Linda Goss

Mama Linda Goss (born 1947) is an American storyteller and performer in the African diasporic oral tradition. She is a co-founder of the National Association of Black Storytellers, which works to preserve folk traditions.

Early life and education

Linda McNear Goss was born in Alcoa, Tennessee to Willie and Junior McNear. She grew up in a large storytelling family, and often cites tales heard from her Granddaddy Murphy and Uncle Buster as her earliest influences. Her mother was a frequent public speaker at Blount County churches and civic events, and Goss learned speaking techniques from her mother's example. From her father, she learned a love of music, particularly jazz, and an appreciation for the way stories can be told through music.

Goss's interest in the oral tradition began when she was in high school, working on an assignment to interview the oldest person she knew. After interviewing her grandfather, she realized that old stories like the folklore and personal history he shared with her would be lost if they weren't passed on and collected.

She graduated from Charles M. Hall High School in 1965, and went on to study drama as an undergraduate at Howard University. She imbued her performances with elements from folk storytelling and oral tradition, in a collision of styles that was considered unusual at a time when vernacular traditions were kept separate from "fine" arts. She went on to earn a master's degree in education from Antioch University. She is a member of Zeta Phi Beta sorority.

Career

Linda Goss was a leader in the resurgence of American storytelling traditions that began in the 1970s. She was a featured storyteller at the 1975 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. It was at this festival that she developed her signature style of beginning a storytelling performance by crying out “Well, Oh Well, Oh Well. It’s Storytelling Time!” while ringing bells to gather the crowd and focus its attention. Goss would later trace the lineage of this calling to her grandfather, who had once been responsible for playing a bugle call to wake workers on a plantation in Alabama. She calls it "waking up the people," in honor of and in conversation with this legacy.

Goss's storytelling is influenced by folk tales, poetry, history, and musical forms including jazz, gospel, and country. She sees storytelling as a "tool for social change": a responsive and flexible art form that can be adapted and transformed to fit the immediate context of the teller and the audience.

One of her mentors was the folklorist and art historian Gladys-Marie Fry, a professor at the University of Maryland. Other storytellers, artists, and scholars of folklore were sources of encouragement and community, including Brother Blue, Stephen Henderson, and Sonia Sanchez.

She is the author of six books, and her poems have been collected in anthologies.

National Association of Black Storytellers

After attending a 1982 national storytelling conference at which she was one of only two Black participants, Goss realized there was a need for spaces focused specifically on Black storytelling and folk traditions. She and Mother Mary Carter Smith cofounded the "In The Tradition..." Annual National Black Storytelling Festival and Conference that year, followed in 1984 by the creation of the National Association of Black Storytellers. Through these organizations, they worked to organize storytellers and provide a platform to increase their visibility, as well as to preserve the oral tradition and ensure stories and folkways were not lost.

Goss is a co-founder of Keepers of the Culture, a Philadelphia storytelling organization affiliated with the National Association of Black Storytellers, and a founding member of Patchwork, a storytelling group in Delaware.

Personal life

Goss lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her husband Clay, with whom she has co-authored several books. They have three children: Aisha, Uhuru, and Jamal.

Awards and honors

Goss was honored as a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow in 2019. She is the first African-American fellow honored for storytelling.

She received the National Storytelling Network's Oracle lifetime achievement award in 2003, the 2005 Fellowship in Folk and Traditional Art from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the 2006 Leeway Transformation Award for women artists. In 2006 she was honored with the Benjamin A. Botkin Scholar Lecturer Award from the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.

She is the storyteller-ambassador for the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, and has been a storyteller in residence at the Peale Museum in Baltimore and the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

She became the official storyteller for the city of Philadelphia in 1984, and her image is featured on a mural in that city as "The Traveling Storyteller"

In 2017, Goss became the storyteller-in-residence at the Peale Center in Baltimore, Maryland.

List of works

The Baby Leopard: A 'How' and 'Why' Story. By Linda Goss and Clay Goss; with illustrations by Suzanne Bailey-Jones and Michael R. Jones. New York : Bantam Books, 1989.

Talk That Talk: an Anthology of African-American Storytelling. Edited by Linda Goss and Marian E. Barnes. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Jump Up and Say! A Collection of Black Storytelling. By Linda Goss and Clay Goss. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

It's Kwanzaa Time!. By Linda Goss and Clay Goss. New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2002

Sayin' Somethin': Stories from the National Association of Black Storytellers. Edited by Linda Goss, Dylan Pritchett and Caroliese Frink Reed; introduction by Eleanora Tate. Baltimore, Maryland: National Association of Black Storytellers; Kearney, NE: Morris Publishing, 2006.

The Frog Who Wanted to be a Singer. By Linda Goss. Philadelphia, PA : Rosenbach Museum, 2007.