FERRUM, VA, October 23, 2025 — Orville Hicks will return to the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival at Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Institute and Museum on October 25 to share his popular brand of folktales, jokes, and family stories. He inherited his folklore and verbal skills by growing up in the most famous family of Appalachian storytellers, the Hicks-Harmon-Ward family of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. During the festival, which takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Hicks will perform at 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
Orville Hicks and his kin are best known for telling Jack Tales, folk stories about the many adventures of a clever boy named Jack, along with a variety of other tall tales and personal narratives about life in the mountains. One of Hicks’s favorite trickster tales is “The Mule Eggs,” about a farm boy who convinces a rich man that the pumpkins he sells him are eggs that will hatch out a mule. Hicks may sing a song or tell a shorter joke as well.
Descended from seventeenth-century English and German immigrants, the Hicks-Harmon clan has carried on one of the oldest Euro-American storytelling traditions for many generations. Having grown up as the youngest of eleven children in a mountain family, Orville Hicks affirms the truth of the cultural history that Ferrum’s farm museum and Jack Tale Players tell visitors about today—that rural families shared stories and songs to pass the time during long hours of hard work. Hicks has worked at farming and running a recycling center near Boone and Blowing Rock, NC. By the 1990s, his older cousin Ray Hicks persuaded him to travel more widely and tell stories publicly.
The Appalachian folktales dramatized by the Ferrum College Jack Tale Players since 1975 had been collected by folklore researchers from Hicks’s family as well as storytellers in southwestern Virginia and elsewhere. After Marshall Ward introduced Richard Chase to Jack Tales in the 1930s, Chase’s books made them popular all over North America. Many Appalachians, including Professor of English Lana Whited, remember their teachers reading Jack Tales in school, and in 1975 Janice Stephenson Watkins, currently a College staff member, brought Chase’s book home from her fourth-grade class at Ferrum Elementary School. Asking her drama professor father, Rex Stephenson, to read them gave him the idea to dramatize them.
In 1995 Orville and his cousin Ray Hicks, the most famous Appalachian storyteller of the past century, joined other prominent storytellers to conduct workshops with Stephenson before the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival and celebrate the 20th anniversary of Stephenson’s Jack Tale Players. The photo shows him standing on the right, introducing them at the festival with Ray in the middle and Orville between them.
Jerry Harmon, another cousin in the Hicks-Harmon family who focuses on music more than storytelling, has also performed at the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival in the past.
“Soldier Jack,” “Jack and the Robbers,” “Jack and the Giants,” and “Hardy Hard Head,” are among the Jack Tales that both Orville Hicks and the Jack Tale Players retell. Hicks wrote, “Jack was just an ordinary boy. But when it came right down to it, he could outwit the king… [with] just a little more sense in him than the king had.” He added, “Jack was kind of a hero to us growing up…. I could see in my mind that big giant coming at Jack and then Jack catching that big wild boar. Sometimes we’d get to thinking we was Jack. And I wanted to be a giant killer.”
Django Burgess from Danbury, NC, a Ferrum College junior and member of the Jack Tale Players, said after seeing Hicks at last year’s Blue Ridge Folklife Festival that “he is such a joy to listen to. He seemingly entertains himself more than his audience. He’ll laugh at the stories and sorta hold it in when he knows a funny part is about to come up. He is a very engaging and authentic storyteller.”
Author Julia Taylor Ebel collaborated with Orville Hicks on two books full of his folktales, personal background and family stories, photographs, original tales, and a few poems and riddles: Jack Tales and Mountain Yarns (2009) and Orville Hicks: Mountain Stories— Mountain Roots (2005). Hicks and his wife of more than 50 years, Sylvia, enjoy sitting in the sun at our festival selling books and talking to people between his storytelling sessions.
Hicks has also recorded several audio collections of his tales, and if you can’t see him in person or you want to hear more after you do, you can find him in numerous YouTube videos telling a variety of stories. He received the North Carolina Heritage Award in 2007, and a number of other folklore, book, and media honors.
Folklore scholar Thomas McGowan has studied Hicks’s narrative style and storytelling tradition in depth, writing scholarly articles about him and an Afterward for his book of Jack Tales. McGowan told The East Carolinian, “Orville is really good at establishing a connection with an audience. There is something about the way he reveals things that immediately creates a little speech community where everyone is together….There are these moments when he knows it’s funny and he gives that little laugh and because of all that, it’s even more fun that you’re aware of what little trick he’s done on you.”
Both McGowan and Ferrum College Professor of English Tina Hanlon, who has written about Appalachian folktales and assisted the Jack Tale Players with research, say that they never tire of the folktales even when they have heard the same stories many times over. “They are hilarious,” said Hanlon, “with enjoyable variations every time they are retold by these masters of storytelling, and they also help us believe deep down that we can overcome whatever giant obstacles we encounter.”
Ferrum College President Mirta Martin said, “The Blue Ridge Folklife Festival celebrates the heart and heritage of our region—the stories, songs, and traditions that connect generations. We are honored to welcome Orville Hicks back home to Ferrum College, where his voice carries forward the timeless art of Appalachian storytelling. His return reminds us that preserving and sharing these stories are essential to understanding our past, and preserving our heritage for our future.”
As part of the music schedule on four stages across the campus and farm museum at the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival, Hicks will perform at the Stringband Stage from 11:00 to 11:30 a.m. and at the Farm Stage from 1:00 to 1:30 p.m.
Click here for festival schedule and tickets.
Blue Ridge National Heritage Area web page on Orville Hicks
Public Radio for the Piedmont story on Orville Hicks, 2023
Julia Taylor Ebel website, with study guide for Orville Hicks: Mountain Stories–Mountain Roots
