Welcome to our ongoing series about Jack tales, those engaging stories about a tricky, lucky, and clever young man named Jack. In previous posts, we’ve mentioned the development of the stories in oral tradition, and also the influence of printed versions. Even though most of the American Folklife Center’s archival versions are audio recordings, it’s important to acknowledge that most people first encounter Jack through print, and even many unique versions of tales carried for generations in oral tradition are mainly available from print sources. We’ll run down some of the most important ones in this post. Most of these books are available at the Library of Congress, and and I’ll let you know when we have related archival collections at the American Folklife Center.
The best known American Jack tale book, of course, is “The Jack Tales” (1943) by Richard Chase, and we discussed its influence in our first post. Richard Chase collected Jack tales from Roby Monroe Ward in the 1930s. He didn’t use a sound recorder, but wrote down the tales as Ward told them to him. Chase then sought all the orally collected versions he could find of those same tales and collated the different versions of each tale into a literary composite, which he published in the book. Chase later made some sound recordings of Jack tales and ballads from traditional tellers and singers, corresponded with other folklorists, and made recordings of himself telling stories, so AFC has quite a few related archival collections, which you can find in the catalog at this link. You can also hear Chase tell Jack tales in licensed videos at YouTube.
In our second post, we mentioned some of the early collections from Britain and Ireland to feature Jack tales. We’ll expand on that here with more recent collections. We mentioned that the collections of Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916) are particularly important as sources of old-world Jack tales; Jacobs was an Australian-born folklorist who spent most of his career in Britain and the last 20 years in the United States. Jacobs was Jewish, and best known in his lifetime as a scholar of Hebrew literature and global Jewish culture, but his most enduring fame comes from his folktale collections. He is possibly the first person to print a version of a Jack tale based on an oral performance, which he heard in Australia. He published his English Jack Tales in his collections “English Fairy Tales” and “More English Fairy Tales,” and Irish and Scottish ones in “Celtic Fairy Tales” and “More Celtic Fairy Tales.”
Possibly the most significant collection to feature English Jack tales since Jacobs’s work is Neil Philip’s “The Penguin Book of English Folk Tales.” Philip visited untapped archival sources and obscure publications, and extracted 12 Jack Tales, including two versions of “The Ox, the Table, and the Stick,” known in the Appalachians as “Jack and the Northwest Wind.” His work suggests that more Jack tales may be located in the various collections of folklore from Romany and other traveling people in England, such as the T.W. Thompson Collection at the University of Leeds, and in published collections of Romany and Traveller folklore, such as Francis Hind Groome’s “Gypsy Folk-Lore.”
Scotland, too, had a rich Jack tale tradition. I previously mentioned the Jack Tales in J.F. Campbell’s 1860 Popular Tales of the West Highlands (noting that Highlander Jack is called Iain). But I didn’t mention another community in Scotland among whom Jack was the quintessential hero: Scottish Travellers. The traditionally nomadic people, who did seasonal and itinerant labor throughout Scotland, had particularly rich oral traditions of song and story. One modern Traveller in particular, Duncan Williamson (1928-2007), became famous as a singer and storyteller in the folk revival after growing up steeped in the Traveller tradition. According to folklorist Hamish Henderson, Duncan Williamson was documented telling 60 different Jack tales, making him possibly the most prolific Jack tale teller on record–though he said he had heard “a couple of hundred.” In his later career, Williamson wrote many of his tales down in collections, including one made up entirely of Jack tales: “Don’t Look Back, Jack!” Other collections, such as “Jack and the Devil’s Purse,” “Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children,” and “A Thorn in the King’s Foot,” feature several Jack tales among their offerings. Most of Williamson’s books were written with his wife, the professional folklorist and ethnographer Linda Williamson, and most feature contextual information about the stories and about Traveller life.
The American Folklife Center has an important archival collection containing interviews and storytelling by Duncan Williamson and other Travellers: The John D. Niles British Isles Field Project collection (AFC 1991/040). Portions of this collection are online as “Scottish Voices” at the University of Wisconsin, where Niles taught for many years, but the collection’s principal home is at AFC. In interviews in the collection, Williamson said that Jack was the most popular character in Scottish Traveller folktales, and that fathers always wanted their sons to grow up and be like Jack. He explained the educational importance of Jack to Scottish Travellers:
“When your father was telling you a Jack tale—Jack had the problems. Well, he also told you how Jack got out of his problem. Well, if you were to listen to the stories, you could get out of the problems the way Jack got out of his problem. To think—what do I do next? You see what I mean? And these words were supposed to teach you—the stories was tellt for teaching you. Teaching you—in your life, your father’d say when you got out in the world—”You are just a Jack.” That’s what he was in the story. You got out there in this strange world, you don’t know nobody. What did Jack do when he went in another country? He had to make his way just same as you. He had to find friends; he had to find food; he had to meet new people; he had problems in his journeys, in his travels. And he had to cope with them. So that’s what you’ve got to do when you go out in this world. You see, you’ll have your problems—you may not cope with then the way Jack done, but you have to think about it.” (AFC 1991/040 Original Tape # 87DW04)
Williamson’s tales and interviews can be consulted in the Folklife Reading Room, and a selection of them is online at the University of Wisconsin. In particular you can find audio recordings of three long Jack tales from AFC’s collection online, all of which have also appeared in Williamson’s books. By listening to these recordings and following along in the books, you can even compare Williamson’s oral style with his literary adaptations. In the player below, hear him tell “Jack and the Devil’s Purse.”
Turning to Irish tales, I previously mentioned the very first known collection of Irish folktales in English, “The Royal Hibernian Tales,” probably made in the late 18th century, as an early and important source of Irish Jack tales. Another notable Irish collector is Patrick Kennedy (1801-1873), whose books “Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts” and “The Fireside Stories of Ireland” contain early versions of Jack tales, including “Jack and his Comrades,” “Jack the Master and Jack the Servant,” “I’ll Be Wiser Next Time,” “The Ghosts and the Game of Football,” “The Three Gifts,” “Jack the Cunning Thief,” “The Grateful Beasts,” and “Shan an Omadahn and His Master.” This last tale is a version of the story Ray Hicks tells as “Lucky Jack and Unlucky Jack” and Richard Chase called “Big Jack and Little Jack.” (Ray’s version is in our first Jack tales blog at this link.) It’s notable because when the tale begins the central character is named “Shan an Omadhan,” which means “Sean the fool.” The narrator switches to calling him “Jack” after a few sentences, and then calls him by both names interchangeably, without commenting on the switch. This suggests that Irish people could be expected to know they were the same character. (Sean is the Irish form of John, whose English diminutive is “Jack.”) In Kennedy’s version Jack bargains with his master that the first to say he regrets their contract suffers terrible consequences. (In Appalachian versions, it’s the first to admit he’s mad!) Additional stipulations are that Jack gets an additional month’s wages if the master either stops him from doing something after telling him to do it, or if he blames Jack for following his orders. Jack bests the master by doing the tasks in a way that follows the letter of the master’s instructions but not the intent. Jack wins extra wages whenever the master stops him or complains about what he’s doing, and eventually the Master admits he’s sorry he hired Jack, allowing Jack to return home a rich man. In this tale, as in its Appalachian counterparts, what might look like foolishness or incompetence in most contexts is shown to be a clever adaptation to the strange rules of the game. This version, by calling Jack a fool at the beginning, but showing that his foolishness is wisdom in disguise, demonstrates more clearly than most stories the connection between Jack’s foolish side and his clever side. Kennedy’s other Jack tales, too, show deep connections to the Appalachian Jack tale tradition, making them fascinating to compare with Richard Chase’s texts and other American mountain versions.
We’ve devoted two blog posts to Jack tales from the Bahamas, and two collections by Elsie Clews Parsons emerged as crucial to understanding this tradition. The first, the book-length “Folk-Tales of Andros Island, Bahamas,” was published in 1918 from tales she began collecting in 1913. It contained 27 Jack tales among many other stories. The second, a 70 page article called “Spirituals and Other Folklore from the Bahamas,” contained an additional 5 Jack Tales she collected in 1926. The tales are interesting, containing motifs recalling the earliest literary Jack tales, combining Jack’s exploits with those of animal heroes like Brer Rabbit, and pitting Jack against foes as different as giants, tigers, and the Devil himself. AFC doesn’t have collections from Parsons herself, but Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle’s collections made in the Bahamas in 1935 yielded audio recordings of many of the same stories, three of which I’ve presented in previous blog posts.
In the United States, the success of Chase’s 1943 book “The Jack Tales” (and his subsequent books, “American Folk Tales and Songs” and “Grandfather Tales,” which contained a few Jack tales too) created a lot of interest in Jack tales, but they also fostered an impression that Chase had produced a definitive Jack tales corpus. On the contrary, both before and after Chase, there were important North American collections of Jack tales.
The collecting of Jack tales in the southern Appalachians began in 1923 with Isabel Gordon Carter (1897-1988), who published her collection in the “Journal of American Folklore” in 1925 with the title “Mountain White Folk-Lore: Tales from the Southern Blue Ridge.” Her collection featured 11 Jack tales along with 12 other stories. Her main storyteller was Jane Hicks Gentry, a member of the Hicks-Harmon family we discussed in our first two posts. Gentry was also the mother of Maud Long, who recorded her Jack tale repertoire for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1947.
The existence of both Isabel Gordon Carter’s published collection and AFC’s archival collection of Maud Long’s stories makes it possible to look through some of the earliest evidence of the Hicks Jack tale repertoire, and to compare Maud Long’s versions of the tales to her most important source, the tales as told by her mother. For example, listening to Maud Long’s version of “Jack and the Giants’ New Ground” alongside Carter’s “Jack the Giant Killer” is instructive; while the ways in which Jack fools and kills the various giants are the same in both tales, the setup (in which Jack meets the King) and the ending (in which he spares the life of the last giant and sends Tom and Will to clear the new ground) are totally different from her mother’s. The reason, folklorist Bill Ellis concluded, is Richard Chase’s literary version; her telling agrees very closely with Chase’s, her recording was made four years after Chase’s book came out, and she and Chase were good friends. Evidently she re-learned the story from his book. Hear Maud Long’s version of the tale in the player below!
The American Folklife Center has a small collection of Isabel Gordon Carter’s papers relating to her folklore work, which sheds light on her pioneering collection. Carter earned a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in anthropology, then made her career as a professor of social work. Her correpondence reveals that she would rather have been a folktale scholar, but that she couldn’t get professors anywhere to take the idea seriously. In a 1938 letter to Richard Chase, she explained:
“I heard the stories as a child when I used to accompany my father, a geologist, on his trips in the mountains. In 1919 I decided to study at the University of Tennessee for my M.A. degree in English and I suggested that I collect them and base my thesis on them. I was told that this would not be satisfactory but that a paper on John Masefield would be! So I wrote on Masefield—and a superficial and uninspired thing I made of it. Next, in 1922 I visited Professor [John Matthews] Manly at Chicago and talked over with him the possibility of securing a collection of the tales and analyzing their relationship to other collections as a basis for a doctor’s dissertation. He told me that a member of his department, who had recently come from North Carolina to join the Chicago faculty, was familiar with the folklore of that region and since he had never mentioned these tales, it seemed probable that I was mistaken in thinking them old, and that they were really the stories the children were now hearing in school. […] Circumstances caused me to enter the English Department of Columbia instead of Chicago and again I met skepticism. It was felt that too many folklorists had been at work in these mountains to make it at all likely that tales could be present end remain unnoticed. I was asked to consider a study of place names instead. A suggestion that I take a course with Dr. Boas lead eventually into his department [Anthropology] and to other interests. I did, however, spend the summer of 1923 collecting samples of these tales, although I did nothing with them other than to publish them in the Journal some years later.”
Carter’s manuscript collection also includes other interesting materials: letters from Chase, courteously asking her permission to use her transcriptions of Jane Gentry’s stories as sources when collating his composite versions of the tales; a letter from Maud Long thanking her for sending a copy of her article containing Jane Hicks Gentry’s tales and then reminiscing about her mother; a letter from travel writer and National Parks advocate Horace Kephart, suggesting he was embarking on a tale-collecting trip and giving her suggestions for corrections to her own transcriptions; and (delightfully), a large color photograph of an oil painting of Isabel Gordon (not yet married to Hugh Carter), painted in 1913 by American impressionist Catherine Wiley. All these materials can be consulted in the Folklife Reading Room for greater insight into Carter’s tale collection.
Isabel Gordon Carter’s experience of having her folktale interests shunned within academia were not unique to her or even restricted to women scholars. According to his biographer, the great collector of Ozark folklore, Vance Randolph (1892-1980), encountered the same problem when dealing with some of the same academics. Attempting to interest Carter’s eventual mentor, Franz Boas, in taking him on as a student to work on Ozark folklore, Randolph discovered that Boas would only support studying narratives if they came from African American or Native American communities. (This may also explain why Carter herself gave up folktale research and pursued “other interests” once Boas accepted her as a student.) Declining (as he put it) to “go up to study Eskimos,” Randolph never earned a doctorate. Instead he returned to the Ozarks and worked for years as a writer and ghostwriter, authoring many articles and books under assumed names like Peter Nemo, William Yancey Shackleford, Allison Hardy, and (in a nod to ballad scholarship) Belden Kittredge. But Randolph continued to gather folklore, and among the stories he collected were many unusual Jack tales.
Vance Randolph’s tales are notable for having more bawdy and scatological elements than most other published Jack tales. This could stem from a difference between Ozark and Appalachian sensibilities, but as Carl Lindahl and Joseph Sobol have pointed out, the bawdy version of Jack did sometimes emerge in the Appalachian tradition too. It’s likely Randolph got more such material because he was very interested in bawdy material, and therefore looked for it specifically, and also because he knew his informants better personally than most folklorists do, which allowed them to feel comfortable sharing stories they wouldn’t tell to strangers. When Randolph began publishing books of Ozark folklore in earnest in the 1950s, he distributed Jack tales throughout his books. AFC has typescripts of two of Randolph’s relevant books, as well as Vance Randolph’s collected papers, which allows researchers to study the background of the tales gathered by this pioneering Ozark folklorist. (We also have most of the published books in our reading room.)
Another important collection of folktales, which was contemporary with Richard Chase’s efforts and affected by them, was a significant corpus of stories gathered by fieldworker James Taylor Adams (1892-1954) of the WPA Virginia Writers’ Project. In 1940, when Richard Chase learned of Adams’s work, he proposed to the WPA that he himself should edit a book of Wise County folklore from the materials collected by Adams. The WPA provisionally agreed to this proposal, and Adams applied himself to the effort with help from James M. Hylton and other WPA collectors. According to Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Chase borrowed a significant amount of original manuscript material from the WPA offices for this planned book, of which no copies were retained by the WPA. Chase published a few of these stories in his later books, including “The Jack Tales,” “American Folk Tales and Songs,” and “Grandfather Tales,” but he never edited the book of Wise County folklore or returned the WPA manuscripts. (Chase later claimed he didn’t remember having any relationship with the Virginia WPA or borrowing the manuscripts, but surviving correspondence makes it clear that he did.) Luckily, James Taylor Adams himself made copies of many of his collection materials before turning them in to the WPA, and these survive among his papers at the Wyllie Library at Clinch Valley College. The original WPA material is at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia.
Working with these two collections, Chuck Perdue (1930-2010) finally did publish the Wise County Jack tales in 1987 as a small but important book, “Outwitting the Devil: Jack Tales from Wise County Virginia.” He published the texts exactly as collected by the WPA workers, thus again providing us the opportunity to compare versions collected from oral tradition with the edited versions published by Chase. Perdue also included photos and information about the tale tellers and the collectors, and explained the story of the collection as I’ve summarized it above.
Kentucky folklorist Leonard W. Roberts (1912-1983) may be the most prolific American collector of stories about Jack, including Jack tales in most of his books. He was also the first major collector of Jack tales to capture most of his tales on audio tapes, then transcribe them carefully for publication. His books give interesting details about performance events and storytelling style, and he notes some Jack tales that were told as cantefables, with embedded songs, much like the tales I’ve featured from the Bahamas. Most of his tales were collected in Kentucky, with some in Virginia and Tennessee; some were collected from his family but even more from his students and their families, who came from an isolated region of the Kentucky mountains. His books that contain Jack tales include : “I Bought Me a Dog: a Dozen Authentic Folktales from the Southern Mountains” (1954), “South from Hell-fer-Sartin” (1955), “Nippy and the Yankee Doodle and More Folk Tales from the Southern Mountains” (1958), “Up Cutshin and Down Greasy: Folkways of a Kentucky Family” (1959), “Old Greasybeard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap” (1969), and “Sang Branch Settlers” (1980).
Another significant book source of American Jack Tales is Carl Lindahl’s “American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress.” Lindahl spent long hours in the AFC archive, listening to and transcribing folktales of all kinds. The book includes meticulous transcriptions of Jack tales from the Hicks-Harmon family, and a few other Jack tales as well, along with tales about “Merrywise,” who is essentially the same character as Jack, by Jane Muncy Fugate. Some of the tales included by Lindahl are featured as audio recordings in the first two blogs in this series, allowing you to hear the tale and follow along with Lindahl’s transcription. Lindahl’s edited volume, “Perspectives on the Jack Tales and Other North American Märchen” includes important articles about Jack tales, along with transcriptions of nine stories from the Appalachians and Newfoundland; in three cases, the book presents two versions of the same story from the same narrator or family, raising interesting questions about the effects of time, transmission, and editing on our experience of stories. Similarly, the volume “Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers,” edited by William Bernard McCarthy (1939-2008), features excellent essays about Jack tales, along with carefully transcribed texts of eight tales with information on the storytellers.
Of the scholars who have worked on Jack tales, the most influential is surely Herbert Halpert (1911-2000), who was one of the first to collect mountain Jack tales in audio form, and who wrote the annotations for Chase’s “The Jack Tales” and for most of Vance Randolph’s collections. When Halpert moved to Newfoundland in the 1960s to teach English and head up the folklore program at Memorial University, it portended great things. As Halpert had come to understand during his military service in Newfoundland, it’s possible that the Jack tradition survived longer and stronger there than in any other place. Halpert’s collecting and scholarship reached prodigious new heights with the publication of his two-volume, 1180-page opus, “Folktales of Newfoundland.” In it, he and his co-editor J.D.A. Widdowson, and their colleague Martin Lovelace, provide extensive commentary and annotation to 150 different folktales, many of them about Jack. Most amazingly, you can find the entire book online from the Memorial University of Newfoundland – Digital Archives Initiative.
One more Newfoundland book that deserves mention is “Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat,” by Anita Best, Martin Lovelace, and Pauline Greenhill. This work includes carefully rendered ethnopoetic transcriptions of fifteen stories, nine of which are Jack tales, along with biographies of the storytellers and folkloristic analysis of the stories. The tellers were Alice Lannon and Philip Pius Power. Power was the father-in-law of Anita Best, who recorded most of the stories told by him in the book. The Lannon stories were recorded by Lovelace and his wife, folklorist Barbara Rieti. The authors are able to include two versions of Power’s “The White King of Europe,” one of which was told to personal friends and one of which was told to folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, allowing us to perceive the difference between “insider” and “outsider” tellings, to the extent this is possible. The combined expertise of the three authors is impressive. Best is a Newfoundland native who grew up with the songs and stories of Placentia Bay (where Power also lived), and who later underwent folklore training and did fieldwork with Goldstein and others. Greenhill is a folklorist and gender studies expert whose analytical lens has been applied to fairy tales, films, ballads, and other genres. Lovelace is a native of the south-west of England, where most Newfoundland settlers and their tales came from, and his years of work in Newfoundland, and specifically on “Folktales of Newfoundland,” give him unparalleled knowledge of the corpus of Newfoundland tales. Their combination of comparative, ethnographic, and textual analysis, rooted in the work of scholars such as Halpert, Linda Dégh and Bengt Holbek, allow them to write incisive and interesting notes on the tales and their meanings to the narrators and their communities. Best of all, the book is open access, and can be downloaded at this link thanks to Utah State University Press.
The storytelling revival has produced many notable books that include Jack tales. I’ll single out two to mention here. Donald Davis is an American teller analogous in some ways to Duncan Williamson: Davis grew up with Jack tales as part of everyday family life, in his case in Haywood County, North Carolina. Like Williamson, he adapted them to more formal performance within the storytelling revival, and also wrote them down in book form. His collection, published under the title “Jack Always Seeks His Fortune: Authentic Appalachian Jack Tales,” is a compendium of literary adaptations of Jack tales. The stories are all engaging and fun to read, and since Davis is from the southern Appalachians they can certainly be considered authentically Appalachian. However, the word “authentic” may suggest to some people that all the tales are traditionally told in Appalachia. While many of the tales ARE clearly traditional Jack tales found in oral tradition, others seem to be plots that Davis found in books and rewrote so that they are set in the Appalachians with a protagonist called Jack. One of these is “How Jack First Came to America,” which is adapted from the medieval Welsh tale of Gwion Bach’s rebirth as Taliesin. Davis’s ability to singlehandedly transform a medieval Welsh chronicle into an authentic Appalachian Jack tale challenges in interesting ways both the category of “Jack tales” and the category of “(authentic) Appalachian.”
Jackie Torrence (1944-2004) similarly challenges some of our usual notions about Jack tales. Her book “Jackie Tales” contains three Jack tales, along with an interesting introduction in which Torrence explains that she first heard Jack tales from a school librarian reading Richard Chase’s book aloud as a child. Since it was a predominantly Black school and a Black librarian, she assumed Jack and the other characters in the story were African American too. The fact that even Richard Chase’s versions of the stories are plausibly about Black characters should not surprise us now that we’ve seen a flourishing Jack tale tradition in the Bahamas in the 1930s, but it’s a further challenge to the idea that American Jack tales mainly belong to (in Isabel Gordon Carter’s words) “Mountain White Folk-Lore.”
This brief rundown of books where you can find Jack tales barely scratches the surface. Most collectors of English-language folklore, from Sidney Oldall Addy to Dora Yates, include Jack Tales in their books. Most of the classic retellings of British and Irish magic tales, including Andrew and Nora Lang’s Colored Fairy Books, Alan Garner’s “Book of British Fairy Tales,” Henry Glassie’s “Irish Folktales,” and Barbara Ker Wilson’s “Scottish Folk-Tales and Legends,” tell of Jack’s adventures. Many compendia and collections of orally-collected folklore, such as Richard Dorson’s “Buying the Wind,” J. Russell Reaver’s “Florida Folktales,” and John Burrison’s “Storytellers: Folktales and Legends of the South,” have at least a few Jack tales too. Below see a “shelfie” of just a few of my personal books containing Jack tales!
As I’ve mentioned before, these blogs about Jack tales are meant to complement our collections guide, “Folktales and Oral Storytelling: Resources in the American Folklife Center Collections.” You can find out a lot more about our folktale and storytelling collections from the guide. We’ll be back with Jack at least one more time, to talk about Jack in literature and pop culture. Stay tuned!