Traditional Appalachian storyteller who specialized in Jack tales. It was Ward who in
1935 acquainted the folklorist Richard Chase with the term “Jack tale” and introduced
him to the many members of his family and community on Beech Mountain, North
Carolina, who performed the stories—among them his father, Miles Ward and uncle
Monroe Ward (grandsons of Council Harmon, the most immediate major conduit of the
tradition), and the brothers Ben and Roby Hicks, also grandsons of “Old Counce.” These
four men were the primary sources of the stories published in Chase’s The jack Tales
(1943).
Ward was himself an exceptional storytelller, having internalized twenty-five of his
father’s Jack tales before he entered primary school. He performed the stories throughout
his life, especially enjoying telling them to his fifth-grade students at the Banner Elk
Grade School, where he taught for thirty years. The folklorist Charlotte Paige Gutierrez
believes that Ward’s talents as a storyteller were direcdy related to his career as a
schoolteacher. For example, Ward, unlike his fellow storytellers Ray and Stanley Hicks,
inserted into the tales his personal advice about how best to conduct one’s life, and he
modified Jack’s actions to the extent diat they displayed much more ediical and less
violent behavior. Further, Ward’s performance style was much more animated dian the
Hickses’, surely an adjustment undertaken to retain the attention of young schoolchildren.
Odier of Ward’s important stylistic devices analyzed by Gutierrez include his use of
voice changes and vocal dynamics, mimicry, facial expressions, and illustrative gestures.
Ward contributed greatly to the preservation and perpetuation of the Jack-tale tradition
by performing them for seventy years for schools, festivals, and for his neighbors.
William E.Lightfoot
References
Gutierrez, Charlotte Paige. 1990. The Narrative Style of Marshall Ward, Jack-Tale Teller. In Arts
in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife, ed. Daniel W.Patterson and Charles G.Zug III. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, pp. 147–163.
McGowan, Thomas. 1978. Marshall Ward: An Introduction to a Jack Tale. North Carolina
Folklore Journal 26:51–74.
Oxford, Cheryl Lynne. 1987. “They CallHim Luckyjack”: Three Performance-Centered Case
Studies of Storytelling in Watauga County, North Carolina. Ph.D. diss., Northwestern
University, pp. 41–97.