Bob Mello is a quiet, unassuming man with a pleasant face, a slight build, white hair -- trimly cut -- and heavy, dark eyebrows that might have once been bushy. He looks like a man who could overhear, unnoticed, stories that might be better left unshared.

Mello is, in fact, a collector of stories, but he's not that kind of storyteller.

"There was a guitarist who had been playing through the Ozarks all his life," he begins, animating with a light of joy and seeming to grow in size to fill the space between his listeners. This man, he says, had a friend who often came to hear him play. He loved to listen, that man always said, "but don't ask me to do it."

"And they went on for a long time, playin' and appreciatin' and appreciatin' and playin'" until the listener got sick and died.

On that day, the guitarist snapped his guitar over his knee and never played again, Mello says. "Because every good storyteller needs a good listener."

There's a moral to his story that is close to Mello's heart. He is one of the Tellers of Tales, a group of storytellers that meets monthly at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. Storytelling used to be big at the museum, says Susan Young, its outreach coordinator, remembering that its popularity was established in 1992 at a storytelling festival.

"It was the brainchild of Mary Parsons, who was assistant director of the museum then," Young recounts. "She had a great love for the wealth of oral tradition found in the Ozarks."

Parsons went to a national storytelling festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., and came back determined to start a movement in Northwest Arkansas, Young remembers. People like Mim Neralich, a children's librarian, and Bob Cochran, director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas, got involved, as did author Stephen Byers, Oda Mulloy, who told stories on KUAF, the local National Public Radio affiliate, and Young, whose roots run deep in the Ozarks.

Young says the Ozarks' reputation for the oral tradition is largely thanks to the stories told in books by Vance Randolph, a folklorist who was born in 1892 in Pittsburg, Kan., and was "as a young man attracted to the margins, to the rich ethnic and cultural diversity and radical politics of the region's mining communities. He dropped out of high school and published his first writing for leftist periodicals such as the socialist Appeal to Reason, published in nearby Girard," according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. "By 1920, Randolph had moved to the Ozarks ... (and) made his living writing for sporting magazines and for pioneer paperback book publisher E. Haldeman-Julius. He also made a name for himself as a student of traditional Ozark culture."

Randolph collected folklore steadily through the 1930s and 1940s, the Encyclopedia states, and in 1978 was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

Young says she often retells Randolph's stories, but -- as is appropriate in the oral tradition -- makes them her own, weaving people she has known into places familiar to her listeners. For example, she says, she often tells a tale about Rube Tackett, whom she remembers from her childhood because he was still riding a mule through Fayetteville in the early 1960s. Or she might take Randolph's tale about going to see the "newfangled" picture show and insert her two old bachelor uncles into the story -- which ends when biting into a banana seems to make one of them go blind.

The act of storytelling -- passing down culture, family history and lessons for the children -- is one of the most fundamental of human interactions, Young says, and one she and Mello fear is being lost.

"When the Tellers of Tales started, there weren't poetry groups and journaling groups and all those opportunities," Young says. "Lots of people came here for that."

She and the other members of the Tellers of Tales want to bring in more people to listen -- and to tell their stories or those of their families, to share favorite fairy tales or folk tales and to keep the tradition alive.

"Every culture has an oral tradition."