In 2002, Joe McHugh, a writer, musician, and award-winning public radio journalist, set out to find the family of an African-American woman named Helen who cared for him when he was a child and who helped his family survive a terrible tragedy. No one remaining in his family, however, knew Helen’s last name or where she had moved after leaving his home when Joe was five. His only clue was a passing reference to a house fire in a letter written in 1952

In Slaying the Gorgon – The Rise of the Storytelling Industrial Complex, traditional storyteller and public radio producer Joe McHugh offers a fascinating and provocative look at how we tell stories in the modern age given the dynamic and transforming influence of new technologies. From the venerated saints and cathedrals of the Middle Ages to the pop stars and cineplexes of today, he explains why images and sound are increasingly supplanting the authority of the printed word, and by so doing radically altering the cultural, economic, and political landscape of the United States and the rest of the world.

Each Christmas season a group of pilots and volunteers visit lighthouses and coast guard facilities up and down the coast of New England bringing gifts to the children. This “Flying Santa” tradition began in 1929 when pilot Bill Wincapaw of Rockport, Maine, the pilot of a float plane that delivered mail, medicine, and other essentials to remote coastal communities became lost in a fierce winter storm. With his compass malfunctioning and running desperately low on fuel, he was eventually guided home by a series of lighthouses along Pennobscott Bay. To show his gratitude, he and his ten-year-old son dropped floatable bundles full of presents to the families of the lighthouse keepers on Christmas Day.

Noted storyteller and old-time fiddler Joe McHugh has put down his bow and picked up the pen to entertain us with a collection of supernatural tales about violins and fiddlers. A hotel haunted at midnight by the eerie sound of a fiddle, a dancing skeleton and a pirate’s buried treasure, a romantic rivalry between sisters that leads to foul murder, an ill-advised bargain with the Devil during the rough and tumble days of the California Gold Rush, these are just a few of the unexpected delights to be found within these pages. Each is an original tale, inspired by ancient myths and folk beliefs, and told with reverence for this most mysterious and seductive of all musical instruments—the violin.

In Ruff Tales, High Octane Stories from the Ruff Creek General Store, storyteller Joe McHugh has gleaned the best of the humorous anecdotes, outlandish tall tales, and eerie ghost stories he has come across in his travels around the country in this delightful collection for young and old..

Well, according to a youngster from West Virginia, the folktales found in this book are just that. Selected from the repertoire of master storyteller Joe McHugh and wonderfully illustrated by his wife Paula McHugh, these simple yarns of giants and wizards and ghostly visitations represent oral literature at its very best. Faithfully handed down from one generation to the next, they are the currency of the imagination that help us better understand the mysterious and magical journey of life.

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