ABSTRACT
From 1979 to 1989 I made biannual trips to Scipio, Indiana, to tape the talk of Spiv Helt and his friends. Spiv was then in his 80s and had long been deemed the master storyteller of this small farming community. As my father, Murray Read, often said, “No one can tell ’em like Spiv tells ’em.” After transcribing around 200 hours of taped talk and thinking about story in the lives of these Scipio storytellers and in the lives of myself and my storytelling friends, I began to set down a list of those things story does for us, both as tellers and as audience. William Bascom is known for his four functions of folklore, namely: amusement, validation of culture, education, and maintaining conformity to accepted patterns of behavior. Here are my suggestions for Scipio's 50 functions of storytelling.
