Storytelling Festival Keeps Mountain Tradition Alive

John Roach
for National Geographic News

October 5, 2005

Long before the Internet, TV, movies, and radio, stories were told the
old-fashioned way—around a fire. Now an annual Appalachian festival devoted
exclusively to the art of storytelling is
striving to rekindle the flame.

"We want people gathering again to share their stories," said Jimmy Neil Smith, president of the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

The center organizes the annual National Storytelling Festival, which takes place this weekend. Started in 1973 as a way to attract tourists to Jonesborough, the festival now attracts the world's best raconteurs to regale crowds of some 10,000 people.

The tellers come to tell generations-old folktales, legends, and myths; they recite written stories word-for-word; and they sometimes relate modern personal stories about their own life experiences, Smith said.

The listeners come for the chance to participate in the world's oldest collective activity, according to Bil Lepp, a self-described "liar" from Charleston, West Virginia, who is a featured storyteller at this year's festival.

"The media we have today—TV and computers—actually have made people more aware of how much we need to do something very low-tech and very collective," he said. "Storytelling is one of the most collective activities people can participate in."

According to Smith, modern forms of media are a distraction to the time-honored tradition of sitting around the family table long after the dishes are cleared to tell and listen to each other's stories.

He hopes, however, that a revitalized storytelling tradition will lead to better movies. "Great movies are built around great stories," he said.

Good Stories Well Told

While it is important to acknowledge that everybody in their own right is a storyteller, Smith said, performance storytelling is an art form just like acting, singing, or playing an instrument.

"It takes not only natural talent but also constant refinement of the art," he said. "The more you perform the more you refine the performance and, further, the more you refine your story."

Lepp got his start as a storyteller in 1990 at the West Virginia Liars Contest. The grand prize was a hundred U.S. dollars and a scale model of a golden shovel.

"When I was 20 years old, a hundred dollars was half my annual income," he said.

He won the contest and has been honing his lying skills ever since. He said the secret to a good story is a grain of truth that stirs up an emotional reaction in the audience.

"To be good at storytelling you have to identify what the audience responds to and present the story in such a way that maximizes the audience's response, the audience's connection," he said.

The greatest reward, he added, is to tell a story he's worked on for six months to a year at the National Storytelling Festival and watch the audience respond, an honor he initially received through a stroke of "pure luck."

Five years ago he was selected as one of six lesser-known up-and-coming storytellers to participate in the event's Exchange Place, where regional tellers get 15 minutes to wow the audience.

"I got my fifteen minutes, and fortunately the audience responded well," he said. "So for the last five years I've become a nationally known storyteller. It's the most fortunate thing. I appreciate that people enjoy my stories so much."

Storytelling Revival

According to Lepp, the National Storytelling Festival has become the proving ground for the world's best storytellers. Since success at the event can make a storyteller's career—as it did for Lepp—tellers work hard throughout the year to perform well at the festival.

The result, he added, has been a revival in storytelling around the country, with festivals held throughout the year.

Smith, the International Storytelling Center president, said that most of these festivals can trace their origins to the national festival in Jonesborough.

"What we really did was ignite a revival, a renaissance, of interest in and appreciation for storytelling," Smith said.

According to Smith there are at least 200 full-time storytellers around the country and hundreds more who make it a part-time job. They speak at festivals, business seminars, schools, and anywhere else there is a need for community.

"What we are finding is people are seeing the wisdom of using storytelling as a tool to enrich their lives," he said.

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