Jerry Harmon

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quick-thinking Jack from other storytellers or from family members who have kept the art of the tale alive.

But it's a fair bet you haven't heard the Jack Tales from anyone like Jerry Harmon. Even in the rural South, where the ridgelines receding into the haze may each conceal a chronologically more distant layer of culture in the "settlements" below (to use the word Harmon uses in his stories), it's uncommon to hear speech like his, the mountain speech of a hundred years ago. It comes at you rapid fire, almost in a monotone, and you have to pay attention to follow it. The listener focus that results only intensifies the effect of Harmon's magical stories and of his spooky Jack tale of a house haunted by mysteriously aggressive cats.

Jack Tales are not the only stories Harmon tells. There are tall tales that serve as a framework for wild flights of imagination and verbal manipulation. And there are occasional jokes of the cornball country sort (he grew up, he says, so far out in the country that he thought everybody had to pack a lunch to go to the mailbox). But for the most part his verbal art comes from before the age of stage humor. And it provides a glimpse of the power good storytelling had in isolated communities little touched by mass media.