TX TALL tales
Celebrating 25 years

im Tingle says he was in Mississippi in 1993, listening to an elderly Choctaw woman tell a story. They were sitting, as he recalls it, on her screened-in porch and he was enthralled –  if a bit spooked. “She spoke of creatures living in the swamps, and throughout her telling, we heard an eerie scratching sound coming from the swamp,” Tim says. The old Choctaw woman just laughed off the sound. “That’s that old alligator gnawing on a cypress tree,” she told Tim. “One of these days he’s gonna chew it down.”

How exactly the tale ends is Tim’s secret – for now. He’ll be telling it this year at the 25th anniversary of the Texas Storytelling Festival, four days of nonstop stories, concerts, interactive plays, story swaps, workshops, networking and nostalgia March 11-14. In 1985, storyteller Finley Stewart came up with an idea of starting a night of storytelling, from old campfire classics to folk stories and children’s tales. The festival now attracts hundreds eager to be entertained by storytellers who are masters at “telling,” whether it’s tall tales, ethnic tales, sad tales or humorous ones.

This March marks the Silver Anniversary homecoming reunion, with 25 of the greatest storytellers in festival history attending – a list that includes inveterate liar and storyteller Sheila Starks Phillips, animated storyteller Toni Simmons, Choctaw enchanter Tim Tingle, Tom McDermott with his traditional Irish-American stories and music, and the humorous musings of Barbara McBride-Smith among others.

Part of the festival’s mission is to introduce the art of storytelling to a new generation – a generation given to texting and tweeting. When the festival first began, buses would go out and pick up children and educators to bring them to the festival. This year, the performers are appearing at the main event in the Denton Civic Center and volunteering to go out to schools and day care facilities to give children a taste of how stories are spun. “Children are so saturated with media these days that storytelling is a way for them to get involved with their imagination and creativity,” says Elizabeth Ellis, president of the Tejas Storytelling Association, the festival  host.

Each storyteller has his or her own vivid story to tell, whether it’s an ancient tribal yarn about ghosts and spirits or a modern-day hilarity about why dogs chase cats. Drums, banjos, shake-a-rays and guitars take the stories to a new level. Thursday night, an evening of Ghost Tales kicks off the festival with a special “tingle”  from Tim who is known for his haunting presentations, bringing to life folklore tales about the Choctaw Nation with vocal chants and hymns set to a Native American flute, drums and ground rattles. (Caution: The stories get scarier and scarier as the evening progresses!) On Friday, up-and-coming storytellers, selected from teller guilds across Texas, appear at the Rising Star Concert. For the Liar’s Concert, storytellers will whip up some whoppers in hopes of beating out the other liars.

Saturday is all about young storytellers. Toni Simmons, a librarian who started doing puppet shows to tell stories, says getting children into storytelling – the good kind – is essential in our mass media world. “When my son was a child, I would have to fight with the TV and things,” she says. “We, as storytellers, have to be creative. We need to pass the tradition on; once a person is exposed to oral storytelling, there is no competition. This festival is not only for you to go home afterwards and say ‘wow,’ but for you to become addicted to it like digital media.”

Adults can wander off Saturday for conversations and workshops with nationally recognized storytellers, such as Sheila “Zoolady” Starks Phillips, who has been telling since she was a little girl. Dubbed the “Zoolady” because she once worked at a zoo, she uses her knowledge of animals to tell stories that will have children and adults balled over with laughter. Her goal, she says, is to teach morals, problem solving and life lessons to children in an entertaining way. For this year’s festival, she’s promised some personal tales about her hometown Amarillo.

 Sheila urges people to collect stories from their families and record them. “People don’t sit around the dinner table and talk anymore so the whole world is changing,” she says. “Get with older grandparents, older people, and ask them stories that were passed down, or stories of their life.” Maybe then, you’ll be on your own porch someday, passing down those memories to the next generation.

by Mechico Rogers