Storytelling and Recitation
Oral Traditions: Context and Background
A friend of a friend told me . . . . Traditional stories are passed down orally, told as truth or told as fiction. Traditional
narrative forms include folktales, myths, epics, legends, parables, and personal experience narratives. Accepting an
expanded version of reality, we add to the list tall tales, stylized boasts, and urban legends. Myths are usually set in a
remote past with characters such as gods and goddesses who have extraordinary powers. Myths often include origin
stories explaining such mysteries as how the world was formed. Folktales occur in an imaginary time and place and are
peopled by fairies, princesses, magic helpers, and talking animals. Legends are stories told as true in which the action
purportedly happens to real people in real places in the recent past. Anecdotes, tall tales, numbskull stories, and modern
joke cycles are often humorous in content and function in part as entertainment. Ballads function as stories in song. Like
legends, they are often based on historic events or people. Oral histories bring together personal experience stories about
a person's life, family history, occupation, social and economic era.
Narrative themes in oral tradition derive from universals of human experience; yet at the same time, stories are tied to
particular groups, reflecting the values, beliefs, and life histories specific to those groups. The spoken word, as the
province of each of us, is layered with semantic symbols and narrative styles, the linguistic legacy of distinct regional and
cultural communities. Seen as contemporary and local, familiar oral narrative patterns (including dialect, lexicon, and
recitation forms) are sometimes devalued as merely slang, colloquialisms, or street talk; yet are rich resources of linguistic
facts and cultural knowledge. The boasting, toasts, and dozens of Black Americans, for instance, are examples of
complicated systems of spontaneous invention and memorization skillfully brought into play within the boundaries of
formal linguistic rules.
Occupational narrative is illustrated by oral narratives of working cowboys. For more than a century, cowboys have
composed poetry and more recently tell poems that express the emotions, rigors, history, and characters of ranch and
cowboy life. These stories are molded into patterns of short, metrically tight, rhymed verses typical of nineteenth century
literary poetry. A conventional form emerging at meals, roundups, and in the bunkhouse since the Civil War, the tone of
cowboy poetry is upbeat, sentimental, humorous, or lightly ironic, and often bawdy.
Storytelling style is a matter of wide variation. Storytellers in Missouri Performing Traditions are those with knowledge of how it used to be, or those knowing the anecdotes, history, and boasts of their communities. Some collect stories from
living resources, elders whose knowledge is in danger of being lost; others combine personal stories with the repertoire of
the written cultural inheritance of their ethnic homeland. An individual's style might be the unselfconscious presentation as
Vance Randolph described Ozark ballad singers, those whose narratives flow naturally into everyday communications.
Others, create a dramatic presentation by borrowing vocal and movement techniques of theater.
The City Feller
Well you live in the city/ya drive a big shiny car
It's got TV in the back/and a little wood bar
Ya got a thin Rolex watch/and big diamond rings
Solid gold chains and other nice things
Ya wear Luchesse boots and thousand dollar hats
Silk western shirts and Cutter Bill pants
You got a huge house with plenty of yard
The maid and the butler and gardener work hard
But late in the night when you're setting alone
And the maid, the butler and gardener have gone
Well your thoughts start to wander and you'll wish you could be
A hard workin', underpaid cowboy . . . like me.
-Martin J. Bergin
Program Offerings:
Gannon Family program includes a recounting of their own bicultural experience in immigrating to St. Louis over thirty
years ago as they embraced the values of their new home while at the same time maintaining a sense of the old. Programs
are built around music and dance and vividly convey the motivation behind the Gannon's dedication to conserving the
expressive arts of Irish traditions. Active in St. Louis teaching, presenting, and organizing càilis, the Gannons preserve in
America the instrumental, song, and dance traditions of Ireland. Other established Irish oral traditions in these programs
include boasting, nonsense recitations, and humorous stories. Presenting artists: Helen and Patrick Gannon. (See also
music and dance)
COWBOY POETRY
The drama and drive of cowboy life related in the lyrical rhymes of poetry surprises those first
hearing cowboy poetry. Martin Bergin's gravelly voice and choice detail can hold audiences spellbound with the dramas
of cowboy life contrasted with touching scenes of cowboys in transition or the nostalgia of older cowboys for bygone
days. Topics cover explanations of regional differences between cowboys, family cowboy stories, ranch life, and
descriptions of the famous annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. Cowboy poets demonstrate the creative
process of traditional narrative forms as they address in poetry current issues for this occupation, such as portraits of
women cowboys, environmental concerns, and corporate ranching; and Bergin, as activist, urges audiences to support a
cowboy: "Eat a stake." Presenting artists: Martin Bergin and Clarence Schaffner.
AFRICAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES AND FOLKTALES
Family legends, personal experience stories, folktales, and collected oral histories make up the repertoire of Gladys
Coggswell. Many of these accounts date back to slavery, while others reveal the efforts of Black Americans from the
post Civil War era up to the present to attain an education, build self-sufficient communities, and fight for equal rights.
Gladys Coggswell shares her family stories and those she has collected from African American communities in Northeast
Missouri. Presenting Artist: Gladys Coggswell with additional presenting artists Debbie Swanegan and Vivian Hawkins.
Classic African and African American folktales and interpretations of African seasonal rituals are included the repertoire
of Imani and Kunama Mtendaji. As Taifa, they look for the lesson embedded in each story, giving their programs the
instructive purpose of cautionary tales. They explore meanings of proverbs and illustrate how we all use story in our
everyday lives. Using African musical instruments and working with movement, they emphasize the teaching aspect of
storytelling and inform listeners of the many cultural contributions from the African American heritage. Giving programs
for teachers, community leaders, or those learning storytelling skills, Taifa examines approaches for adapting the meanings
of folktales so that they speak to current concerns of families and the greater African American community.
Presenting
artists: TAIFA, Imani and Kunama Mtendaji.
NATIVE AMERICAN STORY AND DANCE
Native American animal stories, creation myths, and legends are
presented along with the accounts of tribal concerns, historic figures, and personal experiences. Explanations of social
customs, attitudes toward environment, animals, and spirituality help translate the aesthetic and value system of Native
Americans embodied in the folk tales. Presenters in full tribal regalia give audiences a chance to see splendid beadwork,
careful leather sewing techniques, and percussive jewelry used to enhance the dances.
Members of Eagle Talon Brotherhood set up an Indian drum, and tribal members and elders sit around the sacred drum
singing and beating rhythms for dances. Truman Coggswell tells of his own vision quest and demonstrates a gourd dance.
Programs hold a great deal of visual interest and humor and are followed by question and answer sessions. Presenting
artists: Preston Tonepahhote, Kiowa, and the Eagle Talon Brotherhood; Truman Coggswell, Schaugticoke; Nora Foutes,
Navaho- Ute.
OZARK STORIES
Ozark Stories, in their short, ironic, humorous form are unassumingly told by Jim Price. Slipped into informal
conversational, these stories paint pictures of local people and incidents and illustrate the testing and wordplay that goes
on in an everyday context. Jim Price frequently tells personal experience stories, tall tales, legends, and jokes at informal
gatherings in his home town of Naylor, Missouri. Mr. Price, who keeps his listeners in stitches, is also a respected wood
joiner, tool maker, and archaeologist. Presenting artist: Jim Price.
