Storytelling Festivals-An Ancient Artform

In 1973, the same year I gave birth to my first child, across the nation in a small 200-year old town in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, the love and the art of storytelling was reborn.

By happenstance, Jerry Clower, a Mississippi storyteller, leapt to the stage, "in a hot jammed high school gymnasium and told tales to more than a thousand East Tennesseans. They had come for some side-splitting humor in the tales that had made Clower a household name throughout the Deep South.

"The crowd stomped and cheered and didn't leave disappointed. The next afternoon, under a warm October sun, an old farm wagon in Courthouse Square served as a stage. And the storytellers were there. A former Arkansas congressman. A Tennessee banker. A college professor. A western North Carolina farmer. They told their tales and they breathed life into the first National Storytelling Festival."

"Something had happened, and even as people sat listening, they knew they would return the next year and the next. It was as if an ancient memory had been jogged-of people throughout time sitting together, hearing stories. They were taken back to a time when the story, transmitted orally, was all there was.

"Every October since 1973, thousands of travelers have visited Tennessee's oldest town. They come for one purpose-to hear stories and to tell them at the National Storytelling Festival. This celebration of America's rich and varied storytelling tradition, the oldest and most respected gathering anywhere in America devoted to storytelling, has in turn spawned a national revival of this venerable art," from the National Storytelling festival website.

From the left Brian Conroy, Angela Lloyd and Kendall Haven during the raffle of the "story quilt" at the 1994 Mariposa County Storytelling Festival. Picture by Ray Hunold.

I'd never heard about storytelling festivals before 1987. That was the year that I was in charge of tourism at the Mariposa County Chamber of Commerce and Jean DeYoung, our newly hired Executive Director, had this idea about putting on a storytelling festival to help boost tourism and traffic for this Sierra Nevada mountain hamlet that marks the southerly most entrance into Yosemite National Park.

"Storytelling festival-what's that?" I asked.

Jean held a masters in English and used to teach high school before venturing into marketing and non-profit business management; she knew about these things. Storytellers and Storytelling Festivals are well-known to librarians and English teachers. Outside that, the majority of people don't know about this ancient performing art that still takes place today all across the country.

In March of 1988, we held our first Storytelling Festival at the Bootjack Stompers Hall, a building that could sustain an audience of about 60. Our first master storytellers were Bob Jenkins, Gay Ducey, and Steve Sanfield. Neither Jean deYoung nor I and a handful of other stalwart Chamber volunteers would have imagined that 23 years later, the Mariposa County Storytelling Festival would still be going on. Only now it exists under the artistic wings of the Mariposa County Arts Council.

I think it was at this first festival that my love of oral storytelling cemented its roots into my heart. There is something deeply soothing when one sits at the feet of a master storyteller, the spotlight animating their expressions, the crowd hushed and expectant and breathing as one, hanging on every word that spills forward in the unfolding of the tale.

In its second year, we moved the festival over to the fairgrounds, which afforded bigger audiences and two stages. During the years at the fairgrounds, a PBS special was filmed and broadcast nationally.

The festival finally found its way to the Mariposa High School Auditorium where it is still held today. The high school, originally built in 1937 has an auditorium designed in the style of an old-time theatre complete with slanting floor, a raised hardwood stage and a thick red velvet curtain. It is the perfect place for a storytelling festival in good or bad weather.