Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins’s song “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Every year as Easter approaches, I think of the perennial holiday classic, the beloved song “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Written in 1949 by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins (who also wrote “Frosty, the Snowman”), the song was recorded by Gene Autry in 1950. It became an instant hit, reaching #5 on the Billboard charts. It’s a much-beloved song for my mother and me, too, for I made my singing debut in first grade performing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” My school – Boggstown Elementary School in rural Indiana – announced a talent competition. When I got wind of it, I hurried home to tell my mother the news. Could we get an act together? We hatched the idea of a girls’ trio. I and two of my friends would sing a song, and my mother, an accomplished pianist, would accompany us. I asked my friends – they were in! But what song would we sing? The talent show would be the week before Easter, and Mom struck on the idea of “Here

This week on StoryWeb: Martin Sexton’s song “Happy.” For Jim, celebrating twenty-four years of new life Several years ago, my friend Virginia called to invite me to a concert. Martin Sexton, one of her favorite singer-songwriters, was playing that night at the Boulder Theater, and Virginia had an extra ticket. Would I like to go? I asked Jim what he thought. I had vaguely heard of Martin Sexton, had seen his name, in fact, on the Boulder Theater marquee many times. But that’s all I knew. Jim said, “Oh, he puts on a great show. You’ll love him. You should go.” So I joined Virginia that night, and am I glad I did! Martin Sexton came out on stage – a solo guitarist and singer – and launched into a song I immediately thought of as the “happy song.” I loved it! Such joy! Such a life-affirming song! I sat spellbound through the rest of the two-hour concert. How had I not known about this talented songwriter and even more deeply gifted performer? His pyrotechnic singing (complete with an amazing and effortless false

This week on StoryWeb: Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong. One of the pure delights in moving to Colorado eleven years ago was discovering a whole new crop of regional writers – in this case, Western writers. If you’ve followed StoryWeb for a while, you know I love American regional literature – especially Southern and Appalachian literature (but throw in a little Sarah Orne Jewett for the Maine coast, why don’t ya?). I quickly discovered that the West is richly endowed with powerful, powerful writers. Willa Cather helped set the scene, and well-known later writers like Annie Proulx, Pam Houston, Kim Barnes, and Wallace Stegner followed in her footsteps. Up-and-coming writers like Julene Bair delve into issues of great concern to the region. Among my favorite Western writers is Kent Haruf, whose novels are set on the flat plains of eastern Colorado. This is not a part of the country that gets much attention, and when people hear “Colorado,” they’re thinking Rocky Mountains, not hard-scrabble farming and small-town

This week on StoryWeb: Hod Pharis’s song “I Heard the Bluebirds Sing.” In honor of the first day of spring I first encountered Canadian songwriter Hod Pharis’s song “I Heard the Bluebirds Sing” on Pathway to West Virginia, the first album recorded by Ginny Hawker and Kay Justice. It was 1989, and my good friend Rolf had just returned from a road trip that had taken him through West Virginia. Rolf was the quintessential lover of old-time and early country music. He and his sister had been at a rest stop, and he asked about the music being played. The clerk said, “Oh, yes! Great album! Ginny Hawker and Kay Justice.” Rolf bought a cassette tape and brought it back to our group of grad school friends in Madison, Wisconsin. We were all entirely captivated and mesmerized by these two singers – such beautiful voices, exquisite but often unusual harmonies, Ginny’s Primitive Baptist cadence blending with Kay’s alto. “I Heard the Bluebirds Sing” quickly became our favorite cut from the album. Oh, how we loved the story

This week on StoryWeb: Colin Higgins and Hal Ashby’s film, Harold and Maude. The 1971 film Harold and Maude is a cult classic, a romantic dark comedy preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry and ranked number 45 on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Funniest Movies of All Time. Written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby, it deserves every bit of the love its enamored fans have showered on it over the years. It’s an unlikely love story if ever there was one. Nineteen-year-old Harold meets his future paramour, seventy-nine-year-old Maude, at a funeral. You might expect me to say, “And not just any funeral.” But to both Harold and Maude, it is “any” funeral – for their shared joy, it turns out, is to attend funerals. Harold drives a Jaguar he’s converted into a hearse, and Maude quite literally zips around town in any car she can find. The pair hit it off, and before long, they’ve become lovers. Now if you’ve never seen Harold and Maude, you’re thinking, “What a bizarre-soundi

This week on StoryWeb: Helen Matthews Lewis’s book Living Social Justice in Appalachia. In honor of International Women’s Day, coming up this Wednesday, I want to pay tribute to one of the great teachers of my life, Helen Matthews Lewis. Known fondly as the mother or grandmother of Appalachian studies by the many people whose personal and professional lives she has touched, Helen – as always – modestly denies this title, saying instead that other leaders gave birth to and shaped the interdisciplinary movement. But as her colleague Stephen L. Fisher points out, “there is little question that her program at Clinch Valley College [in Virginia] served as the major catalyst for the current Appalachian studies movement and that no one has done more over the years to shape its direction than Helen.” For me, as for so many others, Helen set the standard for engaged scholarship, activist teaching, and pure regional enjoyment – whether that region is Appalachia or Wales or southern Africa. Helen weaves it all together:

This week on StoryWeb: James Baldwin and Raoul Peck’s film, I Am Not Your Negro. I want to close out African American History Month with a look at a new documentary directed by Raoul Peck. I Am Not Your Negro features a range of James Baldwin’s writings as well as rare television appearances and footage of Baldwin speaking at a variety of events. Indeed, Baldwin’s writing and speaking are so central to this film that he is listed as the primary screenwriter, with Peck as compiler and editor. The words are powerful indeed – Baldwin at his peak of cultural commentary. But as hard as it is to believe, the film is so much more even than Baldwin’s powerful writing and compelling speaking. Adding depth, complexity, nuance, and more than one emotional jolt is Peck’s expert direction. He achieves the seemingly impossible: collaborating with Baldwin thirty years after the famed writer’s death. Here’s the story of I Am Not Your Negro. In 1979, Baldwin wrote to his agent, Jay Acton, with a thirty-page proposal for a new

This week on StoryWeb: Beyoncé’s album Lemonade. Beyoncé slays. That’s the only word to describe her achievement on her most recent album, Lemonade. Now I am not a big fan of hip hop or pop music or what the Grammys call urban contemporary music, but ever since Beyoncé’s performance of “Formation” at last year’s Super Bowl, I have been mightily intrigued by this powerhouse of a performer. For Beyoncé’s songwriting and performance go well beyond hip-hop or pop music or urban contemporary or R&B. Indeed, it seems that any genre is just too narrow to contain Beyoncé. “I am large,” said Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes.” The same might very well be said of Beyoncé. She slays precisely because she contains vast multitudes. “Formation” – especially the video Beyoncé released the day before the Super Bowl – made me sit up and take notice. Indeed, it made an entire nation sit up and take notice. Like many Americans, I pored over the video, read the lyrics online, read analyses of the song and the video, talked

This week on StoryWeb: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s memoir Colored People. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is well known in the United States as a leading professor of African American Studies, director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and host of several PBS series, including Finding Your Roots. Many Americans also know him as the man who was arrested for breaking into his own home and then being invited to have a beer with President Obama. What is less well known about Gates is that he hails from Piedmont, West Virginia, a small town on the Potomac River, two hours west of Washington, DC. The home of working people, many of them immigrants, Piedmont has a sizable African American population. How did Gates come out of a small West Virginia town and ultimately land in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a leading professor at Harvard University? Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. The book tells of Gates’s childhood gr

This week on StoryWeb: Solomon Northup’s book Twelve Years a Slave. Though slave narratives were widely read in the antebellum United States (and in fact were one of the most popular genres at that time), they are mostly read now primarily in American history and literature classes. My mother-in-law, Eileen Rebman, taught a variety of slave narratives for many years in her high school AP American history classes, and I regularly taught Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself as well as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In graduate school, I had the great fortune of taking a course on American autobiography taught by William L. Andrews, author of To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. In his class and in his book, Andrews provided outstanding insights into this genre unique to American letters. Slave narratives – written solely to end the practice of slavery – were not just polemical, says Andrews, but

This week on StoryWeb: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Who could turn the world on with her smile? Mary Tyler Moore, of course! Those of us who loved Mary Tyler Moore and her pioneering work as an actress and comedian were not surprised to hear of her passing last week – but we were sad nevertheless. Moore, who was 80 when she died, had fought Type 1 diabetes and its complications since she was 33. Moore’s television career started with her role as “Happy Hotpoint,” a dancing elf on Hotpoint appliance commercials that ran during the Ozzie and Harriet TV series. She also had minor roles in television and movies during the 1950s. Moore’s big breakthrough came in her role as Laura Petrie, wife to comedy writer Robert Petrie, on The Dick Van Dyke Show. As the show ran from 1961 to 1996, Moore became as famous for her portrayal of the dancer-turned-homemaker as she did for her fashion sense. Her form-fitting capri pants quickly became iconic, just as popular as Jackie Kennedy’s dresses. But it was as TV newsroom associ

This week on StoryWeb: Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. When I was fifteen years old, my favorite album was Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Even then, I knew it was something special, a truly unique album. Recently, I listened to the album again – for the first time in over thirty years. Wow! It still holds together. Elton John himself – among numerous other musicians, producers, and critics – believes Captain Fantastic is his best album. The ninth formal studio release album for Elton John, Captain Fantastic was the first album to debut at number one on the US Billboard 200. Rolling Stone ranks it at number 158 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The album was recorded at Caribou Ranch outside of Nederland, Colorado – just a hop and a skip from our home in Boulder. Taken in its totality, the album tells the powerful story of the growing relationship – both musically and personally – between Captain Fantastic (Elton J

This week on StoryWeb: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “I Have a Dream.” “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.” So said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on December 10, 1964, as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. At 35 years old, he was the youngest person ever to have been awarded the prize. Sixteen months earlier on August 28, 1963, Dr. King had helped lead what is perhaps still the greatest people’s march on Washington – an iconic “mountaintop” moment in the centuries-long struggle for African American freedom, rights, and dignity. Over a quarter of a million black and white Americans gathered in the nation’s capital one hundred years after President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The “I Have a Dream” speech Dr. King gave that day is equally iconic. Just twelve hours before he was going to give the speech, Dr. King didn’t yet know what he

This week on StoryWeb: Jean Ritchie’s book Singing Family of the Cumberlands. If you’re looking for bona fide old-time mountain music – the real deal, before bluegrass, before the Carter Family even – then look no further than Jean Ritchie. Perhaps more than any other performer of her generation, Jean Ritchie gives us the traditional old-time stories and songs and the story of the lived experience of growing up in a family in the Cumberland Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Many Americans know Jean Ritchie from her singing and songwriting career. In addition to songs she wrote (such as “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore”), Ritchie took special delight in preserving, performing, and passing down traditional ballads and other old-time songs. She sings “play party” game songs, she sings murder ballads, and of course, like any mountain balladeer worth her salt, she has her own version of “Barbary Allen.” In her performances, she both told stories and sang songs, accompanying herself on lap dulcimer. I had the gr

This week on StoryWeb: Neil Young’s song “Comes a Time.” StoryWeb celebrates stories of all kinds: novels and short stories and films and memoirs, of course, but also poems and songs and visual art that tell stories. Neil Young’s song “Comes a Time” doesn’t tell a story – not by a long shot. There is no main character, no narrator, no plot, no action. But sometimes a work of art lives with us in such a way that it takes on the role of story. It becomes a part of our personal story. For many of us, songs play this role, becoming part of the narrative of our lives. “Comes a Time” is such a song for me. In fact, it is the song above all others that has become part of the soundtrack to my life. I listened to it often in college. It was on one of the cassette tapes my boyfriend kept in his silver Fiat 128. I listened to it at my friend Genia’s apartment, as she showed me how she was trying to teach herself to play Neil Young songs on her guitar. I listened to it one long day in Alaska, as my college boyfriend slep

This week on StoryWeb: James Holman’s book The Narrative of a Journey. For Jim, in honor of his birthday In 2007, my husband, Jim, and I heard about Jason Roberts’s book, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. It sounded fascinating: a biography of a British naval officer who completely lost his sight at age 25 and then proceeded to travel around the world – and in the most exotic and, often, dangerous places. Born in 1786, James Holman rose to the rank of lieutenant in the British Royal Navy. When he fell ill and lost his sight in 1825, he was forced to give up his career as a naval officer. But in his time with the navy, he had been bitten by the travel bug – and travel became his life’s quest ever after. In 1832, he became the first blind person to circumnavigate the globe. Our favorite expedition found Holman at the edge of the world’s most famous live volcano – Mount Vesuvius. As I read Roberts’s biography aloud (a way we sometimes share books), I could barely make it t

This week on StoryWeb: David Sedaris’s essay “The Santaland Diaries.” For Julia and Jim, my favorite David Sedaris fans My sister, Julia, is one of David Sedaris’s biggest fans. She and my husband, Jim, love giggling together over favorite passages from Sedaris’s droll radio essays. While Sedaris is an accomplished writer, it is in his oral delivery of his essays – his readings – that he really makes his mark. Sure, you can recite a favorite line or try to imitate him doing “Away in a Manager” as Billie Holiday, but really, why try? Only David Sedaris can really do David Sedaris. Sedaris’s breakout came when he recorded “The Santaland Diaries” for NPR’s Morning Edition in December 1992, his debut for national public radio. When the essay was broadcast, more people requested a tape of it than any Morning Edition story up to that time (except for the death of beloved NPR commentator Red Barber.)  Small in stature, Sedaris recalls landing a gig (if you can call it that) as Crumpet the Elf in Macy’s Santaland. He

This week on StoryWeb: Albert and David Maysles’s film Grey Gardens Watching the 1975 documentary film Grey Gardens is like slowing down to watch an accident in the next lane over. You know you shouldn’t, but you simply can’t help yourself. And if you’re really a rubbernecker like me (and apparently like tens of thousands of other Americans), you line up to watch the 2009 HBO Jessica Lange/Drew Barrymore biopic, which provides the backstory to the original film. Clearly, the 1975 documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles were on to something. What is it about Big Edie and Little Edie, the mother-daughter duo who languished in squalor as their formerly grand Hamptons estate, Grey Gardens, fell into disrepair? Why do we want to watch mentally ill, codependent hoarders living out the exact opposite of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? The Kardashians, they’re not. The Maysles brothers’ idea for a documentary was spurred initially by their interest in the Bouvier family and then by national reports of

This week on StoryWeb: Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” Last month during the same week that saw the U.S. presidential election, Canadian musician Leonard Cohen died at age 82. He was one of the great songwriters – a songwriter’s songwriter. The composer of such songs as “Suzanne,” Cohen was perhaps best known for his 1984 song “Hallelujah.” Apparently, it took Cohen years to write “Hallelujah,” to the point where he was once so frustrated that he banged his head on the floor as he sat to write the song. Even after he recorded the song on the album Various Positions in 1984, his subsequent world tour found him altering the lyrics, sometimes considerably. “Hallelujah” was a song that would undergo many revisions, both by Cohen and by others. The song did not really achieve breakthrough status until it was recorded by Jeff Buckley in 1994. Though Buckley did not have a hit with “Hallelujah” while he was alive, by 2004 it was so well known that it ranked number 259 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Songs of

This week on StoryWeb: Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.” As the year draws to a close and the dark deepens, I reflect on the difficult election season and look for glimmers of light. Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” – published in 1978 as part of Angelou’s poetry collection, And Still I Rise – speaks to me as a powerful antidote to despair. Although she specifically speaks from and to the experience of being African American, acknowledging the “huts of history’s shame,” her poem also reaches out to anyone who has struggled, who has despaired of finding the way forward. “You may trod me in the very dirt,” she writes, “[b]ut still, like dust, I’ll rise.” I find her words to be a tonic, an inspiration, a beacon for the journey ahead. Maya Angelou also wrote memoirs, including her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first in a series of seven books that tell the story of her life. I featured I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings last year in honor of Banned Books Week. You can learn more about An