STORYTELLING – A HICKS AND HARMON TRADITION
© 2025 Terry Harmon
My 4x great-granduncle, Samuel Hicks, Jr., or “Little Sammy,” as he was known, was apparently a friendly, outgoing, gregarious man who loved dances, social occasions, and celebrations. He was musically inclined and a natural entertainer. He liked to tell ghost stories and “Jack Tales,” and he, along with his father, Samuel Hicks, Sr., and sister, Sabra Hicks Harman, are believed to be the ones who passed the “Jack Tales” on to Sabra’s son (my 3x great-granduncle), Council “Counce” Harman.
Counce delighted in entertaining his grandchildren with the “Jack Tales” and teaching them to tell them. Some of the family recalled, “He’d be coming down the road and meet someone [and would] sit down on a stump and start telling a story.” According to his grandson, Monroe Ward, “Ever when I’d see Ol’ Counce a-coming, I’d run to meet him…and I’d ask him right off for a Jack Tale. He’d tell me one, too; never did fail me.” His granddaughter, Jane Hicks Gentry, recalled, ““Ol’ Jack, Will and Tom tales…are the oldest stories that ever been in existence, I reckon. Ol’ Grandpap [always] told ‘em – we’d hire him to tell us. Law, he could tell ‘em!”
Counce’s descendants, including grandchildren Jane Gentry of Hot Springs, North Carolina, Sam Harmon of Maryville, Tennessee, and Monroe and Miles Ward and Sarah Harmon Hicks of Watauga County, North Carolina, continued the “Jack Tales” tradition, many of which were preserved by folklorist Richard Chase. The tales were eventually passed on to other family members, including Jane Gentry’s daughter, Maud Gentry Long, and Miles Ward’s son, Marshall P. Ward, who reminisced that, “Daddy used to get out the dulcimer and the banjo, but I got tired of those real quick. I just waited for him to tell a story.” Miles usually obliged with the “Jack Tales.”
Counce’s great, great-grandson, Ray Hicks, was perhaps the most famous storyteller of all in terms of “Jack Tales” and has been referred to as “a classic American storyteller.” He was honored with a National Heritage Fellowship Award and a North Carolina Heritage Award, and he was featured in the PBS documentary The Story of English as well as in National Geographic. Ray was a regular performer and star at the annual National Storytellers Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and the Smithsonian Institution “deemed him a national treasure.” Ray’s life is the subject of the book Ray Hicks, Master Story Teller of the Blue Ridge by Robert Isbell, which was first published as The Last Chivaree in 1996.
Introduced to storytelling by his mother, Sarah Harmon Hicks, Orville Hicks continues to carry on the family tradition. Heavily influenced by Ray Hicks, and the mantle having fallen on his shoulders, Orville is now considered by many “the best of the current Jack Tale tellers.” Even Ray proclaimed Orville to be the “torchbearer.” Orville has received a Brown-Hudson Folklore Award and a Paul Green Multi-Media Award for his CD, Orville Hicks: Mule Egg Seller and Appalachian Story Teller. This award, given by the North Carolina Society of Historians acknowledges Orville’s efforts in preserving North Carolina history.