Update 3 p.m. Nov. 22: Read about the winners here.
Update 5 p.m. Nov. 15: Lisa Thompson originally was listed as a judge for Saturday’s contest. Due to illness, Anissa Atwater will take Thompson’s place, sitting alongside judges Eric Branscom and Laura Pyn.
__________________________
If the Blue Ridge Mountains could speak, they would whisper to us in tales as tall as the ridge is long. Here, we all come together over a good fish tale … a whopper … a fib … a tall tale. Call it what you will, at the end of the day, our storytellers can hold an audience.
On Saturday, up to 12 storytellers will throw elbows to see who can tell the best tall tale in a Liars’ Contest at Floyd’s June Bug Center. This is the first liars’ contest to be held in Southwest Virginia in ages — maybe ever, according to organizer Clint Atwater, founder of Storytelling Connections LLC and Let Me Tell Ya! events, which produced the show. The top three winners will go home with cash prizes. The first-place winner will also be presented with a golden shovel.
Expect a liars’ contest to be funny. Expect exaggeration, things that go awry or are just plain silly. The theme sets the stage for all sorts of shenanigans.
“Tall tales get bigger and more grand and more elaborate,” said Lisa Thompson, judge and storytelling expert. Thompson is assistant branch manager for the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library and a member of the Floyd County Historical Society.
Off the tracks
Storyteller and contest participant Wayne Jordan uses a train metaphor to build a comparison between everyday stories and tall tales: “If you go to the train station, you get on the train and you know where you’re going. You just enjoy the countryside as you’re going along, and you get off the train, and your trip has been what you expected.”
“In a tall tale or in a liars’ contest,” Jordan said, “you get on the train in the same spot. But then, at some point, somebody flips a switch and switches you to another track, and then you’re going some way that you didn’t expect.”
The storyteller might switch the track again or might derail the train, but the audience is going to end up in a completely different place than they expected when they loaded the train to begin with, Jordan explained.
The audience doesn’t notice they are off track at first, he said. That’s where the magic comes in.
“It just keeps getting farther and farther and farther out until they’re like, ‘Wait a minute,’ and then it all wraps up at the end,” Jordan said.
“It’s absolutely entertaining to just hear the exaggerated nature that people can go to,” storyteller and contest participant Hettie Farley said.
That’s so Appalachian
Atwood expects to see that larger-than-life experience come out on Saturday night. Storytelling, he points out, is as old as the Appalachian Mountains.
People might be familiar with those traditional tales, the Jack Tales and the folk stories, the old gods, the ghosts that roam these hills. They may also be familiar with the Moth podcast-like tales, stories that are on display at story slams or at Lee Hunsaker’s regular Hoot and Holler events — the stories that are based in truth.
“A liars’ contest really is an opportunity to kind of meet in the middle between those,” Atwater said. The tales may pull in some elements from a traditional tale: the repetition of threes, the search for treasure, or a rather clever character or someone or something larger than life. “But the story will be largely based in reality and told as if it were a personal narrative.”
Merging the traditional and personal narratives aside, tall tales are solidly rooted in Appalachian culture.
“The tall tale, while maybe not exclusively an American art form, certainly has been mastered by America,” said award-winning storyteller Bil Lepp, a five-time champion of the West Virginia Liars’ Contest.
“Part of it, at least in Appalachian culture, there’s this idea that you’re not supposed to brag. Nobody wants to hear you brag, and tall tales are a way of bragging without necessarily talking about how great you are,” Lepp said.
And so, Lepp explained, people in the Southeast U.S. come from families where they’re used to sitting around telling these tall tales or exaggerated stories — stories in which they can stretch the truth and brag all they want without exactly bragging. The tales may have been told around the dinner table, or on the front porch, or even by the old folks in front of the hardware store. The point is, they were told. Over and over and over again, they were told.
There’s no telling
Liars’ contests are taking off around the country, Atwater said.
The Liars’ Contest is part of Tellabration!, a National Storytelling Network event that introduces new audiences to storytelling. Since its start in 1988, that organization has held public storytelling events across the U.S. with the goal of spreading the joy of story listening.
Most any topic is fair game, including fish stories, aliens, “strike-it-rich” tales, ghosts and vacation adventures.
“You have to wonder, are the tellers stretching the truth or all-out lying?” Atwater said.
“We are charging $10 for contestants, and that’s really just so they have some skin in the game, and they’re putting a little money on the line,” he said. “They’re going to work to come up with a really good tall tale, at least, that’s our hope.”
All registration proceeds will be donated to the June Bug Center.
Admission to the event is otherwise free.
There’s no telling what might happen on Saturday night. It is possible that something a little racy might get mentioned even though the event is supposed to be family-friendly, Atwater said, noting that he will not be previewing the stories prior to the event.
The June Bug’s black box theater seats a hundred people in a three-sided ring of risers. The storytellers will stand center stage, just feet from the front row and the judges. The space is intimate, cozy.
“You don’t need any microphone or any other amplification,” Jordan said of the venue, which holds monthly storytelling events. You can talk directly to the audience. I love it because I can see the look in their eyes and see them take the emotional trip with me.”
In a space that small, every reaction is magnified a hundredfold. Every well-timed joke hits like a thousand fireworks on Uncle Sam’s birthday. Every clap makes the teller stand taller on heel, stretching upwards like Paul Bunyan.
“It’s a conversation with the audience. You can see how they’re flowing with you,” Jordan said.
The fumbles and fails? They feel like a growth on the end of a storyteller’s nose.
Lepp said that his most consequential failure happened the one time he didn’t know the story as well as he should have. A crowd can tell, and it sours them every time. You have to know the story inside and out, know who the characters are, what they want, and why they’re doing what they’re doing, he said.
Just like as a kid, when you hear a good story, you lean in, listen a little closer. “It’s a social event. The audience enjoys it together,” Atwater said.
After, he hopes, folks will turn to each other and wonder, “Was that true? Was any part of that true?”
Maybe it was. Or maybe it wasn’t. That’s the thing about liars’ contests — there’s no telling.
May the circle be unbroken
How to write and perform a tall tale
- Life is about perspective: You can’t be present in your story. The tale should not be written in the first person, according to Bil Lepp, a five-time champion of the West Virginia Liars’ Contest.
- Not every superhero has powers: And if you are in your own story, you can’t be the hero. “If you are the hero, you have to be like Jack though, bumbling around and somehow managing to find the right way out, kind of using your stupidity as your strongest strength,” Lepp said.
- Start your engines: “How fun is it to expand on something that’s already there?” said storytelling expert Lisa Thompson. Begin with something plausible and then just keep going.
- Funny bones: Your story needs to have some element of humor in it and some element of exaggeration. Those things must go hand in hand, Lepp said.
- Don’t worry, be happy: “A tall tale is generally a positive thing,” Lepp said. The audience wants to leave feeling good.
- Be bragadocious: “You want to kind of brag in a tall tale, but also be a little bit self-deprecating at the same time, so that you’re showing how smart and how good you are, but you never say it exactly,” Lepp said. It just blends in with the Appalachian culture.
- The magic moment: Pull your audience through the story, hanging with you, as you rattle on and on and on about bigger and grander exaggerations, until they finally have a “Wait a minute!” lightbulb moment. That’s a “magic” moment, said storyteller Wayne Jordan.
- I have a dog: When you stand up to tell the tale, build a point of commonality with the audience. Lepp tells a story that ends with flying a train around the sky, he said. “The very first line of that story is, ‘I have a dog.’ So my audience says, ‘Oh, I also have a dog.’ And then the next line is, ‘My dog’s name is Bucha.’ They’re like, you know, ‘What a coincidence. My dog also has a name.’”
- Believe in yourself: “The most important thing, as far as performing a tall tale, or any story, is that the storyteller has to have confidence in their story; they have to believe it so that they can get their audience to go along with it as well,” Lepp said.
“Storytelling is as old as the mountains,” Atwater said.
“There’s so much history here, and in the Appalachians in general. The culture just runs deep. We’ve got the Cherokee tales, the pioneer tales, tall tales, history stuff. There’s so much material you could just get lost in it,” Jordan said.
“The old timers who have grown up and been around here, hearing these stories for generations, are familiar with this stuff,” he said, adding that younger generations and folks just moving into the region are infatuated with tales about the Blue Ridge.
“As people talk, we tell stories,” Thompson said.
The tradition has played a huge role in every hill and hollow in the countryside, and in the urban areas, too. Anytime someone tells you how to get to Cousin Beth’s house and says to go on down Old Holler Road a ways and then take left turn by the Ingram Store, they’re telling a story. The key is in recognizing the tradition and preserving it, Thompson said, adding that the Floyd County Historical Society has been collecting many of these oral histories.
“Well, that road probably isn’t still named that, and there is no store there now,” she said. Still, the memories are important to preserving the county’s story.
“Hearing these things firsthand is powerful,” Thompson said.
“As we move further away from our family, I think those histories are sometimes lost,” she added.
Passing the torch
While institutions like East Tennessee State University offer programs in storytelling, most tellers still pick up the traditions from their elders. They pass along heirloom stories and traditions from one ear to another, from one rocking chair to the next, on porch after porch after sunset-lit porch.
Jordan’s grandmother lived in North Carolina, he said. As a child, he would often travel from his home in Washington, D.C., to visit her, sleeping on her feather bed, using her outhouse and listening to her stories of old Appalachia. Even as a child, it was obvious that she loved to tell those stories, he said.
She would tell him about wampus cats to keep him out of the woods. “They’re sketchy,” Jordan said. “I remember being impressed by them.”
Lepp learned how to spin a yarn from his grandfather, “He was a master, he never told the same story twice.” Every time he told it, the story grew larger and larger, Lepp said. His uncles, aunts and cousins followed the same tall-tale propensities. There was always some new element to every story they told, and they always got bigger and bigger. “From as far back as I can remember, I was part of an informal tall tale/lying contest situation,“ he said.
Farley had the same experience, listening to one tale after another. She and her family would gather around the campfire with the neighbors, swapping ghost stories late into the night.
“There were a lot of older people around all the time. So I tried to listen out for stories,” Farley said. Now, she tries to carry on that tradition during the holidays, asking her family to share new stories, tales of their best day ever or other story starters from her past as an educator — memories that the rest of the gang perhaps hasn’t already heard a hundred times before.
Stretching the cat
Folks might hear a story and think, that’s not the way I heard it — and that’s expected in the storytelling world.
“Five different tellers might tell a story five different ways,” Farley said. That’s the magic of oral storytelling.
“Every time I tell ‘Jack and the Robbers,’ the story grows a little more, and I feel like it’s a little more even a part of me,” Farley said of her own version of that story, which she’s told for 30 years. [Scroll down to read another version of the tale.] Her songs change a little bit — she sings parts of the tale. Other parts become more elaborate. The story takes on a life of its own.
Most of the stories that stand the test of time teach a lesson, Farley said. The story is surely entertaining, but the hero also conquers something — perhaps a fear like the wampus cat or some impossible obstacle.
Storytellers repeatedly return to that sort of plot line, like a cycle, or an unbroken record, a train on a roundabout track. The victory tales are inspiring, and they teach a certain amount of fortitude, one of those qualities that Appalachia is particularly known for.
And so, as the mountains tell tales of change and tales of things that never change — birth and renewal and renewal again — so do the stories, cycling from elder mouth to newborn ear, turned over and over again, one generation to the next, heartstrings pulled to impress lessons that must be learned. Each generation’s wampus cat is a tale stretched longer than the last.
The Liars’ Contest will be held at 5:30 p.m. Saturday at the June Bug Center for Arts and Education (251 Parkway Lane South, Floyd). Admission is free. Find more information at this link. Contestants of all ages pay $10 to enter. Pre-registration is required at this link.
The tale of ‘Jack and the Robbers’
Stories we’ve heard a hundred times still have a place in our canon. The Jack Tales may be tracked as far back as Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” but they spread to this region by way of immigration. Landing in the hills and hollows of our central Appalachian Mountains, they were popularized after being collected from a number of folks, including the Hicks, Harmon and Ward families, as a Works Project Administration Project in the New Deal era.
Today, storytellers recount those old Jack Tales as common practice, thanks primarily to the work of the WPA story collectors and the original families’ oral preservation of those tales. Still, every time a tale is told, it changes a little.
In one version of that tale, Jack — a common, clever, Appalachian boy who is always looking to find a dollar — sets out to seek his fortune. He and a bunch of animals run into several robbers and trick the robbers into running away without their bounty, and thus Jack becomes rich off the recovered (stolen) goods.
He goes along until he meets up with a cat, who asks what he’s up to. Jack says, “I’m off to seek my fortune.” The cat, believing that Jack will definitely succeed, asks if he can go along, giving a big “Meow, meow.” Jack says, “Let’s go!” And off they go, jiggety-jig, jiggety-jig.
That goes on and on and on. Jack collects more animals: a billy goat, a dog, a pig, a cow, a rooster, on and on.
Every time, the refrain is the same: “I’m off to seek my fortune,” a big animal noise, “Let’s go,” jiggety-jig. On and on, on and on.
Up the hills and down, all day long, they travel, until the sun begins to set. The animals ask Jack where they will sleep, but Jack isn’t worried. He’ll figure it out; he always does.
Sure enough, up the next hill, he spies a house. They’ll sleep in the barn, at the very least. The whole group slinks on up to that cozy little home, all clever and sure, and peek in the window. Three robbers sit around a wooden table, counting stacks of pure gold coins as high as they will go.
“My fortune is made,” Jack whispers. He concocts a plan to stack the animals and to make them all scream a scream that would scare the ever-loving wits out of the meanest bullies in the whole world. They all scramble one atop the other in the silliest snowman-type menagerie you ever saw, elbows going this way and hooves going that way and wings flapping and snouts spewing snot and Jack sitting up high above all of them like the king of the merry-go-round. “Now you just make a big racket when I say go,” Jack says.
Jack gives the “go” and the animals blow their lungs as hard as they can blow, and the robbers look out the window and get spooked at the sight of a pile of heads and haunches and legs, kicking and jerking and wailing and bobbing around like a cloning experiment gone wrong.
Jack gets rich and takes care of all those animals for the rest of their days, and that’s how Jack finally found his fortune.
