Southern Appalachia has long been identified in the popular imagination with a deep-rooted sense of place, an antique and authentically distressed region that is somehow "more real" than the industrially processed America that surrounds it. That this imagined Appalachia has some deep kernel of truth only encourages both locals and outsiders to pump it full of entertainment calories for the mass market (see Dollywood, Gatlinburg, and Opryland). But the traditional art of storytelling has been an essential part of that truth--a part that has been only mildly susceptible to refinement into cornpone.

While Appalachia didn't invent the front porch, the country store, the fox- or coon-hunting shack, or the visitors' parlor, it has perhaps perfected them as forums for family yarns, tall tales, local character tales, or sly refinements of gossip. Nor did Appalachia invent the preacher's pulpit, yet the art of the Appalachian preacher has preserved with special fervor the rhythmic cadences of Biblical story-singing