A storytelling icon comes to new Burke Arts theater

Storyteller. That term has become associated with a lot of vocations lately. It has been commandeered by everyone from movie directors to journalists and ministers and even marketers. I understand their appropriation of the word. It adds a certain cachet to what they do. But when I think of storytelling I think of a person who does just what the term implies, tells stories. And in the oral tradition. That may be because I was lucky enough to have grown up around people who did just that. And there is no finer purveyor of that art form than my good friend, Connie Regan-Blake.

I find that folks who are good storytellers tend to be interesting people, and Connie is the very definition of that. Fresh out of school, she donned a backpack and headed for Europe on what would lead to a lifetime of travel and adventure. Not only was she amassing a collection of stories about her personal encounters but by immersing herself in the cultures that she encountered she was exposing herself to folk tales that remain an integral part of her repertoire to this day.

After extensive touring abroad young Connie needed to recharge both herself and her bank account. She decided it was time to come home and find a job with the single goal of getting together the finances to get back to her adventures. That opportunity appeared through her cousin, Barbara Freeman who worked for the public library in Chattanooga, Tenn. It seems that the library had received a grant to hire a full-time storyteller and Barbara told Connie that she should apply. She did and was hired. Within weeks she knew that storytelling was her calling.

The first storytelling festival ever held was in the little East Tennessee town of Jonesborough in the fall of 1973. It grew from an idea nurtured by a single man, Jimmy Neill Smith. And since there were no other storytelling festivals at the time, it was decided that it should be called the National Storytelling Festival.

Somehow Connie and her cousin Barbara found out about it and drove up from Chattanooga. When Jimmy Neill Smith interviewed the duo, he invited them to tell their stories there on that very first ever festival dedicated to the art of storytelling.

The two soon began telling stories not only separately but in tandem as well. That grew to telling not only for libraries but at folk music festivals, in schools, in coffee houses, at house concerts, for civic originations, just anywhere that they could find an audience.

They called themselves the Folktellers. As more venues opened up for them, they decided to give themselves over to storytelling as an avocation.

And so, Connie’s lifelong storytelling journey began in a well-used yellow Datsun pickup with a camper shell packed to the gills that became their home. They went wherever the stories took them. And it took them far and wide for the next twenty years as the seeds of what was being called a storytelling revival took root. Many of those seeds they had sewn themselves. But as all good things inevitably must, the duo ran its course.

But Connie was just getting started. In her more than 50-year career as a professional storyteller, Connie has performed for audiences on six continents. Her vast catalogue of stories encompasses those gleaned from an enormous number of people in dozens of countries and across hundreds of thousands of miles, as well as from her own experience.

The number of awards that have come her way is staggering, not the least of which are the Lifetime Achievement Oracle Award and the Circle of Excellence Oracle Award from the National Storytelling Network. And one of her greatest achievements is that Connie is the only storyteller to have been on the stages of the National Storytelling Festival as either a Featured Teller or as an Emcee every year in its more than 50-year history.

The good news is that Connie Regan-Blake is coming to Morganton as the second featured storyteller in the continuing Burke County Arts Council’s Table Rock Storytelling Festival on Saturday, June 21. Included in the ticket price is admission to an hour-long workshop given by Connie on the art of storytelling.

This presentation will give the attendee an overall history of the craft as well as information on the procedures used in crafting and telling one’s own stories. That evening Connie will perform a 90-minute concert in the Arts Council’s newly opened state of the art theater. For tickets or for more information, go to burkearts.org or call 828-433-7282.