I am on the steps of Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. The birth site of an American president. And it’s humbling.

No. Not just “humbling.” It’s humble. This humble cabin in which Lincoln was born is situated inside a proud Neoclassical memorial building made of both Tennessee marble and Connecticut granite. The cabin still has mud caked between the logs. The wood is rough and splintered. Just the way it was two hundred years ago.

For a long time this was believed to be the actual cabin he was born in. Some well-known people chipped in to preserve it. Samuel Clemens was among them. His name is on the plaque outside. Schoolchildren donated their pocket money to the cause. Locals dug deep.

And here I stand.

Over a microphone, I am talking to a sprawling audience. I tell the story of how 7-year-old Abe almost drowned. I am dramatizing the story by using body movements. I can see a little boy in the front row, listening in rapt wonder, while solemnly picking his nose.

I have no training as a storyteller. I have no idea what I’m doing. It took me ten years to find out that I’m not a skilled storyteller, but by then it was too late because it was my full-time job.

There is no official training course to be a storyteller. No special class you attend to become a teller of tales. And you can’t really tell people what you do for a living when they ask you at various cocktail parties and soirées.

“So, what do you do for a living?” one man might ask.

“I tell stories.”

Then we laugh together, and after he catches his breath he says:

“No, seriously, what do you do?”

As a young storyteller, the only true experience I had telling stories was the one about my dog digesting my English essay. Oh, sure, I knew a few jokes, too. But I can’t tell them here.

Also, I had experience sitting on a porch, watching old men chew the fat and lie to each other. This was a kind of training, I suppose. I was usually their only audience. For I was the only one who hadn’t heard the lies a million-and-one times before.

Still, I learned a few things from those men. Each lie they told followed certain rules. Their story had to (a) be engaging, (b) it had to be loud—the speaker had to sound like he was speaking from the front seat of a dump truck driving through a Steinway factory, and (c) above all—this is the most important part—your story had to be funny. If people weren’t laughing while listening to your story, your tale was a failure.

This is all I know of storytelling.

Something else I know. Abraham Lincoln was a storyteller. I know this because as I prepared for this presentation, I consulted the archives of the President’s writings as compiled by the University of Michigan. Over a period of months I got lost in his work.

The man was a poet. Abraham could whittle a sentence down to its barest essentials, trimming the waste, dusting off unnecessary hyperbole, leaving only the spartan essence of meaning behind. He said more with less.

Edward Everett, the keynote speaker who shared the stage of the Gettysburg consecration ceremony, said of Lincoln: “[I] came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as [Abraham Lincoln] did in two minutes.”

His speeches were short. His voice was a relatively quiet, high tenor. His mannerisms were easy. He was notoriously gentle.

But he was no pushover, either. He was a river boatman, a circuit rider, a blue-collar worker in his heart.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a historian. I have no business telling you this stuff. I did not even go to high school. While most kids were learning to memorize the Compact Theory of the Constitution, I was deep-frying waffle fries, or playing music in some place where the microphone smelled like Anheuser-Busch products. If you would’ve told me I would be telling stories of our American history to audiences at our national parks, I would’ve laughed and told you to get me a refill.

The way I got into this history business was my friend, Bobby Horton. Bobby is a local musician in Birmingham, who recorded stacks of historical songs in his career. He recorded thousands of them for the Ken Burns documentaries. Bobby has traveled the country, sharing our heritage music with audiences on riverboats, in auditoriums, upon historical battlefields, in the rec rooms of nursing homes, and inside the stinky gymnasiums of elementary schools.

Years ago, I started traveling with Bobby as an auxiliary musician. I was merely a roadie and a utility player. I backed him up. I picked a banjo behind him. I laughed at his jokes even though I’d heard them before.

I listened to his stories, and I watched him talk about our country and all the best parts of it, and all the best people of it. And all of the ordinary men and women who made it—men and women who were usually caught in a whirlwind not of their own making.

And I began to fall in love with these humans he told stories about. Not just the icons. The average Americans whom the classroom history books might never mention. My forebears.

What impressed me most, however, was not just “their story.” What touched me was that their story is our story. Their story is yours. It’s mine. Their story belongs to your children.

Their lives are ours now. Their highest beliefs, their greatest morals, have all been passed down to us through their mythology. Their worst beliefs have been tested by the rigors of time and fire, and shown to be soiled and fallible.

So, as I speak to this audience, I am thinking about how lucky I am. I am not lucky because I’m a storyteller. I’m lucky because I had the privilege of being born American. I realize that is not a popular stance. But it’s how I feel.

Don’t misunderstand me. Being born an American does not make me any different, nor any better than anyone else. I am neither higher, nor lower. Neither stronger, nor weaker. But being American means I was taught that all men have the inalienable right to be equal. Being American means I stand eye to eye with the most powerful man or woman this world has ever produced, while also being brothers with our weakest. Being American means I have the right to disagree with my fellow man, and still love them dearly.

So anyway, as soon as I am finished here in Kentucky, I will be back on the road. And in a few days, I’ll be making an East Coast run, performing with Bobby again. We’ll be stopping in Virginia. We will be playing in Toms River, New Jersey. We will be speaking at schools, telling stories, sharing our American history.

And as we ride across verdant countryside and rural two-lanes, I will continue to fall deeper in love with my country. But it is not the land itself I love, nor its damning politics, nor our Labradoodles—although they’re pretty great. It is our people.

I love people. I love the men and women this land has produced. I love the men and women this land has attracted. I love my ancestors. I love my ancestors, such as the elderly 19th-century Irish immigrant who, just before he died, said: “You can move to France, but you’ll never be French. You can relocate to Italy, but you’ll never be Italian. But you can come to this country, and you are an American.”

And above all, I love you—whoever you are.