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

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.

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Based on a true story, this debut Civil War novel follows a Southern plantation woman's journey of transforming her home into a hospital for the war. This debut novel is based on the true story of Carrie McGavock. During the Civil War's Battle of Franklin, a five-hour bloodbath with 9,200 casualties, McGavock's home was turned into a field hospital where four generals died. For 40 years she tended the private cemetery on her property where more than 1,000 were laid to rest.

"Orville Hicks has enthralled audiences beyond the porches of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, for more than two decades. Jack Tales and Mountain Yarns captures the voice of the master storyteller in more than twenty transcribed stories, paired with lively pencil sketches. Having grown up in a hollow, he knows the mountain setting and his clever character Jack"--Provided by publisher.

Small-time journalist John Converse thinks to cash in on the last days of the Vietnam War by becoming involved in a major drug deal, but things go very wrong when he gets back to the U.S. and finds himself hunted by a corrupt government agent.

The Jack Tales derive from a Western European narrative cycle and are the oldest folktales to survive in the North American oral tradition. In the twenty-first century, the Jack Tales continue to retain their place at the forefront of Western Oral Tradition. Over the centuries the tales of Jack and his adventures have tended to absorb the interests and values of the culture in which they are operating. Ray Hicks and the Jack Tales: A Study of Appalachian History, Culture, and Philosophy, assesses folktales in the oral tradition and examines both the history and the cultural impact of them. It includes a survey of existing scholarship concerning orality and the European origins of the Jack Tales and then focuses upon a prominent Appalachian native recorder of the tales, Ray Hicks. His enthusiasm and skill as a storyteller has allowed Hicks to bring an ancient body of oral literature to all types of audiences. The way that Hicks has enhanced the Jack Tales through his manner of storytelling-the nature of his performance, his voice and mimicry, the stimulus of the audience and his response-is explored along with the setting of these tales-the Appalachian mountains.

Representations of southern poor whites have long shifted between romanticization and demonization. At worst, poor southern whites are aligned with racism, bigotry, and right-wing extremism, and, at best, regarded as the passive victims of wider, socioeconomic policies. In Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing, author Sarah Robertson pushes beyond these stereotypes and explores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. Robertson examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism that crosses the boundaries of the US South and regionalism, moving past ideas about the culture of poverty to examine the economics of poverty. Included are critical examinations of the writings of southern writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim McLaurin, Toni Morrison, and Ann Pancake. Poverty Politics includes critical engagement with identity politics as well as reflections on issues including Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and mountaintop removal. Robertson interrogates the presumed opposition between the Global North and the Global South and engages with microregions through case studies on Appalachian photo-narratives and eco-literature. Importantly, she focuses not merely on representations of southern poor whites, but also on writing that calls for alternative ways of reconceptualizing not just the poor, but societal measures of time, value, and worth.

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.