‘Southern Storytellers’ and its irregular Americans
NEW YORK — We think we know things we don’t. The big guy with the rolling bag and the brusque air about him boarding the Q70 bus to LaGuardia Airport has to be a native New Yorker. It’s there in his thick mandible and his prominent, shallow-sloping brow line. He looks like a Big
East power forward from the mid1960s, someone who might have pushed around Dave DeBusshere.
We peg him. He’s a native. Probably from right here in Queens. We have made up a story about him.
Then he opens his mouth, telling us to “goan ’hed” of him. Tennessee whiskey accent, smooth and languid with a little bite at the end. A certain courtliness. The man is from down South.
It’s amusing when one’s immediate and certain expectations are undercut by a complicating reality. Remember when you first heard Idris Elba speak in his regular accent? Weren’t you expecting Stringer Bell?
I resist the idea that geography has any effect on character. All kinds of people were born in the South or moved here. Southerness is a claimed identity, some of us can put it on and take it off like a seersucker jacket.
But most of us have something in mind when we attach the adjective “Southern” to any noun — the descriptor is rich in connotative suggestion, freighted with all sorts of positive and negative implications. I understand why someone like Richard Ford might bristle at being labeled a “Southern” writer; the same kind of implicit ghettoizing attaches as when you label an artist “female” or “Black” or “Christian.”
I also understand why someone might take pride in it; though if you know your Bible (or your Torah or your Quran) you’ll understand that pride is a sometimes problematic thing.
At the same time, I am an undeniable Southerner, born in Savannah, Ga. Most of my life has been lived in Southern states. As a child I drank sweet iced tea. I rode in the back of cars past billboards proclaiming that
such-and-such was “Klan Kountry.” Even in an America that’s been leveled by fastfood franchisees, amazon. com and Netflix, regional differences exist.
MORE FRANTIC CULTURE
It’s not that New Yorkers are (in my experience) any less helpful or kind than other people, it’s just that they’re acclimated to a more frantic culture. You have to keep things moving in Metropolis, you can’t just ask everyone you meet about their mama and them. You’d never get through the day.
Maybe Southerners are known for storytelling because we have more time for it.
I’m thinking about Arkansas PBS’ “Southern Storytellers,” a new three-part documentary series directed by documentarian Craig Renaud and produced by Courtney Pledger, the executive director & CEO of Arkansas PBS. I’ve known both of these folks for years, and if I had any negative thoughts about the series I’d probably keep them to myself, seeing how there are plenty of movies and TV shows and cultural happenings that I could use for content.
But what newspapers — at least this part of the newspaper, the part that goes out and gathers news — are supposed to be about is serving readers. And if you are interested in this Southern culture that has produced an academic industry and several magazines (most of which have their own, often conflicting, ideas about what it means to be of the American South), you should check it out.
A LOCAL PRODUCT
One reason is that the series is a local product — though Renaud now lives in Austin, Texas, he has deep roots here — and it serves as proof of concept that excellent documentary series worthy of national distribution can originate with Arkansas PBS. We don’t have to rely on the coastal capitals of culture to produce stories about ourselves and our kind; we can make shows every bit as good as the ones they make in Boston and San Francisco and New York. (We can take unproblematic pride in “Southern Stories”; that it exists is evidence that Arkansas PBS is not Podunk.) The more compelling reason to check it out is that it is a fascinating series of conversations with diverse artists — storytellers — with Southern roots and connections who collectively make an argument for the richness and deeply humanizing practice of telling stories. Renaud, who conducts the interviews off-camera, in an unobtrusive way that genuflects toward the cinema verite “fly on the wall” methods of Albert and David Maysles, Les Blank and D.A. Pennebaker, walks and talks and observes, gently infiltrating the everyday lives of people like North Carolina-based novelist David Joy and south Arkansas-reared playwright and filmmaker Qui Nguyen as they talk about their craft and their relationship to the storytelling tradition.
THORNTON, STEENBURGEN
Actors/songwriters Billy Bob Thornton and Mary Steenburgen turn up, giving Renaud remarkably intimate glimpses into their lives and creative practices. Thornton reads excerpts from John Kennedy Toole’s allegedly unfilmmable “A Confederacy of Dunces” and Arkansas writer John Fergus Ryan’s hilarious “The Redneck Bride.” Later Thornton explains his dog — which he pushes in a stroller on their daily walks — isn’t spoiled, but arthritic.
Steenburgen reminisces about her railroader father, noting that seeing him waving to her from atop a box car “with the morning sun coming up behind him” was one of the “most singular images of my life.”
“I loved being a trainman’s daughter,” she says. “I was proud.” The experience led to her writing a song called “When I Hear Trains” that’s in the series.
New Orleans-born novelist Jesmyn Ward and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown from Shreveport are featured. Angie Thomas, the Jackson, Miss.-born author of young adult novel “The Hate U Give” and Gulfport, Miss.-born Natasha Trethewey, former poet laureate of the United States, have segments.
Lyle Lovett talks about his Texas childhood. Married musicians Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires give their insights.
Though the individual segments are not long — a little more than 10 minutes is allowed for each artist — it’s obvious Renaud and his small crew put in a lot of time. They achieve a startling intimacy and unguardedness. Maybe that’s to be expected, given that Thornton and Steenburgen are actors who seem incapable of presenting as inauthentic. But whether through luck or the soft power of his affable, empathetic personality, Renaud doesn’t seem to have any trouble putting his subjects at ease.
BACK SEVERAL YEARS
Tennessee singer-songwriter Adia Victoria, whose representative warned Renaud that she was wary of cameras and that he was unlikely to “get much out of her,” ended up allowing Renaud to film her wedding.
The roots of the series go back several years; production was interrupted by the covid-19 pandemic. Pledger was determined to do a project with Renaud Brothers Films, the documentary production company Craig established with his brother Brent. But Brent was killed in March 2022 while working on a project about refugees in Ukraine.
After that, Craig began working on “Southern Storytellers” in earnest, in part as a way to occupy himself, move forward, and heal. He was using storytelling as self-care, a way to honor the memory of his brother.
HUMAN COMPULSION
Which is just one of the uses our kind makes of it; there is a human compulsion to tell and consume story, as a way of inventing and re-inventing ourselves and our world. Even if the stories we tell ourselves — like the one about our fellow straphanger — aren’t necessarily true. (Or, as the folklorist Vance Randolph observed, “we always lie to strangers.”)
And if it seems a particularly Southern thing, maybe there is a little something extra in it for us.
“It’s kind of like what William Faulkner says,” Adia Victoria says. “The Southerner feels a compulsion to explain — to explain through story their experience. We’re great orators as well. And I think it’s because we have these unresolved questions about our identity, and what it means to be an American. I think a lot of Southerners don’t feel like a regular American.”
Maybe that’s because we are the part of America most recently conquered and occupied.