Appalachian History

Jane Gentry -- piano teacher, Appalachian folk-music historian, weaver -- was an inspiration for the movie Songcatcher.

She was born Jane Hicks in 1863, the first child of Ransom and Emily Hicks, in Watauga County, NC. "My pappy were a minister, name of Ransom Hicks. Mammy were always peckin' me over the head with a stick. She were turrible ill and cross, pore woman! I were that foundered with the peckin' that I declar'd that I would never whup ef God sent me childern. You'll whup as much into `em as you whup out o' em."

And later, Jane said of her life growing up, "Twere like a three-legged cat's. They didn't show me till I were nine yur old. I used to walk miles and miles bar'foot in the snow." She was twelve years old when the family moved to the Meadow Fork section of Spring Creek in Madison County. At sixteen, Hicks married Jasper Newton Gentry, though her parents were against the marriage because of her age. Around 1912, the Gentry family bought 'Sunnybank' in the town of Hot Springs, moving there so that their nine children could attend Dorland Institute, a Presbyterian mission school.

Irving Bacheller, New York newspaper editor and author of books, short stories and magazine articles, (his novel Eben Holden, published in 1900, outsold The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, To Have and To Hold, and other popular books of that year) met Jane Gentry in April 1914 when he came to Hot Springs on vacation.

"I could hear voices as I came near the house," he recounted in his novel, The Tower of a Hundred Bells (1916), "and chiefly those of young children laughing as if at play. Then I heard the kindly voice of Mrs. Gentry. She sat on her little verandah sewing with a number of small children grouped around her. She was amusing them as she worked."

"Go on with your story telling," I pleaded. "I am a child myself as young as any of these."

"I were tellin’ some mount’n stories," she answered. "It mout be they’d tickle ye. So if you’ll be one o’ the young uns, set down thar an’ I’ll scratch around an’ see what I kin fetch out o’ my ol’ brains."

I took the chair she offered and sat down with a girl of four on my lap while Mrs. Gentry opened a mine of old mountain folk lore which delighted me.

"Well here comes:
Eight humly, bumly bees,
Seven humpity, crumpity no horn cows,
Six hicketty, ficketty, custards,
Five bob-tail, bald-face, skewball nags,
Four colly birds,
Two ducks and an ol’ fat rooster."

Cecil Sharp, founder of The English Folk Dance and Song Society in England, and its American counterpart, the Country Dance Society in the United States, sought Jane out. Sharp visited her home on at least eight separate occasions and was clearly welcome there. He collected more songs from Jane (70) than from any other singer in the ‘Laurel Country.’ Many of the songs were those she sang for children, such as "Sing Said the Mother," "Froggie He Would A-Wooing Go," "The Farm Yard," and "There's Nothing to be Gained by Roving." He included forty of her songs in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians(1932).

Jane Gentry’s stories received as much attention as her songs. Mrs. Isabel Gordon Carter visited her in 1923 and did the first collecting of Jack Tales, as told to Jane by her grandfather, Council Harmon ("Old Counce"), in which Jack is the third son, left behind when his brothers seek adventure. Fifteen of these tales, which Jane called "old Jack, Will and Tom tales," were published as "Mountain White Folk-Lore: Tales from the Southern Blue Ridge," in the March 1925 Journal of American Folk-Lore. Jane Gentry died two months later, on May 29.

sources: findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_1_113/ai_86063336
http://homepage.mac.com/wilsonh/jack/
www.bettysmithballads.com/bettysmithballads/play.cfm
Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers, by Betty N. Smith, Univ Press of Kentucky, 1998


appalachia Appalachian+ballads appalachian+folktales appalachian+history Cecil+Sharp Irving+Bacheller Isabel+Gordon+Carter Jack+Tales Jane+Gentry

Oh, Lady Margaret she sat in her high chambers.
She was sewing her silken seams.
She lookit east and she lookit west
And she saw those woods grow green.

So, picking up her petticoat
Beneath her harlin gown,
It’s when she came to the merry green woods,
There she let them down.

Oh, she had not pulled one nut, one nut,
One nut nor scarcely three,
When the highest lord in all the countryside
Came a-riding through the trees.

--opening of Lady Margaret, a traditional Scottish Traveller song
told by Duncan Williamson; transcribed in 'Scottish Traveller Tales'

Who are the Scottish Travellers (a small contingent of whom emigrated to Appalachia in the late 19th century)? In the Old Country, this nomadic group has pitched its bow-tents just on the outskirts of villages and earned money there as tinsmiths, hawkers, horse dealers and pearl-fishermen for at least 500 years.

They were called tinkers, from the Irish tincéirí, eg. tincéir or "tinsmith." “It’s not worth a tinker’s dam” (a little rivet for repairing stuff) is the original saying from whence we get the less polite common saying. Travellers themselves now consider the term derogatory.

Caption reads: Tinsmith at work in drainpipe section in one of the flourishing shops in the Shenandoah Valley. Photo John Vachon, 1941.

In Scotland, they developed regular routes and sold goods, repaired carts and pots and pans, and worked the horses or land as they went from one side of that country to the other. In Appalachia the men are still itinerant in the sense that their work takes them away from home for many months at a time, but they have a home base where the women and children stay during the school year.

The Travellers never bank their money but spend it quickly, or keep large amounts of cash on hand, or they turn it over into silver and gold and carry that with them. They don’t trust banks or governments, so they fend for themselves.

Scottish Travellers devised two languages. One was Cant, a combination of Scottish Gaelic, English, Romany and Arabic. The other language is a version of Gaelic unique to the Travellers alone called Beurla Regaird.

These languages are guarded. They are taught only in the community, taught from birth, and those who marry outside the community do not teach their new families the language. In fact, to marry outside the community is to die to your family.

Scottish Travellers in America do intermarry with other groups from time to time. Most frequently, when they marry outside the Travellers, they marry Melungeons, Gypsies, or mixed blood groups such as Redbones, Brass Ankles, the Guineas of WV, or Lumbees.

Photo caption reads: "Jockey" Street, near the courthouse. Here is where mountaineers and farmers trade horses and mules. Campton, Wolfe County, Kentucky. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, 1940.

Scottish Travellers are and were known as storytellers, entertainers, humorists, and musicians. Scottish Travellers have a word in the Cant language – conyach. Conyach describes the state when who you are, and what you are doing, merge into one. It’s a highly sought after state when one is the singer, dancer, or storyteller at a ceilidh.

In a traditional informal ceilidh, family and friends got together after dinner and the dishes were done, and there was that little bit of time between then and time to go to bed, and they sat and visited with each other. And they talked, and sometimes they got to telling stories or singing together.

Stories were often told that were hours long. They could be drawn out over several days, told in parts every night. Common stories included the Jack Tales that we now associate with Appalachia, but were originally from the British Isles. They exist both in Gaelic and the Scots tongues.

Usually at the ceilidh, songs would be sung about local people. This was a form of social control. You could spread gossip, make fun of someone, express admiration or love for someone, spread bad news about someone, or ruin the reputation of someone, just by singing a song about them, or inserting their name into an already existing song.

Travellers share a love of words in songs & stories. Also — a desire to constantly move on. They tend to travel before a birth so that the children have the right to be in more than one country. They tend to be drawn to thrown away people, or outcasts, the broken, or the hidden. They are known for passing through quietly, not making a noise unless they are wanted, needed. You might move on an hour or so down the road or you might move to another country. That is the way of the Travellers.


sources: Scottish Customs: From the Cradle to the Grave, by Margaret Bennett, Polygon, 1992
http://patrickmead.net/
Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories, by Donald Braid, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002
www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/754640/posts?q=1&&page=1
The Thistle and the Brier, by Richard Blaustein, McFarland, 2003



appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Beurla+Regaird ceilidh conyach Jack+Tales Melungeons Scottish+Travellers

Ray Hicks, born this day in 1922, was best known for his traditional storytelling and for preserving the original Beech Mountain 'Jack Tales' brought to western North Carolina by his ancestors. Ray, his grandfather Benjamin and his great-great grandfather Counce (Council) Harmon all carefully passed down these tall tales to the next generation.

It seems Ray knew everything there was to know about living off the land and about his family's history. A lot of what he knew-- songs, jokes, and customs of the mountain people-- is in a new book by Lynn Salsi, seven years in the making: "The Life and Times of Ray Hicks-Keeper of the Jack Tales."

Salsi is also the author of "The Jack Tales" and "Young Ray Hicks Learns the Jack Tales." She has received the American Library Association's Notable Book Award, six Willie Parker Peace History Book Awards for her non-fiction books about North Carolina, and was named the North Carolina Historian of the Year in 2001.

We caught up with Lynn this week to get a sneak peek at what to expect from this new book.

Appalachian History: How conscious was Ray Hicks of his role in preserving oral storytelling?

Lynn Salsi: He was well aware that he was saving stories. That was the magical part of many conversations. Jimmy Neil Smith told Ray more than once he [Ray] was saving the art of storytelling. That was a point of pride with Ray. His appearances at the National Storytelling Festival further convinced him that what he was doing was important, and it was. So many scholars studied Ray's speech that he became aware that his accent, coupled with the old mountain way of speaking, was special. Many people traveled to his home just to hear him talk. He once commented that he wished his granddaddy Ben could have lived long enough to know that he [Ray] was making a little pay goin' off the mountain to talk.

AH: In today’s hyper-media culture, oral tales seem to be from another time altogether. Was Ray Hicks the last of his kind?

LS: There are scholars (meaning Ph.Ds in folklore) who have commented that it is a cliche to refer to Ray as such. In a way Ray was the future of storytelling because he was certainly a bridge to future storytellers like his son, Ted, and his cousins, Jerry Harmon (from Franklin, NC) who travels internationally telling Jack tales, and Orville Hicks, who is well-known around Boone. They are all fine storytellers and they tell about Jack. However, since storytelling's an individual art, there'll not be another Ray.

AH: As a transcriber of oral tales, how do you know which version to 'lock down' in print?

LS: Storytellers are unique performers who bring forth stories in their own way. I attempted to write down Ray's stories as often as possible. However, he never told the same story exactly the same way twice. That means that when I combine three versions and then take out redundancies and smooth out some transitions, the stories become my version even though they have the
same plot structure.

AH: You’ve written two books previously dealing with Ray Hicks and the Jack Tale material. How's this new book different?

LS: There are no stories in the book. There are references to many stories, however it seemed appropriate that the book should celebrate Ray's life as the most important story.

AH: Many people comment that the old Jack Tales are nothing but a re-hashing of the Brothers Grimm tales.

LS: I have thought alot about old stories and the way Ray told them. Most of them I have studied and compared to old European versions. However the people in the mountains were telling tales about Jack PRIOR to the Grimm tales (after two hundred years they could not be exactly the same as the early Hicks, Harmon, and Ward family members told them). It is amazing that the families were in the area of Valle Crucis intermarrying decades before the Grimms put together their book.

AH: How did Ray interact with audiences?

LS: Once I had my North Carolina Youth Touring Theater members at his house on a cold March day prior to traveling to England and Scotland where the youngsters (ages 9 to 16) performed in schools and with other play groups. After listening to Ray for at least two hours, one of the kids said, "Ray, we want to tell you a story." They jumped up in front of him and told him a Jack tale. He got the biggest kick out of them and later said, "Now, I hain't never heared that tale. Why don't ya' teach 'em one of mine."

After we returned from Europe, those same students performed with Ray. He sat in a chair and started the story and the students would pick up a line when a certain character came up. Some of those students are now grown. When I run into them, they usually mention the times they performed with Ray Hicks.

AH: What prompted you to first think of a biography about Ray?

LS: After I won an American Library Association Notable Book Award for "The Jack Tales", I had people calling from AZ, NM, CA, CT, MI, IN, and KY asking questions. That got me thinking that there should be a biography about Ray Hicks. One day I started sorting my notes and since I am the type of person who sometimes has to doodle on the church program when the preacher is preaching, I'm good at writing long hand. Most people know that when Ray spoke he often digressed to make a point, to correct a thought, and/or to explain how the action related to something he had experienced. I wrote everything down.

AH: How’d you settle on the idea of writing the biography in the first-person voice?

LS: One day I thought I should get started, but the first three or four pages seemed to be pedantic. I set it aside to think about how to make the prose have some flow. I thought back to a book I wrote about the people who lived on the North Carolina coast and how, after interviewing my subjects, I was able to put the information into an essay form but in first person as though the people I had interviewed were talking.

I enjoy listening to how people speak and envisioning how their paragraphs might be coming together on paper. I think about their colloquialisms and work not to delete the tone and flavor of their voices. A couple of weeks after my first attempt I went back to my hand-written document and threw it away. I pretended that I was Ray Hicks telling a story. After two pages I knew I could do an essay in his voice, but a book was a different matter. I stopped 100,000 words later and I had a book.

I have a lot of things that could be added to the book, but no one had ever done a pure biography of Ray Hicks--just Ray in a book. His life was the Appalachian version of "Angela's Ashes." It begged to be written in first person. Since I have a master's degree in writing, I have ten or twelve writer friends I e-mail often. I told one of them that I was doing something really crazy and she said, "Certainly, you can do that. Don't you know that people are writing non-fiction in novel form and it's called creative non-fiction? At least you're writing non-fiction as non-fiction. It's just in a different form."

That's how I ended up writing a biography in the form of a memoir. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do something like that, but now that I look back on the experience, I wonder how I was able to sustain that first person train of thought for so many chapters.

AH: Did you have any trouble writing the book through a male perspective?

LS: Writing in a man's voice in this book gave me the courage to write a young adult novel about young men serving on a boat in Vietnam. It is a work of fiction, but I wrote it in first person in a male voice. I guess if Nicholas Sparks can write women's fiction, I can write a few books in a
male voice. Needless to say, after taking five years to write the book and two years for the University of Tennessee Press to go through all the publishing processes, I am eager to get some feedback. By writing in Ray's voice, I could more easily preserve mountain language.

AH: Did your publisher ‘rein in’ your use of dialect in order to sell the book better?

LS: If I had my way every word would be in dialect. However, it would be difficult to read. The editors at the University of Tennessee Press were outstanding in the way they helped me analyze the dialect that was essential versus words that needed to be written in standard English. The University of Tennessee Press was the perfect publisher for this material, because every one of the people working on the book, including Tom Post, the marketing director, understood the importance of the language, the history, and the man. The actual essence of the work shows that Ray Hicks, the famous storyteller, lived within the boundaries of his stories. I hope that readers will be awed about Ray's life and times.

AH: Thank you so much for joining us today!



appalachia appalachian+folktales appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Beech+Mountain+NC Jack+Tales Lynn+Salsi Ray+Hicks

"A long time ago, when Jack was growin' up, his daddy give him a brand new shotgun for Christmas. Obviously, Jack was as proud as a peacock over this new gift. He wanted to show his daddy just how proud he was by going out and gettin a whole mess of game on his first huntin trip. So, bright and early the very next morning, Jack jumped out of bed, threw on his overalls, boots, and jacket and flew out the door before breakfast. He got up so quick he even beat the crack of dawn.

"As the sun slowly yawned out over the horizon, Jack's shadow was beginning to cast out over Bear Creek. He figured that most of the small game around these here parts would be gettin themselves a drink, right smart early in the morning. Well it wasn't long before Jack's logic paid off.

"Just 40 feet ahead of where Jack stood sat two rabbits, one on each side of a large boulder. Sittin right purty on top of that boulder was a flat rock with a large gray squirrel eatin a hickory nut. Jack looked and calculated a bit. He raised his gun up under his chin and aimed. Boooom. One shot was all it took.

"Jack had hit that flat rock smack dab in the middle and broke it in half exactly under where that big old grey squirrel had been perched. Of course it instantly killed the squirrel. The flat rock's two broken pieces fell simultaneaously on each side of the boulder killing the two rabbits, in a moments notice.

"The kick from the double barrel shotgun was so strong that it knocked Jack clean out into the middle of the creek. It nearly took Jack the better part of 30 minutes to climb out of that creek. Reason being, his overalls had gotten so full of bass that he could barely climb up the bank.

"Finally, when it was able to get up the bank and out of the water his dad-burned butten come flyin off them overalls due to the overload of fish they contained. That button had such force that it flew at a whiz-bang velocity like a rocket into the woods and just happened to hit a twelve point buck running from all this excitement. When this deadly button hit him in mid-stride his momentum carried him nearly 60 feet before he landed and hit his antlers on another rock. This caused a portion of the antlers to become a fragmented projectile that flew into the next pasture killing the neighbors prize bull.

"All that there was left to do now was for Jack to gather up everything to carry home. The only problem was; how in the world was he going to carry 24 largemouth bass, 1 large grey squirrel, 2 fat rabbits, 1 very large slightly damaged deer, and a 2000 lb. prize bull home by himself? Now that would really be a story…"

Told in the Beech Mountain tradition, from the Wilson Library North Carolina Collections/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

http://www.ibiblio.org/bawdy/folklore/hunt.html

related post: "The Jack Tales. Not just beanstalks"


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Christmas+in+Appalachia hunting Jack+Tales

ONE TIME away back years ago there was a boy named Jack. He and his folks lived off in the mountains somewhere and they were awful poor, just didn't have a thing. Jack had two brothers, Will and Tom, and they are in some of the Jack Tales, but this one I'm fixin' to tell you now, there's mostly just Jack in it.

Jack was awful lazy sometimes, just wouldn't do ary lick of work. His mother and his daddy kept tryin' to get him to help, but they couldn't do a thing with him when he took a lazy spell.

Well, Jack decided one time he'd pull out from there and try his luck in some other section of the country. So his mother fixed him up a little snack of dinner, and he put on his old raggedy coat and lit out. …

--from Jack in the Giants' Newground!

Remember “Jack and the Beanstalk”? There’s more where that came from! Jack Tales are part of a cycle of folk stories that revolve around a central character named ---wait for it!--- Jack. The tales originated in Europe, with American Jack Tales being most closely related to those of the British Isles. Richard Chase first demonstrated the existence of the Jack Tale cycle in America, when he published ‘The Jack Tales’ in 1943. Chase compiled his collection of stories from oral interviews taken from members of the Council Harmon family of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, and also from three families in Wise County, Virginia.

Jack is a kind of trickster-hero, one who is successful through his cleverness. Certainly he is not the admirable prince of fairy tales, but rather a quick witted and not always too scrupulous farm boy. In these tales as told in Appalachia Jack is an ordinary poor boy who achieves success in only one of two ways: either by his wits, or by sheer luck --- and the latter predominates. Quite a contradiction to the “American fairy tale” mythos that honesty and hard work are the means to success!

“In April 1939, while I was recording folklore for the Library of Congress, I was fortunate enough to get a number of these Jack Tales from Sam Harmon in Tennessee," says Herbert Halpert, who wrote the appendix to ‘The Jack Tales.’ “Just the previous month I had been collecting folksongs in Wise County, Virginia, and nearby Letcher County, Kentucky, and never thought to ask for tales.”

“About a year later, Mr. Chase worked in the same area and with some of the same informants from whom I had recorded songs – and got tales from them. Mr. Chase deserves considerable credit for tracing the folktales in one family tradition. The discovery of the interrelationship of the Ward-Harmon-Gentry families is a fine achievement.”


Sources: http://www.ibiblio.org/bawdy/folklore/giants.html
http://tinyurl.com/38af68
http://tinyurl.com/2ley75

Related post: "Indian tales told by firelight"
"Now I've got my Tailypo!"


Jack+Tales Richard+Chase appalachia Appalachian+tales appalachian+language appalachian+history appalachian+culture history+of+appalachia