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In the Appalachian Jack tale tradition, children are told stories about the ingenious trickster Jack for pleasure and edification. For hundreds of years on several continents older family members have been telling multiepisodic stories of the young man who, against all odds, uses his good nature, guile, and cunning to slay the giant or outwit the king. Tales survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries portraying Jack as a hero, but not until the early eighteenth century in England is he portrayed as a giant-killer in the “Jack and the Beanstalk” story. Stories about Jack and the giants were favorites in English storybooks in the nineteenth century, and his popularity spread from northern England to Scotland and Ireland. Jack was thriving at the time of English colonization, so he traveled across the ocean with the settlers to North America, and many English, Irish, and Scots eventually migrated to the mountains of Appalachia, bringing Jack tales with them.
Tales about Jack are part of the märchen tradition—märchen are long wonder tales with many parts. The early märchen were kept alive in the New World by immigrants who remembered the stories told to them by their forebears. European märchen tellers were usually travelers, representing the magic of the outside world and bringing their exotic tales into the homes of the folk. In America the märchen settled down, mostly in the Appalachian and Ozark mountains. Here the stories varied according to the family history or to suit the whims of the teller.
The Hicks-Harmon family on Beech Mountain in North Carolina is credited with preserving Jack tales for succeeding generations by telling those and other mountain stories to their children. Most of these tales about Jack can be traced back to Council Harmon, who died at the end of the nineteenth century. The family is believed to have come from England, settling in North Carolina around 1760. The Jack of Council Harmon and his descendants was an ingenious mountain boy who outwits his foes and his brothers, Will and Tom, and confronts poverty and fear with guile, good nature, and good luck. The king lives in a house on the hill, and Jack and his family live in a mountain cabin. The Jack of the Beech Mountain storytellers reflects the realities of life for mountaineers who found life hard. Although Jack tales have an international history and appeal, the Appalachian Jack reflects the culture and values of the mountain people.
With the publication of his collection, The Jack Tales, in 1943, Richard Chase made Jack a national folk figure. He gathered tales from members of the Beech Mountain family and other well-known storytellers to revise and assemble a group of stories about a boy with a distinctly American personality—clever, ambitious, and shrewd. Chase was working at the time for the Federal Writers’ Project (a branch of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration). Chase’s renditions were shortened versions of the tales, more appropriate to be included in a book, and easier for other tellers to remember and to read to children. Chase always insisted, however, that Jack tales should be told, not read. The telling should be original and peculiar to the teller, even if the tale is not.
The National Endowment for the Arts named a noted member of the Hicks-Harmon family, Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow. Ray said he remembers hearing the stories from his grandfather. One of their favorite Jack tales was “Big Man Jack, Killed Seven at a Whack.” Richard Chase’s version of the tale is called “Jack and the Varmints.” In both versions, Jack idly whittled himself a paddle and went along the road, stopping to slap a mud hole full of butterflies, killing seven. He goes by a blacksmith shop and has a belt made with words on it, in Chase’s version somewhat different: “STRONG—MAN—JACK—KILLED—SEVEN—AT—A—WHACK.” The story continues with Jack proceeding on his way, where he hears about wild creatures that are wreaking havoc on the countryside, but the king’s soldiers cannot stop them. The king offers a reward, and Jack eventually kills a boar, a unicorn, and a lion by chicanery, outwitting the king and his soldiers and finally winning the reward. The Hicks tale ended the way Hicks’s tales often did: “And said him and his mother then lived pretty good for awhile off of that.” The Jack of Richard Chase “went on home after that; had a whole pile of money down in his old ragged overhall pocket.” It ended: “And the last time I went down there Jack was still rich and I don’t think he’s worked any yet.” Both the Hicks and Chase versions reflect the background, the culture, and the language of the tellers. The illustrations by Berkeley Williams Jr. delightfully portray the Jack of Chase’s stories.
Herbert Halpert made the first recording of a Beech Mountain Jack tale in 1939 on a collecting trip under the auspices of the Archive of American Folk Song. Halpert visited Samuel Harmon, the grandson of Council, near the end of Sam’s life. In the Appendix to Chase’s collection, Halpert notes that the tradition of the wonder stories began in Europe, but there were few collections there or in Ireland and Scotland. English folklorists seemed to focus on the ballads of the previous generations. Richard Chase recognized that Jack tales were central to the traditional culture of the descendants of the Scots Irish mountain people. He searched and found a family that had accumulated a rich and varied store of tales and songs.
Chase was not the first outsider to see the value of preserving the tales. The earliest known collector of the Beech Mountain tales was Isabel Gordon Carter, who recorded some of the tales told by Jane Hicks Gentry of Hot Springs, North Carolina, in 1923 and published some of them in the Journal of American Folklore. Jane Gentry was the granddaughter of Council Harmon and was more commonly known as a ballad singer, but she told stories for the amusement of the children in the family. In Appalachia, Jack tales were often told to keep the children on the job, so that they would sit on the porch and string beans or work in the field digging potatoes as long as stories were being told.
There have been other collectors in the Appalachian and Ozark Mountains. Leonard Roberts collected some Kentucky tales from the Muncy family in eastern Kentucky in 1955. He discovered that mountain people were often reluctant to share their stories with outsiders, concerned that they would be considered objects of ridicule because of their mountain speech or country clothes. In some communities Jack tales were strictly for men, thought to be too risqué for women and children, with ballads being more appropriate for public entertainment. Roberts’s collection consisted of a variety of tales, including the Kentucky version of Jack tales and some of those of James Taylor Adams. Adams was part of an active oral tradition in Wise County, Virginia. He collected Jack tales and other local stories in the early 1940s while he was working for the Virginia Writers Project.
Historically, Jack tales are handed down orally from parent to child through generations of tellers. The way stories are told depends on when they were presented, or why, or where. Richard Chase’s Jack tales in written literary form sparked a movement from a strictly oral tradition to a literary and revivalist subgenre and were written to be told in schoolrooms and public venues across the country. Collectors do not reproduce their renditions of stories exactly, since they try to make them appealing and pertinent to the audience at hand. Contemporary tellers, like storytellers throughout history, bring their own perspective to the tales, and the style assumed by the semiprofessional is that of a performer, not the close family member in the living room or on the porch. In this way they are keeping the stories alive and introducing them to an ever-changing audience.
Jack tales are part of the history and folk culture of mountain people and they will always be told, whether in the form of a live performance, a written text, a recording, or a film. Histories are rarely considered to be the absolute truth, as they are someone’s account of an imaginary or past event. Some versions are better than others, but there is no substitute for the Appalachian Jack tale told by a mountaineer.
Elizabeth M. Williams
See also Folklore and Folktales; Hairy Woman; Hardy Hardhead; Hoe Handle, Snake, and Barn
Further Reading
Jones, Loyal, Jim Marsh, Leonard Roberts, James Taylor Adams, and John Cook. 2010. Appalachian Folk Tales. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation.
Lindahl, Carl, ed. 2004. American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress. 2 vols. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
McCarthy, William Bernard, ed. 1994. Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
McGowan, Thomas. 1978. “Four Beech Mountain Jack Tales.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 26 (2), Jack Tales Issue: 51–142.
Perdue, Charles L., Jr. 1987. “Old Jack and the New Deal: The Virginia Writers Project and Jack Tale Collecting in Wise County, Virginia.” Appalachian Journal 14 (2):108–152.
Smith, Betty N. 1998. Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.