The Jack Tales derive from a Western European narrative cycle and are the oldest folktales to survive in the North American oral tradition. In the twenty-first century, the Jack Tales continue to retain their place at the forefront of Western Oral Tradition. Over the centuries the tales of Jack and his adventures have tended to absorb the interests and values of the culture in which they are operating. Ray Hicks and the Jack Tales: A Study of Appalachian History, Culture, and Philosophy, assesses folktales in the oral tradition and examines both the history and the cultural impact of them. It includes a survey of existing scholarship concerning orality and the European origins of the Jack Tales and then focuses upon a prominent Appalachian native recorder of the tales, Ray Hicks. His enthusiasm and skill as a storyteller has allowed Hicks to bring an ancient body of oral literature to all types of audiences. The way that Hicks has enhanced the Jack Tales through his manner of storytelling-the nature of his performance, his voice and mimicry, the stimulus of the audience and his response-is explored along with the setting of these tales-the Appalachian mountains.

Renowned storyteller Ray Hicks was a certified national treasure. He received many prestigious honors in his lifetime, including the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Best known for his traditional storytelling and also for saving the original Beech Mountain Jack tales brought to the Appalachian Mountains by his ancestors as early as 1776, Hicks was conscious of the role he played in the preservation of oral storytelling. Many of those stories are included in The Life and Times of Ray Hicks. Born in 1922, Ray lived his whole life in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. (Although it finally got a refrigerator and electric lights, Ray's place never did get a telephone, indoor plumbing, or a radio or television.) It seems he knew everything there was to know about living off the land and about his family's history. A lot of what he knew is in this new book. Hicks made his public storytelling debut in 1951, when a local schoolteacher invited him to her class. In 1973, Ray performed at the very first International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He appeared at every one until he became too weak to attend. He died on Easter Sunday in 2003. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews and visits, painstakingly pieced together by Lynn Salsi, The Life and Times of Ray Hicks comes as close as possible to capturing the way Ray talked. Part memoir and part biography, The Life and Times of Ray Hicks presents, sometimes in Ray Hicks's own words, the most important part of his long, colorful life-a life scarcely less interesting than the Jack Tales he told so well. Lynn Salsi is the author of several books, including 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, and was named the North Carolina Historian of the Year in 2001.

Ray Hicks, 78, the famous teller of Appalachian Jack Tales, is one of America's best-loved storytellers. In this book he shares a different kind of story, a chronicle of his family's experiences in the remote section of the North Carolina mountains where

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"Orville Hicks has enthralled audiences beyond the porches of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, for more than two decades. Jack Tales and Mountain Yarns captures the voice of the master storyteller in more than twenty transcribed stories, paired with lively pencil sketches. Having grown up in a hollow, he knows the mountain setting and his clever character Jack"--Provided by publisher.

The "Jack" known to all of us from "Jack and the Beanstalk" is the hero of a cycle of tales brought to this country from the British Isles. Jack in Two Worlds is a unique collection that brings together eight of these stories as transcribed from ac