Grandfather Tales [antikvár]

PREFACEIThese tales are the "others" mentioned by R. M. Ward in his foreword to THE JACK TALES. Mr. Ward, the "old man in North Carolina" mentioned by James Turner herein, told eight of the tales in this collection. The rest are from various people in North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. A bit of "The Tall Cornstalk" came from Maine. Exact sources for each tale are accounted for in the appendix.In this book I have taken a free hand in the re-telling. I have put each tale together from different versions, and from my own experience in telling them. I have told the tales to all kinds of listeners, old and young; and only then, after many tellings, written them down.This spontaneous telling process is really important for you, too, the reader. After you have read these tales, put the book away and try telling one. You don't have to use dialect. Use your own common speech. Reading the printed word can never especially for your young listeners be the same as using the living word.For me, the writing down of these tales has often been a difficult and tedious process. Mrs. Grover Long, a descendant of Council Harmon (through whose grandchildren THE JACK TALES "and others" have been preserved), told me how she had once tried to put down "Old Counce's" tales on paper. "And I just couldn't do it," she said, "it all went stale on me."Filling up blank sheets of paper is, indeed, not the same as the sound of your own voice shaping a tale as it wells up out of your memory and as your own fancy plays with all its twists and turns. And the best part of it is that finally by some mysterious process you find that you are listening to the tale yourself as much as the listeners around you. I'd really much rather be telling these tales to you instead of having to sit here all alone, pecking at a typewriter. It is not the same as hearing a hush settle down on a group of young people when a tale begins and watching their faces as they become more and more absorbed in what's going to happen next to little Jack, or tovii