nb-- I tried to send this to myself as a test message, and apparently a spam filter caught it. I'm trying a different mailing address, and hoping maybe a few more of you will get it. Let me know if you do-- I'm trying to figure this thing out again.
IN THIS ISSUE
• Upcoming gigs-- NB, we're in Warren this Saturday!
• January live-recording.
• Premiere performances at Lost Nation Theater on Valentine's Day weekend.
• Our prizewinning recordings make great holiday gifts!
• New writing about how I got started.
• Part one of a new transcription-from-memory of the folktale I heard Sara Cleveland tell, back when I was a young hippy, 1970 or thereabouts. It kicked me in the pants and set me out on the road I've been traveling, lo these many years.
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Holiday Family ProgramsSAT DEC 8, 1:00
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The Gypsy SoldierLive Recording
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One purpose for this newsletter is to create a series of deadlines for writing stuff about folktales and storytelling. At some point, maybe there'll be a book or something. Meanwhile, here's
Something About Storytelling
Sara Cleveland
Dr. KennethGoldstein
I had my adult come-to-storytelling moment at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Sara Cleveland told a traditional three-brothers folktale called "Little RedCap" that she'd heard as a little girl from an Irish grandmother in their home near Saranac Lake, up in the Adirondacks. She'd learned a lot of traditional ballads that way, too, along with other songs, jokes, and rhymes. I don't believe she knew any more of this kind of long marchen/folktale, but I'd be very happy if I was wrong about that..
That was back around 1970, on one of the bigger outdoor "workshop" festival stages that (if memory serves) sometimes had very big audiences when the act was, say, the young Maria Muldaur or the quite young (about my age) Bonnie Raitt. The storytelling workshop didn't have a big crowd. I think Sara Cleveland shared the stage with Utah Phillips, Norman Kennedy, and others, but this was a long time ago. I went to that "workshop" several other years when she wasn't there; it's all become a blur, and to speak frankly much of it was a blur for me at the time. I do remember she already seemed like an old woman to me; of course she was probably about the age I am now.
I heard her tell it again ten years or so later, at a little festival in Southern Vermont, might have been Marlboro College. She was older and frailer, but still strong in performance.
I was completely spellbound on both occasions. She sat so still, her hands folded in her lap, her face not moving from the microphone, speaking quietly but vigorously, sending the story out from behind her wrinkles with such strong, simple authority that it seemed tangible, something vivid and irresistibly present. "That's it," I thought. "I want more like that. I want that again. I want to do that."
After fifteen years of developing myself into a performer of traditional tales, specializing in three-brothers stories. I decided I wanted to try telling the three-brothers story that got me started. A couple of people told me that Dr. Kenneth Goldstein was the guy to talk to. He ran the School of Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Cleveland was his discovery, and he had been responsible for her appearance on the festival circuit. Apparently folklorists sometimes act (or did back then) as a kind of manager for their discoveries. He had taped her telling that story, and a bunch of songs and rhymes and a dirty joke or two. He'd wanted to make a record out of it, but he was never able to get anybody to release it.
I called or wrote-- I don't remember-- asking for the story and permission to tell it. He was cagy. We made an appointment, and I met him in his office at the University. I had probably served him coffee fifteen years earlier, I had followed my brother-in-law as a bus-boy at the faculty club some years before, but we were basically new to each other. "You're a storyteller, eh?" he said. "Well, tell me a story." The moment seemed fraught, I hesitated. "Is this weird?" he said. I said "I guess maybe a little, but I ought to be able to do it." He went into the other room briefly, and brought back a colleague, a woman with an expressively receptive face, and sat her down across the table from me. She nodded and smiled and exclaimed (I think), and generally reacted in a strong and consistently appreciative manner, honed specifically to elicit material from a traditional source I guess. He sat stonefaced to one side, puffing on a pipe, like a judge at a fiddle contest.
I told my audition piece, Dimwit, which some of you have heard or read.
One my first experiences in telling folktales to an audience that might not be polite was in the front of a schoolbus for emotionally disturbed and brain damaged urban kids. This was the story I told there, standing up in front, holding onto the pole, projecting out to the back of the bus. Over the years that followed I had built it into something almost fearsome; without stage, amplification or lighting I could dominate hundreds and hundreds of children crowded into a gym: among the most acoustically horrendous and horribly lit spaces on the planet. (Though jails are certainly worse.)
This was not something you would want to sit across the table from.
Fortunately for both all three of us, by the time I found myself in Dr. Goldstein's office I had figured out how to perform for small audiences again without flattening them against the back wall. So I was able tell in an appropriately social (rather than aggressively broad) manner. I sat, I speaking quietly, instead of walking and bellowing. I made smooth and only slightly heightened gestures appropriate to conversation, rather than big movements of the arms and torso. I did not climb up on top of the filing cabinets. I put my content into a social space rather than filling the physical room with noise and movement.
I finished. The expressively responsive faced woman thanked me. Dr. Goldstein puffed his pipe five or six times, nodded his head, and said, "You're a good storyteller."
He asked me where I got the story, I told him from a book. Nothing wrong with that, he said, lots of oral tales were in books for awhile before they got out again. He asked me if I changed the story around, I said, sure, you've got to, and told him some of the things I'd done, and why. He nodded again, asked me a few more questions about my work in the schools, some of which-- for example, "They let you tell that story? You don't get in trouble?"-- have left me forever grateful to be living and and working in Vermont.
Then he got on the phone to Sara Cleveland, told her "There's somebody here who heard you tell Little Redcap. He really likes the story and admires you; he wants your permission to tell it. He's a nice young man, and I think he'll do a good job." He ran me off a cassette tape of the whole unreleased album from his reel-to-reel, and put it in my hand.
Dr. Goldstein is universally referred to as "Kenny" among the folks who knew him. I never got to know him, I was too shy. I got the story and went home to Vermont. He was interested in recording me in performance, which was flattering, but the only time I did a show in Philadelphia while he was alive he was attending a Bar Mitzvah.
The story I heard on the tape was different in many respects from the one that had lodged in my story-memory. I worked up a kind of compromise, working with Benny Reehil for a couple of weeks in one of the two storytelling development workshops I've ever taken. I performed it-- not exactly as follows, better in some ways in others not as well-- for a while. but while kids liked it and asked for it, it never came around to feeling "right" to me.
So it's been at least 20 years since the last time I told it. Both the cassette Dr. Goldstein ran off for me, and the transcript I made from it have disappeared. Dr. Goldstein's recordings did finally get issued as a Philo Records LP, but Philo is long gone. So what follows is from memory. It's not the way she told it, or the way I told it, it's somewhere in the middle. I'll try to finish it up in the next issue.
Little RedCap
(Part 1 of 2)
(illustration by Nick Harris)
There was an old man who had three sons. And his wife died, and he married again. And the woman he married for a second time was a real old biddy, she hated the boys and did everything she could to make their lives miserable.
Then a famine came, all the food was gone, nobody had enough to eat. She began telling her husband , "Those boys don't do anything but eat, and we don't have enough for ourselves. We should get rid of them." The old man would say, "No, they're my sons!" But she kept going at him and going at him, and finally he agreed.
Now one of the boys-- his name was Shane-- he happened to be standing by the window, and he heard them talking, He heard the old woman tell the old man that he should wait until the boys went to bed-- they slept in a kind of shed out back-- Shane heard her tell the old man to set fire to the boys' house while the they were asleep. Burn it down, she said, then we'll be rid of them for once and for all.
So Shane went and told his brothers, and didn't think their father would go along with a thing like that, but it was best to be on the safe side. So they each packed a little food in a bag with a few of their things, then when it got dark they went out and hid in the bushes. After awhile they could see the old man come down from the house with a couple of big cans of kerosene. They saw him throw the kerosene up against the house, stand back, and light a match. They saw their little house go up in flames, and they saw the old woman dancing around the fire, jumping for joy.
Well they didn't want to stick around there anymore, not if they were going to be murdered in their beds. So they walked on to the next village. They had to climb a mountain pass to get there, and up at the top of the pass midway between the villages, they saw a sick old man lying in the road. He was dying of hunger, he was too weak to stand up. He said, "Please boys, give me some food, I'm starving!" The two older boys, they were named Tom and Will, they said, "No, we don't have enough for ourselves." But Shane, he was the youngest, he told the old man, "You can have my food. You're old and weak, I'm young and strong, you need it more than I do." His brothers said "If you're such a fool to give your food away, when we don't have enough, you're going to get hungry later on. Don't come asking us for any of our food, you had yours and you gave it away." And they walked away down the road, laughing at him.
But Shane stayed on behind to help the old man. He had to put food in the old man's mouth, at first, because he was too weak to do it himself, but after a little bit the old man started to sit up and then a little while after that he was able to finish the rest of the food on his own. Then he told Shane, "Young man, you saved my life." He said, "I want to give you something. Take my stick." And he took the old stick he used to walk with, a tall branch of wood with the bark peeled off, and he put it into Shane's hand. "Where you're going, you're in for a hard time," he said, "and you're going to get into some tough fights. When that happens, just throw it up into the air and say, "Beat, stick" and the stick will fight for you. And the stick will win that fight."
So Shane thanked the old man, and went on his way. After a few steps he suddenly wondered whether he ought to have left the old man alone, after he'd been so weak. He looked back to make sure he was all right. And I guess he must have been so, because he wasn't there anymore, in fact there was no sign of him at all.
Shane caught up with his brothers; they laughed at him some more, and made fun of him. But he didn't pay any mind, he laughed too.
So they went on together into the next village. And when they got there, everything was draped in black, and the people were all crying as they went about their business. When the boys asked what was wrong, they told him: the King's daughter had been stolen away by Little Redcap, and nobody could get her back. The King was heartbroken, she was his only child, and they said he was offering half the kingdom to anybody who could bring back the princess.
(continued in January)
Tha tha tha tha tha tha tha that's all for now. Contact us, we love to hear from you.
Tim & Leanne
