Keeper of the Past: An Appalachian Storyteller

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.
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.
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.’”
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.”
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.