Do You Know Jack? Jack Tales at the American Folklife Center

If you’ve ever heard people discussing American folktales, chances are you’ve heard them speak about “Jack tales.” The phrase refers to a loose cycle of adventure stories featuring a young hero, most often named Jack, who makes his way in the world with cleverness and wit. The stories weren’t often called “Jack tales” before 1943, when Richard Chase’s popular anthology of the stories, The Jack Tales, presented Jack as a quintessential American hero. Long before that, though, Jack was already a popular protagonist, the central figure in a wide variety of adventure tales, wherever English was spoken. From John O’ Groats to Land’s End, from Ireland to the Caribbean, and most especially from Atlantic Canada to the southern Appalachians, Jack was a favorite folktale hero, a clever, lucky, generous Everyman.

Of course, there isn’t just one Jack. In some tales, Jack is an only child who lives alone with his mother. In others, he has two older brothers, Will and Tom, and two living parents. In still others, his mother is dead, and he is at the mercy of an evil stepmother. Jack is sometimes a fool, sometimes average, sometimes the cleverest boy in town. Traditional storytellers have their own ways of dealing with Jack’s multiple lives; some of them try to reconcile their stories to provide a clear biography for Jack, while others embrace his variety. Folklorist Bill Nicolaisen once asked North Carolina narrator Marshall Ward why Jack seems to get married over and over again in the stories. Ward answered, “This ain’t the same Jack. These stories are one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years apart.”

Jack tales abound in American Folklife Center collections. One great way to find them is in a new research guide, Folktales and Oral Storytelling: Resources in the American Folklife Center Collections. The guide has a page on “Jack Tales and other Magic Tales” where you’ll find references to all the relevant collections at AFC, including the ones I’m drawing on in this post. But since almost no Jack tales from our collections were online as audio at the time we published the guide, I thought it would be fun to introduce some of these stories, some of their tellers, and a little about the Jack tale tradition as it’s represented in our archive. Then in future posts, we’ll look into the deep history of the Jack tales and some of their influence on diverse communities and on popular culture.

Although tales about Jack are widely known, the phrase “Jack tales” is especially associated with the Southern Appalachians, partly because that’s where Richard Chase did the collecting that led to the book The Jack Tales. AFC collections reflect this, and a preponderance of our Jack tale collections come from this region. In the Southern Appalachian mountains, one particular extended family has had the reputation of carrying Jack tales for generations, and telling them with style and wit. The Harmon and Hicks families have been entwined for generations through marriage, and the extended family includes prominent stortellers with other surnames including Proffitt and Ward. We’ll concentrate on this extended family and visit with some members through AFC’s archival recordings.

Samuel Harmon

 

Among the earliest full recordings of Jack tales in the AFC archive are a set of April 1939 recordings of Samuel Harmon made by the pioneering folklorist Herbert Halpert. With funding from the Folk Arts Committee of the Works Progress Administration, and a disc recorder and lacquer discs supplied by the Library of Congress, Halpert was on a multi-state collecting tour when he spent four days recording songs and tales from Harmon and his family. Harmon had been born in Watauga County, North Carolina, but by 1939 he was living in Maryville, Tennessee. Unconventional in many ways, his branch of the Harmon family had largely converted to Mormonism after moving to Tennessee, but they kept up their tale-telling tradition. Samuel Harmon’s Jack tales have an earthy, uncensored quality that seems missing from some of our later recordings. On the other hand, his renderings of tales are typically shorter than his relatives’ versions of the same stories. At the time of the recording session, Harmon was 68 and had lived a hard life; he died a little over a year later. The interviews suggest he had begun to doubt his prodigious ability to recall long tales, so it’s possible he kept his stories short on purpose so as not to overwhelm his memory. Let’s hear a tale his family members tended to call “Jack and the Varmints.” He himself called it “Stiff Dick,” which is just a nickname for Jack. (Spoiler Alert: There’s no sexual content to the story at all!) Hear it in the player below.

Ray Hicks

At around the time Halpert was setting out on his trip, the young Frank and Anne Warner, newly married and settled in New York, were introduced to the mountain dulcimer by their friend Maurice Matteson, a professor of music at the University of South Carolina. Hoping to get one of their own, the Warners began corresponding with Nathan Hicks of Beech Mountain, NC, who had made Matteson’s instrument. Through their letters, they planned a summer visit to Beech Mountain to pick up a dulcimer and commission a banjo. Learning through their correspondence that the Hickses were struggling financially, the thoughtful Warners collected clothes, toys, and food, and arrived with a car full of gifts as well as cash to pay for their instruments. This kindness was much appreciated by Nathan and his family, including his wife Rena, his father John Benjamin Hicks (known as Ben), his mother Julia, his uncle Roby, his aunt Buna, his cousin Stanley, his daughter Bessie and her husband Frank Proffitt, as well as Nathan’s son, Lenard Ray Hicks (known as Ray). It was the start of a friendship between the Warners and the Hickses that lasts to this day.

The Warners made their visits to Beech Mountain an annual tradition, and on subsequent visits brought recording equipment, ultimately becoming crucial folklore collectors across the United States. They collected numerous songs from the Hickses and Proffitts, including Frank Proffitt’s version of “Tom Dooley,” which was later published by Alan Lomax and popularized by the Kingston Trio in a massive, Grammy-winning 1958 hit.

Less well known are the fragments of Jack tales they recorded from young Ray Hicks, who was 16 when they first visited; since the Warners were on a strict budget and had few blank discs, they couldn’t afford to record Ray’s twenty-minute stories in their entirety. Still, these fragments are the first recordings of one of the greatest storytellers of our time; 45 years after he first met the Warners, in 1983, Ray Hicks was recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship for his masterful storytelling. All these recordings of songs and stories are now part of the AFC archive, along with the very banjo Nathan made for Frank Warner, .

Luckily for us, Ray Hicks continued telling stories throughout his life. When the late Jimmy Neil Smith and a group of storytellers founded the National Storytelling Festival in 1973, Ray was a featured teller, and he returned every year he could until his death in 2003. The recordings of the National Storytelling Festival came to the American Folklife Center in 2001 as part of the International Storytelling Collection (AFC 2001 008), and we continue to receive accruals to the collection. That means we have decades of recordings of the best storytellers in America, including Ray Hicks and his Jack tales. Let’s hear one of the Festival’s recordings of Ray: He describes this as his favorite Jack tale, but can’t decide if it’s called “Unlucky Jack and Lucky Jack” or “Lucky Jack and Unlucky Jack!”

Maud Gentry Long

In 1947, singer and storyteller Maud Gentry Long moved temporarily to Washington DC from Hot Springs, North Carolina. Her mother, Jane Hicks Gentry, had sung for the English folklorist Cecil Sharp during his 1916 collecting trip, so her family was known to folklorists. Duncan Emrich, who was chief of what was then the Library of Congress Folklore Section (an older name for the Archive of Folk Culture), invited her into the Library’s Recording Lab to capture her songs and stories as the Maud Gentry Long collection of Jack tales and folk songs (AFC1948/110). Of course, Maud Long’s family tradition long predated Chase’s book The Jack Tales, and she typically called the stories “Jack, Will, and Tom tales,” which shows that the term “Jack tales” was not universally accepted. The Library issued five of her “Jack, Will and Tom tales” as a two LP set in in 1956, Jack Tales told by Mrs. Maud Long of Hot Springs, North Carolina (AFS L47-L48). The tales told at these sessions included “Jack and the Varmints,” “The Heifer Hide,” “Sop Doll,” and “Hardy Hard Head, or ‘Sail, Ship, Sail.’”

Maud Long also provided a vivid description of how Jack tales would be told by her family in North Carolina:

“It would be on a long winter evening when, after supper, all of us were gathered before the big open fire, my mother taking care of the baby-or else the baby was in the cradle very near to Mother. And she would be sewing or carding. My father would be mending someone’s shoes, or maybe a bit of harness. The older girls were helping with the carding or the sewing, and all of us little ones would either have a lap full or a basket full of wool, out of which we must pick all the burrs and the Spanish needles, and the bits of briars and dirt against the next day’s carding, for my mother wove all of this wool that had been shorn from the backs of our own sheep (raised there on the farm that was in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina) into linsey-woolsey, for hers and our dresses, or into blue jeans for my father’s and brother’s suits, or into blankets to keep us warm, or into the beautiful patterned coverlets, to say nothing of all the socks and stockings and mitts and hoods that it took for a large family of nine children. And so she needed every bit of the wool that she could get ready. And to keep our eyes open and our fingers busy and our hearts merry, my mother would tell these marvelous tales, the Jack, Will and Tom tales.”

Let’s hear Maud Long telling “Jack and the Northwest Wind” in the player below. Note that, unlike Marshall Ward, Long felt that all the Jack tales were about the same person, and therefore is careful to explain just why Jack and his mother live alone in this tale, with Jack’s father and brothers away for work.

More About the Hicks-Harmon Jack Tale Tradition and Its Place in the Archive

Before the founding of the American Folklife Center in 1976, the Library’s Folklore Section was part of the Music Division, so the section head, folklorist Duncan Emrich, had to make a case for recording Maud Long’s stories, since they couldn’t be considered music. In a memo to the Library’s Music Division chief Harold Spivacke, dated January 20 1947, Emrich wrote:

“The collection of tales is an extremely rare one. Richard Chase of Virginia has collected in writing some of the Jack tales told by Mrs. Long and published them in his book of the same title. They have not been recorded, nor has Chase acquired the full collection from Mrs. Long. […] As part of the developing work of the Folklore Section, it would be most valuable to have these tales added to our collections.”

Emrich clearly located part of the collection’s value in the fact that Maud Long was a source for Chase’s work. He also mentions that Chase himself had not made sound recordings, and that Chase hadn’t even drawn on all of Maud Long’s repertoire for the book. This left an opening for the archive to document new stories with a connection to a popular book, and even to curate them for release on LPs, which was a specialty of Emrich’s.

Maud Long was not the only teller Chase consulted in compiling his now-classic collection. In fact, Chase collected from many tellers, primarily in the extended Hicks family, including Ben Hicks, Ray Hicks’s grandfather, from whom Ray learned his tales. Chase relied especially on Roby Monroe Ward, another Hicks/Harmon descendant, who died soon after the book came out.

Chase’s book didn’t capture any tale as it was told by any one storyteller. Instead Chase edited together tellings from different people; in his words he took “the best of many tellings and correlated the best of all material collected into one complete version.” This, of course, opened the way for Chase to emphasize the things he wanted. Carl Lindahl suggests in his introduction to the eidted volume Jack in Two Worlds that Chase’s version of the Jack character may reflect the author’s own Depression-era search for an American folk hero.

Richard Chase was a performing storyteller too, and we have some recordings of him in collections he and others donated. We don’t have permission to place those recordings online, but you can hear some of Chase’s entertaining versions of Jack tales in licensed YouTube videos like this one. For the full range of traditional ideas about Jack, though, your best bet is to listen to versions from oral tradition—like the ones I’ve embedded in this post.

Chase noticed that all his Hicks informants seemed to be descended from a patriarch named Council Harmon, and titled the book “The Jack Tales: Told by R.M. Ward and his kindred in the Beech Mountain section of Western North Carolina and by other descendants of Council Harmon … with three tales from Wise County, Virginia.” He thus popularized the idea that Council Harmon was the main source of the Jack tale tradition in the North Carolina mountains. “Old Counce,” as Council was known, was the grandfather of R.M. Ward, Samuel Harmon, and Ben Hicks; the great-grandfather of Maud Gentry Long; and the great-great-grandfather of Ray Hicks. Clearly, our Jack Tale collections, along with Chase’s, are greatly influenced by Council Harmon’s contributions to the tradition.

As Emrich pointed out, Richard Chase did not make sound recordings of Maud Long or of his other informants of the 1930s and early 1940s. However, he later did make recordings of singers and Jack Tale tellers, and in so doing discovered some Hickses who told the tales but weren’t descended from Council Harmon. In 1946, for example, he recorded Mrs. Cal Hicks (whose birth name was Nora Hicks); she was descended from Council’s uncle, William Hicks. Let’s hear Nora Hicks’s version of “Jack and the Giants’ New Ground.” This story came to us as part of the Richard Chase Appalachian recordings collection (AFC 1977/022).

Of course, it’s possible Nora’s branch of the family learned their Jack tales from their cousins who were Council’s descendants, but the knowledge of Jack tales among Hickses who are not directly descended from Council Harmon has suggested to scholars like James Thompson that the ultimate source of many of the Hicks-Harmon family traditions, including the Jack tales, was Council Harmon’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Hicks (ca. 1753-1835). Samuel, known as “Big Sammy,” was also William Hicks’s father, and thus the most proximate common ancestor of all the known Jack tale tellers in the family.

It may be impossible to uncover just who first told Jack tales in the Hicks-Harmon family. Ultimately, though, the tales come from Britain and some of them were probably brought from there by ancestors named Hicks or Hix. The Harmon family, meanwhile, came from Germany, and might have brought their German versions of folktales that mixed with the Hicks tradition, adding elements to Jack’s exploits.

Thus, we are left with the situation described by James Thompson: “The Atlantic Ocean now stands as the barrier to our further search for the origins of the Hicks family traditions.” But if we can’t trace the Hickses’ and Harmons’ tales directly back to Europe, on a broader scale, the roots of the tales in the old world are fascinating to explore.

We’ll talk about the deep roots and spreading branches of Jack tales in a future post. For now, let’s hear one more story: Ray Hicks’s unforgettable version of “The Heifer Hide,” once again from the International Storytelling Collection (AFC 2001/008).