Stories and storytelling are baked into human nature. The paleolithic hunter describing his latest hunt by firelight was both entertaining his audience and passing along valuable information to a younger generation. The friend who calls on the phone and says “Guess what happened to me today?” is about to launch into a story.
In many ways, we shape our very lives by means of stories. We tackle the chaos and mess of the world by composing an interior autobiography, with chapters running from childhood and youth to old age. We make sense of existence itself by assembling, ordering, and relating mundane and extraordinary events. Sit in a coffee shop or a bar, and listen; all around you are people swapping stories. Sometimes these tales are instructive, as those speaking describe how they study for an exam or why they fast one day a week. On other occasions, they use their narratives to convey emotions, the joy of surprising a father on his birthday or the sadness of a friend just diagnosed with cancer.
Some of the best tellers of tales hone their talents and become novelists, playwrights, and comedians. Some of them even become professional storytellers.
Roots
Writer of short stories and plays, an amateur expert in foreign films, and recipient of numerous honors like the 2001 Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the 2012 North Carolina Award for Literature, the 89-year-old Carden is still known best for his storytelling talents. For several decades, he earned a good part of his living appearing at elder hostels, schools, and community events, sharing his own memories and stories absorbed from family members and friends.Carden comes honestly by all of these reminiscences. He lives in the farmhouse where he spent most of his childhood and youth in Rhodes Cove near Sylva, North Carolina, which lies at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains. He was too young to remember his father, a local musician and service station owner who was shot dead by a drunk. Soon afterward, Carden’s mother left the 2-year-old to the care of his paternal grandparents in Rhodes Cove and moved to Tennessee.
His grandparents and others regarded “GarNeil” (their way of saying “Gary Neil”) as “quare,” which was Appalachian dialect for “queer,” as in “strange.” He gained this reputation in boyhood by playing out with daring gusto the scenes and characters he found in “funny books” and his beloved western movies. By his own admission, this mix of superheroes, cowboys, and his vivid imagination often created situations that tested to the limit the patience of his elders.
Let’s Play
Like all good storytellers, Carden aims first to entertain his audience, which he does in “Stories I Lived to Tell” by recounting the eccentricities of his neighbors and kinfolk as well as reviving his own youthful enthusiasms and peccadillos. When a rainstorm transformed a path near the farmhouse into a racing creek, the lonely but inventive 10-year-old grabbed some of his grandmother’s canning jars, took up his Blue Horse notebook, and wrote notes listing his interests and inviting other children to “come and play with me.” He screwed these messages into the jars and pitched them “into the flood and watched them go bounding and jumping through the cornfield.”Then, there’s his portrait of Sadie Womack, who “had lived a grim existence for all of her life.” At age 70, she turned her farm over to her children, told them that “she had decided to enjoy life for the remainder of her time on Earth,” and wandered from household to household and community to community, dependent on the people who lived there for her bed and board. She was appreciated because “she was an encyclopedia of gossip,” could sing the old gospel songs, and told ghost stories. “Sadie,” as Carden says, “was ‘entertainment.’”
Bringing Alive the Past
In addition to its entertainments and amusements, “Stories I Lived to Tell” preserves an important part of Appalachian and American history. Carden’s re-creation of his boyhood, for example, will be familiar to many Americans who were children during the 1940s and 1950s and who lived on a farm or in a small town. Here are the accoutrements of boyhood of that time: the comic books, the importance of movies, the outdoor play, the schoolyard fights and friendships, the never-ending chores around the home and farm.At one point, for instance, we read of the 9-year-old Carden, “a runty little fellow,” starring in a church Christmas play as a wicked Jack Frost. He would appear on stage “with an evil laugh” and freeze dancing elves and fairies by touching them with his finger, “a long, white, bony thing that encased Jack’s forefinger.” Only the arrival of the Good Fairy broke this spell.
For the first time in his life, Carden felt himself a minor celebrity among his schoolmates. He enjoyed this attention, but after the pageant was over he “noticed that [his] friends had lost interest in [him].” It was then that a girl he had a crush on, Betty, encouraged him to tell these same friends stories from the Westerns he loved, movies featuring Lash LaRue, Johnny Mack Brown, and Gene Autry. It was that day that Carden first realized the powers and pleasures of storytelling.
At times, Carden more directly summons the past. Here, for example, he calls up this mental picture from 1953: “With a snap of my fingers, I am parked in front of Troy’s Drive-In and Johnny Ray is warbling from the loud speakers on Troy’s roof: ‘If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye ...’ Here comes the [carhop], Kati Love, with a tray laden with hotdogs and cokes.”
Hats Off to a Storyteller
In his Introduction to “Stories I Lived to Tell,” filmmaker Neal Hutcheson, a friend and a fan of Carden, recounts this incident: “And the first time he told stories professionally, he returned home to discover an anonymous note on his porch in carefully penned capital letters. It read, “Our culture was built on ignorance and superstition let it die.” Gary did not heed the admonishment, but it must have stunned him. He pinned the note to the wall, where it remains today for his perpetual contemplation.”
Like so many judgments by the present on the past, that note brings a grim smile. In another 100 years, our descendants will likely pass that same verdict on our own age.
Meanwhile, the storytelling of Gary Carden has preserved a vital part of our history that still, after all these years, brings us some truths and a bellyful of laughter.
