"Whistlin' Towards the Devil's House": Poetic Transformations and Natural Metaphysics in an Appalachian Folktale Performance

Abstract

"Whistlin' Towards the Devil's House": Poetic Transformations and Natural Metaphysics in an Appalachian Folktale Performance Joseph Daniel Sobol East Tennessee State University [*eCompanion at www.oraltradition.org 1 ] Great writers spend their working lives inclining toward posterity. When they set seal upon their final opus, all that remains is for the editing, publishing, and critical industries to add up their literary artifacts into an accounting of an artistic legacy. Great storytellers, on the other hand, breathe their art into the wind that blows where it lists. Their legacies are scattered in the hollows of community memories, in whatever may have been written or spoken about them, and in any formal or informal recordings that remain behind of their voices or their images. Electronic culture may have compounded storytellers' legacies by multiplying the media products available for study. But major translation problems remain as stubborn as ever: how to move from the ephemeral delights of a storytelling performance into abiding illuminations of the storyteller's art? The late Ray Hicks (1922-2003) of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, is certainly more fortunate in his posterity than most traditional tellers. He was still a child in the 1920s and 1930s when folklore collectors Robert Gordon, Mellinger Henry, Maurice Matteson, Richard Chase, and Frank and Anne Warner began visiting Beech Mountain to record his family's tales and songs. In 1962, at age 40, he made his own first recording of four Jack tales on a Folk Legacy LP, still in print. In 1973 he began a 27-year run as the iconic heart of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee (all recorded and deposited in the Library of Congress). 1976 brought the Appalshop documentary "Fixin' to Tell About Jack." Following his receipt [End Page 3] of the NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1983, a profile by Gwen Kincaid appeared in New Yorker magazine. PBS filmed him for their series The Story of English. There was a 1989 June Appal recording of his personal stories, "Jack Alive." Robert Isbell published two editions of his biography of Ray and other family members—The Last Chivaree (1996) was later re-titled (2001) after its central figure, RayHicks: Master Storyteller of the Blue Ridge. In 2000 Lyn Salsi published three of Hicks' Jack tales as a children's picture book with accompanying CD (Hicks 2000); and there have been innumerable other theses and dissertations (Gutierrez 1975, Sobol 1987, McDermitt 1986, Oxford 1987, Pavasic 2005), popular books (Petro 2001, Smith 1988), articles, newspaper and magazine features, and field recordings in university and private archives documenting Ray's torrents of talk and his impact as an artist and a man. In short, over the course of his four-score years Ray Hicks made his way onto the fringe of that peculiar American terrain: folk celebrity. There is widespread consensus among those acquainted with traditional and contemporary storytelling that Ray was a master of the art. There is ample documentation of that art, and plentiful attempts to convey the facts and the legendary atmosphere of his life, in which much of his personal magnetism lay. I have written several previous essays on him: on a particular telling of AT513, "The Dry Land Ship" (1994), on his iconic relationship with the National Storytelling Festival (1999:104-16), and on his transformation of a hospital into a setting for some particularly memorable performances (2002). Yet there has been too little written that conveys the poetical inner workings of his tellings, their thematic urgencies, and their striking liberties within the traditional molds. Beyond the aura of celebrity, these are the elements that made up his actual artistry, and that made his storytelling sessions so spontaneous, risky, and exhilarating until nearly the end of his life. In writing about these matters here, I will be deliberately avoiding the "last-of-a-breed" myth-making mood that suffuses much of the popular literature on Ray, and the literature on the storytelling movement generally...