Before television and smartphones, there were front porches, and there were storytellers. For Dennis Peterson, the greatest storyteller he ever knew was his grandfather, Frederick Newman “Paw” Summers, an East Tennessee jack-of-all-trades whose tales could keep neighbors, friends, and family listening for hours.
Dennis, a regular contributor to Our American Stories, shares a warm tribute to the grandfather who embodied the rich storytelling tradition of Southern Appalachia and helped preserve a way of life now fading into memory.
📖 Read the Transcript
Lee Habeeb (00:10):
And we return to Our American Stories.
Up next, a story from our regular contributor, Dennis Peterson. Dennis is an author and historian who specializes in Southern history.
Today, Dennis shares with us a story about his grandfather entitled “Paw: The Storyteller.”
Dennis Peterson (00:28):
Take it away, Dennis.
Part of the Southern Appalachian heritage is the skill of storytelling, and whenever that topic arises in conversation, my mind automatically returns to memories of Frederick Newman Summers, or “Paw,” as we grandchildren called him.
To me, he was the quintessential storyteller, a natural who probably never realized his own skill.
During all of my lifetime, and until his death in December 1972, Paw lived in the rocky hill country of the rural community of High School, Tennessee, between Knoxville and Clinton. But he had moved around considerably during his eighty-two years.
He had also held a variety of jobs before my time.
He had been a well driller and a house painter. He even sold Mason shoes on the side, and I’m sure he enjoyed every minute of it, even if he never made much profit.
Paw was the proverbial jack of all trades, master of none—unless you count storytelling.
He was an avid student of politics, politicking as a precinct worker for innumerable elections. His yard always seemed to have one or more campaign signs in it.
Paw also had some fame, at least locally, as a musician.
In fact, he and my grandmother met and fell in love at a rollicking barn dance at which he was playing and singing.
Carl Beam, a distant relative and a frequent performer at the now world-famous Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, remembered recording Paw singing “The Name Song,” which mentions about every name imaginable.
I faintly remember Paw playing his guitar and singing that song and a lot of other humorous ballads.
But I more clearly recall him singing old-fashioned hymns.
For years, he led singing at Little Mount Harmony Baptist Church in High School, Tennessee.
There, at his funeral, the mourners sang his favorite hymn, “When I’ve Gone the Last Mile of the Way,” before we laid him to rest in the family plot in the cemetery behind the white clapboard church.
Perhaps it was his breadth of experience, his length and variety of life, that provided grist for Paw’s story mill.
Many of his stories involved himself. Others were about people he had known or had worked with or for.
But some of his stories were renditions of stories he had heard others tell, always with his own interpretations and embellishments thrown in to give them a homey, personal flavor.
As a kid, I used to sit with him on his blue-painted wooden porch on many warm afternoons, staring out across Raccoon Valley Road toward the Southern Railway tracks, and listen to him tell stories to whoever would listen.
He sat in a homemade rocking chair that was held together by innumerable layers of paint and stared off into the distance rather than looking at me or whoever else might happen by for a visit as he spun his tales.
He was perpetually moving, incessantly tapping his foot on the porch planks.
Occasionally, he patted the wide arm of the rocker with his hand for emphasis.
Sometimes his feet, as though moved by an uncontrollable urge, burst forth with energy, tapping out a brief but lively buck dance routine.
When the urge for motion had apparently been satisfied, his feet got still for a while.
An occasional car often passed, and Paw threw up his hand in a friendly wave.
“Who was that, Paw?” I would ask.
“Oh, that was so-and-so,” he responded.
He knew more people, and more people knew him, than I’ve ever met.
Seeing the person who had just passed reminded him of a story, and off he went with another tale.
Frequently, someone whom he didn’t know would pass.
To my query about who it was, Paw usually responded, “I don’t know him. He must be from off somewhere else.”
Paw dropped out of school in the fourth grade.
“We were working on short division,” he explained to me one day, “and the teacher said that tomorrow we would start on long division. I took one look at those problems and never went back.”
In spite of his limited formal education, Paw was an intelligent man.
He read a lot and had a vocabulary that surprised me as a college student.
On the end table beside his chair, which sat behind the front door of his house, was always a magazine or two, the Knoxville Journal, perhaps a copy of The Watchdog Growler, politician and coon hunter Cas Walker’s political scandal sheet, and a big worn Bible.
Although Paw probably never read Mark Twain’s instructions on how to tell a good story effectively, he was an expert at doing exactly what Twain advised.
Like Twain, Paw made a big deal out of insignificant minor details in his stories.
For example, during a story he would worry over what day of the week the event actually happened, what the weather had been that day, what year it was, or whether the event had happened in Clinton or Kingsport, on Chestnut Ridge or beside Bull Run Creek.
He quite often diverged innumerable times during his stories, burying stories within stories, but finally finding his way back to complete the original story just when listeners were beginning to think he had lost his way entirely.
Yet he somehow always left his listeners wanting to hear more.
Or he would use the just-finished story as a springboard into the next one.
Invariably, a train would come through during one of Paw’s stories.
He stopped his story mid-sentence and rocked silently amid the rumble of the diesel locomotives and the click-clack of iron wheels on shiny rails, counting the freight cars as they went by.
When the caboose had passed from view down the track, he picked up right where he had left off without missing so much as a word.
Sometimes Nanny was sitting with us.
She too occasionally entered into Paw’s storytelling, usually to argue with him over one of the many insignificant details of his story.
Sometimes, discerning the story that Paw was about to tell just as he began it, she declared, “Good Lord, Fred, you know better than to tell that.”
Because he knew so many people, Paw had a lot of visitors, especially on Sunday afternoons.
I suspect that many of those visitors came not so much to talk to Paw as to listen to him tell stories.
I think he was totally unaware of his own storytelling prowess.
He was just being himself.
Perhaps that is the very quality that makes Appalachian storytellers unique.
Like Paw, they just do what comes naturally.
Storytelling is an important way in which my generation and countless ones before it learned of its heritage.
And it is a part of our heritage that must be preserved and fostered—a skill that must be passed on to our children and to their children for generations to come.
Lee Habeeb (09:00):
A job well done on the production by Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Dennis Peterson.
Check out Dennis’s website at DennisLPeterson.com.
Frederick Newman Summers, a.k.a. Paw: well driller, house painter, shoe salesman, singer of songs, and teller of stories.
The story of Paw, here on Our American Stories.
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