After collaborating on the radio for 10 years, Hendren and Windham are trying TV for a documentary on graveyards. Above: the team in Live Oak Cemetery, Selma.

Listeners connect with Alabama through radio storytellers

Originally published in Current, Jan. 25, 1999
By Stephanie McCrummen

Of all Kathryn Tucker Windham's words recorded by Alabama Public Radio reporter Sam Hendren, the pauses are most telling.

Windham, 81, is a storyteller. For more than two decades, she has made a second profession out of travelling the South and other parts of the country, telling tales about such southern phenomena as butterbean cows, grapevine swings and cornbread. She describes how an Alabama child makes a "frog house": by packing cold mud around a bare foot, gently withdrawing the foot, and borrowing the tail of a lightning bug to top it off and welcome the frogs. Hendren has spent many mornings sitting at Windham's dining room table in Selma, recording those stories, both for NPR and for local broadcasts.

"If there is anyone who ever had a knack for radio," Hendren said, "it's her."

But if anyone ever had a gift for recording Windham and documenting rural life, it's Hendren.

During their 10-year collaboration, Hendren said, he's learned to respect the relatively long pauses that distinguish the speech of Windham and many rural Southerners. Where most editors would blip out her three, four, and five-second pauses, Hendren considers them precious sound.

"She can't be edited like that because it would destroy the rhythm," he said. "You have to be more sparing with your edits and let people speak in their own voices."

The significance of those silences is great. Some listeners suggest they bespeak the trust that has developed between Windham and Hendren over the years, and remind you of the dogged perfectionism with which he approaches his work. Others say they reflect the open landscape of rural Alabama and the pace of daily life there. Windham herself said the pauses come out of her own history: the time it took for her father to light his pipe while he was telling a story, or the rhythm of a rocking chair. The silences evoke sometimes emotional reactions from listeners. In any case, they are authentic.

"She is kind of the embodiment of the region," said Roger Duvall, station manager at Alabama Public Radio/WUAL-FM in Tuscaloosa. "And not just the days gone by--she says something we can all relate to today."

Like "deliciously thick custard"

Windham grew up in Thomasville, a town of about 1,200 that had no traffic light until the 1930s, where town gossip was exchanged at the post office, and evangelical tent revivals were part of every summer. Thomasville is part of Alabama's black belt region, named for the rich, black soil so conducive to good farming.

The accent of the black belt region is perhaps best characterized by natives' pronunciation of the word "bird." They pronounce it "boid." It is also rather deep and strong, and it rolls over you like a thunderstorm.

In a letter to Windham, one listener described it this way:

"Your voice is so rich. I feel as though I am savoring a deliciously thick custard as I listen to you. It melts on the tongue, envelopes it and slowly evaporates down the throat. I want it to last forever."

In 1983, Windham came to public radio through station manager Bo Pittman, who heard her at a folk festival in Northport, Ala. Soon thereafter, Pittman brought Hendren to meet with her over a plate of the locally famous Hancock's barbecue in Selma, where Windham has lived most of her adult life.

"I was not very interested," Windham recalled in her memoirs, Twice Blessed. At the time, public radio did not even reach Selma.

"It took some coaxing," said Hendren, who has a low-key, even cautious demeanor. But Hendren was able to convince her, as he has convinced many a reluctant person to speak into his microphone.

The first taping was in her house. Hendren draped chairs with quilts to improve the acoustics, took the phone off the hook, closed the windows and drew the curtains, Windham recalled.

"She had no idea what we wanted, and she read something about spitting--about rumors and folklore of people who could kill a rattlesnake by spitting," Hendren said.

The first story was the last one Windham read from a script. It sounded too stiff. The approach Hendren devised thereafter was to simply suggest a topic, and let Windham talk.

Windham prepares little. "I just talk as though I'm telling it to Sam," she said. "Probably would be a whole lot better if I wrote it out. But this seems to work for Sam and me."

The first piece aired on local public radio and won an enthusiastic response, Hendren said. In 1985, Bo Pittman sent a recording to All Things Considered, and from that point until 1987, ATC and Morning Edition regularly aired Windham's stories. The first one was about a hailstorm in Thomasville that allegedly knocked the eyes out of goldfish in the pond in Vance and Myrtie Norred's front yard.

She received piles of letters in response to that and other stories that aired.

A listener who grew up in Selma but had since moved to San Diego wrote of moving to her new home there, and becoming lost in a maze of unfamiliar streets. She began to cry, pulled over and turned on the radio.

"Then you came to my rescue," she wrote. "There you were on All Things Considered, telling me a story about Selma and Mabry Street where I grew up, about Live Oak Cemetery where dear ones are buried, and about the Hotel Albert, where I used to stand outside the barber shop and watch old men get their haircuts. You were my compass. I wasn't lost anymore."

The stories Windham tells are not didactic. They are simple, straightforward and intended, she says, to do little more than entertain. Their significance reaches beyond mere entertainment, however. Most listeners comment that Windham's stories ground them in some way, remind them of what's important, or of a vanishing way of life now being usurped by economic change, strip malls, and such homogenizing influences as television.

"It preserves a part of our Southern history maybe, our heritage," she said of her recordings. "We need to know where we came from."

Indulging in nostalgia

Her harshest critics accuse Windham of indulging in nostalgia. One listener wrote ". . . when I heard her elegant southern accent, justified or not, all I see is a beaten down race of people mowing her friends' lawns."

Windham responded to the writer that she and many of her friends still performed that chore themselves.

"I hope [the stories] let some listeners in some other parts of the country get another view of the South," she said of the nationally broadcast stories. "We're not all ignoramuses and not all racists and not all culturally deprived. We may have opened their eyes to a South they had never even considered existed. A South that we love and enjoy."

Hendren speculated that such negative comments may have driven NPR executives to pull Windham off the national programs, although those executives cited the need for other regions to be represented on the air, Windham recalled.

Hendren, who regularly contributes reports to NPR, also said that there is, at times, a subtle prejudice in the stories that NPR editors want.

"I detect that they want the conservative southern governor and he's going to defend the 10 Commandments on the courthouse wall and call out National Guard," he said. "They want to hear the quirky, barefoot, backward kind of southern story. But Alabama has changed."

The stories that Hendren does these days, mainly features on rural life for local and national broadcast, have been influenced, he said, by his work with Windham.

"She has caused me to be patient with people," he said. "To keep the recorder running."

The result is that in Hendren's stories we get characters that transcend stereotype--we get stories with the kind of revelations that a less patient reporter would miss. In a story about pollution in the Pigeon River, we get to know the owner of a local general store in Tennessee, whom Hendren recorded as they drove by the river in the man's truck. In a story about a coon dog cemetery, we come to understand the special attachment some people develop for those dogs. The characters Hendren gives us are not backward; they are full, and in the editing process, they are treated with dignity.

Hendren's previous career ambitions come through in his work. Born in Tennessee and raised in North Carolina, he wanted to be an architect at one point, he said, and a botanist at another. His work is infused with the precision of the former, and the respect for nature of the latter. A typical Hendren piece is interspersed with the sounds of the rural outdoors--crickets, a thunderstorm, birds, the whistle of a train. His recordings of Windham are usually framed by such sounds.

Michael Fields, soon to be Atlanta bureau chief for NPR, who worked with Hendren in 1993-96, said Hendren's success as a reporter stems from a rare combination of expertise in technology and compassion for people.

"On the one hand, he's a craftsman. He gets good sound--the quality of the tape he gathers is generally very pristine and very, very good," Fields said. "I'm guessing Sam is very very good at listening to folks--my guess is that he's very sympathetic and empathetic to the folks that he talks to--and as a result they talk to him in a fairly straightforward, fairly open kind of way."

One of the best tests of his persuasion was a story Hendren did last year on Gees Bend, a region in south Alabama surrounded by water on three sides, which was until recently practically cut off from the mainland. It was a story that Windham had told him about. The people who lived there are nearly all named Pettway, because they are descendents of a slave owner of the same last name who abandoned the region after the Civil War.

The story was about how Gees Bend was to be connected to the mainland by a ferry. Hendren walked with his DAT recording equipment into an area without access to public radio and most other broadcasting. And he walked out with mesmerizing recordings of people telling, in their own words, the story of development and change in the rural south.

"I've often wondered why I can get people to be so honest and forthcoming, transparent," he said. "I feel like I would intimidate somebody because I'm 6'5" and 240--I'm surprised people would talk to me. I must have some sort of demeanor."

It is that demeanor that won him Windham's trust, and has kept their collaboration going, despite one thing that seems to annoy Windham: "He doesn't know how good he is," she said in slightly pained tones. "He never seems to realize that he's made a melodious story."

While Windham's stories continue to be broadcast Fridays on WUAL, the two have undertaken a new project, a television documentary on graveyards--a favorite topic of Windham's--which she will narrate, to air on Alabama Public Television sometime this spring.

Although Hendren describes himself as a perfectionist and Windham describes herself as "anything but," the two have much in common--not the least of which is that they are both storytellers. But more than that, they share a reverence for the rural South and a way of life that is vanishing. The passion evident in the stories they both tell is a desire to capture that--and savor it--before it fades away forever.

The writer, Stephanie McCrummen, hails from Alabama, interned at Current several years ago and now covers Long Island news for Newsday.

To Current's home page

Outside link: Web site of Alabama Public Radio/WUAL, Tuscaloosa.

 

Web page created Feb. 11, 1999
Current
The newspaper about public television and radio
in the United States
A service of Current Publishing Committee, Takoma Park, Md.
E-mail: webcurrent.org
301-270-7240
Copyright 1999