Laugh-Makers Variety Arts Magazine
Story/Interview by Cathy Gibbons
, knew they
were happiest telling stories when, in 1975, they left
their jobs at the Chattanooga Public Library in Tennessee,
pooled their resources to come up with $2,000 between
them plus a pick-up truck with a camper named 'D'Put,'
and set off to 'live the life of storytellers." What
they didn't know was that they would be trailblazers in
the amazing storytelling Renaissance that has since swept
across America.
Connie: When we first started, we didn't
know of anyone else out there making a living as traveling
storytellers. The word 'storyteller' wasn't out there
yet. Sometimes we had to convince people to let us perform..
Barbara: We'd get to folk and music
festivals and tell them we were storytellers, and they'd
look at us and say, 'Well, I just don't know, we've
got a big crowd out there, ' and sometimes we would
have to tell them a story off to the side. We'd say, 'Here's
a little sampling,' and then we were hired from that
point on.
Connie: People just didn't know what
to expect.
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What audiences got from The Folktellers®
was the experience of listening to stories told with energy
and consummate skill by a duo that loves literature and
books and performing. Following the advice they give anyone
interested in telling stories, Connie and Barbara relied
on their own heritage and began building a performance
repertoire drawn from the broad Western European tradition
in general and from the wealth of Southern mountain and
Appalachian tales in particular.
For three years Connie and Barbara lived in their truck/
camper. 'D'Put" was office, home and prop room. Festival
organizers, friends, and listeners helped spread the word
about The Folktellers® and the "new'
art of storytelling captivating their audiences. Steadily,
a strong foundation was put in place. Ready to do odd
jobs on the road if necessary, Connie and Barbara never
had to do anything other than tell stories.
In 1978, they decided to settle in Asheville, North Carolina,
a beautiful place in the Western Carolina Mountains. A
feature story published about Connie and Barbara in the
School Library Journal, a highly respected
international magazine, unleashed an overwhelming response.
Readers wanted to know more about storytelling. They wanted
to do it too. And they wanted to book The Folktellers®.
Within 6 months over 1,000 letters requesting more information
had landed in Connie and Barbara's hands. Over the next
seven years these intrepid ladies traveled the length
and breadth of North America and performed as well in
Europe and Asia. Now, however, they logged their travel
miles on planes and no longer slept in the camper.
Generous with their knowledge and aware of people's growing
hunger for stories and for telling stories themselves,
Connie and Barbara became founding members with organizer
and good friend Jimmy Neil Smith, of NAPPS
(The National Association for the Preservation &
Perpetuation of Storytelling). They served on the
Board of Directors for ten years and helped shape the
Festival and resources that have given direction to so
many storytellers working today.
Connie: Today when you mention storytelling
to people they say 'Oh, I read about that in Parade
Magazine," or "I've seen that on public
television,' or 'I heard a storyteller."
That's the major difference between today and when we
started. People are just ready for stories. Did you know
that now there are over 1,000 people who make their living
telling stories all over the country? And there are lots
more than that who actively do storytelling in their communities....
Barbara: Everywhere we go we hear about
groups getting together, very informal, once a month,
and having a pot luck and then telling stories afterwards.
It is exciting.
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As storytelling awareness kept growing over the past
decade and a half, The Folktellers® continued
evolving as artists. Since 1982, they have produced six
wonderful tapes of their stories. Three of them have been
honored by the American Library Association as
ALA Notable recordings, most recently in 1993 when The
Folktellers®’ tape was one of just 28 (including
work by Robin Williams, Max Von Syndow, and Arlo Guthrie)
chosen from the 400 submitted.
In 1985, Barbara and Connie co-wrote and produced a 2-act
play called Mt. Sweet Talk. They worked with
their friend JOHN BASSINGER, a talented
writer, director and actor and one of the founders of
the National Theatre for the Deaf, and with his
daughter SAVANNAH, and have described the project as a
true 'creative leap." Initially, planning to put
together a two-woman show with powerful, polished transitions
between stories, Mt. Sweet Talk actually became
a fully scripted play with strong female characters, Sarah
and Jenny Rose, played by Barbara and Connie.
Instead of telling about mountain characters and their
lives, they became the characters on stage. The underpinnings
of the script were the stories Barbara and Connie had
been telling meshed with their own family history. They
also worked with the devices theatre offers - lighting,
sets, and more blocking and stage movement than storytellers
usually utilize. Connie and Barbara's husbands, Phil Blake
and Mike Vaniman, helped immeasurably with technical theatre
work and advice.
Mt. Sweet Talk ran every summer for eight seasons
at the Folk Arts Center near Asheville receiving rave
reviews from magazines like Southern Living
and shows like Good Morning America.
1994 marks the first summer without Mt. Sweet Talk.
It will be missed.
It was a beautiful spring day dripping with dogwood in
the Carolina mountains when I finally got to hear Connie
and Barbara, in person, tell stories to an auditorium
filled with kids. Their voices, melodious and rhythmic,
crafted words into stories like master quilters piecing
fabric into well-chosen designs. The children were enthralled,
laughing uproariously at the funny parts and then quiet,
intent and absorbed during more serious tales. It is a
joy to experience artists who are so good and skilled
at what they do. I also enjoyed discovering that, along
with their individual talent, The Folktellers®
have the elusive chemistry that makes a duo great. You
can't buy it or plan it, it simply is.
"...with artful direction
they lure us into that distant inner space, revealing
in us depths of joy and terror, hilarity and grief...
one minute we feel the pangs of regret or denial, envy,
revenge, even the chill hand of death... in the very next
story we luxuriate in the rib-bursting laughter of a mountain
Jack Tale... it's all part of – the storytellers'
magic.”
Barbara Home Stewart
writing about The Folktellers in School Library Journal
(11/89)
They had a little time to talk after their
assembly, and following are some more excerpts from our
conversation.
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LM: What is tandem telling,
and how did you develop it?
Connie: It's working as a duo. We didn't
plan on doing tandem telling, it just happened...
Barbara: ... in a parking lot the first
week we were out on the road. One of the little children
ran over and looked at all the stuff we were taking out
of our truck and said, “What are you all doing?
"... 'We're storytellers!”..."Well
tell me a story!”... and Connie told him Three
Billy Coats Gruff and then another one of the
kids said, 'Tell Where the Wild Things, Are!”
Well, we didn't have the book with us but we knew it
from when we used to tell it as a picture book in the
library so . . . 'that night Max wore his wolf suit
and made mischief of one kind and another . . .
Connie: . . . and his mother called
him . . .
Barbara: . . . Wild Thing!”
It was like ping pong and the kids loved it and we thought,
“Great!"
Connie: There is a group of performers
from Kentucky called Appleshop and they had taken
a lot of old mountain stories and four or five of them
would tell them, chinning in on different things. That
was kind of in our minds, but, still, it was that parking
lot story that launched our tandem telling.
Sometimes
we talk about tandem telling in our workshops. We encourage
people, especially newcomers, to take a story that has
more than two parts or two characters and kind of go back
and forth with it rather than necessarily trying to do
things like saying the action words together because I
think that really takes knowing each other's rhythms and
ways each other says things.
LM: I enjoyed the way you tell a story
together, and then each tell a story by yourselves, and
then come back and tell together again. The pacing is
excellent....
Barbara: We try to work it out where
we don't put a slew of funny stories together, a slew
of tender ones together, but, rather, go back and forth....
Connie: . . . and build them into a
whole concert. Unlike our play Mt. Sweet Talk
which has a definite script, we change our minds sometimes
once we get up there to do a storytelling concert because
we might see that a story has had special impact on an
audience. They may have taken it in a lot deeper, so we'll
have to give them something a little bit milder, and then
lead them into something real, real funny. So we change
our minds. We make a set list usually and put what we're
in the mood for and what we think will work by looking
at the audience. That's why we get to a concert or assembly
early enough to see what our audience seems to be composed
of age and personality-wise.
LM: What kind of repertoire do you draw
from? Do you have a trunk full of stories up here (points
to head)?
Barbara: Yes, we really do. When I wrote
them out one time we had about 35 tandems, and we've got
traditional packages of, say, our seven favorite stories
for little kids, our seven favorites for 4th, 5th and
6th graders, then our favorite little set of maybe four
longer stories for high school. For our family concert
we might have ten stories that we really love the most
if people have never seen us before. We always write down
the stories we tell so when we go back to an area or school
or theater, we can give them an entirely different program.
Then we have our second echelon team of another 10, 20,30
stories, and then we have the ones we can call on if we
go to do a weeklong residency. We have many, many different
stories, but you always have your top thirty that you
love to tell over and over again.
LM: We're listening!
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