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Take it away, Dennis. Part of the Southern Appalachian heritage is the skill of storytelling. And whenever that topic arises in a conversation, my mind automatically returns to memories of Frederick Newman Summers, or Paw, as we grandchildren called him. To me, he was the quintessential storyteller, a natural who probably never realized his own skill. During all of my lifetime, and until his death in December 1972, Paw lived in the rocky hill country of the rural community of High School, Tennessee, between Knoxville and Clinton. But he moved around considerably during his 82-year lifetime. He had also held a variety of jobs. Before my time, he had been a well driller and a house painter.
He even sold mason shoes on the side, and I'm sure that he enjoyed every minute of it, even if he never made much profit. Paw was the proverbial jack-of-all-trades, master of nine, unless you count storytelling. He was an avid student of politics, politicking as a precinct worker for innumerable elections.
His yard always seemed to have one or more campaign signs in it. Paw also had some fame, at least locally, as a musician. In fact, he and my grandmother met and fell in love at a rollicking barn dance at which he was playing and singing. Carl Bean, a distant relative and a frequent performer at the now world-famous Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, remembered recording Paw's singing the Name Song, which mentions about every name imaginable. I faintly remember Paw's playing his guitar and singing that song and a lot of other humorous ballads, but I more clearly recall his singing old-fashioned hymns. For years, he led singing in Little Mount Harmony Baptist Church in High School.
There, at his funeral, the mourners sang his favorite hymn, When I've Gone the Last Mile of the Way, before we laid him to rest in the family plot in the cemetery behind the white clapboard church. Perhaps it was his breadth of experience, his length and variety of life, that provided grist for Paw's story mill. Many of his stories involved himself. Others were about people he had known or had worked with or for. But some of his stories were renditions of stories he had heard others tell, but always with his own interpretations and embellishments thrown in to give them a homey, personal flavor. As a kid, I used to sit with him for the first time, on his blue-painted wooden porch on many warm afternoons, staring out across Raccoon Valley Road toward the Southern Railroad tracks, and listen to him tell stories to whoever would listen.
He sat in a homemade rocking chair that was held together by innumerable layers of paint, and stared off into the distance, rather than looking at me or whoever else might be happening by for a visit. As he spun his tails. He was perpetually moving, incessantly tapping his foot on the porch planks. Occasionally, he patted the wide arm of the rocker with his hand for emphasis. Sometimes his feet, as though moved by an uncontrollable urge, burst forth with energy, tapping out a brief but lively buck dance routine.
When the urge for motion had apparently been satisfied, his feet got still for a while. An occasional car often passed, and Pa threw up his hand in a friendly wave. Who was that, Pa?
I would ask. Oh, that was so-and-so, he responded. He knew more people, and more people knew him than I've even met. Seeing the person who had just passed reminded him of a story, and off he went with another tale. Infrequently, someone whom he didn't know would pass. To my query about who it was, Pa usually responded, I don't know him.
He must be from off somewhere else. Pa dropped out of school in the fourth grade. We were working on short division, he explained to me one day, and the teacher said that tomorrow we would start on long division.
I took one look at those problems and never went back. In spite of his limited formal education, Pa was an intelligent man. He read a lot, and had a vocabulary that surprised me as a college student. On the end table beside his chair, which sat behind the front door of his house, was always a magazine or two.
The Knoxville Journal, perhaps a copy of The Watchdog, grocer, politician, coon hunter, Kaz Walker's political scandal sheet, and a big, worn Bible. Although Pa probably never read Mark Twain's instructions on how to tell a good story effectively, he was an expert at doing exactly what Twain advised. Like Twain, Pa made a big deal out of insignificant minor details in his stories. For example, during a story, he would worry over what day of the week the event about which he was telling actually happened, what the weather had been that day, what year it was, or whether the event had happened in Clinton, or in Kingsport, or on Chestnut Ridge, or beside Bull Run Creek. He quite often diverged innumerable times during a story, burying stories within stories, but finally finding his way back to complete the original story just when listeners were beginning to think he had lost his way entirely. Yet, he somehow always left his listeners wanting to hear more, or he would use the just finished story as a springboard into the next story. Invariably, a train would come through during one of Pa's stories. He stopped his story in mid-sentence and rocked silently amid the rumble of the diesel locomotives and the click-clack of iron wheels on shiny rails, counting the freight cars as they went by.
When the caboose had passed from view down the track, he picked up right where he had left off without missing so much as a word. Sometimes Nanny was sitting with us. She, too, sometimes entered into Pa's storytelling, usually to argue with him over one of the many insignificant details of his story. Sometimes, he was sitting with us. Sometimes, he was sitting with us. Sometimes, he was sitting with us. Sometimes, he was sitting with us. Sometimes, discerning the story that Pa was about to tell just as he began it, declared, Good Lord, Fred, you know better than to tell that. Because he knew so many people, Pa had a lot of visitors, especially on Sunday afternoons. I suspect that many of those visitors came not so much to talk to Pa as to listen to him tell stories. I think that he was totally unaware of his own storytelling prowess.
He was just being himself. Perhaps that is what the very quality that makes Appalachian storytellers unique. Like Pa, they just do what comes natural. Storytelling is an important way in which my generation and countless ones before it learned of its heritage. And it is a part of our heritage that must be preserved and fostered, a skill that must be passed on to our children and to their children for generations to come. And a great job on the production by Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to Dennis Peterson. Check out Dennis's website at dennislpeterson.com. Frederick Newman Summers, aka Pa, well driller, house painter, shoe salesman, singer of songs, and teller of stories.
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