North Carolina’s stories are full of folklore and magic. With myths dating back to the 1600’s, our state’s oral tradition tells of mermaids in the Cape Fear, Moon-Eyed people in the mountains, fairy crosses on the Blue Ridge, and a circle in Siler City where the devil himself paces. Some North Carolinians still hold their breath when passing a cemetery, for fear of accidentally inhaling a spirit. And nearly every North Carolinian grandmother knows how to talk the fire out of a burn, or whip up a folk remedy with ginger, honey, and lemon.
“My grandmother would show me how to see ghosts,” recalls Donald Davis, a nationally-known storyteller born in western North Carolina. “My mother grew up in a log house that’d been built in 1800, with no electricity or running water. My grandmother grew up exactly the way the first settlers had lived.”
“She’d say, ‘I’ll show you how to see a haint,” instructing me to pick an object across the cemetery and focus on it. She said if you carefully looked in your peripherals, you’d see all the people buried here sitting up on their tombstones and talking to each other.”
He laughs, “I wouldn’t ever do what she told me though, because I didn’t want to see a haint!”
Bill Leslie, who has spent over 40 years crafting stories as a broadcast journalist on WRAL, was also born in the shadow of the North Carolina mountains. His parents, William and Charlotte Leslie, owned the bookstore in his hometown of Morganton, instilling him with a love of reading, storytelling, and songwriting. Having retired as a journalist, Leslie has fully embraced his love of music, using the power of song to tell stories of his home state. Many fans of legendary musical storyteller Mike Cross may find Leslie filling a folksy niche we’ve missed for so long.
North Carolina storytelling connects us to our cultural traditions using a blend of history, folklore, and legend. Commonly told stories like the Jack Tales, revolving around a trickster hero named Jack, can be traced all the way back to Scotland and Ireland. “Jack,” a stand-in for the everyman, often faces obstacles like poverty, harsh landscapes, and difficulties with which any young North Carolinian could identify.
North Carolina’s legends are often larger than life, toying with the listener by riding the line between truth and fiction. Whether true or not, the stories help us understand who we are, and how we fit into our own culture.
On November 1-3, these two lifelong North Carolinian storytellers will be visiting The Cary Theater to share decades of history, myths, and cultural insight. Donald Davis is appearing as part of the Old North State Storytelling Festival and Bill Leslie will be performing from his new album, Storyteller, which serves as his personal autobiography, including love songs, lullabies and lessons he’s learned from history and heroes.
North Carolina Culture: Folk Heroes and Tall Tales
While stories play a powerful role in maintaining culture in every state, there seems to be something inherently sweet, nostalgic, and a touch haunting about North Carolina’s stories. “Our state has the wonderful mountains and the beautiful coast and some of the most important rivers in the country,” says Leslie. “With that rich environmental backdrop and the colorful personalities of North Carolinians, this is fertile ground for storytelling.”
Perhaps those wild, rolling mountains provide the perfect backdrop for the Jack Tale’s adventures, and the old shipwrecks on the Outer Banks can’t help but conjure ghost stories of vengeful pirates. With the convergence of many cultures, stories coming all the way from Ireland picked up new elements once arriving in Appalachia, where they began blending with myths from the indigenous tribes. This eclectic combination of cultures came together on an adventurous landscape perfect for inspiring tall tales.
Having spent 40 years crafting stories as a broadcast journalist in the Triangle, Leslie has been a first-hand witness to sweeping political changes, courageous and cowardly leaders, and all the stories, large and small, that build our culture. He taps into popular folk hero legacies in his song “America is Calling You,” which harkens back to his own McDowell Ancestors from Burke County, who served as active Patriots during the Revolutionary War. According to the tale, the McDowells ran to gather young men to fight as soldiers at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Their heroic efforts turned the tides of the war.
Leslie also wrote a song about a North Carolina Senator from Morganton, who became a national folk hero after appearing on televised hearings on Watergate that led to the resignation of President Nixon. “His wife was a Leslie family cousin,” he shares.
For all the folk heroes and tall tales, Leslie’s stories, like most North Carolina stories, all come down to one thing: Family roots.
Many stories on Leslie’s new album are pulled from his own childhood in the North Carolina mountains. “When I was a kid learning to sing, play guitar and write my first songs I would retreat to the stairway of my home in western North Carolina,” he recalls. “There was a sweet, natural and forgiving echo to the place. It was here I gained confidence to perform.”
This special spot inspired the first song on Leslie’s album: Echoes of My Heart.
Some of the most powerful stories come from these simple, everyday, almost mundane moment. There is a soft magic in the mundane–an uncomplicated experience to which we can all relate.
Grandma’s Carolina Traditions: A Shared Mythology
The most impactful storytelling doesn’t happen on a stage. It happens around a quiet dinner table — usually on Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving Day, when all the siblings and cousins gather around to hear their elders share their memories.
These kinds of stories are often our first experience with storytelling. Donald Davis shares, “Those family stories are so important because they carry the identity of the family. Because of them, you know where you come from.”
These old-fashioned mountain stories were Davis’ first exposure to storytelling. Davis grew up in the mountains, with his own grandparents living very close to the way the first settlers lived–a log house built in 1800 with no electricity and no running water. “My dad grew up telling me stories about how when he was a child the only thing he had to buy was salt — everything else they grew or made themselves.”
According to Davis, North Carolinians “all have this mythological past,” reflected in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry: “That Grandma grew up in a little town, and lived on a farm, and rode horses and wagons.” No matter how big the city you live in, the mythology is that we come from these simple, antique beginnings.
Whether rich or poor, whether raised in the Appalachian mountains or Outer Banks, whether old or young — nearly every North Carolinian can relate to the simple memory of sitting around the dinner table while Grandma re-lives her childhood stories over an album of faded photos.
“Good stories transcend distance, age, culture, and time periods,” explains Davis. “If you had siblings, sibling stories are going to be similar. If you had issues with parents, it doesn’t matter where you live.”
There’s an immense power in discovering the things we really thought were unique about us, are not so unique. We realize we aren’t carrying the load alone.
“The stories that work best are the stories that remind us of someone we knew, somewhere we’ve been, or something that has happened to us,” explains Davis. “Then, when we meet another person who identifies with that story, we become more like one another. It builds a bridge between strangers.”
When we’re young, these stories seem small and unimportant compared to the larger, history-making events in the world. But really, our Grandparents are preserving the backbone of history.
“When we look at history books, they’re written in terms of movements and concepts and ideas — they’re the stories of leaders and Presidents, not everyday people. But these homespun stories teach us the day-to-day living history of how people got along.”
Ordinary stories by ordinary people.
These are also the most fragile, easily lost stories. One day people wake up and their Grandmother is gone — they’ll wish they wrote down those important family stories. Sometimes, they’re gone forever. That’s part of what makes storytellers so magical: They record and resurrect the lost stories.
A Weekend of Carolina Folk Storytelling at The Cary
It’s not often so many of our state’s most well-known, beloved storytellers share their collection of tales in one weekend. Both Leslie and Davis have developed their stories and musical tales from decades of insight living and working in North Carolina. Their upcoming performances allow the Cary community an opportunity to connect to our small town North Carolina roots.
Friday and Saturday November 1-2: Old North State Storytelling Festival, with $15 for a single “concert” of multiple storytellers, or $50 for the entire festival.
November 3 at 3:00 p.m.: Bill Leslie “Storyteller” CD Release and Concert, including Meet and Greet and signing CDs afterwards. $7 per ticket.
It’s the perfect weekend to appreciate our North Carolina roots, and learn more about our own place in the grand scheme of our state’s ongoing story.