Granny Sue Shares What Makes An Effective Storyteller

Do you want to get paid to tell stories? Margaret Agard who lives her life by letting go and letting God, interviews Granny Sue as she shares how to become a professional storyteller.

Listen to Granny Sue professional storyteller explain how to

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Do you like to tell stories? You know someone who does? We all like to hear a good story. Today I’m going to be talking with Granny Sue who shares with us how she got started and how you could get started getting paid to tell stories, and why it fits into a Christian lifestyle.

Now here’s this week bible question and answers sponsored by the amazing bible timeline. It’s the bible as you’ve never understood it before. Use this color-coded wall poster to see all the events and people of the bible in order. You’ll learn exciting new facts that can’t be seen in any other way. That the prophet Daniel and the Chinese philosopher Confucius lived in the same century, or that Noah’s son Shem, lived until the prophet Abraham was 150 years old. It’s a necessary tool for the true student or teacher of the Bible. Bible and world history all in one place. Find out more at amazingbibletimeline.com

The Bible question this week is: What is the Holy Grail? The Holy Grail is supposedly the copper dish Christ used at the last supper, that was later used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch Christs’ blood as he hung on the cross. It’s mythical, it’s a story, it’s not accepted as true by any church. The stories about it were written between 1170AD and 1240AD and they’re part of the legends of King Arthur. So like the stories of the Three Wise Men, they’re entertaining, but have nothing to do with the Bible.

Coming up, I’m talking with Granny Sue on how to become a master storyteller.

The first question I had for her was this: Tell me, how does this fit with your Christian life?

My Christian life. I believe that all of us know the difference between right and wrong, but storytelling helps bring that alive by giving examples, but it gives examples in an entertaining way.

True. And when you get started (uh-huh), how do you tell a story so it’s entertaining without being too much like Aesop’s fables ‘and the moral is…’

(Laughs)…Right well one of the keys for me in storytelling is that you don’t need to tell people what the moral is. I let each listener pull the moral from the story themselves, so…because different stories have different meanings to different people. Some people take one thing from it and then somebody else might pull something completely surprising from it, so each listener processes the story in their own way and finds the meaning in the story that suits their own life or suits something that they need, or what they’re understanding.

Right.

But, as far as making it entertaining, my style of storytelling I call it front-porch storytelling, because it’s very much to me a conversation between myself and the audience, so that it becomes very direct and personal to each person, umm if not – for example, when you see a play, the actors have a wall between the audience and the actor and the stage, so it’s like you’re looking at a window and watching what’s going on and they don’t know you’re there.

Right.

With storytelling the connection is very direct. It’s very important to be able to make eye contact with the audience and read that audience, so that you’re using the right vocabulary, for example if I’m telling stories in Ohio, and maybe an area where it’s flatter country, if I say something about the head of the hollow, they’re not going to understand what I’m talking about. So, if I can read your eyes and understand ‘Oh these people don’t understand that term’, I can build them a description of head of the hollow so that they do understand what it is.

I got it.

Yeah, so you vary the vocabulary depending on the audience. If it’s a younger audience, you know you might use a little lower level of vocabulary; an older audience you might bump  it up, uh, you stretch, the story can be longer or shorter depending on the audience, the listeners, so it’s a very active art form, I tell people ‘Never tell a story the same way once’(Laughing), because it varies from audience to audience, and just NEVER the same story twice in a row, I don’t memorize the story.

And, where do your stories come from?

All sorts of places. Some come from my family, I was one of 13 children, so…

Which one are you?

I’m number 4, I’m the oldest daughter, I have 3 older brothers.

I’m the oldest daughter in a family of 11, so I hear you Susannah! Ok…(Laughs)

You know all the responsibility that goes with that role

Yep

Being the oldest one…so yeah there’s a lot of storytelling from that, my Mom was a World War 2 bride, so, you know, the stories of her and Daddy meeting in England, their life together, that forms some of my storytelling, my husband…

Is your Mom from England or she was just in England?

Oh no she was from England, she was from Cambridge, or near Cambridge, a little village called Coldicutt. Daddy was actually from New Orleans, and he was, you know, stationed over there during the World War 2 and happened to meet Mom at a tea-shop, and the rest is history.

So how did they end up in West Virginia? Or did you just come here?

I came here. My parents came back from England, and settled with his parents in Arlington, Virginia for a short time. Eventually um, they lived in Manassas and that’s where I grew up, but..

That was country then!

It was quite different in Manassas it was a small town, but then it changed and by early 1970s I just didn’t want to live their anymore, so we started looking for a place where we could own land and where there weren’t quite as many people, and that’s how I ended up over here.

Here, Ok..This is a good spot to play that ballad from the old country, that you’ve recorded ‘Pretty Saro’…

When I first came to this country, in 1849, I saw many true lovers, but I never saw mine, I’ve viewed all around me, and saw I was alone, and me a poor stranger and a long way from home, my true love won’t have me, and this I understand, she wants a free holder, and I have no land, I could not maintain her, on silver and gold, and all the other fine things, that her heart might behold,if I were a poet, and could write a fine hand, I’d write my love a letter, that she might understand, and send it o’er the ocean, on the wings of a dove, to the heart of my Saro, pretty Saro my love. If I were a pretty bird, had wings and could fly, I’d fly ‘cross the ocean, to my true lovers side, all through the night, in her lilywhite arms I’d lay, and look through my little window, to the dawning of the day, and look through my little window, to the dawning of the day.

Well that is a beautiful example of a ballad that was ‘Pretty Saro’ sung by Granny Sue, we’re talking with her today about many of her talents but especially about storytelling. Now’s a good time for you to share one of your stories.

Oh, one story that I like to tell, now I tell quite a lot of Appalachian stories, but one story that I really enjoy telling is actually for, of a European origin, it’s a Yiddish story and it’s called ‘Feathers’. It’s useful; this is a story that’s useful in so many settings.

For once there was a woman who loved to talk. She loved to visit her neighbors, she loved to listen to stories, and she loved to tell stories, especially stories about other people. Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to pass on a little piece of news about someone, and she didn’t stop at telling just the truth; she liked to embellish her stories a little bit to make them even better (uh-huh). So one day she told a story about a neighbor that was very damaging to his reputation. And when the neighbor found out well he was horrified, his good name had been ruined in front of all his neighbors. And so he went to a judge and told the judge ‘Look, I demand justice from this woman, she has ruined my good name!’ Well the judge called the woman in and she said ‘Well yes this is true I did say that’ and the judge said ‘But was it true?’ she said ‘Well no it wasn’t really true, but I didn’t really mean anything by it’ and the man said ‘But you have ruined my good name!’ And said the woman ‘Well I’m sorry I will take my word back then’. The judge looked at her for a moment and said ‘Look, you have admitted that you did wrong, so here is your sentence: you must take a feather pillow out into the village square, rip it open and scatter the feathers to all four corners of the wind, let them blow where they will, and then, gather each and every feather back, put it back into the pillow and bring it back to me’. ‘Oh’, said the woman ‘I can do that, that’s not a problem’. She grabbed the feather pillow, ran into the village square, opened the pillow and scattered the feathers. Well , as you can imagine, the feather scattered in all directions, some of them flew up into the trees, some of them flew in windows of houses, some of them landed in the gutter and went down into the sewers, some of them landed in the river and floated away. Try as she might, the woman could in no way gather all of those feathers back into the pillow. She went back to the judge with the very few feathers she had collected, and she stood in front of her neighbor and she said ‘I understand now, what I have done. My words are like these feathers, nothing I can do can ever bring back the words once spoken’.

That’s a good story…and you tell it well!

Why thank you.

Yes, yes, you tell it well. And, do you share that with, in your library programs, how do you choose what stories to tell?

Well that depends quite a lot on the venue/ I actually told that story one time at a meeting at a place where there’d been a lot of strife and the grapevine, you know the stories that run through the grapevine the rumors were just running rampant and I told that at a meeting and I gave each person a white feather and said ‘look, you take this and stick it in your pencil holder or your boken board or wherever you like to put it, and just remember, before you speak again remember the story about the feather’, so it’s useful in a setting like that as telling you know to children they get the meaning of that so you don’t have to tell them what that means(laughing), they get it. So, that story can be used in a multitude of settings, if I’m telling, um, sometimes I get calls from schools and I tell world folk tales, you know from different world cultures so I’ll tell that story, that fits very well, um, it can fit in a lot of settings but when people call me to come tell stories a lot of times they have an idea in mind what they want, like for example a school calling and saying look we want stories from world cultures or we want adult latin stories or we’re looking for ghost stories or do you have any tall-tales to tell, or I did a program or I actually I did 2 days with the inland waterways festival in Marietta, Ohio, they wanted stories of the river, of the Ohio river, the communities along there, the folklore of the river, so I studied and found stories to fit that as well as um a few songs, a few folk songs that I could do, that also fit with the river.

Tell us an Appalachian story, I’d like to hear one.

Ok well I’ll tell you, this is another short one, you know a lot of stories run longer, that’s the other thing too you can pick up once you have a repertoire you can pick stories to fit whatever time span somebody needs, this is a little short story about a boy named Jack. Now you know Jack is a very popular Appalachian figure and if you know anything about Appalachian folklore he um, he was quite the hero in a backward sort of way. Jack was one who survived by his wits, and he came to the Appalachians from the folklore of Europe, from England and Ireland and Scotland and even the Hans tales and other tales in Europe that featured a character very like Jack. So this is one about Jack here in the mountains. Now he had gone hunting, Jack did and he had taken some peaches with him for his lunch, well he went out hunting and he filled his game-bag. He sat down on a rock to eat his lunch and he sat there eating those peaches and spitting out the pips till he had finished all the peaches. Well he was about ready to pack up and go home when he saw the biggest buck deer he had ever seen in his entire life. He reached for his bag but he was out of shot!

Oh.

He looked around looking for some ammunition and he saw those peach pips laying on the ground, so he put the wadding and the powder and the peach pips down the barrel of his gun and he shot them at that deer. Well of course they just bounced right off, that deer shook his head and ran off.

(Laughs)

Well Jack went home with his bag full of squirrel and rabbit and he had his story, you know, about this big deer that he had seen and each time he told it, why the antlers on that deer got bigger and bigger, until no-one believed he had seen a deer at all. Well, about a year later Jack went hunting back in the same spot, and he sat down to eat his lunch and he looked across and there was a full-grown peach tree full of ripe peaches. Well you know Jack loves peaches, so he climbed up into that tree and he started picking peaches and putting them in his poke and picking peaches and putting them in his poke, so he had that poke full. And then all of a sudden, that tree stood up (laughs) because the tree was a peach pip that jack had shot and had landed right between the antlers of that buck deer and had grown right there and sprouted into a full-grown peach tree. And when that deer realized that there was something up there on his head shaking around in those branches well he stood up and he tried to shake it out, he shook this way and that way and this way and that way and finally Jack went flying out of those branches and went rolling down the hill, but he did not spill even one peach out of his bag. He took his peaches home and his game-bag home and that night his Momma made peach poggle for dinner.

Oh, that’s cute. (Laughs)

Now that’s just an example, most of the Jack tales are a lot longer, and that’s about the shortest one of those I know.

A lot of people want to get started as a story teller, what would be your first piece of advice?

Read. Read lots and lots of stories, just read stories and read stories until they become almost the way you think. Um, to me that’s the key, you have to know stories to tell stories, read and just as important as the reading is listening, because you hear stories everywhere you go. We were in a little restaurant here in town one day and a lady said ‘you know’ she said ‘yesterday I was at the graveyard and I saw a funeral without a casket’. Well, I’ll tell you what my ears perked up (Laughs). You know sometimes it’s just a phrase that you hear.

Well that was a funny incident but what makes a story?

A story, there’s a thing of telling an incident, which is pretty much like that little thing about the graveyard service it’s just an incident, it’s funny, but um, but making it into a story it has to have more to it.

Right.

You know it has to be more than a joke, it has to have meaning for those who hear the story. So, you often you look for that, but if you want a start as a storyteller you read, you listen, you listen to storytellers that’s a really good thing and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you know someone who calls themselves a professional storyteller, that might be like the lady at the restaurant in town (laughs). She’s a good storyteller.

Right.

So you listen to the storytellers and then…

Some people who have that impact, everybody just enjoys listening to them just tell these stories, but where do you go with that, you know where do you go with that. I know there’s a storyteller guild, or association…

There is…yeah the West Virginia storytelling guild is a group of people round the state who you know they’re story listeners and storytellers and that’s a great place to network with other storytellers, and to find out about different places you can tell stories. A lot of people start out by volunteering; you know they’ll volunteer at their local school maybe at their read aloud they’ll volunteer but then they also will, that’s what I did a lot of that I volunteered as the read aloud person at my sons school but I would always sneak in a story that I felt had to be told. And that way I got some practice in with some stories…

Good

…and well you know did the read aloud. You could volunteer at your local library, um, so a lot of times storytellers there’s open mic opportunities out there…

What’s an open mic opportunity?

Open mic is, now, you know different places have most of the time they’re for musicians, like oh a club or some place will have open mic, you know and they’ll all be musicians come but down in Charlston there’s an open mic at a church where you can go and you get you know, I think about 10 minutes and you can tell stories, you can read a poem, you can play music, you can sing whatever you want to do you have 10 minutes to do it. And now we’ve started one here in Jackson County too at the library, it’s the 3^rd Friday of every month from 7-9, we’ve done it for 2 months and it’s been a lot of fun, we’ve had musicians and poets and people reading stories they’ve written and it just varies you know, who comes depends on what show, and its free you just, you’ll have to come and listen.

Ok so it’s the 3^rd Friday of every month, at the…

The 3^rd Friday of every month at the Ripley library,

At the Ripley library, OK, good to know. Now, what was your first professional appearance and I consider professional as someone actually paid you money.

Hmm? Mine was at Room County library I had them telling the librarian up at Room County asked me to come and do a workshop for librarians and at was then called the Alpha Regional library, I think it included seven different county libraries, and to do a workshop for them on storytelling, so I thought sure, so I went up there and talked about storytelling and taught them some simple stories to tell, and she paid me 25 dollars.

(Laughs)

Yeah, I was thrilled. I was like ‘Wow, I can actually make money doing this?’. (Laughs) How amazing was that! So that was my very first paid gig, yeah that was so exciting.

When someone asks you to perform in a different part of the country do they pay your expenses?

Yes, usually so.

Yes

Yes, they will pay travel, they will pay you for the performance, yeah a couple times its been for conferences you know like conferences don’t, if they pay you anything they don’t pay a lot, but a lot of times its for storytelling conferences worth going just for the networking, but you know there’s potential there too.

I was looking at your list of events and you’re very, very busy and are most of these paid events?

Yes, yes. They are. I do some volunteer work but you know especially now that I’ve retired, uh, being paid to tell stories is really important (Laughs).

Yeah.

It’s a nice addition to retirement income. And the pay for a storyteller varies from one thing to another, it depends on what you’re doing and for how long, and how far you have to travel, and you know what they want you to do, it just varies a lot, and what you willing, you’re your own boss and you decide whether it’s worth it or not.

True. And then, you also came up with books, so did you tell the stories first and then decide to collect them in books?

Yeah, actually most of the stories I tell are not written down anywhere, they’re just in my head. Which you know may not be a safe place to store them, there that filing system may not be the best, but um, I have a hard time when I write a story, that it um, it becomes carved in concrete.

I see what you’re saying, mm hmm, I understand that. Yes.

So, quite often the stories I’ve written are not the stories I tell, there’s a big difference between what I write, and what I tell.

Granny Sue is there something that you want to tell people that you haven’t said yet about how a storyteller might get started. I think a lot of people want to do that, you know they have a vision of themselves as going out and just captivating an audience by telling stories.

Well, it’s um, getting started really is finding a place to tell, so you may need to contact a local day care or a local school that would be willing to have you come in and tell because, the stories, you need to get them polished, you know before you bring them out in front of a paid audience you want to make sure that you’re bringing quality to that audience, but on the volunteer basis you still of course want to bring quality but it does give you that opportunity to explore and find out what your style is, and identifying who you are as a story teller is important, you know finding your niche, for me my niche is an Appalachian storyteller I tell lots of other stories of course and I sing Appalachian ballads too, but finding out ‘who am I as a storyteller’. Umm, and a very important thing to think about to is the fact is that just because you like to talk, does not make you a good storyteller.

(Laughs)

That’s a common mistake – I love to talk, I can do that! – well, yes, but you need to listen, you need to be able to really be able to really read an audience a whole lot, its more about the audience and the story then it is about you as a teller. You’re the conduit, to bring that story through to that audience so you’re constantly reading them to make sure that what you’re bringing to them Is what they want or need to hear.

Okay.

That’s a very important part. That and the practice. It takes discipline and it takes passion.

It’s like anything, if you’re going to get out there and do something your going have to work to develop your craft.

Now we’ll listen to Granny Sue singing the ballad Railroad Boy from her album Beyond the Grave – Ghost Stories and Ballads From The Mountains.

She went upstairs to make her bed, and not one word to her mother said. Her mother she went upstairs too, said daughter dear daughter whats troublin’ you, O’ mother dear mother I cannot tell, that railroad boy I love so well, he’s courted me my life always, and now at home he will not stay, there is a place down in the town, where the railroad boy goes and sits down, he takes a strange girl on his knee, and he tells to her what he won’t tell me, her father he came in from work, said where is daughter she seemed so hurt, he went upstairs to give her hope, and he found her hanging by a rope, he took his knife and cut her down, and on her bosom these words he found, oh dig my grave both wide and deep, place a marble stone at my head and feet, and on my coffin hang a snow white dove, to warn this world that I died for love.

That was ‘Railroad Boy’ sung by Granny Sue from her album Beyond The Grave – Ghost Stories and Ballads From The Mountains. It’s a little depressing though, so I think I’m going to share a story with you from my book ‘In His Footsteps’, a different kind of love story. Parker and his Magic Barn. Maybe you know someone like Parker, he has a barn that has anything and everything in it, people were always showing up at our house, couple times a week to say ‘Hey Parker, do you have this part or do you have that kind of rubber hose thing’, and Parker usually did! Here is some of the things Parker had in his barn. He had a pink toilet for a bathroom, a stove, a refrigerator, four metal framed windows, a hundred dollar replacement part for a metal detector he picked up at a garage sale, a lovely hexagonal aquarium on a wooden base, dark room equipment, an organ. I once told Parker, who was in the process of remodeling our house, that I thought what would look perfect in this small entryway was a tall, slender, wooden window, a narrow one that would just fit in the wall next to the door. And he said ‘I have one of those in the barn’ I said ‘Really?’ and sure enough he did. It was beautiful, it even has a screen and the window would swing open using a hand crank on the inside to let in summer breezes. When my sister came to visit she said it was too bad we didn’t have a row boat for our pond and Parker he said he had one in the barn, I said ‘Parker, there is no way I missed seeing a row boat in the barn’. But, apparently I had missed the 10 foot row bort, row bort, row boat stored along with everything else in there. See? It is magic!

You can find out more about how to have the joy that comes from living each day for God, while still keeping up with daily life, in the book ‘In His Footsteps – How to be happy in every situation’ available at the website https://inhisfootsteps.com or online at amazon.com

Useful Links:

Granny Sue’s calendar of events and how to book her