This thesis is the result of fieldwork, research, and time spent with Ted Hicks and
other members of the Hicks family who reside on Beech Mountain in Watauga County in
western North Carolina. Ted, who was born in 1954 in Avery County, has spent his entire
life living with his mother, Rosa Harmon Hicks, and his father, Ray. He learned the
Appalachian mountain traditions from his parents. Modernity has not substantially
influenced the Hicks family. They have continued to live, work, and play in the “old ways.”
Ted has been a subsistence farmer, woodsman, craftsman, carpenter, and herb gatherer. Only
recently has he become an active bearer of the oral tradition of the Jack and Grandfather
Tales.
Ted grew up in the house on Beech Mountain where his father was born and where
Ray heard his grandfather, Benjamin Hicks, telling the tales that his relatives had passed
down to him. In 1995, Ray received the National Storytelling Association’s first Lifetime
Achievement Award, and he received numerous storytelling awards. He was also the only
teller who was featured every year at the National Storytelling Festival that is held in
Jonesborough, Tennessee. Ted has been a passive participant in the oral traditions of the
family. He was shy and spent more time alone in the woods and farming the family land
than in public gatherings. It wasn’t until after his father’s death in 2003 that Ted became an
active bearer of the tradition of the Jack and Grandfather Tales. Due to health challenges, he
could no longer farm and gather herbs, and therefore he turned to the oral traditions he grew
up hearing in his home. Ted continues private performances in the context of his and his
mother’s home, and he has transitioned to public performances in the past few years. His
performance in October 2009 was his first delivery of a tale on the main stage in
Jonesborough. He sat in the same center spot where his father had performed the tales year
after year. The delivery of “Jack and the Doctor’s Girl” transcribed in Appendix B was
Ted’s fourth public performance.
My research includes Ted Hicks’s private performances and one public performance
of the Jack Tales, a genre that has been recorded as a two hundred-year old tradition brought
to western North Carolina by the Hicks, Harmon, and Ward families, who came from
England and Germany and settled near Valle Crucis, North Carolina in the 1700s. Because
of the Hicks family’s long history of involvement with the Jack Tale tradition, there is a need
for further documentation of this family, which has taken responsibility for keeping the
cultural traditions alive in the Appalachian region. My thesis documents Ted Hicks’s role in
maintaining family traditions and his transition to being an active bearer of the Jack Tale
tradition as he struggles with health issues and a changing community. A video recording
and transcriptions of Ted’s private and public performances accompany my thesis and are
central to this project