Appalachian storytelling in Blackbeard Country

Josh Goforth brings love, murder and mystery from his mountain porch to the coast

ETSU alumnus Josh Goforth, known for his Appalachian storytelling and music, has performed for several years at the Ocrafolk music and storytelling festival in Ocracoke, North Carolina. (Photos by Rick Davis)

By Donna Davis

Every September, on the first night of the new moon, there are those who vow they see a flaming ship sail three times past the coast of Ocracoke. The fiery vessel glides swiftly toward the northeast, they say, always accompanied by an eerie wailing sound. It’s on this eastern fringe of North Carolina, where tales of Blackbeard’s ghost are as tactile as the salt spray and gusty threat of a summer squall, that Appalachian storytelling found a ripe audience. 

Hailing from Madison County, North Carolina, musician and storyteller Josh Goforth made the pilgrimage across the wide spans of the state by land and sea to attend the Ocrafolk music and storytelling festival held in June. An alumnus of East Tennessee State University, Goforth is well known in Appalachian music circles for his skills as a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and for spinning down-home yarns, often involving charmingly eccentric family members.  

“I was sort of lucky because I grew up in a musical family in terms of church music,” Goforth said. “My granddad was a shape-note-singing school teacher. He taught, so that’s where he put a shape with each note of the scale. So, you don't have to read music, you just know what a square to a circle sounds like. I started doing that when I was like 3 years old, and when I was 4, I just sat down at the piano. I don't understand, I can’t describe it, but I could just play.” 

Goforth’s great uncle gave him a guitar when he was 10, and he fell in love with the instrument. 

Ocracoke, North Carolina is known for its stories of Blackbeard and ghost ships. Josh Goforth brought his Appalachian storytelling to the fertile coastline.

“I lived with a guitar,” he said. “I would come home from school and I would play until I fell asleep. I did that every day. I found out there were a lot of people I knew that played instruments. I picked up some stuff from them and started going to local jam sessions.”

At one particular jam session on Thursdays inside a drugstore, an array of instruments were on walls and available for jammers to play. “So I would sit on the outside of the circle and just watch people,” Goforth said. “And that’s where I learned to play. I never took lessons.” 

Goforth explained that his storytelling evolved as a result of performing music. After high school, went to East Tennessee State University to study in the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music program, and then started on the road with bluegrass music, spending 20 years performing with Grammy-winning musician and storyteller David Holt.  

“I wasn’t really doing any storytelling, but David kept encouraging me,” Goforth said. “He said, ‘You know, you really could do this.’ He said, ‘It’s a part of your history, it’s a part of your heritage. I’m sure you’ve sat around and heard people tell old tales.’ And I had because when you went to these people’s houses to learn these tunes, they would sit and talk for 20 minutes, then they’d play the tune. And I was like, ‘Just play the tune.’ But when I started playing solo, I realized that was the model. It was just like being on a porch where we’re all sitting around and we talk a little while, and then we play a song, we talk a little while and play a song. So I’ve basically made a career out of the way that I grew up hearing stories on the front porches, and that’s the way I try to make it.” 

Common themes

Listeners might look for discernible differences in storytelling styles from the mountains to the coast in a wide state like North Carolina. Is there a concentration of certain themes, like nuances in vocal dialects? Goforth shares what he thinks about it. 

“No matter the story tradition that you’re in, whether it be cowboy poetry, or war stories or whether it be a Louisiana Cajun story… it doesn't really matter. Wherever you’re from, there are common human elements. Like, we’re all interested in suspense. Everyone is. And so any place that you go, they have suspenseful tales. Everyone’s interested in tall tales. We’ve all been there. In the Appalachian Mountains, it’s the Jack tales that are really, really popular. Or ghost stories, such a universal thing, the paranormal, supernatural. We have a ton of it.” 

Sitting at a knotty wooden table with bench seats in a house that has seen decades of hurricanes and history near the Ocracoke harbor, Goforth channels an Appalachian ancestor who clearly had a substantial influence on his storytelling. Other musicians performing at the Ocrafolk Festival create a background cacophony of jamming and clattering of plates and utensils. 

The Ocrafolk festival, now in its 25th year, is held the first full weekend of June. Paperhand Puppets based in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, holds a parade during the festival each year.

“My Grandmother was the best ghost storyteller I ever knew,” he said. “You would sit at her house and she would smoke these cigarettes, one right after the other, and the whole air would be full of this smoke. And she had a really low, sort of slow voice like this and it was so suspenseful. So I think the material is different in terms of, you know, obviously there’s the ocean here and we tell a lot of stories about ships and things like that. In the Appalachian Mountains, it could be about farming, but the universal themes are present, no matter where you go. Love, murder, mystery. All those, yeah.” 

Dialect differences 

Goforth explains that because of early settlers, there are many noticeable dialect differences between the Appalachian areas of western North Carolina, East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia and coastal areas like eastern North Carolina.. 

“The Scots-Irish, and most of the people who came to Western North Carolina, actually landed in Pennsylvania,” he said. “They landed there, and they came down basically the great wagon road or the Appalachian Range until they made it down into here. Now, people in the eastern part of the state had a different migration pattern. Some landed in Charleston, some in Virginia. So the language is obviously different. You hear the mountain language really almost being Shakespearean.” 

Using his grandfather as an example, Goforth said a common phrase he would use like “I walked over there” would be pronounced “I walk-ED over there,” accenting a second syllable. 

“Appalachian English is definitely an older English style, I think, that has slowly evolved as it made it to American,” he said. “So I think the migration patterns are quite a bit different for both groups.” 

Family characters 

A recurring quip that Goforth uses in his show banter is that where he grew up there wasn’t a family tree, but a family wreath. Family members often find themselves as characters in his stories. And how might they feel about that?

“My family is truly a mountain family,” he Said. “They don’t really get out. They rarely come and hear me play. I mean, they’re just home folks. I think they get a kick out of it in a lot of ways because that was the entertainment, just to sit around and tell stories about each other. And my granddad was the biggest character I ever knew. I was telling somebody the other day, there are so many families that don’t preserve their family stories. And it’s really those stories about people that keep them alive. It’s not the things that they owned, it’s the stories about them that keep them alive. I’ve introduced my granddad all over the United States. People know about him everywhere. So, his stories will live on.” 

Storytelling survival

Josh Goforth performing at the workshop stage with Joe Troop and David Benedict.

In 2025, an era straining with artificial intelligence and political upheaval, what is it about the simpler times depicted in Appalachian storytelling that garners strong appeal? Goforth has a good explanation. 

“Dolly Parton said when things don’t go our way — whether it’s politically or whether it’s through some kind of tragedy, or if it’s something that feels like it just puts us somewhere we don’t want to be — she said the first thing we do is we go back to our community and we start there, and we change things there. I think the thing that’s so appealing about Appalachian culture is that it’s such a tight-knit community. If I were to describe mountain people, ‘stubborn’ would be the word I would use. Sometimes like you can’t tell people anything. They’re going to do what they want to do, you know, they’re characters. But stubborn in that I feel like they could survive no matter where you put them. I think that people are attracted to the Appalachian stories because they are so family oriented and they’re so community oriented.” 

Diamonds in disaster

The devastation of Hurricane Helene in 2024 impacted many Appalachian residents significantly, including the Asheville area where Goforth lives. 

“I think back on an event like the Titanic sinking, how so many people shared their stories no matter what angle they were coming from,” Goforth said. “And so, I think when something like this happens, everyone has their own personal story. And there’s so many of them. I mean, there’s countless stories about the tragedy, about where they were that day, how they felt, who they tried to get a hold of. But I think the thing that I’m most happy about was no matter how bad things got, for every one terrible thing I saw, there were probably 50 acts of kindness and beauty that people were doing.

”My friend Donald Davis has a story about his father that I just love so much. And he talks about how when something bad happens, how you try, if you can, to tell the story from every different angle. Like what was that person going through? What were you going through? What was it like on a national level? What was the relief effort like? And when you can view a story from all those angles, it helps you to understand and process these things for your own help and also for others. That’s where story can be healing.” 

The Impact of ETSU 

When graduating from high school, Goforth said he didn’t know where he wanted to go to college, but he’d heard about ETSU’s Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music program. So he made a last-minute decision that he doesn’t regret. 

“A lot of my friends had already decided what college they were going to. It took me a little while. But I visited, I loved it, I loved the area,” he said. “It was enough away from home to where I felt like I was having the college experience, but not too far away where I couldn't get back. And so, I enjoyed my time there.” 

Given Goforth’s prowess with all things stringed, it may come as a surprise to learn that he was a music education major, playing the euphonium.  

“I was a classical music person there,” he said. “I did both music genres while I was there. And the thing that I loved about East Tennessee State, I think you couldn’t go to a better place for our type of music because of so much networking potential. I have so many friends who I met through ETSU that I could call at any moment if I needed an instrumentalist or a singer, or if I was down on my luck and needed work, I have 20 people I could call right now, you know, who are in the business who could help. It really is a family. And it’s a wonderful thing to be able to meet so many people that are as driven about this music as you are, and that makes you want to get better.” 

It doesn't matter whether Josh Goforth is telling stories through song or spoken word (with an imaginary chaw of tobacco in his bulging cheek as he channels a family member). He proves that Appalachian storytelling can keep good company with the tall tales of infamous pirates and their buried treasure. But Goforth does something that Blackbeard likely never did: He leaves his audiences smiling. 

Donna Davis is a North Carolina writer and columnist who covers music communities, events and artists.