The Life and Times of Ray Hicks: Keeper of the Jack Tales (review)

The newest work on the legendary storyteller Ray Hicks comes from Lynn Salsi, oral historian and North Carolinian writer. She crafted this biography as "a suitable tribute to a notable and well-loved man—the Jack of his stories and also of our times" (xv). With Hicks as her primary source, Salsi has previously published two books for young readers, The Jack Tales by Rayand Young Ray Hicks Learns the Jack Tales. Stories of Jack, the sometimes-trickster-always-adventurer, were carried across the Atlantic from the British Isles to find a new home in the Appalachians where they changed to reflect the mountain culture. Families like the Hickses and Harmons kept the Jack tales of hardship and survival alive in the oral tradition before Ray Hicks earned a national reputation in the storytelling community. Hicks says that "it is impossible to separate me from Jack" (195). Throughout the book he claims that he is Jack or "just like Jack," for he says that "I feel every word of my stories in my heart" (191).

This biography joins a solid body of literature about the legendary Hicks and his contributions to the storytelling community. Since the 1960s he has been the subject of numerous publications, and his stories have been preserved in recordings, videos, books, and scholarly works. Unlike the other biographies of the Beech Mountain Hicks family, this one reads like a memoir. Those who have heard his recorded voice or seen him perform on the National Storytelling Festival stage in Jonesborough, Tennessee, can recognize Ray Hicks's unique turn of phrase and dialect from the opening sentences of chapter 1: "I'm lucky one of my legs hain't shorter than the other'un. That's cause farmin' on the side of a steep mountain is something ya don't get used to" (1).

Because this work conveys a picture of life in rural North Carolina during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offiers some appeal to a broader audience than the storytelling community. Salsi has shared the accounts of those who grew up on Beech Mountain in North Carolina through the voice of Hicks who claims that "the Jack tales are part of who we all are—all our history, 'specially if ya was ever related to anybody who come to the mountains. I just want to tell the ol' way to preserve the history" (197). It is a history of Appalachian culture and daily life, from farming to schooling, folk cures to religion, and courting to cars.

True to the subtitle, Salsi weaves into the family accounts frequent references to Jack and specific stories by name, although no complete stories are included in the biography, nor does she provide a list of Jack tales for which Hicks was most noted. Although loosely chronological, most of the biography covers family history and Hicks's early years. Only a few pages are dedicated to the last thirty years of his life; however, this account does include more than two dozen photographs and a Hicks genealogy.

While The Life and Times of Ray Hicksis intended to be appreciated by all those interested in Appalachian history and culture, the storytelling community will find it most appealing. Because Hicks was a lifelong storyteller, he spun the traditional Jack tales and his life on Beech Mountain into what Salsi has crafted into "the final tale of the real Jack" (xx).