Here's a sermon from the First Unitarian Church of Nashville that warrants retelling.
-Joe Offer-The Power of Story
Rev. William Metzger
November 28, 2004“In the place where the storyteller was, the coming of night was marked as it was not in towns nor in modern houses. It was so marked that it created in the mind a different rhythm. There had been a rhythm of the day and now there was a rhythm of the night.”
So it was that the Irish writer Padraic Colum described the mood and spirit of the time and place of the storyteller’s arrival on the scene. There was a time when the art of the storyteller was fitted to the daily tasks of life. Indeed, the Grimm fairytales and other stories popularized by storytellers were called household stories. In western Ireland the presence of a spinning wheel was a sign that a traditional storyteller could be found within.
The girls of the neighborhood would gather at such a cottage to do the spinning, and the storyteller was fetched to entertain them. Perhaps one of the few places where this practice still exists in some fashion is in Cuban cigar factories, where workers are entertained as they roll cigars by readers.
Of course it was not only the disappearance of such daily tasks that marked the near disappearance of the storytelling art. The development of lights for nighttime also played a part, because before the evening was lighted up, storytellers held forth as darkness came. Books and newspapers, and a decline in the household arts also contributed to the end of traditional storytelling in English cottages.
In 1984 I spent six weeks at the UU church in Huntsville, Alabama, as minister-on-loan. I took along a collection of The Jack Tales, intending to use one of them during my time there. These tales were assembled and retold by Richard Chase during World War II; they were first published in 1943. The stories, which Chase had gathered in the Appalachians, had roots in England and Ireland. Imagine my surprise when, on my first day in the Huntsville church, I found a newspaper clipping on the bulletin board about the noted storyteller Richard Chase. He was a member of that congregation!
Mr. Chase, a master storyteller and one of the foremost authorities on English and Anglo-American folklore, had collected several books of folk songs and singing games as well as folk tales. Another of his books is called The Grandfather Tales. These books were all originally published in the thirties and forties. When I met him in 1984, he was 90 years old and nearly blind; a young man helped him with his correspondence and brought him to church every Sunday, where he sat in the front row.
While I was in Huntsville, he turned 90, and someone baked a cake. We sang “Happy Birthday” to him and I told a Jack tale in the service. Afterwards, this charming and gracious man commented how he learned something new in my telling of the story of Soldier Jack. And he inscribed my copy of The Jack Tales: “for Sarah & Bill Metzger & David & Chris. Have fun! Uncle Dick.”
Richard Chase told how a great English folklorist, Cecil Sharp, had visited Mrs. Jane Gentry in Hot Springs, North Carolina during the First World War, and had recorded sixty English folksongs from her. What Cecil Sharp had not known at the time, and that Chase found out later, was that Mrs. Gentry also liked to tell what she called “the old Jack and Will and Tom Tales.”
Chase discovered the Jack tales himself in North Carolina, which seems to be the source of many folk story traditions—not only English and Irish-American, but black American stories as well, such as the Br’er Rabbit stories. Even today, some of the best storytellers come from North Carolina.
Marshall Ward told Chase about old stories his folks knew that had been handed down from generation to generation. Mostly these were about a boy named Jack and his two brothers, Will and Tom. This was the same Jack who climbed the beanstalk. As told in that region, it was called “Jack and the Bean Tree.” Jack came up against other giants besides the one up the bean tree; one time he hired out to the King to clear a patch of the Giants Newground.
Jack is a thoroughly European hero, like Br’er Rabbit a trickster, who overcome through quick wit or cunning rather than physical force. In Germany the character is called Hans, not Jack, and you can find him as well in Spanish-American stories.
Marshall Ward referred Chase to his Uncle Mon-roe, who had learned the Jack stories from his great-grandfather, Council Harmon, or “Old Counce” as he was called. Uncle Mon-roe-that is, R. M. Ward, was a Southern mountain farmer, descended from the earliest settlers in the southern Appalachians.
Mon-roe told how his grandfather “Old Counce was a sight to dance. He was just as good a church member as any of ‘em, but he just couldn’t [resist] music. Time anybody anybody would start in picking on the banjo, he ‘uld hit the floor; hit didn’t differ even if he was in church. Seventy years old, he could clog and buck-dance just as good as a boy sixteen. He knowed how to run reels, too . . . . But ever’ time he took part in such goings-on somebody would tell it on him and the next Sunday the preacher’d get after him again.”
The old storytellers could often stretch these stories out to about two hours in the telling. These of course were also the times when sermons could go on for two hours—and nobody complained.
The Jack tales were told on many occasions—sitting on front porches in the evening, perched on clods of dirt in tobacco patches, leaning on a rail fence after weeding the turnips, lounging on hay in the barn, and on cold winter nights in front of blazing fireplaces.
A practical use for stories was described by Mon-roe’s wife as “keeping kids on the job.” While stringing beans, stories kept the kids on task. Mrs. Ward told Chase, “We would all get down around a sheet full of dry beans and start in to shelling ‘em. Mon-roe would tell the kids one of them tales and they’d work for life!”
When I was a kid, growing up in South Dakota, when visiting my grandparents’ farm we had tasks, too. My Uncle Nick had stories to tell, and we would often sit on the porch and he would spin out his tales. They were almost always in rhyme. One of his shortest ones was this:
“Old Bill Green was a good old soul, as good as any man could be. He only swore when he got made, to show that he had piety. He only ate when he was hungry, he only slept when he had to yawn. But he stole four horses because he wanted to steal, so they hung him in the dawn. They hung him twice, and shot him full of lead, but the doggone fool was nowhere’s dead. So they filled gun full of dynamite and threw him over the bluff; he got mad and left the place, because he’d had enough.”
He had a much longer one, stringing together lines from many sources. It began with a bunch of the boys whooping it up in the Malamutes one day, while Little Muss Muffett sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. The Assyrian came down like a wolf in the fold, into the din and glare, and Little Bo Peep had lost her sheep and was hunting them here and there. Over the hills of Haversham and down through the Valley of Hall, he chased his brother over the lea, and shouted aloud, “Play ball.” Casey Jones appeared, and eventually struck out. Steamboat Bill was there; even Frank Roosevelt making fireside chat, and Lochinvar threw down his cup.
The story continued, on and on, increasingly convoluted, with gambling and a young woman crying “I’ve won, I’ve won,” whistling thrice, an old man declaring “You’ve won like hell, you’re rolling loaded dice.” Finally, many verses later, it ended thus: “The boy stood on the burning deck and watched the vessel sink. I then woke up and swore that I’d touch not another drink.”
This was all pretty frivolous, but folk tales—and storytelling generally—have much to teach. They entertain and occupy time spent in practical activities. But they also offer lessons for living.
The Grimm fairytales, for example, are a rich source of lessons. There is the wonderful story of the Frog King, for example. Perhaps you remember it. The King’s youngest daughter was “so beautiful that the sun itself, which had seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face.” One day she went into the forest to sit near a cool fountain. She was throwing her favorite plaything, a golden ball, into the air and catching it. But once the ball didn’t fall into her hand, but on the ground, and rolled straight into the water, vanishing as it sank to the bottom. She began to cry, louder and louder, until she heard a voice: “What ails you, King’s daughter?” She saw a frog’s big ugly head stretching out of the water.
“Ah, old water-splasher, is it you? I am weeping for my golden ball, which has fallen into the well.”
The frog offered to retrieve the ball, if she would agree in return to take him home to be her companion and play-fellow, and if he could sit by her at the table and eat offer her plate and drink from her cup and sleep in her bed.
She agreed, but not in good faith. After the frog retrieved her ball, she ran home and forgot all about him.
But the next day, as she sat at the table with her father the King, something came creeping splish-splash, splish-splash, up the marble staircase, and when it had got to the top, it knocked at the door and cried: “Princess, youngest princess, open the door to me.” She ran to the door, but when she saw it was the frog, she slammed the door and returned, frightened, to the table.
The King wanted to know why she was so upset, and she told him what had happened. “Well,” said the King, “that which you have promised must you perform. Go and let him in.” And so it developed that the frog ate from her plate and drank from her cup, but when he wanted to sleep in her bed she angrily threw him against the wall. But when he fell to the floor he was no frog, but a king’s son, and he had kind and beautiful eyes. He explained that he had been bewitched by a wicked witch and that only she, the princess, could have delivered him from the well. By her father’s will, he became her dear companion and husband.
The next morning they left for the young man’s kingdom in a carriage pulled by eight white horses, which had golden harnesses and white ostrich feathers on their heads. As they rode away, the King’s son heard a cracking noise behind him as if something had broken. His servant, Faithful Henry, had been so unhappy when his master was changed into a frog that he had caused three iron bands to be laid around his heart, lest it should burst with grief. Now the bands were breaking—and as each band broke the King’s son thought the carriage was breaking, but it was only the bands springing from the heart of faithful Henry.
In these stories, Padraic Colum has written, “human behavior is always in accordance with a fine ideal. A real faith in human powers is present. Happiness is possible, and compensation is due those who have been wronged. Envy and unfaithfulness are condemned and punished.”