The grandkids are in their bedroom dancing to The Wabash Cannonball blaring from a cassette of Texas history for children. I spotted it yesterday while sorting through a box of things slated to be tossed away. Snatching it up, I popped it into our “retro” phonograph with its CD and cassette functions. Off it went, launching a new aural adventure.

This particular cassette dates from the mid 1980s. Was it really so recently that little cassettes filled the marketplace? Discovering this tape on Saturday was apropos since, the previous day, my Texas-born husband reminded us that it was Alamo Day. Both grandkids were born in Texas, so they were all ears as Hank told them the basic story.

“Everyone got killed?” was their repeated exclamation. For my part, I tossed in the Davy Crockett song.

As a native Virginian, surely I learned the phrase “Remember the Alamo” in school, but that’s about all. Kids raised in Texas, however, would be awash in Alamo history. The narrative taught today may have spun around to be unrecognizable to those from my generation. Be that as it may, the heroic story is vividly told on this heartfelt cassette, along with songs of Texas and the Old West, including Yellow Rose of Texas, Deep in the Heart of Texas, Git Along Little Doggies, and the aforementioned Wabash Cannonball. (Yes, Wabash is in Indiana, but the song talks about the Rock Island line that extended into Texas.)

Oh how my dad loved the Wabash Cannonball. He sang it so frequently, I cannot hear it without recalling his voice. Digging into this box, I found other treasures, including two cassettes of him singing and playing the guitar. These are so precious, I am afraid to hold them, much less stick them into a cassette player. Once safely transferred to digital format, though, this compendium of his favorite tunes will resound across our house.

Just in time, too. Our grandkids are at that marvelous, but brief, stage where their ears, hearts, and minds grab everything presented to them. Hence, to restate the obvious, we race to put quality stories, songs, and poetry into their spongy little minds!

That fact has spurred a new talk I will be giving during the 2020 conference season: Engaging History Through the Storytelling of Jim Weiss. Let me share why.

Growing up, I never had anything like the beguiling voice of Jim Weiss to guide me in the acquisition of language and history. There were children’s story records, but not so many. And of those, only an LP of Mary Martin’s and Cyril Ritchard’s masterpiece Peter Pan brought the kind of magic found regularly in Weiss’s productions.

Across 31 years, master storyteller Weiss has read, paraphrased, or otherwise brought to life a cornucopia of classic works of literature and history. Hank and I encountered his creative genius when visiting our first homeschool conference back in 2008. I quickly heard Weiss’s name bantered about. “Oh you’ve got to hear his sessions” and “You must get some of his recordings!”

Then, a year later, with Discovering Music still an announcement on a flyer, we set up shop across from this gentle, thoughtful man whose eyes twinkled with joy. His table was loaded with stacks of CDs that diminished hour-by-hour. Except for when he exited every couple of hours to give a talk, he was surrounded by fans.

I finally slipped off to hear him speak, and was dumbstruck. Not only did Weiss lay out the principles of how one conveys the power of a story, but he explained the aesthetics and spiritual efficacy of storytelling. What he said about telling stories matched up with what I knew to be the power of performing music. For the first time, I realized that the nuances, dynamics, color, and choreography of telling a story were little different from those same qualities expressed in the performance of a Brahms Intermezzo or a Chopin Ballad.

Needless to say, I became a fan too. Gradually Hank and I came to know him and his wonderful wife Randy. Their work was a gutsy dream fulfilled, embarked upon when they chose to leave professional careers and commit their lives and livelihood to the art of storytelling.

Already two generations of children and adults have been blessed by their work. A few years ago, they took up new directions and turned the distribution of their recordings over to a long-time friend and colleague Susan Wise Bauer of The Well-Trained Mind.

We here at Professor Carol, are also embarking upon a closer connection with Weiss’s creative work, integrating his recordings more directly into our course material. As you can imagine, I’m hugely excited about this opportunity and delighted to introduce his material to people who may hitherto have missed the chance to discover it for themselves.

Masterful aural material serves as a steadying force to a child—a consistent, encouraging support in their intellectual and verbal development. Consequently, I want children everywhere to grow up with Jim Weiss’ voice as their friend.

Furthermore, nothing is scary about a subject if Jim Weiss tells the story. Case in point: my six-year old granddaughter loves Archimedes. She can recite some of his accomplishments and is gleeful at the very mention of his name. Why? Because she became infatuated with a particular CD where Weiss narrates Archimedes’ life. It contains one of the funniest scenes you can imagine; the absent-minded mathematician racing out of the bath house to the king’s palace, sans robe, shouting, “Eureka” upon solving a certain problem! Weiss’s narration has in a specific way shaped this child’s mind positively towards the subject of mathematics and towards heroes with difficult names from Antiquity.

I’ll have more to say about all of this in the future. No resource can replace a loving adult consistently reading to a child. Still I rejoice that someone like Jim Weiss exists who has devoted his life to making this experience possible for children across the world, delighting their souls, enriching their hearts and opening doors that might otherwise be closed.