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. … 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 us these marvelous tales. …

Popular Revival

But even as Long was preserving the setting in which these tales were often told, the Jack tales began a revival in popularity that would begin to move them away from their shy Appalachian tradition.

Billy Howard/Courtesy of Ferrum College

The Jack Tale Players in performance. Their stylish presentations have helped popularize the stories.

In 1943, Chase published The Jack Tales, a series of tales he collected while working for the Depression-era Federal Writers Project.  While Chase’s book has gone on to sell over a million copies and has done a great deal to increase public awareness of the tales, Chase remains a controversial figure because the tales he presented in this and two subsequent books were edited composites collected from a variety of performers. In a rather critical chapter in Outwitting the Devil, Perdue writes that “[Chase’s] interests lay primarily with Jack tales and his own publications and performances.”

Lindahl is a little more circumspect about Chase’s contribution. “Chase has sparked some people” to become interested in the Jack tales, but “has taken [them] away from [their] natural settings,” he writes.

Lindahl says that while there still are traditional storytellers around, citing Ray Hicks and Frank Proffit Jr., most are “not really representative” of the shy tradition. At storytelling festivals in Tennessee and elsewhere, Jack tales are popularly told, but the tellers follow Chase’s demonstrative style (he went on to become a renowned storyteller after publishing The Jack Tales).  “They are more extroverted, have more swagger,” he explains.  “Now less is left to the imagination.”