Yarns are exciting, sometimes spontaneous, often short-lived stories that are so surprising that they are difficult to believe and can be confused with a tall tale, which is a narrative made up of impossible events. To spin a yarn is to tell a tale, especially a long drawn-out or totally fanciful one. Originally a nautical term dating from about 1800, this expression probably owes its life to the fact that it embodies a double meaning, yarn signifying both “spun fiber” and “a tale.” Yarn spinning is the process of amateur storytellers repeating informally the tales they may have heard as children along with new stories invented out of their lives and imagination. Yarn-spinning functions as a tradition-building activity for yarn-spinners and listeners that allows for play, engagement in conversation, and the use of life experiences to entertain, inform, and foster social engagement.
American yarn-spinning reflects the diversity of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the colonies, many of whom came as indentured servants hoping for greater opportunity at the end of service than could be found in their homelands. In reality their status was only a little higher than that of a slave, and many did not survive to finish their contracts. Between 1607 and 1700, North America experienced its first wave of immigration, comprised of English and Welsh settlers accompanied by a large influx of enslaved Africans. This pattern continued between 1700 and 1775 with the addition of Germanic and Scotch-Irish groups immigrating to the Pennsylvania region.
Yarn-spinning is a unique type of informal oral communications that is encouraged by specific social contexts, in this case the social environment of colonial America. Yarns are shared in work environments, in coffeehouses and bars, at meetings, during long journeys, and at family gatherings on long winter nights. They encapsulate traditions, preserving memories of the past, the lore and legends that give people a sense of who they are and the world to which they belong. Once a yarn-spinner has experienced the magic of telling tales, he or she will consciously find or develop new ones to add to the repertoire. In one sense, yarn-spinning occurs within male social contexts—such as the crew of a merchant ship—and also includes jokes, humorous anecdotes, rumors, and so on. To be sure, women held their own sessions within their own female-dominated contexts. In the Enlightenment era, men began chronicling oral traditions of storytelling in a variety of literary genres, though the distribution of literary yarns was limited by various factors including literacy rates, geographical extent of print cultures, and socioeconomic status.
Yarn-spinning is an apt metaphor for a certain type of oral narrative storytelling. Homespun fabric is fashioned by weaving together wool, flax, and cotton. In like fashion, popular storytelling combines elements taken from personal experience and older oral traditions and improvises a unified narrative. Yarn-spinners build tales around frame stories, creating mnemonic devices and coloring their tales with a variety of emotions. Yarn spinners are at their best when they are not striving for artificial effect, but rather telling stories from memory or created in their mind’s eye.
Because yarn-spinners preserve links to the past, they hold places of respect within their communities. They also have a particular talent for storytelling, which might come naturally to them: audiences provide clues as to how to best reveal the story from the teller’s inner sense of plot. Listener-response lets the spinner gauge the success of the story. Over time, yarn-spinners shape and reshape the repertoire to get a desired response, and perhaps earn a profit for their efforts. Yarns get respun in different settings to serve different purposes in the lives of listeners and in the process help to give shape to the form and content of spoken language. In this sense, homespun yarns contribute to the development of cultural identity.
Almost as soon as children can speak, they are introduced to yarn-spinning as a natural aspect of play and learning. Children spin yarns, creating toy and games that become part of stories that are passed along to others. The universally understood and sometimes epic yarn about catching the giant fish that gets away may emerge during childhood play antics. Native Americans dependent upon fishing for nutrition developed a string-and-object game called pommawanga (spear-the-fish) that was an essential learning device for boys to hone spear-throwing skills; in Eskimo traditions it was known as gazinta; and in Iroquois traditions it was zimba. The challenge of all these games was to see how many bones, when tossed into the air, could be caught on the spear. Yarns are also introduced with infant amusements. These games are employed by adults to entertain babies and small children, including finger rhymes, toe rhymes, face rhymes, nose rhymes, hand rhymes, tickling rhymes, and sleight-of-hand tricks. Adults will later sometimes spin yarns for children to teach and test critical thinking skills.
The stories of the great American cultural heroes were fashioned either from autobiographical yarn-spinning or through the literary exaggerations of their contemporaries. American-born Daniel Boone (1734–1820) blazed the famous Wilderness Road from Virginia to Kentucky. Boone’s experiences were chronicled and published internationally, making him the colony’s first native folk hero during his lifetime. Boone exemplified the European ideal of the “natural man,” one who lives a simple and virtuous life in the wilderness. While Daniel Boone had been captured by the Shawnee and adopted into a Native American family, he escaped captivity in time to reach home to prevent the British and Native American allies from taking Booneville.
Mason Locke Weems (1759–1825) was a literate yarn-spinner among semiliterate communities on the Southern frontier. Weems approached George Washington seeking his patronage, and reached his height of fame during the infancy of homespun American popular culture. Weems observed that amidst a land of plenty, many Americans surrendered to their inclination for gluttony and bawdy entertainments. Chapbooks introduced popular literature to newly literate Americans, and they became Weems’s chief instrument for delivering his message of moral improvement. As a chapman, Weems charmed common folk with his fiddle playing, soapbox, and plethora of little books on religion and right living. Weems earned enough as a chapman to continue making and selling books that preached against adultery, drunkenness, and gambling, and short biographies that stressed the moral qualities of well-known Americans, including George Washington (1800), Francis Marion (1809), and Benjamin Franklin (1815).
An example of yarn-spinning in American fiction can be found in the work of Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), who wrote a children’s book titled Rootabaga Stories (1922). This book featured a set of interrelated short stories often featuring nonsense language created for his daughters. Sandburg had the desire to spin a group of “American fairy tales” set in a fictionalized Midwestern landscape called “the Rootabaga Country” filled with farms, trains, and corn fairies. The yarn-spinner, a man named Potato Face Blind Man, was an old minstrel of the Village of Liver-and-Onions. He hangs out in front of the local post office spinning yarns, “his eyes never looking out and always searching in.” Sandburg’s fictional yarn-spinner created animals and fools that were so real that it was as if he were talking about one of his own children.
Each generation has ways of making yarn-spinning relevant within changing cultural contexts. During the late twentieth century, for example, Sasquatch or Bigfoot yarns began to surface, but ultimately those scientists who took the bait and searched for Bigfoot were humiliated when claims of sightings were proven to be erroneous. After decades of claims and counterclaims, some still entertain hopes of finding undocumented creatures, and yet Bigfoot claims still go unproven. Bigfoot is a modern version of an old archetype known as “the Wildman,” or one who moves on the outskirts of civilization. Wildmen stories abound in world literature and date back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Protestant missionary Reverend Elkanah Walker (1805–1877) was the first to gather threads of indigenous cautionary tales of giant “men stealers” from Tshimakain, Native American sources, living in the region of Spokane, Washington. An American teacher, John W. Burns, on the Chehalis Indian Reserve in British Columbia also gathered stories of a local wildman who abducted women and consolidated these legends into the hypothetical archetype stories of Sasquatch for newspapers during the 1920s. Building from the wildman tradition, Bigfoot was born, spread by, and fed from modern mass media and popular consumer culture, and is therefore an example of how an oral tradition can ultimately be formalized in print and other media.
Yarn-spinning, as a casual form of oral storytelling, remains a staple of folk festivals, historical reenactments, historical parks and preservation areas, and a wide variety of other venues. In addition, it stands as a vital part of the history of American storytelling, as celebrated in literature ranging from George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood tales from Appalachia to Mark Twain’s fictional accounts of life on the Mississippi to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories set in the Old South. As such, it offers a window on the growth and development of American regional cultures and the changing social and cultural dynamics of the United States over the last two centuries, as traditional storytelling has given way to modern, digital forms of storytelling in television, film, and the Internet.
Meredith Eliassen
See also Folklore and Folktales; Harris, George Washington; Storytelling; Tall Tales; Uncle Remus
Further Reading
Carson, Cary. 1994. Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Harrell, John. 1983. Origins and Early Traditions of Storytelling. Kensington, CA: York House.
Leary, Lewis Gaston. 1984. The Book-Peddling Parson: An Account of the Life and Works of Mason Locke Weems, Patriot, Pitchman, Author and Purveyor of Morality to the Citizenry of the Early United States of America. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Leeming, David A. 1997. Storytelling Encyclopedia: Historical, Cultural, and Multiethnic Approaches to Oral Traditions Around the World. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.
Pellowski, Anne. 1995. The Storytelling Handbook: A Young People’s Collection of Unusual Tales and Helpful Hints on How to Tell Them. New York: Simon & Schuster.