Shepherd University has named a native West Virginian to its first “storyteller-in-residence” position, with an eye on sharing Appalachian folklore with the world.
Adam Booth, a native West Virginian, has been awarded the position and will use his skills to help reflect the region’s culture and heritage through stories, according to a press release from Shepherd University.
Booth is an award-winning storyteller, who has taught at Shepherd for the past 14 years. This new position will allow him to share his skillset beyond the university.
“Our stories define who we are and determine who we might become,” said Sylvia Bailey, director of Shepherd’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities. “Our stories reflect our culture and heritage, and the most fundamental parts of ourselves, and they are essential for survival.”
Booth has won the West Virginia Liars’ Contest four times and he created the Speak Series — an international storytelling series partnered with the Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities.
Booth’s stories are a combination of mountain folklore and contemporary Appalachia. For example, on his Youtube channel Booth tells his interpretation of the traditional story “Rawhead and Bloodbones,” a story that originated in the British Isles and traveled with immigrants to southern Appalachia.
“…That woman she had a daughter that was about as mean as she was. They’d do mean things to people all day long, and then go home a laugh about it…and there was also a man that was just the opposite. He had a heart that seemed to be made out of pure gold…and he also had a daughter, who was just like him…”
Through the storyteller-in-residence position at Shepherd University, Booth will continue to develop the Speak Series, sharing Appalachian folklore with a modern twist to the world.
In a quiet neighborhood in southeast Ohio, Talcon Quinn and her 12-year-old apprentice Juniper Ballew have revived an age-old tradition with just three ingredients: a deer skin, some water and a handful of animal brains. They have transformed a hairy, fleshy animal skin into buckskin, a buttery soft material stronger than fabric.
In a special report as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, reporter Clara Haizlett met with Quinn and Ballew to find out why they practice the tradition of brain tanning.
Quinn has trained Ballew in the art of brain tanning, through an apprenticeship program with the Ohio Arts Council. While most modern tanneries use chemicals to tan, Quinn and Ballew use the traditional method of soaking the hide in animal brains.
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
In the final stages of the tanning process, Talcon examines her hide while Juniper sets up the work space.
Brain tanning requires a strong back and a stronger stomach, patience and some serious elbow grease. To tan one hide it takes around 16 hours of intense labor extended over multiple days.
Quinn’s workshop is located out of her garage at her home, which is in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Athens, Ohio.
Holding a deer skin, Quinn instructed her apprentice to “find the neck, find the membrane side, and what I’d like you to do is go down the spine, and put your weight into the cable.”
Quinn coached her apprentice through a step called cabling, a technique for softening the hide. At this stage in the process, the deer skin was slippery and limp, resembling a slimy blanket. Following Quinn’s lead, Ballew leaned back and pulled at the hide, abraiding it against a wire cable. Back and forth she yanked at the deer skin, one foot in front of the other.
Both Quinn and Ballew are from southeast Ohio, a cradle of forests, rivers, lakes and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Growing up in the region, Quinn spent a lot of time outdoors, developing a deep appreciation for her natural environment. In her early twenties 20s she began providing more of her own food by fishing, hunting, and picking up roadkill.
Prior to adoption of these practices, Quinn was a vegetarian, then a vegan. Yet in spite of this shift in lifestyle, she continued to set high ethical standards for herself. Quinn decided that if she was going to source her own meat, she wanted to be respectful and use all of the animal. That is what led her to brain tanning.
“I think because I’ve always been a craftsperson and I’m not easily squeamish, I just took to it really easily and fell in love with it in ways,” Quinn said. “I mean there’s times where I don’t like it at all because it gets smelly.”
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
Talcon wears a buckskin bikini that she tanned and sewed.
Quinn sources her hides from local game processors where animal carcasses are often just thrown away after the meat is processed. After skinning the deer, she starts tanning, transforming the throw away hides into bags, clothing, and knife sheaths. She sells these unique pieces online to a diverse group of customers. Quinn also teaches brain tanning to learners of all ages and identities. Her favorite class to teach is the buckskin bikini top class.
“The bikini top class was passed down to me and it’s been this really beautiful thing,” Quinn said. “It’s people of all different body shapes coming together to make something very sacred and beautiful for their body, and to encourage them to honor themselves and feel sexy.”
By sharing brain tanning with customers and students, Quinn hopes to encourage a more respectful relationship between humans, animals and the environment.
“It’s heavy. It’s heavy work,” she said. “And there’s a lot of respect and like gratitude and even a sense of grief for the loss of the animals or the loss of a spirit. But I also really believe that everything continues on and by continuing on it lives on. That’s the one thing I hope people see when they see my work, that it’s a lot of humbling respect that I put into it.”
When Quinn found out about the Ohio Arts Council apprenticeship program, she saw the opportunity to pass on the tradition of brain tanning to a young person in her community. Ballew belongs to the Potawatomi Tribe, a Native American group centralized in the Great Lakes region. Although Ballew was introduced to tanning at a young age, she never had formal training in the skill. Now under Quinn’s tutelage, Ballew has made her own buckskin medicine pouch. Ballew plans to incorporate the medicine pouch into the regalia that she wears at tribal powows in Michigan. She said that brain tanning, no matter how obsolete it might appear, still has value in today’s society.
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
Juniper shows off her tanned hide which she will sew into a medicine pouch,
“There is so much out there that has like shriveled up and died because people don’t think it’s valued enough,” Ballew said.
For Ballew, brain tanning is about connecting with her Potawotami ancestors and their way of life.
“The great thing with how Native Americans hunt is that they take one and they’re satisfied with it because they use all of it and what they don’t use goes back to the earth,” she said.
In Native cultures around the world, brain tanning was an ordinary practice, including here in Appalachia. In 18th century America, European settlers and Native Americans often traded food and supplies for buckskins or “bucks” for short. According to regional legends, this is where the slang word “buck,” meaning “dollar” comes from. Yet as the fur trade became commercialized and Native Americans were removed from their lands, traditional tanning methods fell by the wayside, displaced by industrial chemical tanning. Today the majority of global leather comes from China and instead of using natural materials as tanning agents, most modern tanneries use chemicals.
Although tanning has changed a lot over the years, Ballew said that traditional tanning still holds important cultural value.
“My uncle, when we FaceTimed the other day, he called it ‘learning the language of his grandmother,’” Ballew said. “Because she was taken by the settlers and taught English and forced to cut all her hair off. He was learning what she had been forced to forget.
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
Juniper and Talcon display their finished brain tanned buckskins.
“I want to inspire kind of a new definition of Appalachia, particularly around here where it’s just so poor,” Ballew said. “And I want the youth to grow up knowing that there are these skills that were kind of lost but they’re not forgotten. We still have it and we can make it something new that viable for today.”
Although they have come to the practice for different reasons, together Quinn and Ballew are reviving the tradition of brain tanning, hour by hour and hide by hide.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
Before the pandemic hit, our Inside Appalachia team was planning a reporting trip to Wales as part of our ongoing folkways project, as the country has a strong historical connection to Appalachia that we wanted to explore. The trip’s been postponed, but in a special report as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, Caitlin Tan interviewed two Welsh storytellers who through their craft bring us artistic parallels between our region’s sister country.
Wales, Appalachia, COVID-19
They called it “The World Turned Upside Down.” In the 18th and 19th century the British monarchy took over Wales and the Industrial Revolution began. Thousands of poorer farmers were displaced, left with no land or work, so they sailed West, eventually finding themselves in Appalachia. This continued to happen for hundreds of years.
“People were displaced from here and then coming over to Appalachia and displacing people who live there,” said Peter Stevenson, a professional storyteller, artist and folklorist who lives in Wales. “So, it’s not necessarily a particularly nice story, but there’s a lot of folktales behind that.”
Credit Peter Stevenson
/
One of Peter Stevenson’s drawings depicting a part of his story, ‘The War of the Little Englishman.’
Peter spent the last few years writing about this complex period in history and about the resulting connection between Wales and Appalachia. The tales have culminated into a book called “The Moon-Eyed People.”
In a way, these old stories help us understand ourselves and the times we are living in, Peter said. Even the title, “The World Turned Upside Down” seems familiar right now.
“And I don’t think it’s too much a stretch of the imagination to kind of realize we’re probably in one of those right now, in a very different way,” he said. “But it’s in a human emotional level. We’re upside down. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”
Rooted In The Land
West Virginia Public Broadcasting interviewed Peter for a story last year when he hosted an art exhibit in Morgantown featuring Welsh and West Virginian artists, exploring the unique folklore connections between the two regions. Peter has family in the Mountain State, which initially sparked his interest in the connections between these two places.
He said that through the centuries of immigration Welsh and Appalachian folklore have naturally influenced one another.
“Geographically, they’re very similar landscapes, you know, mountains, woods, you have the big rivers, we have the sea, but there’s this strong connection between the people and the land,” he said. “And the thing that comes out of that connection, it’s stories and music, folk culture, buildings, all the things that are rooted in the landscape that people respond to and see.”
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Welsh countryside on a WVPB scouting trip in December, 2019. Peter Stevenson said he sees a lot of similarities in the Appalachian and Welsh landscapes.
The Craft Of Storytelling
When Peter tells a story, one feels like a kid again – sitting crisscross, entranced by the vivid tale.
As Peter has retold these old folktales for audiences, he has adapted them – sometimes just taking the idea of an old story and writing it using his own folklore research.
In live performances, Peter’s artwork typically accompanies each story. He often tells Welsh tales using an Appalachian storytelling device called the crankie. Basically, it is a scroll that moves horizontally, depicting hand drawn or painted images.
Credit Peter Stevenson
/
The crankie scroll that Peter designed for the story “The War of the Little Englishman,’ set in front of the actual old ruins from the tale.
In the book “The Moon-Eyed People,” Peter intentionally used white, black and red in his drawings. He said he hoped the colors conveyed the tense times. He drew the faces of the characters, often including animals, to look inherently friendly; however, the scenes and the small details often depict things from one’s nightmares – a group of angry villagers burning a castle down, a girl with wolf ears, and little goblins and fairies emerging from a fairytale book, to name a few.
“I can tell a great long story and I know hundreds of stories, but how do I remember them? Well, I don’t remember word for word,” Peter said. “What I do remember are pictures. I see images. So, I know the narrative of a story. I know what’s going to happen one moment to the next, because I can see the pictures.”
Featuring The Cello
Lately, Peter’s storytelling performances about Wales and Appalachia have included music.
Specifically, music performed by Ailsa Hughes. She is a Welsh musician, storyteller and artist.
She wrote the song “Messenger of the Darkness,” to accompany one of Peter’s stories – adapting it from old Appalachian and Welsh folktales about death, featuring an owl, an ominous symbol in many cultures.
messengerofdarknessWEB.mp3
Listen to Ailsa's song 'Messenger of Darkness.'
Ailsa’s voice is hauntingly beautiful. Whether in Welsh or English, her voice harmonizes with her cello – creating a reverberation that fills one’s whole room, even if it is coming through a computer, several thousand miles away.
Although Ailsa has not traveled to Appalachia, she said she is inspired by landscapes and the old folktales of both countries. In fact, during the pandemic Ailsa has been using music, sounds and the landscape to bring people together, through something called “sound mapping.”
Credit Peter Stevenson
/
One of Peter’s drawings from the story, ‘Rhyfel y Sais Bach’ or in English, ‘The War of the Little Englishman.’
“I get people to listen at the moment from their gardens or just put their windows open and creatively depict the sounds they’re hearing in the landscape,” she said. “So, like drawing and writing words and finding ways of describing the sounds that they’re hearing.”
Melody Rooted In Tradition
Ailsa started playing the cello at age seven. It was only later as an adult that she started writing songs, using them as a storytelling device and, as part of her band duo Tinc y Tannau, sometimes finding lyrical inspiration from old Welsh texts.
“This sense of finding, belonging that I feel really present with that at the moment, this need to connect with my ancestors and to connect with the place where I am, the place where I feel at home in a deeper and deeper way and I think through the arts we can do this,” she said.
Ailsa has also taken to the dulcimer, an ancient stringed instrument from Western Europe that was later modified into the mountain dulcimer in Appalachia. It is featured prominently in a lot of the region’s old-time music.
Ailsa recorded herself playing the dulcimer in her own unique, Welsh style, across the Atlantic Ocean, nearly 4,000 miles away.
dulcimer.mp3
Listen to Ailsa's dulcimer improvisation.
“I can’t profess to be able to play this, but I couldn’t not play it a little bit for you,” she said.
Ailsa and Peter had plans to perform their stories and songs this summer in Wales, but the pandemic canceled their shows. However, they recorded themselves and shared their collaboration with us at WVPB.
Credit Peter Stevenson
/
Peter’s drawing of one of the several castles burnt down in the ‘War of the Little Englishman.’
The story and song they performed is about the “World Turned Upside Down” period in Wales. The story is called ‘Rhyfel y Sais Bach‘ in Welsh or, ‘The War of the Little Englishman,” and it is written and told by Peter Stevenson, and the Welsh hymn is sung by Ailsa Hughes.
storyandsongWEB.mp3
Listen to the story "Rhyfel y Sais Bach."
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
These days, kids are spending less time exploring the outdoors and more time in front of screens.
A 2019 report by the independent non-profit Common Sense Media found that on average, 8-to-12 year-olds in the United States spend approximately five hours on entertainment screen media every day. But numerous studies show that time outside is great for kids, helping them reduce stress and stay healthy.
In a special report exploring folkways traditions, as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, reporter Saro Lynch-Thomason explores how one North Carolina naturalist is using storytelling and song to get kids excited about the natural world.
Using Folklore to Learn About Nature
On a humid afternoon near Leicester, North Carolina about twenty people tromp through a field behind naturalist Doug Elliott. They are participating in a plant walk, exploring trees, flowers and herbs. Doug leads the group to a large tree, turns around and challenges them all to a riddle.
“Hidey hidey hi, hidey hidey hey
There’s a big black stain in my driveway
High as a house, low as a mouse
Got more rooms than anyone’s house.
Hey diddle high, hey diddle, diddle.
Look inside there’s a possum in the middle.
What is it?”
One person in the crowd calls out the answer, “Black walnut!” Gesturing to the tree behind him, Doug explains that black walnut trees grow high as a house, while their nuts fall low as a mouse. But, he says, what about the “possum in the middle?”
Doug takes out a black walnut shell cut in half that looks just like a possum’s face, with a narrow head and small, black eyes. Everyone “oohs” and “ahs” at this small, delicate discovery.
For more than 40 years, Doug has been telling stories and singing songs about nature, using riddles, songs and lore to engage audiences. As a child, he loved catching bumblebees in jars and exploring the woods and swamps around his home.
Credit Saro Lynch-Thomason
/
Doug Elliot
But it was not until after graduating college that Doug realized his passion for educating others about nature. It started when Doug began to grow his own food.
“I was an art major. I was totally unemployable,” he says. “And I thought, if I’m going to be an artist I better start growing a garden. I started growing the garden, all these weeds came up!”
But Doug says a friend had given him a book called “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” by wild food enthusiast Euell Gibbons, and after reading it Doug realized the weeds growing in his garden were not useless. Some were even more nutritious than the plants he was trying to grow.
“It kind of opened the world to me,” he says. “I got so excited about that, I started giving talks about nature, or useful wild plants.”
Since then, Doug has made a career out of storytelling living in North Carolina. He says he settled in Appalachia because people here have a deep connection to the land and they are willing to share what they know.
Now in his 70s, Doug uses storytelling to help kids learn about nature at a time when most are spending less and less time in it.
One of the kids inspired by Doug’s work is five-year-old Forest Herschman.
Forest and his father Kevin live in a house on a rural mountainside in Barnardsville, North Carolina. During the evening, one can hear tree frogs and crickets right outside their door.
Forest spends a lot of time in the woods, watching tadpoles and deer. He can even name his favorite local trees.
Credit Saro Lynch-Thomason
/
Doug conducts an evening performance at the Firefly Gathering. Doug’s performances typically include traditional songs, riddles, and folk tales from Appalachia and the American South.
“I like pine trees,” Forest says. “And I like maple trees so we can tap them and get the sap!”
A few years ago, Forest found some second-hand tapes of Doug’s stories and songs and was mesmerized, Kevin says..
“There was probably a three or four or five even month period where he would listen to these Doug Elliott tapes like every day,” Kevin says. “He learned how to work the tape player. He would sit down on my bed and listen to Doug Elliott for 25 or 30 minutes, easy.”
One of Forest’s favorite stories by Doug is about a non-venomous snake, called a black rat snake. It lives near farms and eats rodents. The story is about a time that Doug gently squeezed a black rat snake to help it regurgitate a plastic egg.
Kevin says not too long ago he and Forest spotted a black snake near their house. But Forest was not scared, he was excited because he had heard songs and stories about snakes. Upon hearing about this encounter, Doug just smiles.
“That warms my heart,” Doug says. “You ask me why I’m doing this, that might be one of the reasons.”
It is just one example of the many ways that Doug’s stories help kids take delight in the natural world around them.
Raconteur “Riley” Wilson died on October 6, 1952, at age 69. The Kanawha County native was a lawyer by trade, but a close friend noted that Wilson rarely practiced law.
He took few, if any, cases for decades at a time. Instead, Wilson earned his living as an entertainer and developed a national reputation. He traveled the country as a storyteller and toastmaster, toured on the vaudeville circuit, and made national radio appearances.
Wilson’s best stories came from rural West Virginia, often provided by his brother, a Lincoln County lawyer. He published at least two books: Reach Me the Tin and From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Charleston, West Virginia, Via Nome, Alaska.
He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1920 and later served in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration as a member of the National Bituminous Coal Administration. Wilson became seriously ill while attending the 1949 inauguration of President Harry Truman and died three years later. Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie version of Davis Grubb’s novel Fools’ Parade was based in part on Wilson.
Riley Wilson is still regarded as one of the greatest storytellers of his day.
