some Dog and Other Kentucky Wonders.
2. Munds and Millett, The Scenic Route, preface. Learn more about Storytelling Arts of Indiana at www.storytellingarts.org. Some of you may question whether Kentucky can be considered a midwestern state. In the A Kentucky Journey exhibit at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, there is a display which talks of Kentucky’s role as a border state during the Civil War. It concludes with, “The debate over Kentucky’s regional identity continues today. Some geographers classify Louisville and Covington as midwestern cities. Others identify the state as southern on the basis of cultural characteristics. Kentuckians surveyed in 1988 identified themselves as southerners, but respondents in states to the south did not include the commonwealth in this region.”
3. Medway Elementary is in the Tecumseh Local School District in New Carlisle, Ohio. I told stories at the district schools in 1993, 1994, and 1996. I’m not sure which year I told the story. Many thanks to the current library aides at Medway and Donnelsville Elementary Schools, Jo Ruiz and Helen Mullins, for using my fifteen-year-old memory of a school library configuration to help me identify the specific school in which I overheard this conversation.
4. When time and circumstance permit, I’ll often talk after programs with audience members I’ve seen chanting along to learn where they heard the rhymes. The jump rope rhyme is known well beyond Kentucky, but the first grade babies rhyme has so far been familiar mostly to women who attended Catholic elementary schools in the Owensboro, Louisville, and Bardstown areas of Kentucky. While I did not attend a Catholic school, I did attend a public school in an overwhelmingly Catholic community and Ursuline nuns were among the teachers at my school. Now, I’m not saying the Ursuline Sisters taught the first grade babies rhyme to children; I’m only saying the common threads I’ve found most prevalent among the women from my audiences who grew up with that rhyme are Kentucky and Catholicism. My observations are far, very far, from a scientific study!
5. The Cherokee Rose Storytelling Festival took place in Carrollton, Georgia. I told there in October 1990 and again in September 1996. I’m not sure which year I met Tersi Bendiburg. Tersi has told stories all her life, and professionally since 1993. You can learn about Tersi’s Cuban background, her storytelling experiences, and her programs at her website: www.tersibendiburg.com.
1. Petro recounts her time spent talking with me and my parents (302–317). She titled that chapter “The Farmer’s Smart Daughter” and she intersperses my telling of that tale, also in this book, with her experiences on my parents’ Hidden Spring Farm.
2. In her Storytellers’ Research Guide, Judy Sierra comments, “I believe that people share information with me during a formal interview that they wouldn’t share during a simple conversation. The situation evokes a sense of history that leads people to remember long-forgotten events, and to have new insights” (68). So, perhaps this insight was new to my father during that interview, or perhaps he had long been aware of his intent but never saw the need to mention it before.
3. Zeitlen characterizes these types of family stories as stories of innocents. He compares them to traditional tales and jokes about fools and says they are often told about children, noting, “A child’s solution to a problem often seems comical to us, yet forgivable and charming because it makes perfect sense from the young person’s point of view” (52). He adds, “Sometimes these stories are told to teach a lesson, to tease a child or an absent-minded adult into changing his behavior, and thus resemble moral or cautionary stories. But perhaps more often, the celebrated mistake is so much the product of a child’s stage of life, or an adult’s established way of thinking, that the tales are just playful and forgiving. We don’t laugh at these innocents derisively, but gently. . . . We all do them [the actions told of in the stories], succeeding most of the time, but failure is inevitable” (52–53).
4. Mount Saint Joseph Academy for girls was founded at Maple Mount, near Owensboro, in Daviess County, Kentucky, on August 14, 1874, by the Ursuline Sisters. Postgraduate courses to prepare young women to take the state teachers’ exam began in 1894, and the Mount Saint Joseph Junior College was established in September 1925. By 1929 Mount Saint Joseph Junior College was a member of the American Association of Junior Colleges and the Southern Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges. My great aunts would have attended during the mid- to late 1930s. In 1950 the location of the college was transferred to Owensboro, and the name was changed to Brescia College, now Brescia University.
5. Mama Ham was my great-grandmother, Lena Frances Ritchie Hamilton. My father’s parents, Robert Francis Hamilton Sr. and Alice Elizabeth Bunger Hamilton, raised their family on a farm between both their parents’ farms, near Big Spring in Meade County, Kentucky, so my father had the opportunity to hear family news directly from his grandparents.
6. This came from an April 22, 2011, phone call with my parents, Martha Jane Hager Hamilton and Robert Francis Hamilton Jr., after they read a draft of this chapter.
7. This detail came from a May 23, 2011, phone call with my cousin, Charlie Hamilton. Both Charlie and Dale Hamilton are sons of Lamar Hamilton, an older brother of Mary Helen Hamilton Ferrara. Lamar’s family lived in Jefferson County, Kentucky.
1. My mother’s mother, Lillian Clara Medley Hager, lived in Meade County, Kentucky. Because I had four grandparents, four great-grandparents, and two great-great-grandmothers when I was born, none of them were known to me by the more common grandma, grandpa, or other grandparent titles. As a result, I grew up knowing the given names of most of my grandparents.