ABSTRACT
Jane Muncy Fugate (born Jane Muncy in 1938), one of the nation’s finesttraditional storytellers, has until recently also been one of the most elusive. For more than half a century folklorists knew Jane almost exclusively through a series of published tales. In the spring of 1949 folklorist Leonard Roberts visited an Appalachian mountain schoolhouse and asked the children to record their family’s folktales on the first reel-to-reel tape recorder that anyone had seen in Leslie County, Kentucky. One by one they marched up to the mike, spoke their piece, and took their seats again to listen to the other kids. Most of the tellers demonstrated that however carefully they had listened to their family tales, they hadn’t yet learned how to tell them. The one great exception was 11-year-old Jane Muncy, who spoke with precocious composure and style. Most of the children told one story, a few returned to the mike to tell a second, but Jane told five, crafted as carefully as any adult could. In 1955, they were published in Roberts’s South from Hell-fer-Sartin, a landmark collection of Appalachian tales. Roberts ran into Jane again in 1955, when she was 17. She recorded six more tales for him at that time, and four of these later performances, including the title tale, were eventually published in Old Greasybeard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap (1969).
