Voices

An important part of storytelling is to go with your strength. If you are good at movement, let it flow with your stories. If you can do voices, make them enhance the tales you tell. If you enjoy working with pre-schoolers, then focus your energy on working with them and learning stories in that age group. The same goes for those whose likes are with older children, teens, or adults. Go with your strength. One of my characteristics is the use of voice.

I find that I pick up accents and speech patterns naturally. You will see that if I’m in conversation with a person for any length of time or just listening to someone, that I will start to sound like that person. This began back when I was 5 years old and was requested to stand on a chair in the butcher’s shop singing, “Oh My Papa” and sounding like Eddie Fisher. This is especially true when I go to different places where the inhabitants speak with a different dialect. After returning from my first National Storytelling Festival, it took me about 4 days to lose the southern accent. Part of it was out of my control. As I spent more time listening to people talk and tell in Jonesborough, Tennessee, the more I began to talk that way. When I returned home, it just felt comfortable and I liked the way it sounded. Only people telling me to talk with my normal voice made me conscious of it. Once that was done it was easy to revert to my own accent (whatever that is). This also followed my trip to England, where the inhabitants knowing this about me kept trying to get me to sound like them.

I’ve always had fun playing with voices. When I worked as a stock boy for J. C. Penney’s following college, I was forever changing my voice to fit whatever I was doing. While running the freight elevator I would use an old man voice and similar to a piece on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in”, as the door opened I would croak, “Third Floor everybody out” and would proceed to fall on the floor in front of whomever was standing outside waiting to get into the elevator.  A fellow stock boy and I would do a routine while stacking boxes, where he stood in front of big empty box, moving his hand back and forth toward the box calling, 26, 26, 26… I would walk up to him and in curiously British accent ask, “Pardon me sir, but what are you counting.” As I looked in the box, his hand would push forward into me, making me tumble into the box whereupon he would call, 27, 27, 27… (This was only effective if there were other unsuspecting people around.)

There were lots of other instances where I would change my voice to keep from being bored. My supervisor put up with it, in that it didn’t impact the work that I did. She was quite amazed that I was actually certified to be a teacher. She could not imagine me in the classroom being serious. I guess after 34 years of teaching I can safely say that I proved her wrong.

The only time this talent has become an issue was when I was working as a teacher and the Assistant District superintendent stuttered. After being in a meeting with him for more than 10 minutes, I would start to stutter.

This penchant of mine has helped me become a better storyteller. As I hear stories that I like and think are well told, the style of my telling adapts to fit that voice. It allows me to learn from good storytellers. As I read new stories that I want to learn I can picture in my mind how they might sound. Sometimes to relieve the repetitiveness of practicing a story, I will tell the whole tale in a voice that I would never perform in. In doing so I have occasionally found a voice that fits the story better than the way I had been practicing it regularly. This was the case in the Jane Yolen story, “The Wind Cap” where a little green mannikin thanks the main character, Jon, for his kindness. One day I started telling the entire story for fun in practice with an Irish accent and when it came to the mannikin part of the story, I liked the way it sounded. So when I finally performed the story, it was told in my normal voice except for when it came to the little green mannikin.

This is not to say that I don’t have a style of telling and that all I do is copy others. My style of telling has evolved as does every storyteller’s. The more stories I learn and tell the more I’ll be able to identify what my voice is. For right now I choose to go with my strength and to use voices to enhance the characterization with the tales that I tell.