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Interview with Michael "Badhair" Williams

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  • Michael “Badhair” Williams talks about the importance of storytelling in his family, and being inspired to begin telling stories himself in the fourth grade after folklorist Richard Chase visited his school. He mentions that although he gets to tell all kinds of stories in public foums, he primarily works with Appalachian folktales (especially for school children), personal family stories, and Appalachian stories.
  • Interview with Michael "Badhair" Williams Interviewer: Laura Lansford Interviewed on October ih, 2009 Flat Rock Coffee; Flat Rock, NC Laura Lansford: Alright, this is Laura Lansford interviewing Michael Williams. It is October the ... 71h? There we go, I should have looked that up before I got here. Michael Williams: I am 58 today. LL: Oh, wow, congratulations, I think my dad turned 58 almost exactly a month ago, so [both laughing] His birthday is the week before mine, my cousin's is the week after that so, everybody in the family has September/October birthdays. Alright. .. I'm going to start out with some basic kind of background stuff. Where are you originally from? MW: I grew up in Boone, all my people are from Burke County, just down the mountain a little ways, but Boone was where I grew up. LL: Ok, is that where you were born also, everybody born and raised in the same area? MW: I was born in Raleigh, Wake Forest was down there, my folks, my dad was in school, so I, that's where I was born. LL: When you were younger, did you have kind of a large family environment, or was it more just a small.. MW: The immediate family was fairly small, my brother, my mom and my dad and I. But I had a very large extended family. I've got probably close to 55 or 60 first cousins. LL: Oh wow. MW: So we'd get together and it'd be, it'd be a lot of fun, we'd have a big crowd. LL: I've got like, four. [both laughing] How old were you, do you remember, when you first started to tell stories? MW: I was in the fourth grade, as a matter offact. We had the good fortune to have Richard Chase, do you know who Richard Chase is? LL: The name sounds familiar. MW: Richard Chase wrote the books Grandfather Tales and [unintelligible because of my response] LL: Oh, that's why it sounds familiar! MW: And he lived in Banner Elk right there. And so he came by our school when I was in the fourth grade, and satin class and told us stories, and one of our assignments was to tell an Appalachian folk tale. So I went off and learned Jack and the Giant's Newground from his book, and it's about a 30 minute tale. I came back and everybody's tellin' these little two and three minute stories, and I stood up and started in on Jack and the Giant's Newground, you know they were [pause] LL: You know they were all sittin' there goin' maaan ... MW: I had 'em in the palm of my hand, they loved it! LL: That's awesome! MW: And the teacher, you know, after 15 minutes said, that's enough! And the next day she said 'ok now tell that story again' and I got about 20 minutes into it, she said, that's enough. So the next week she said tell that story! So I got up and I've got to just about the end of it, and she was in the back of the class snorin', she was [unintelligible] she just needed to catch up on her sleep, and there, she started snorin' and everybody started laughin' and woke her up. [both laughing] So that was my first storytelling experience, In front of my peers. LL: [completely unintelligible due to espresso machine, *but* I think I asked what kind of stories Michael tells.] MW: My family are all tellers of various kinds, so you know, stories about personal things that have happened to them and family stories. But my first performance, true performance, was in 1975 at the Jubilee festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I was working with Roadside Theater at that point. And there were 6 of us onstage tell in' Wicked John and the Devil, once again from the Richard Chase books. LL: When you started tellin' stories when you were younger, did anybody, did you find anybody to teach you how to do it or did you just kinda ... start? MW: Well, like I said my family is, they're tellers, especially my [unintelligible] uncles. Are you familiar with Coyote? You know who Coyote is? LL: Vaguely MW: He's the trickster in the Western folklore. Well, they the Coyotes of the East, and they do all these things and told all these stories and so I had some emulatin' comin' up, but we'd tell the stories that they told to other people. So if anybody was my teachers I would say they were. Although I had a natural gift for it, you know, I was really shy, was really, you know, and tellin' stories was one way for me to get out there and express myself. LL: Do you have a specific kind of story, like do you only tell the Appalachian folktales? MW: In the schools, yeah. Now there's all kinds of stories I tell in public forums. But yeah, primarily I work with Appalachian folktales and stuff that's either my family stories or Appalachian stories. Occasionally I'll tell a [unintelligible] story or stories from other cultures that I picked up here and there and yonder, but not very often. LL: How do you think growing up in Boone and being in that area with your big extended family, how do you think that affected your storytelling or the stories, the specific types of stories that you tell, like the family stories? MW: Well, you had to be good [both laughing] To get anybody's attention when there were that many. LL: With that many people, yeah. MW: And bein' the oldest grandchild on my father's side, you know, that was, that was one way, I was expected to take care of the kids, you know, whether I was down there or not, it was my fault if one of 'em got hurt [laughing] LL: That was one way to keep 'em in line. MW: So you know, you, there were all kinds of situations where I used stories either to teach a lesson or to lie so they wouldn't do somethin' [both laughing] LL: Hey that's ... you gotta do what you gotta do. Now when you tell a story, like when you do it in school or when you do it in another public performance, do you use your audience's participation a lot or..? MW: Oh yeah, I, especially with children I, actually with the story of [unintelligible] get five children on stage with me and they are the little old woman, the little old man, the little old girl, the little old boy, and the bear .. .is me. Oh and the little old squirrel. So, and we act it out, and and kids love that! They love being up there on stage with me and it's amazing how often I'll go back after having done a performance and they can still tell me the story. And you get parents that go 'they came home and they told me your whole story that night!' you know, it was amazing! LL: And they never remember anything from school! MW: And I'm that way, once I hear a story, especially ifl tell it, it just sticks in my brain. It's just one of those things that I can .. .I have heard stories and turned around on stage and told them. LL: Oh wow, that's pretty cool. [unintelligible] Do you ... do the audience's reactions, like even if it's not technically a story where you're using audience participation, do their reactions to how you're telling the story, does that affect how you tell the story? Like if you're telling it a certain way and you can see then either really not reacting or really reacting? MW: Well, yes, absolutely. You're ... when I'm doing storytelling I am ... it's almost a Zen state you go into if you're doin' it right, you know, because you're doin' so many things at once. You're emoting, you're conveying • words in sequence, you're conveying the, the discourse world is the vocal emotions. You're looking at your audience seeing how they're reacting to stuff, and I never tell a story the same way twice. It's not uncommon that if they come up with somethin' that I haven't thought of, if I see it, somebody says somethin' I'll play off of it, work with it. Some days, occasionally you get audiences like when I was in ... not Tahoe ... Yuma, Arizona. I was working in Yuma years ago, and I, I was do in' dinner theater out there do in' stories and I got to middle of the show and three people had gone 'huh .. ha, ha huh'. So I went into the bathroom and I washed my face and I said ok, you've gotta get out there and really work hard, an do, do really good, and by the end of the show, I had five people goin' 'huh ha, ha huh'. So I went to the lady that, the presenter presenting the artists to the public, right, is seminal in the arts world. A presenter is, makes contracts with the artists, so I went to the presenter and I said, what do you think? Waiting for her to say I wanna have my money back, and she said it was wonderful, it was great, it was fantastic! I really loved it, it was awesome! She went on and on and on, and I looked and I said wait a minute, nobody laughed! She said, you don't understand! She said You're a [unintelligible]. She said, we had a major name comedian in here last week, you got more laughs than he did! These people just don't, they don't. .. LL: react MW: They don't respond! She said it's like in New Hampshire when Mark Twain was doin' shows there, she said, he did a show and nobody laughed, and he went outside and hidin the bushes. And as people walked through he was listenin' to what they said and one of those down easters said 'Yah, yah that Twain fellah he was pretty funneh. Almost laughed out loud.' [both laughing] So, so it depends on the audience, and yes you work off the audience. You know, if you get a really great audience, you participate with them, I, the first thing I do when I get onstage, if you're doing a stage performance, there's an invisible barrier most of the time between you and the audience. So that, like in a play, a Shakespeare play, you don't interact with the audience. Well that's not what storytellin's about at all. First thing you have to do is break that invisible barrier, and reach out there and touch those folks. And it's a very personal thing that you're doin'. I have people, I was, I went to the, I told stories at the World's Fair back when it was in Knoxville, and just not long ago I had somebody come to me and 'hey Badhair! How you doin!' shook my hand, 'oh boy it's good to see you again!' I had no idea who he was! No idea whatsoever! And we talked a little while and I said, I'm sorry I just can't place you. And this person said, I was in the audience at the World's Fair, don't you remember, we had a real connection! You would be sad! But it's because I do that, I look at my audience, and I looked from place to place to place, and tried to connect with, I try to look at everybody in the audience durin' a show, each and every person at least once, and sometimes more than once, so ... yeah, the answer is yeah. [both laughin] LL: When you tell stories that have like a meaning or a lesson in them, do you think that sometimes, does the audience grasp the meaning, do you explicitly say it, or .. ? MW: One of the reasons folktales are so well received in every culture you go to is I think there's an underlining, I don't know how to describe it, it's somethin' that just reaches out and grabs your soul. You know, I've told stories in the Navajo reservations, the [unintelligible] reservations, Inuit, I've told stories in England, and it doesn't matter where you go. Little kids are mesmerized, they just sit there. I think it's innate in all of us that these stories have some connection with our soul, and they teach very deep deep lesson, you know that a lot of them are down in your psyche. They're not overt, they're covert. Have you ever read Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment? LL: I don't think so. MW: If you're interested in folk tales that's something you oughtta look at. LL: Wait, what's the last name again? MW: Bettelheim, Bruno Bettelheim. Uses of Enchantment I think's the name of the book. He talks about, and this is the woman out of Colorado who runs with the wolves, it's the same sort of idea that she espouses, he just did it thirty or forty years before she did. But, there's, there is hidden meaning in a lot of the folk tales today, You've got to be careful, because if you're too explicit with 'em the parents say 'oh the kids came home cryin' and oh boo hoo hoo ooh no, and they had bad dreams and kept me up all night!' which is the real problem. [both laughing] LL: Yeah, that's the only reason they care [more laughing] MW: But, what you've done is you've touched a place in them that's you know, that's a hard lesson they learned that day, most likely. And takin' the violence out of the folk tales I think is a disservice, to a lot of these kids. I don't want to do it. I leave it in there but it's not as horribly expressed as it is in other situations. LL: Are there times when events that are going on in the broader society like political climate or like war, something like that, that that affects the stories you choose to tell at that specific time? MW: It affects the way people perceive the story that you're telling. The stories are, are mutable only from the teller's standpoint. The teller can of course change 'em around, and how it's presented, will make 'em mean different things to the audience. But, yeah, yeah. The stories themselves don't change, it's the way the teller tells 'em as to whether it means more or less. And it's, you can tell exactly the same story and depending on the situation and the lead-in, will mean completely different things to different people, at different time. And that's true with things like, if you're teaching about war or if you're teaching writing expression as opposed to oral expressions, it's just how you present what you're getting ready to present as to how they look at it when you present it, and it connotes different things [unintelligible because of espresso machine ... again.] LL: Yeah, it's a different situation. Have you noticed the style that you tell the stories in, have you noticed whether that's changed at all over time? Or does it change from story to story? MW: My style hasn't changed much, you know, it depends on where you're at. I noticed in Baltimore I was tellin' stories once, and I tell people I'm poly-dialectual, because I use various accents, but I speak the way I'm speakin' now, but then lord huuneeey, when I start tawkin' in story tone, I go back to the way I grew up speaking, so ... LL: I do the same thing. MW: And it's, I think it's important to have a common language that you can speak with other people and at the same time be able to talk in a way that is the language you grew up with. And both are equally important. I get a lot of flack from my friends that I grew up with for it. 'Oh you're not true to your heritage, you're not true to your heritage, you're tawkin" ... but at the same time if you don't speak in a common language people don't take you seriously. Especially away from Appalachia. LL: It becomes an issue. That's, I lost most of my accent when I went to California because when I talked with my accent people would be like whoooooa! Where are you from, you're Podunk! So I ended up losing it so I don't have one most of the time until I'm around one of my family members that speaks with a heavy accent. MW: I do understand, so, I forgot the question. LL: Oh, the question was whether your style of storytelling changed from ... MW: I was in Baltimore and was telling stories and I got to the point where people usually laugh and nobody laughed. And so I started up and then they laughed and that happened about five times and it took me that long to realize that it was taking them that long to figure out what I'd said. LL: Oh, there ya go. MW: So, I have ameliorated my accent when I travel outside the Appalachian region. Just because I don't want people to not understand what I'm sayin'. As far as style goes? No, I've, I've been tellin' sorta the same way, you know, you get. .. hopefully you get better at it after thirty some years, but you know, you know, basically I'm tellin' the same basic style that I had. LL: Now this is just, I don't know why I didn't ask this at the beginning, do you do your storytelling as an occupation, or do you just do it, to do it. MW: Oh no, I do it as an occupation. For many long years it was my only source of income. But, storytelling goes through cycles with the economy, and when you get in a recession situation like we're in right now, a heavy duty recession, the amount of money for the arts drops precipitously. Especially in the schools, which is where I do most of what I do. So I don't, I don't work as much there, and because of that, over the past number of years I have had a couple of jobs that I've done. One, in the summer I've taught fishing, and then I do Santa Claus at Christmas. And in the kiosk here in town, I teach everybody how to use the cameras and everything, and facilitating paying the mall their percentage, and pay my employees and take the profit. And I've been doing that for a number of years now. I was just the Santa for a while, until a few years back, and somebody said, you wanna run it? And I said absolutely. LL: Heck yeah. MW: So, and I've been doin' it ever since. So that gives me the opportunity, and that's a slow time anyway for storytellers, around Christmas, that gives me the opportunity to be a little more stable in my income. But it's a major source of my income for the year, yeah, except for this year ... this year's been really slow. I had $30,000 worth of shows cancel on me this year. LL: Oooooh, that's bad. MW: It's not good. So I'm hustlin' to figure out what I'm gonna do about it, 35,000, about 35,000, I just got a cancellation today. LL: Crap, I forgot what I was gonna ask. Oh, your moniker of "Badhair", did that arise out of your storytelling, or was that a ... [both laughing] MW: Have you ever heard of Appalshop? Appalshop's outta Whitesburg, Kentucky. They do films they're dedicated to the preservation of Appalachian heritage. They have a recording studio there, they have a radio station they run outta there. They have a theater group called Roadside theater they run outta there, they're amazing. They're somethin' else, [unintelligible] set up television shows and do graphic essays, and this, that, and the other, but I was there to learn how to shoot film and videotape. And they said you're also gonna work with the theater group. I said, No I'm not. They said, yes you are, the next thing I knew I was on stage doing storytelling. So the first day I walked in where they were workin' on, you know, doin' this. This guy in there had a hammer and a nail, looked over his shoulder at me and I had hair out to here [motions very far out from his head all around, indicating a very large mass of hair] He looked back at his nail and did a double take and dropped his hammer over his shoulder and his mouth went open and his eyes bugged out, he said: Oh my god, it's one o' them badhaired fellers! And he had hair down to his shoulders, and this was 75, and I said yessir, that's me! Who're you? He said, Iiii'm Potbelly! And he introduced me up n' down the East coast as Badhair, and the name stuck! Now I'd call people up on the phone and I say 'hello this is Michael Williams' and thay'd say, Who? I'd say, Badhair! BADHAIR! Why didn't you say so??? And it.. .I, you know, have sort of tried to get away from it a little bit, but it's somethin' that everybody remembers! I mean it's just stuck on there like reeeeeally ... LL: Of course, 'cause you're tryin' to get rid of it. MW: My hair's, it's longer now than it's been in a long, long time. It's not as bad as it used to be by a long shot, 'cause I been datin' a hairdresser, but [both laughing] she's been outta town for a while. LL: She keeps it under control. MW: Well, she cut it down to where it wuddn't even curlin' anymore and I said, no no. I can't do that, no curl. LL: My brother does that with his hair. Is there anything else that you wanna talk about or anything you can think of? MW: What is the purpose of this project? LL: This project is, what we're doing, every student in the oral history course picks a different group of people. Like, a bunch of people are doing Veterans, and there's a couple of people doing, somebody's doing TVA employees, and another one's doing Blue Ridge paper mill employees and I think there's one other person doing traditional arts and crafts people, and I decided that I wanted to do an oral history of Storytellers from the region. ' Because I grew up, part of my childhood was Miss Patti McClure, who's a Storyteller, I grew up with her from the time I was born and I thought that that was just the coolest thing on the face of the planet. She was just the ultimate in awesome, so I decided that I wanted to do my oral history on collecting information from the regional Storytellers so that there's a record. MW: That's true. LL: What their lives are kinda like, and how it affects their lives and how people in the community deal with it, like whether the schools are getting' 'em to tell stories or stuff like that. MW: Well, I think the oral communication of folktales is an important aspect of the Appalachian culture. It's, it's something that sorta went by the wayside when TV and radio came along, and there's a Iotta folks who've come along and pulled those old stories out and started to tell 'em. And, you know, like I said I've worked in the school with children for 35 goin' on 36 years now. And I think it's one of the most important things I could have done, is to number one, give those children all across the country back those folktales, and number two, give Appalachian kids an idea of exactly where they came from, who they are, not Beverly Hillbillies, not Green Acres, you know, and I've run into that all across the country. Had a fella ask me is I brought my shoes with me when I came, had somebody in New York teach me how to flush the toilet, you know it's interesting out there. It's not as bad as it used to be 20 years ago. So, that, but I think that the oral communication skills are an important aspect of the Appalachian culture. With all the folktales, and then sittin' around talkin' the ... we're losing it still, because of texting, because of email. It's gotten to the point, I used to make, book all my shows on the telephone and I don't do shows on the telephone anymore. I never talk to the people before I get there and sit down and tell the stories. LL: The time that you called me on the phone was the first time I'd used the phone in probably two weeks 'cause nobody uses the phone anymore. MW: I hate it, very honestly I hate it. LL: And school is that way now too. Everything for school is electronic, I've never been to the registrar's office, ever. Everything's done by email, you never meet anybody, so I got to class, I didn't know who my professors were, I was like .. .! don't know what's going on! Yeah, it's having a tremendous effect on how people ... MW:HUGE. LL: ... connect to each other. MW: Huge. Yeah, you get email friends, you get [laughing] text friends. LL: Yeah, people try to friend me on stuff on the internet and I'm like ... I don't know who you are! [both laughing] If you wanna go hang out and have some coffee, sure, let's be friends but. .. MW: Yeah ... well, as a performer I get people who friend me who I have no idea who they are, when you're a performer you have to do that. I have reconnected with a lot of my peers from High School, which has been really nice, to find out that they're still out there and about. We had, we only had one class reunion years ago, hadn't done it since. I'd love to see some of 'em, I know we're Josin' 'em as we go. LL: Has the internet and stuff like that, has that affected how many, like how many people try and book stories, or like ... MW: Well, it's affected the way I book stories. Used to be what I did, when I first started doin' this for a living, I sent out a bunch of emails ... no, not emails ... a bunch of brochures to the schools in Knoxville, Tennessee. And then I sat down and I called them, and out of the 50-60 brochures that I sent out, I got 50% of them to book me to come into the school and tell stories. I did that for years, and taught lots of people how to do it. It got to the point that schools were inundated with brochures, and they became something that went immediately in the circular pile, instead of going to the performance person or you know... And once it got to that point, then I had to search around and figure out what to do to get out there and get my name out there. And I've since created a website and I've just now started google adworks. You know I'm on facebook, they say I should be on myspace, that I should be friending all these folks, that you get a Iotta work by doin' that. It seems so impersonal, to me. But I guess, you know, I know that when I was in L.A. the last time I was asked by the ... I've been on the Music Center Tour in Los Angeles for years and years and years. It's like the Kennedy Center except it's on the other coast. LL: Ooookay. MW: Music Center, I've been workin' in the schools in L.A. for 20 years now. And goin' week after next, was on the phone with them today doin' a rehearsal for the Artists in the Schools Showcase that's comin' up at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But I went, I went there and I said to folks I said, at home I nod to people on the street and they nod back! You say, hey folks, they say hey back. I said, out here they act like you stepped in a pie, or why?? And one woman said, the most succinctly, I've got enough friends, I don't need anymore! LL: That's ... when I went to California I was smilin' at people and the guy that I started see in' out there was like, don't smile at people! What are you doin'?! [both laughing] I was like what? I'm sorry, is that bad ... ? So when I came home and people would drive past meon the road and wave hi and they didn't know me, I was like WHOA! What's going on? What are you doing? MW: [laughing] Well see I smile at everybody while I'm out there, but I'm out there but about two or three weeks outta the year. While I'm there I smile at everybody! LL: See, I tried for a while but then people started getting' mad at me. MW: Well, I walk, I just keep right on walkin' and walk right on by 'em, and create a situation where, and I noticed I did this in college at ASU and it made a huge difference. Created a situation where, oh, well that guy looked like HE was happy! Oh, that was, boy isn't that nice to see somebody who's really happy and havin' a good day! And it. . .it piqued peoples' interest and created a situation where they would have ... they opened up to being happy, and I know that I did that in college. It was not uncommon to be goin' around and it would be cold and rainy or nasty or just people were in a bad mood. And you'd walk by when they were all AAAARRRRGGGGGH, hung-over or whatever in college, and I'd walk by, HEY! How you doin'? What's goin' ooon today? And by the end of the day you could see it, the mood of everybody would slowly start to change. And I don't know whether it was actually me that had an affect that was that fast, but I like to think it was, because it was part of what got me started tell in' stories. There's an old story about this feller that, that, he went for his Ph.D. He went out to California, he made up five jokes and he told them, that nobody'd ever heard before. Then he came back to the East Coast, and sat around watchin' TV and drinking his beer until the jokes came back to him. And when they came back to him he then proceeded across the country to different cities and categorized how those jokes had come across the country, this was before the internet, how these jokes had come across the country and been told, and how they changed as they came across the country, and they all came back to him, every one of them. LL: That's so cool. MW: So now think about that. One guy started a joke that spread all across the country. I think it talks to how powerful oral communication can be. And how one person can affect what'sgoin' on everywhere. LL: That's .. .I think we're kinda losin' it, which is sad. MW: I'm afraid we are, but we shall see. I think people's gonna get awfully lonely LL: Yeah, sittin' in their room [both laughing] on their computer, I have all these friends! ... no I don't. There's, there's an evolving thing ... adage, that says that the more friends you have on myspace or facebook, the less friends you have in real life [both laughing] so whenever I see somebody with like, 17,000 friends I'm like Oh .. .I'm sorry. [both laughing] I've got about 20, and I know all of them. MW: Well you know it's really funny, I go to the Kanuga Conference here and tell stories at camp there. Have for 25 years now. And when they discovered that I was on facbook, there was this rush, I've got 150 friends and I suspect 100 of 'em are Kanuga, Kanuga campers. And the school kids, when I say well I've got a website and I'm • on facebook, they'll friend me, and I don't have a problem with that, I think it's just fine. LL: Yeah. MW: You know, cause I talk about where I'm goin' and I blog with pictures of where I've been and you know, sometimes I'll do a little commentary on well this is, and this is, and I had a great time, and these are the schools I was in. Here's the kids, wave at 'em, you know. Have to be careful though because people get all tense if you post 'em on a site, especially the schools, they're really urn ... so ... but, that's what I do on the internet. LL: Well, I think that just about does us MW: It does. LL: Thank you so much for ... MW: You're Welcome! I hope I was ok ... LL: I think you'll be an excellent interview, yeah.
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