By Rex Weyler
Folktellers Barbara Freeman
and Connie Regan
Once,"
says Barbara Freeman, face all alight with sun and wonder,
driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire on
a spring day in 1980, "long ago" - and so stories
have always begun, invoking a fundamental lore deeper
than any record, a mystery more profound and subtle than
any that could be captured by the relatively crude mechanics
of written and dated history - "there were two brothers...
Now, this is a true story..."
“Every story has some truth to it,”
adds Connie Regan, looking out the window, "although
some of the details may be lost or changed from culture
to culture. What makes a story a true story... Hey! Look!
Whoa, look at that purple coat'! Hey, Barbara..."
The car slides to a stop on a country road in front of
an old farmhouse with a big 
"Used
Clothes" sign out front. The two women disappear
into a barn filled with remnants and antiques from which
they will not emerge for an hour.
I sit in the sun scribbling notes, knowing
that the notes won't be much help later when I try to
figure this out. There's a mystery here. Connie Regan
and Barbara Freeman are storytellers, The Folktellers
by name, and their art is an ancient one, passed from
old tongue to young mind, from the fountainhead of culture
and history.
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Folk tales grew out of the rich tradition
that followed Homeric epics and ballads, Roman legions,
Viking raiders, and Gypsy lore throughout Europe,
giving rise to the Anglo -Saxon stories of Beowulf
and the Canterbury, Tales. From this same tradition
grew the Cymric school of bards in Wales and the
Gaelic school of ollamhs in Ireland. Storytelling
became a high art, and ollamhs the keepers of genealogy
and history; the techniques of composition and telling,
as well as tales themselves, were passed down from
master to apprentice.
To the seanachie, one of nine divisions
of ollamhs, fell the responsibility to keep and
transmit the historical tales. A seanachie apprentice
was required to learn 178 traditional stories of
common and royal history. The heroic sagas, or loidhes,
were metered, rhymed, and chanted by the seanachies
in the eerie Gaelic minor scale of five notes. The
seanachies, it is told, learned their skill for
song from the banshees, female spirits who wailed
warnings of death.
This tradition, alive with leprechauns,
elfin kings, heroes, and children, was brought to
North America by Irish immigrants during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Carried across the ocean
to the New World, the seeds of Old World lore took
root in the Appalachian Mountains, from Nova Scotia
to Alabama, and eventually spread throughout the
continent.
Ruth Sawyer, author of The Way
of the Storyteller (Viking, 1942; Penguin,
1977) was fortunate to grow up under the care of
one such traveler, her nurse, Johanna, who came
over from County Donegal in the 1880s. Becoming
a storyteller herself, Sawyer would one day write:
"Thrice blessed is that child who comes early
under the spell of the traditional storyteller,
one who holds unconsciously to the ancient and moving
power of her art. I was such a child. No fairy godmother
could have hung over my cradle with richer gifts
than Johanna, my Irish nurse. The blood of the old
seanachies ran in her veins.
"I can feel the comfortable
refuge of her lap. I can see her face, fairy- ridden.
I can hear the soft Irish burr on her tongue which
made the words join hands and dance, making a fairy
ring that completely encircled me."
Storytelling is a sacred art, a living
art passed on from teacher to Student, parent to
child, master to apprentice, through a shared experience.
Throughout her career Ruth Sawyer taught would-be
storytellers to honor the rich inheritance of the
art with "integrity, trust, and imagination."
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The Folktellers are cousins whose families
settled in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and
Alabama. As a young girl Barbara lived in Nashville, Tennessee,
while Connie's family moved to Florida, but they spent
the summers together riding horses, running through great
green fields of grass, swimming the river, and listening
to their fathers tell Irish jokes that had passed down
through the families from further back than anyone could
remember.
Barbara Freeman was born in Nashville on
November 2, 1944. "No one in my family really told
stories," she says, "but my father told jokes,
old ones, and I thought they were funny. Then one day
I saw Martha Raye on television, and I remember laughing
and thinking, 'That's great! That's what I want to do!"
I wanted to make people laugh, and I knew I could do it.
I knew that if I went and knocked on her dressing room
door, she'd hire me on. Then later I saw Lily Tomlin and
I realized that making people laugh was only part of it,
that it was also important what you said."
Connie Regan was born in Mobile, Alabama,
on January 20, 1947. "My father," recalls Connie,
"was a lover of the English language, and he told
Irish tales. I remember also being very impressed by Hal
Holbrook as Mark Twain."
Martha Raye? Hal Holbrook? Leprechauns?
These two women definitely weave a special magic in their
performances - Barbara always quick with a joke, Connie
able to still the rowdiest crowd with an eerie mountain
tale - but it isn't simple entertainment that they offer.
The mystery haunts me.
Boom! Out of the old barn like an explosion
twirls Connie in a new sky-blue skirt, and behind her
Barbara, with arms full, beams and chatters. "Owww,
what a lovely day! Chauffeur? Chauffeur? Quick, we must
hurry; there might be another antique shop down the road..."
We're on our way to Brattleboro, Vermont,
where The Folktellers are scheduled to perform at a coffeehouse.
I sit in the back seat, hot wind whipping in through the
windows, old brown wooden boxes with neat little brass
latches, unnamable artifacts of the road, dog-eared storybooks
falling from the pile of old clothes worn by who knows
who or how many healthy country women.
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"Connie and Barbara learned
something more important than the stories themselves:
they learned to love the telling..."
". . . So what makes a story true,"
continues Connie, surprising me, picking up right where
she left off as if the hour in the old barn had been only
an instant, or the whole thing had been a flash of imagination,
"are not the details, but something that lies under
the details, not like a 'moral' or a 'message' or anything
like that - a true storyteller never says, 'And the moral
of that story is. . .' - but something even deeper than
that. You see, it's like people always ask us, 'How did
you get into this?' Well, it's not really something you
decide to get into, it just sort of happens."
"Yeah," says Barbara, "it's
not like you say, 'Oh, I guess I'll go to college and
be a storyteller.' "
"So," I ask, a bit hesitantly,
"how did it happen?"
These
two quite remarkable women were once adventurous young
girls. Both traveled out west as teenagers to work and
to see what they could see. Connie worked as a, waitress
at the Broadmore Hotel in Colorado Springs, and Barbara
worked as a tour guide At Yellowstone National Park. Later
back in Tennessee, Connie joined Barbara at the Chattanooga
Public Library, where, in addition to many other duties,
they told stories to children. Barbara at the main library,
while Connie toured the daycare center's showing films,
performing with puppets, and telling stories as "Ms.
Daisy."
In the early '70s, after the country had
exploded in protest over the bombings in Cambodia and
the killing of students at Kent and Jackson State Colleges,
both Connie and Barbara joined and worked on the steering
committee of the Chattanooga chapter of the National Organization
of Women. "We toured clubs and organizations,"
says Barbara, "talking about women's rights. You
can imagine," she laughs, "the level of awareness
about women's issues in those days at the Chattanooga
Kiwanis Club or the Saratoga Sunrise Breakfast Club! Whew.
You know," she mimicked, hunching her shoulders and
snarling, “‘ask one of the girls at the desk
to help you.' "
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"We
learned that terminology is important," explains
Connie, "that words do make a difference. This carried
over later in our selection of stories."
It was at this time that they learned many
of the traditional and modern tales that still make up
a large part of their ever-growing repertoire. They also
learned something much more important than the stories
themselves: they learned to love the telling. Not reading,
but telling stories became a focus for their lives, a
duty, the one thing they loved to do, individually and
together.
In
1972 they took a trip to the Folk Festival of the Smokies
in Cosby, Tennessee. "This was the first time,"
recalls Connie, "that we had heard music presented
like this, at a gathering. The atmosphere was - amazing!
I have such a vivid memory of that feeling: that if there
was any way I could earn a living traveling around to
these festivals, I would do it. Anything!"
The following summer they went to the First Annual National
Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, North Carolina. "The
festival was organized by Jimmy Neil Smith," explains
Barbara. "He got the idea while listening to a story
on the radio, so the joke is that the National Storytelling
Festival was conceived in the back seat of a Chevy!"
That first storytelling festival was the
last time either of them would be just part of the audience
at any such gathering. The next summer, in 1974, Connie
went back to Jonesboro a month early to help set up the
festival grounds, to hang around and to see who she could
meet. Sitting by the campfire one night, someone asked
her what she did. The answer just burst out of her: "I'm
a storyteller. And, uh, so is my cousin Barbara - she's
coming up next week."
"Well,
you should tell some stories on stage," suggested
someone in the circle.
"Follow me!" said a lively woman
in a black cape who led Connie through the black night
like the embodiment of mystery itself. "My name is
Carolyn Moore; you should meet Jimmy Neil."
After they had talked for a while in his
office, Jimmy Neil reached down into a drawer and pulled
out a soiled manuscript. "You're just the woman I've
been looking for," he said, handing her the manuscript.
"Here, this story comes from Coffee Ridge. It's true;
it was written down by an old woman named Elizabeth Seeman.
Read it. If you like it, maybe you can tell it at the
festival."
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The
story, "Two White Horses',” was the most haunting
and powerful story that Connie had ever heard. After reading
it, she knew she would tell the story at the festival,
that she would be a storyteller, that she would tell stories
to adults as well as to children. She phoned Barbara and
told her to come to Jonesboro as soon as she could; they
were going to be on stage this year.
When it came time for them to perform, they
were too excited and determined to be nervous. They told
some of the children's stories that they had collected
at the library, some mountain tales that they knew, and
then Connie told "Two White Horses." There was
a magic in their performance, a balance, wit, charm, humor,
seriousness, they were a hit.
As they came off stage Jimmy Neil Smith
introduced them to Elizabeth Seeman, who had been in the
audience. "Well, Connie," said Elizabeth, seventy-
five years old, bright-eyed mountain woman, "you
did right well. Now, I may have written down those words,
but that is your story."
Back in Chattanooga, the two librarians
began to save their money. By July 1975 they had saved
$2,000, outfitted a Datsun pickup truck - nicknamed "D'Put"
- with a camper, quit their library jobs, and had taken
to the road. They hadn't had time to arrange bookings
for that first summer on the road, so they bought two
tickets to the Fox Hol- low Folk Festival in Petersburg,
New York, and headed north, figuring that something would
work out.
Arriving in Petersburg they pulled into the campground
and picked a good spot down by the river. The place was
jammed with people. How, they wondered, would they ever
find the festival organizers? The backstage area was fenced
off, and everybody and their dog was trying to get back
there. After the first day of the festival Connie and
Barbara went back to D'Put and went to sleep.
Connie awoke at 4:00 A.M.: someone was shaking the truck
and hollering: "The river is flooding. You folks
better get up!" Connie looked outside: little D'Put
was up to her hubcaps in water. "Barbara!" she
cried out, "the river's risin'! The river's risin'!
Barbara, wake up!"
"Oh," grogged Barbara, looking out, "Hum,
yeah, wow . . ." and she rolled over, back to sleep.
Connie got dressed and drove D'Put to high ground. A festival
worker met them at the top of the hill. "All you
people who got flooded out down by the river," he
waved to them, "come over here to the performers'
area where there's some room for you to camp." When
they awoke the next morning, they were out of the flood
and into a sea of fiddlers, pickers, singers, and folk
world heavies. "Wow," said Barbara, "what
happened?" Connie laughed, "You wanted backstage,
didn't you?"
That evening they sat around the campfire with some of
the performers and joined in the storytelling. "Hey,"
said a woman in the crowd, "you two should go to
Hartford! Caroline and Sandy Paton are going to have a
storytelling workshop there."
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So, later that summer D'Put chugged into the festival
parking lot outside Hartford, Connecticut. As the two
storytellers sat on the back of their truck, a crowd of
kids gathered around. "What do you guys do?"
asked one of the boys. "Are you musicians?"
"No," said Barbara, "we're story- tellers."
"Tell Where the Wild Things Are!"
"Well, okay," said Barbara, "but first,
open up your closets ... Creeeeak," as a dozen children
opened up their imaginary closets, "and put on your
wolf suits!"
“‘Cause that night Max had his wolf suit
on . . ." chimed in Connie. It was the first time
that they had ever told Maurice Sendak's story together,
though they had each told it to library children many
times. The tandem approach worked like magic: they traded
lines, acted the parts, howled, hooted, and held the children
spell-bound,
Sandy Paton managed to squeeze them into the program,
just before Gordon Bok, the well-known singer, songwriter,
and storyteller from Maine, was to appear. "Oh, my,"
thought Barbara, "we're gonna get tomatoed! These
people are waiting to hear Gordon Bok, and here we come,
total strangers." But the crowd loved them. They
told some mountain tales like "Wicked John and the
Devil," introduced Wild Things in their new style,
and left the stage under a thunder of applause.
Backstage, they were mobbed with job offers and suggestions
of people to meet. Bob Zentz invited them to the Old Dominion
Folk Festival in Norfolk, Virginia, and Bill Domler booked
them into a Hartford coffeehouse, the Sounding Board.
Domler took them in hand: he introduced them around, wrote
to people throughout the folk world recommending them,
and, for the coffeehouse date, took them to a photographer
who made their first flyer. Not yet "The Folktellers,"
- they called themselves "Barbara and Connie"
at one place and "Connie and Barbara" at the
next.
After Hartford they never again had to count on rivers
flooding to get backstage, their talents became well known
by word of mouth throughout the folk community. They played
a lot of middle sets and free shows that first summer,
and, after exhausting their savings, went back to North
Carolina for the winter. Meanwhile, their names flowed
along the grapevines of folkdom.
The following year they were back at Fox Hollow as performers,
and with a dry campground. They were paid $500 to present
a two-day workshop for the libraries of Kingsport, Tennessee;
they played the Smithsonian Folk Festival and the National
Bicentennial Folk festival in Washington, D.C.
They were flying to performances now. Though still not
making much money after, all their expenses, they were
breaking even and feeling good. They'd been blessed, getting
to do exactly what they wanted to do. With all their worldly
goods packed in their camper D'Put, they were free - or
so they felt till they got to Atlanta.
Returning to their camper after their performance at
the Atlanta Folk Festival, they discovered that D'Put
had been broken into, their belongings pilfered. Their
hearts sank as they stared into a ransacked, empty D'Put.
Gone was their money, tape recorder, tapes precious and
irreplaceable, personal journals, quilts, and their banjo.
"Ants!" screamed Connie. "Ants! They should
be buried up to their necks in the desert by an anthill,
with honey all over their heads. Thieves! They should
be eaten by ants."
Barbara grabbed her by the arm. "Hold on, it'll
be all right. There's nothing we can do about it now anyway.
Just calm down. It's all'right, we'll figure something
out." Barbara crawled in to check the damage, went
through what was left of their clothes, and discovered
that her overalls were gone. "My overalls! They took
my overalls! Ants! Ants! Ants!” They sat on the
back of poor D'Put and cried.
"...They were flying now. Though still not making
much money, they were getting to do exactly what they
wanted to do..."
But now they were really free - with no home, no belongings,
no money, just D'Put and their stories. It was a turning
point for them; they had to start all over, and they were
more determined than ever. They took a new name, "The
Folktellers," made it through the summer paying for
their travels with the small fees they earned, and returned
to Asheville poor and proud.
In 1977 they taught a credit course for Pace University
in Westchester, New York, and gave workshops for the Catholic
Library Association in St. Louis. When they performed
at Saint Bernard Academy, Barbara's Nashville high school,
they received a standing ovation, their first. It was
a big night for them, sort of a homecoming. Later, at
the thirty-sixth annual Chicago Folk Festival, they were
called back on stage for their first encore. They were
beginning to feel like professionals.
By 1978 they were doing 150 programs a year, including
workshops, festivals, high-school performances, library
story hours, concerts, and benefits. They were making
money now, and the world was opening up to them. That
summer they traveled north to the Winnipeg and Mariposa
folk festivals. At Mariposa they met a man who would introduce
them to an entirely new realm of storytelling, Ron Evans.
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Evans was a Métis, French and Chippewa Cree,
from northern Saskatchewan; he told traditional tribal
stories of the "Trickster Hero," the personification
of the Creator/Destroyer in Cree spiritual teachings.
He shared with the Folktellers ancient and historical
stories of his people, including the history of Luis Riel,
who fought the English for the liberation of the Métis.
He planted within their rich garden of lore the seeds
of Native American Indian culture.
The Folktellers' perspective was broadened further by
a trip to England in the summer of 1979 for the twenty-fifth
Sidmouth Folklore Festival: while in England they performed
at libraries, coffeehouses and pubs, picking up new tales
along the way. Then they returned to tour Texas, California,
and to attend the Rocky Mountain Healing Arts Festival
high in the Rocky Mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado.
It was here that I first heard them.
"Howdy, y'all," chuckled Barbara on the first
evening of the festival. "We're the Folktellers,
and we're from Asheville, North Carolina. Any y'all ever
been to Asheville? No? What's a-matter with you? Well,
that's all right.
"Anyway, I know you've come here to work on your
yoga and T'ai Chi an' all that, but I thought maybe I'd
catch ya up on the latest about ol' Dry-Fry - surely you've
all heard of ol' Dry-Fry, haven't ya? Eeeeeeverybody's
heard of ol' Dry- Fry!
"Well, Dry-Fry's an old preacher, but he's that kind
of preacher that only preaches for the," rubbing
her thumb and forefinger together in front of her nose,
"you know, the big bucks! Well, maybe you haven't
heard the latest about what ol' Dry-Fry's been up to,
so I'll tell ya. Last I heard, his bicycle'd come up missin,'
and ol' Dry-Fry was fit to be tied, lookin' for who it
was that stole his bicycle.
I sat spell-bound with the others in the room as the
two women told tales that made us laugh or gasp as the
mountain wind rattled the windows now and again through
the night - right on time, always, as if the tellers were
in touch with the elements themselves. I was sorry when
it was over; I wanted them to go on forever.
During the week that we spent in the mountains with
herbalists, physicians, musicians, psychics, therapists,
and healers of every persuasion I never once missed an
evening session of storytelling, and I felt most honored
to make the acquaintance of The Folktellers. They were,
among all the wonderful and richly gifted people there,
the one unifying factor, the most universally healing
influence, the one hand that reached out to everybody,
mystic and scientist, young and old. Their touch was deep.
One night toward the end of the week, after stories,
we sat in the moonlight late and talked. "This is
a good experience for us," said Connie. "We
don't meet these kinds of people at folk festivals and
libraries. It's very different; I'm learning a lot about
a whole new way of thinking. I can see a tie between what
we are doing and the whole idea of healing, of wellness.
"It's like Ron Evans told us: Stories are sacred;
you have to treat them with respect. Ron says that when
you let your breath out - when you talk, tell a story
- you are letting your children out of your body, you
are releasing your children. That means that you have
to be very careful, you can't just let your children out
anywhere under any circumstance.
"As we travel, we can see the moods of people. We
just try to share something positive and loving."
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Passing now through Hillsboro, New Hampshire, heading
southwest to the Connecticut River (it has been a year
since we waved goodbye in the Colorado Rockies), I am
beginning to understand what Connie and Barbara mean by
the truth and sacredness of stories; I am beginning to
sense the significance of the storyteller in this modern
culture dominated by giant entertainment industries, where
a story is judged by its box-office receipts or Nielson
ratings.
We've just come from a librarians' workshop held in
North Conway, New Hampshire. There the Folktellers stood
before a buzzing assembly of librarians, young and old,
from towns and cities throughout New Hampshire, and told
"The Brave Little Hunter," a participation story
for young children. As they listened, a hundred librarians
slapped their laps, swam imaginary rivers, sloshed through
mud, saw a deer, got frightened by a bear, and scurried
back, double-time, past deer, through mud, river, forest,
and safely back to their cabin.
After performing, Connie and Barbara had talked to the
librarians about the art that had become so central to
their lives.
"There is an important difference between
telling a story and reading a story out of a book,"
Connie explained. "By putting the book down, you
open up the imagination of the child, you let them draw
the pictures with their fertile minds. As children get
older, storybooks lose their appeal, they think it is
something for little kids, but you can still capture their
imagination by telling stories."
"We suggest," offered Barbara,
"that you learn the modern stories word for word,
and learn them well. Traditional stories change and vary
from place to place, but if you make changes in them,
do so with a gentle hand. Remember, stories are very subtle:
it is only after many years, sometimes, that we see the
meaning and get a sense of why a story is told a certain
way."
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"The most important thing to remember
in learning stories to tell," said Connie, "is
that you must love the story. Don't try to learn a story
that you don't really like; it is useless. You must love
the story so that the story can become a part of you.
Thus, it always gains something in the telling because
you have put your heart into it. Once you learn a story
well - you may have to read it over fifty times - you
will always have that story with you; it is something
that you will carry with you all your life.
"And remember," she added, "as
we storytellers get older, we only get better. The stories
grow inside us; we become more credible, more subtle,
wiser, and the stories gain in richness. As an eighty-
three-year-old storyteller from Michigan told us, 'If
you learn just one new story a year, by the time you're
my age you'll know a lot of stories, won't you!'"
From North Conway we have traveled east
along the Swift River and over Kancamagus Pass in the
White Mountains. We drove south along the Pemigewasset
to the Merrimack River, singing, telling jokes, and ancient
tales of how the sea got its salt, how dogs came to hate
cats, how big man Jack killed seven in a whack, and -
and this is a true story - how two young country girls
of Irish blood rose on a flood of ancient lore to become
storytellers, magicians of emotion, jugglers of smiles
and tears, reminders of what is precious in these loud
and electric decades of the late twentieth century.
In Brattleboro, Vermont, on Friday, May
16, 1980, I sit in the shade of a blossoming crabapple
tree with The Folktellers - our last chance to talk before
their evening performance at the Chelsea House. I ask
them about their performances, their balance of humor
and seriousness.
"At first," confesses Connie,
"I was uptight about Barbara's jokes. Sometimes I
thought it was too much, sometimes during a performance
when everybody was laughing, I felt real bad. There was
too much of a polarity, I felt - it was going away from
storytelling. I struggled with these feelings."
Barbara: "People would tell Connie,
'Let Barbara go, don't hold her back,' but it was necessary
for us to struggle to find the balance. Connie would get
people in a certain mood, and then I'd always break it
with some one-liner, but you have to be careful. Jokes
are okay, but I found that I had to use restraint. What
we have now works, but if we get too far from the harmony,
we have discord, we lose the magic."
Connie: "Maintaining a mood is
important. It has been painful sometimes, working for
the right balance, but we always knew we could do it."
Barbara: "People love to laugh,
but they also love to feel things, to feel sincerity or
intensity. Scary stories for instance, are not really
for the scariness, but for the tapping of emotion. People
really like those stories, it makes them feel good."
Connie: "Real sharing is the sharing
of deepest human experience - sharing of emotions, the
whole range. If you only laugh, you have nothing to compare
your laugher to; if you only love, you have nothing to
compare your love to. It is necessary, if we are to grow
emotionally, that we learn to see the many sides of our
inner selves, to share those inner feelings and urges,
because they reflect what is really essential, not only
to our personal growth but also to our collective cultural
growth."
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The Folktellers return to the Chelsea House; I wander
through town to the west bank of the Connecticut River,
where I find a weather-white log suitable for sitting
and thinking. I recall how D. H. Lawrence warned that
the twentieth century would "bury the delicate magic"
of its cultural heritage; how Carl Jung admonished modern
humankind as "poor in spirit because they no longer
live a symbolic life."
At the same time that we're experiencing an electric
information explosion which is maybe invidiously, sometimes
benignly, or even adroitly and gloriously global, there
is an organic, nourishing implosion happening, a movement
toward sustainable, decentralized survival and wellness
of person, community, and culture. Storytelling reemerges
in this environment to reclaim its place as a personal
and cultural healing force. Cultural media either run
deep or they run dry; the river outlives the state. 'Styles,
fads, network stars, electric flashes of instant global
identity are simply not the stuff of which culture is
made. Culture is simply that - culture: it grows; it is
organic. And the oral transmission of knowledge, of behavioral
styles, of truth - "Every story has some truth to
it" - lives and flourishes because it involves an
organic process: the knowing, telling, hearing, and visualizing
of information.
As the Irish storyteller Ruth Sawyer writes in The Way
of the Storyteller - "Memory is a pleasant and profitable
performance of the mind, so is intellectual appreciation.
These as compared to the imagination, however, are but
pale and sterile. It is your imagination I would conjure,
and your emotions, to touch your heart, so the mind may
know."
That evening the Chelsea House is abuzz with excitement.
Local musicians play and sing while the Folktellers listen
and wait graciously for the stage. Then, taking the stage,
they slowly begin to weave their special magic. As the
evening passes, we, the listeners - held in trance, dashed
with a joke, then stirred with wonder and excitement -
grow finally quiet as we hear the story of the Mountain
Whippoorwill, of the fiddler who fiddled 'til he cried,
and the old fiddler who grew too sad to play after losing
his young bride. And when they finish with their last
great tale, we explode and applaud them back on stage
for one more story.
Well, they decide to tell an old story of a mother whale
who lamented for her young. As I wait in the dark for
the story to begin, Connie calls me up to the stage, saying:
"Do you have your flute? Can you play a whale singing
for this story?"
"Uh, sure," I say, though my stomach feels
weak and I'm nervous to be stepping up on a stage to play
before people, even with the cover and help of the Folktellers.
But I do it, pulling a chair to the side and a little
behind in the dark, and they began their tale. When they
come to the part about how the mother whale breathed,
I make a little breathing sound through the bamboo flute,
and when they come to the part about how she cried, I
try to forget all about the people and the stage, so I
close my eyes and there imagine as best I can a real crying
mother whale; I can feel the cry swell up from deep inside,
and I know that these Folktellers are giving me a lesson,
teaching me to share something, and though I feel a little
scared, I blow real soft and hear the whale cry fill the
room. I feel suddenly close to everybody; then it is over.
Outside in the dark night the moon has already fled
the starry sky, but Jupiter still chases Mars, and way
over in the east, Saturn awaits them both. Under all of
this we hug and - feeling a little silly and embarrassed
- say how much fun we've had and how sorry we are to be
splitting up. We dance a bit and swing in the road holding
hands, laughing. I drive off toward the city, singing
to myself all night on the road.
That was the last I saw of them, jumping and dancing
and waving in the moonlessness, but from what I hear folks
tell, they are still a-wanderin' and doin' right well.
The Folktellers will appear at the following
festivals the summer of 1981:
July 18-20: Vancouver Folk Festival, Vancouver RC
July 22-24: Black Hills Survival Gathering, Rapid City
SD
August 8-10: Augusta Folk Festival, Augusta GA
August 22-24: Philadelphia Folk Festival, Philadelphia
PA
October 3-5: National Storytelling Festival, Jonesboro
TN
For further information on these and other events, contact
the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation
of Storytelling, 116 West Main, Jonesboro TN 37659.
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“...
‘Stories are sacred. As we travel, we can see the
moods of people. We just try to share something positive
and loving’ ...” 
