Lindahl offers several explanations.  The oral tales, he says, persisted as a popular form of entertainment for the lower social classes, usually among mountain people. But folklorists who worked among these people were usually more interested in folk songs than folktales. Consequently, no one asked about the Jack tales until Isabel Gordon Carter collected them in the 1920s.

But even if they were asked, the oral artists who kept the tales alive in all probability “were not that anxious to share them with outsiders,” Lindahl explains. As the stories were usually told to kids, “They may have been embarrassed [to tell them to adults] and didn’t necessarily want to.”

Lindahl also believes this represented an important difference between American and European Jack tale traditions.  While European tellers were often wanderers who presented the tales to audiences large and small that often included adults, Americans had more of what he calls a “shy” tradition.  “American frontiers were too fluid and print–oriented to sustain the communities of traveling storytellers that had thrived in Europe,” he writes in Jack in Two Worlds, “so the bulk of marchen [folktale] narration has been confined to homes and passed down largely within families in a series of little traditions.”  Here, children were the main audience.

Author and folklorist Richard Chase, whose book The Jack Tales helped reinvigorate interest in the lore, wrote that the tales were told for “a very practical application—keeping the kids on the job.”  In a statement reflective of the agrarian economy that once dominated the South, Mrs. R.W. Ward told Chase that “we would all get down around a sheet full of dry beans an start in to shelling them.  [Someone] would tell the kids one of them tales and we’d work for life.”

In the introduction to a series of recordings performed for the Library of Congress, storyteller Maud Long painted a vivid picture of these “little traditions”:

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.