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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I'M STILL STANDING is the story of a man whose idea of duty put him in conflict with the powers that be, and how he endured the injustice of false charges and wrongful incarceration, turning bad providence into spiritual growth. Raymond Hicks writes candidly about the humiliation that he suffered as an upstanding young black officer who was wrongly accused by his coworkers-the anguish and financial ruin that he and his family experienced as he single-handedly attempted to fight corruption within the sheriff's department, as well as within the justice system which failed him. Hicks, a modern-day Serpico, reveals his story in hopes that no other dedicated individual will ever have to suffer through a "justice system gone mad." The purpose of this book is not just to restore justice, to "right the wrongs" visited upon Mr. Hicks, but to make everyone aware of the dangers we all face in a country riddled with corruption to such a degree that "honesty" is all but eliminated.

As a young boy living in the Appalachian Mountains, Ray Hicks loved his grandfather's stories because he told them "the mountain way." After his grandfather's death, Ray continued to tell these stories to anyone who would listen. Years later, his storytelling became so famous he was known as the "Voice of Appalachia."

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