The Living Tradition of Appalachian Storytelling

By Dogwood & Deathcap | Field Notes | Culture & Storytelling

Deep in the cultural heartland of America, the Appalachian region hums with a rhythm that is both ancient and intimate. From the fog-laced hollers of southwest Virginia to the coal seams of West Virginia, this land is steeped in contradiction, grit and grace, hardship and humor. One of its most enduring forms of cultural resilience is the act of storytelling.

In Appalachia, storytelling is more than entertainment. It is pedagogy, preservation, and presence. It is how we remember the dead, how we teach the living, and how we remain tethered to place and people in a rapidly shifting world.

Storytelling as Cultural Transmission

In regions shaped by oral traditions, storytelling functions as a primary method of intergenerational knowledge transfer. In Appalachia, these stories are rarely written down. They live in the lilt of a familiar voice, in the slow cadence of a tale passed down on a front porch or beside a wood stove. Their power lies not only in content, but in context, the unspoken weight between sentences, the laughter after a well-timed punchline, the quiet nods of those who already know how the story ends.

Folklorists have long noted that Appalachian humor as a survival skill—what Loyal Jones called “laughter through tears.” Even the exaggerated tall tales (like the Jack tales collected by Richard Chase in the 1940s) carry moral lessons and community values, preserving everything from herbal remedies to warnings about the land itself.

Growing up in this tradition, I heard stories of my Mammaw Jones, who picked tobacco barefoot in Rose Hill, Virginia, during the Great Depression. Of my Pappaw “Jack,” who mined coal in Wyoming and Raleigh counties from the 1950s through the 1980s, long days in the darkness, the air heavy with dust, the wages barely livable. He threatened me that he’d “kick my ass or come back and haunt me” if I ever set foot in the coal mines.

Other stories carried stranger details: animals fleeing the forest before blasting began, and sightings of creatures that “weren’t supposed to exist” in these parts.

And of course, there were the hunting and fishing stories. These grew with each retelling, each time a little funnier, a little bigger, a little more alive. In Appalachian culture, humor is a survival skill. Stories stretch not just to entertain, but to carry grief and soften it through laughter. In this way, even tall tales become carriers of deep truths.

Deep Roots: From Cherokee Myth to Scots-Irish Ballads

Long before my grandparents were telling stories under porch lights, the region was already thick with narrative tradition. The Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples of Appalachia—whose ancestors have lived in these mountains for over 11,000 years—maintained rich oral mythologies centered around animals, landscape spirits, trickster figures like the Rabbit (Tsistu), and cosmic balance. Their stories shaped both spiritual understanding and ethical codes. James Mooney’s 1900 collection Myths of the Cherokee remains a foundational record of these sacred narratives, many of which explain natural features like the Judaculla Rock in North Carolina.

Centuries later, Scots-Irish and English settlers brought the ballad tradition—narrative songs recounting love, betrayal, crime, and redemption. These ballads, like Barbara Allen or Omie Wise, were the cultural newsreels of their time, offering moral insight wrapped in melody. “Little Omie Wise” (based on the real 1808 murder of Naomi Wise in Randolph County, North Carolina) is one of America’s oldest documented murder ballads. It spread orally through the mountains and was collected by Cecil Sharp during his landmark 1916–1918 fieldwork in Appalachia.

Modern musicians continue this legacy. Colter Wall’s 2017 song “Kate McCannon” is a direct descendant of the murder-ballad form, echoing the betrayal-and-revenge structure of “Omie Wise.” Tyler Childers, Town Mountain, 49 Winchester, and others carry that thread forward, translating Appalachian struggle into a musical dialect that feels both current and ancestral.

Even mid-century legends, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, understood this implicitly. Their songs are saturated with Appalachian storytelling instincts: pain softened by metaphor, tragedy balanced by wit. And before them: Del McCoury, Ralph Stanley, Hazel Dickens, Hank Williams Sr., all chroniclers of Appalachian truth in its many forms.

The structure evolves, the rhythms change. But the story stays alive.

A Living Archive

Today, storytelling in Appalachia finds new mediums. Podcasts like Inside Appalachia (West Virginia Public Broadcasting), Stories of Appalachia, and YouTube channels such as The Appalachian Storyteller keep the porch-talk tradition alive in digital form. Institutions like the Foxfire Museum & Heritage Center in Georgia (which has preserved thousands of oral histories since 1966), the Digital Library of Appalachia, and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center extend the oral tradition into the 21st century without replacing its rootedness in lived connection.

Appalachian folklorist Dr. Ed Karshner has written that storytelling, for us, is “how we preserve the things that matter most… a knowledge we are made of.” It’s not nostalgia—it’s survival. We are not just born with instincts for farming or coal work or hunting. But we are born with a deep instinct to make sense of our lives by telling the story of them.

When we speak the names of those who came before us, we revive them. When we retell their stories to our children, we pass something sacred on.

Inheriting Memory

As I think about my own children and what they’ll inherit, I know the stories matter as much as the land beneath our feet. They are our living inheritance: not deeds or titles, but memories told aloud. Echoes passed through kitchen screens and picket fences. A way of saying: We were here. We saw this. We endured—and we laughed anyway.

Appalachian storytelling isn’t just about where we’ve been. It’s about how we remember. How we keep one another alive. And how we carry home with us, even when the porch lights go out.

Further Reading & Listening

• James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900)

• Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917)

• Richard Chase, The Jack Tales (1943)

• The Foxfire book series (1960s–present)

• Loyal Jones & Billy Edd Wheeler, Curing the Cross-Eyed Mule: Appalachian Humor

• Saundra Kelley, Southern Appalachian Storytellers (2010)

Digital archives: Digital Library of Appalachia, Library of Congress American Folklife Center, Foxfire.org

Podcasts: Inside Appalachia, Stories of Appalachia

Music to hear the tradition alive: Dock Boggs’ 1920s “Omie Wise,” Colter Wall “Kate McCannon,” anything by Tyler Childers or Ralph Stanley.

These stories were never meant to stay on the page. They were meant to be spoken, sung, laughed over, cried over, and then handed to the next voice.