Near the end of his oft-bleak history of Appalachia, historian John Alexander Williams cites Jonesborough, Tennessee, as one possible future for the region’s small towns. He specifically calls out Jonesborough as a community that successfully reinvented itself through the preservation of its historic buildings and the escalation of an annual fall festival into the National Storytelling Festival. As Williams tells it, the festival caught tailwinds from a national storytelling revival that was tied to the counterculture’s 1970s shift away from politics toward spirituality and personal growth. Over that time, the…
