"Jack and his Lump of Silver." Collected by R. Rex Stephenson from Raymond Sloan. ALCA-Lines: Journal of the Assembly on the Literature and Culture of Appalachia, Vol. VI (Fall 1999): 6-7. Full text in AppLit. When he collected this tale from Raymond Sloan in the 1980s, it confirmed Stephenson's belief "that there had to be some Jack Tales on the Eastern slope of the Blue Ridge although no one, including Chase, had been able to find any." Sloan's tale is set in Ferrum, VA. It is interesting that the animals being swapped talk in this tale. Stephenson, R. Rex. "Foolish Jack." The Jack Tales. Schulenburg, TX: I. E. Clark, 1991, pp. 31-35. Story theatre dramatization, as performed by The Ferrum Jack Tale Players. After seven years of apprenticeship to a silversmith, Jack receives a lump of silver and loaf of bread, which he gives up in a series of trades for a talking donkey, cow, pig, and a silver dollar, but he throws the silver dollar at two frogs who call him "a poor trader." He has to go back to work for the silversmith for the rest of his life instead of going on to the city, but "he did learn how to become a better trader." "Jack and His Lump of Silver." James Taylor Adams Collection. Full text in AppLit. This tale is also published in Outwitting the Devil: Jack Tales from Wise County, Virginia, ed. Charles L. Perdue, Jr. Sante Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1987, pp. 25-26. The tale was collected for the Virginia Writers' Project by James M. Hylton in 1941, from Mrs. Amy Vicars, whose mother told many tales brought over from England and Scotland. Perdue identifies the tale as type 1415, "Lucky Hans" (see below). In this version, Jack is an English worker who is given a lump of silver by his master. He trades it for a series of animals (who don't talk). Finally he gets a grindstone and drops it in a well. Then he is happy with "nothing to worry me now and nothing to carry and make me tired." "Foolish Jack." In Nippy and the Yankee Doodle, and Other Authentic Folk Tales from the Southern Mountains. Collected by Leonard Roberts. Berea, KY: The Council of the Southern Mountains, 1958. Jack gets gold from his rich relatives for his poor mother, but he loses it in a series of trades for different animals that cause him difficulties, and then a whetrock, which he throws at some noisy frogs who annoy him. He's proud of himself for not letting the frogs make fun of him. "And with that Jack's mother fainted. And that was natural. For she allas did faint a lot because her son was allas doing such foolish things." Roberts reprinted the tale under the heading Humorous and Tale Tales in Old Greasybeard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap. Illus. Leonard Epstein. Detroit: Folklore Associates, 1969. Rpt. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1980. "The Swapping Song." In American Folk Tales and Songs. Compiled by Richard Chase. New York: Dover, 1956. pp. 174-75. From Greene County, VA, in Chase's section Songs to Sing to Your Children. The speaker's father leaves him "a horse to hitch to the plow." He swaps for a cow, a calf, a pig, a hen, a cat, a mouse, and a mole—then "the dad-burned thing went straight down its hole." The traditional refrain is "To my wing wong waddle! To my Jack Straw straddle!/And Johnny's got his fiddle and he's gone on home!"
Illustration at left by Jean Tamburine from "Mr. Songcatcher Comes By," a chapter of Mr. Songcatcher and Company reprinted in Smoky Mountain Sampler by May Justus, 1962. It depicts a ballad collector's visit to the Purdys' double log cabin halfway up Near-Side-And-Far. Joe, who lives with his grandparents, gets their permission to go traveling with the friendly man who stays overnight with them. Joe's Grandpaw plays the tune on his violin and remembers only one verse of the words to the song. Joe wants to help find the rest of it himself, as well as visiting his relatives and seeing a little more of the world. Langstaff, John M. The Swapping Boy. Illus. Beth and Joe Krush. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960. A picture book version of the song, with brightly colored sketches featuring a young boy playing the fiddle and a girl dancing while she sweeps their cabin. This book has the traditional ending: "And now the songbook's back on the shelf,/If you want any more, you can sing it yourself!" The author's notes discuss the 500-year history and different versions of this children's song "about the foolish boy." He used a tune sung in his own family, one discovered by Cecil Sharp, the Englishman who collected ballads from children and adults in the Southern Appalachian Mountains forty years earlier. Langstaff chose the words he liked best from different parts of the country. Ritchie, Jean. comp. Jean Ritchie's Swapping Song Book. Photos. George Pickow. New York: H. Z. Walck, 1964. 93 pp. Piano arrangements by A. K. Fossner and Edward Tripp. "Twenty-one songs from the southern Appalachians," including children's songs. Ritchie, Jean. "Swapping Song." Childhood Songs. CD. Port Washington, NY: Greenhays Recordings, 2001. The speaker in the song goes to London to get a wife, and has to bring her home in an old wheelbarrow. The wife and wheelbarrow fall so he swaps for a horse, then a mare, a mule, a goat, a sheep, a cow, a calf, a hen, a rat, a mouse. The often-repeated refrain contains nonsense words that sound like "Wing wong waddle to my Jack straw straddle to my Johnny fair faddle to my long ways home." The CD contains 16 songs and games, 9 from Ritchie's own childhood and 7 from the childhood of the younger generation of her family, some made up by herself and some based on older songs she has greatly altered. Instructions are given for some of the games, with encouragement for dramatization or movement through the others. See also Jenny Put the Kettle On for discussion of this CD. See also: Johnson, Paul Brett. Bearhide and Crow. New York: Holiday House, 2000. A comic twentieth-century trickster tale about a farmer getting the best of simple Sam Hankins through some swapping. See AppLit's folktale picture book bibliography and cover and other information at visitingauthors.com. For the foolish series of trades, often ending in the acquisition of a rock, see "Jack and the Three Sillies." Notice that the outcome is different after Jack's seemingly foolish trade in "Jack and the Bean Tree" (or "Jack and the Bean Stalk") is scorned by his mother, when the seeds he acquires send him up the magic beanstalk to find a fortune. Compare with: Trading Away One's Fortune, a group of tales of type 1415, edited by D. L. Ashliman. The texts include "What the Old Man Does is Always Right" by Hans Christian Andersen (Danish), "The Story of Mr. Vinegar" (English), "Gudbrand on the Hillside" from Asbjörnsen and Moe (Norwegian), and "Hans in Luck" by the Grimm Brothers (German). Hans starts off with a bag of gold after seven years' work and ends up happy to have no burdens after a series of trades. "Hans in Luck" is also reprinted online with old illustrations by several artists and source materials at 19th-Century German Stories. Last
update:
11/16/2007 |
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"The Swapping Song"
as recorded by May Justus is a folk song in which the speaker goes
to London to get a wife and takes her home in a wheelbarrow. When
he falls, he swaps the wheelbarrow for a horse, then swaps it for
a series of animals until he has a mole—"And the silly
thing ran into a hole!" Justus included the song in several of
her children's books set in the Smoky Mountains in the first half
of the twentieth century. See, for example, "Fiddle Away"
in Children of the Great Smoky Mountains, Mr. Songcatcher and
Company, and Fiddle Away, in