Collector and performer of Jack tales, folksongs, and dances. Chase’s family was firom New England, but his father established a nursery near Huntsville, Alabama, and Richard grew up there. He went to local schools and, as he put it, a school in Tennessee “for problem boys.” At age twenty, Chase was in Boston, where he learned about the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky. There he discovered ballads and the work of folksong collector Cecil Sharp. He had found his calling. For the rest of his life, he collected, performed, and taught various forms of folklore to audiences around the country. In the mid-1920s, Chase attended Harvard University for two years and also took courses in progressive education with Marietta Johnson in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Fair Hope, Alabama. During this period, he worked off and on as a performer-teacher of folksongs and dances. In 1929 he graduated from Antioch College in Ohio with a B.S. in botany. He married in 1930 and then spent two or three years in Europe, where he developed contacts with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. In 1935 Chase was hired to teach folksongs at a teachers’ conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, and, from a student there, he learned for the first time about Jack tales (essentially, European-derived Märchen [fairy tales] that feature a young man, Jack, as the main protagonist). Chase began collecting, performing, and publishing Jack tales, collected primarily from members of the Ward family of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. Six tales were published in Southern Folklore Quarterly beginning with Volume I, Number 1 in 1937 and continuing into 1941. In late 1940, Chase learned through the Ward family that there were Jack tales to be found in Wise County, Virginia. About a year later, he was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Virginia Writers’ Project to put together a book on Wise County folklore, but the goal was shortly changed to emphasize folktales. For various reasons—in part because the Writers’ Project ended—the Wise County book was never published, but thirty-four Wise County tales, fifteen of which were Jack tales, were included (in whole or part) in Chase’s three books: The Jack Tales (1943), Grandfather Tales (1948), and American Folk Tales and Songs (1956). Chase also began working with the White Top Mountain folk festival in North Carolina in 1934 and remained with it until its demise in 1941. The next year he moved to a small farm in Albemarle County, Virginia. His life and travels between 1942 and his death in 1988 are too complex to delineate here. Suffice it to say that, in that period, he lived, traveled, and performed in various places in Virginia, North Carolina, and California, moving back to his original hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, about 1983. Richard Chase is best seen as an editor of folklore, using his creativity to put together several versions of each Jack tale when he told it or when he published it. His collated versions were widely popular and are frequently told by professional storytellers; and a few appear to have been picked up by traditional tale-tellers.
Charles L.Perduejr.
References
Perdue, Charles L., Jr., ed. 1987. Outwitting the Devil: Jack Talesfrom Wise County Virginia. Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City.