Folk Artists Specialize in Telling the Tale : Storytellers: A new national organization and smaller, local groups promote the oral sharing of history, tradition and myth.

The National Assn. for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, an organization based in Jonesboro, Tenn., was founded in 1973 by Jimmy Neil Smith. That year, the group’s first storytelling festival was attended by fewer than 100 storytellers. Since then, there’s been a growing fascination with keeping oral traditions and cultural stories alive.

In 1989, the festival drew more than 5,000 professional and amateur storytellers from around the country. Locally, smaller storytelling groups are springing up, with schools, libraries and museums increasingly using storytellers. Here are the stories of three.

Betsy Brown-George, 72, remembers those hot Texas nights more than 60 years ago when she would listen to her grandfather on the porch at her home. He told stories of growing up just after the Civil War and the perils of moving from Kentucky to the “wild West” of Texas as a After acquiring a good supply of balsa wood, Brown-George set to work, hand carving 36 marionettes--a time-consuming and painstaking task. “I didn’t know how to make them,” she said. “Ever since I saw ‘Pinocchio,’ I thought puppets all had to be made out of wood.”

Nevertheless, Brown-George managed to live up to her commitment and entertained her schoolmates with several shows. Brown-George has constructed hundreds of puppets since then and told hundreds of stories.

Kathleen Zundell’s approach to storytelling is a little more unusual. She tells stories about women, mostly, and spins her tales while outdoors.

Zundell, 42, who holds a degree in drama from CSUN, began telling stories seven years ago. She chose the outdoors as a backdrop for her workshops--”In Search of the Wise Woman” through The Wilderness Institute in Woodland Hills--because she says the natural environment allows women to be more open and expressive.

“Being in the city puts us out of balance,” she said. “We’re surrounded by four walls, and we’re often cut off from a great force--Mother Nature. There’s a relationship we have to the earth that we ignore.

“By coming to this environment, the body just naturally relates to the earth in a loving way. We can feel the power and energy of the earth. We can look at the different aspects of nature. We can see how birth, life and death are manifested in nature, and how we are part of the cycle of nature.”

Zundell’s “In Search of the Wise Woman” workshop, which she began two years ago, emphasizes the value of older women in society, something she believes has deteriorated with society’s obsession with youth.

“The media influences us to view older women as helpless, feeble and incapable of making decisions,” Zundell said. “A lot of stereotypes of what it is to grow old as a woman are negative. But older men are shown in a more positive light--being aggressive, asserting themselves, in the company of younger women.

“Often what women give is not acknowledged in our culture,” she said. “The things women do, like taking care of people, are undervalued. We’re not recognized enough for our work, time and commitment to our families. So in this workshop, we take a moment to recognize and value our contributions.”

After years of research, Zundell found stories from ancient literature and peoples--the Celts, Picts, Arcadians and American Indian tribes--that depict older women as wise teachers, healers and leaders, as well as caring matriarchs. In her workshop, Zundell leads a group of women through the trails of the Santa Monica Mountains. They listen--and sometimes incorporate movement and writing exercises--as she tells of times when women played an active role in law making procedures, medicine and the spiritual equilibrium.

Martha Stevens is a professional storyteller from Studio City, and her audiences tend to include both adults and children. She performs at museums, schools, clubs, libraries, for religious organizations and at various special functions. Over the past 10 years, Stevens, 49, has built up a repertoire that includes about 175 tales collected from sources around the world.

Karen Schmidt, director of Music Center on Tour, a program which brings a variety of cultural events to schools and other children’s centers, called Stevens “one of the best storytellers. She has a long career, and we’ve always been impressed and touched by her work and her personality. She touches people. She touches their hearts and touches their minds. Very few people can do this.”

Stevens prefers performing solo, and without costumes or props.

“Stories have a holding power all their own,” she said.

Over the years, Stevens has been amazed to find that very often the same story is retold, with slight variations, from country to country. For example, she said, there are about 365 versions of the ever-popular fairy tale “Cinderella.” And this, she believes, as most storytellers do, is the thread that brings people of different cultures together to discover similar problems with similar solutions.

“We live in a multicultural city, where people are having a hard time with the different races,” Stevens said. “I feel storytelling is a wonderful place for us to learn to understand one another. Stories go beyond race and remind us we are all human beings.

“When we listen to stories from our own culture, we get a sense of the past and we can take pride in that,” she said. “And when we start listening to stories from other cultures, we gain a respect for these cultures. It’s a great way to start talking, listening and respecting one another.”