Ferrum, VA, July 17, 2026 —Three members of the Ferrum College Jack Tale Players performed at the Library of Congress on July 10, 2026. The unusual opportunity arose while the director, Emily Blankenship-Tucker, conducted research there as a participant in a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty focused on the Federal Writers’ Project.
The NEH participants are now concluding two weeks of meeting virtually, and they gathered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. during their middle week, where the NEH, in collaboration with the City University of New York, arranged for access to the largest collections of documents on the New Deal project that resulted in extensive archives of folklore and writings developed between 1935 and the mid-1940s. At the end of their in-person meetings, participants gathered all afternoon on July 10, concluding with short talks by four scholars and then a rousing Jack Tale show.
Silas Blankenship-Tucker (10), the youngest Jack Tale Player, traveled by train with Emily and Rachel Blankenship-Tucker, and Professor of English Tina Hanlon, for the week of research and exploring before the performance. They ended up spending all day Saturday on a train that left Roanoke two hours late and had to travel at 25 mph because of the extreme heat, so they had plenty of time to compare notes and plan the program that had just been arranged the day before they left Ferrum.
During the unexpected delay, Hanlon wrote in Facebook that “Runwell could run circles around this train without breaking a sweat (even when it’s 100 degrees out).” In one of their popular Jack Tales, “Hardy Hard Head,” Runwell is one of the helpers with magic powers and he can run circles around the magic land ship that Jack acquires after sharing his food with an old beggar man. The helpers join him one by one on an adventure to rescue the king’s girl. Jack’s magic words “Sail ship sail” wouldn’t have helped this train, but small packs of snacks and bottles of water were provided to the travelers as the ones from Ferrum counted their crackers in anticipation of meager rations later in the evening.
Hanlon said she was amused to see instrument cases on the train platform with a washboard attached by zip-tie to the banjo case. The washboard and other old-time instruments for sound effects and songs are hallmarks of Jack Tale shows. They were sure they had packed everything, but on Friday morning Silas’ indispensable red suspenders could not be found, so they used the not-so-old-time method of getting a Door Dash delivery of red suspenders from a store.
The Jack Tale Players had performed in many libraries over the past fifty years and traveled all across the country in decades past, but never before in the world’s largest libraries. Rachel Blankenship-Tucker wrote on Friday, “Gingham and suspenders have entered the Library of Congress! I repeat: gingham and suspenders have entered the Library of Congress!” On the Facebook page called The Jack Tales, generations of Jack Tale Players and their followers would grasp the significance of that image.
Although the Library of Congress has the world’s largest collections, the NEH group met in a dining room in the Madison Building with a quite small performance space and a podium but no stage. The Jack Tale Players have extensive experience performing in all kinds of spaces and conditions, to audiences huge and small. Hanlon reported, from watching them up close this time, that it was the first time she saw Silas play Jack and the acting of all three was as good as she’s ever seen. They are always well-prepared for playing different roles on short notice. She said, “I’ve seen the same tales dozens of times but there is always something new to evoke surprise and laughter–such as seeing Rachel play all of the animals in ‘Jack and the Robbers’ because the cast was so small.” Rachel’s first Jack Tale role had been an old cat in this tale in 2010, and Emily had joined in 2001.
To start this program, Emily explained the early history of the Jack Tale Players and the adventures and tricks that typically occur in Jack Tales. Hanlon, who discussed a few more of their methods, experiences, grant-funded projects, and their logo, displayed a few picture books based on Appalachian tales, scripts by Rex Stephenson, copies of archived tales from the James Taylor Adams Collection at Ferrum’s Blue Ridge Institute and Museum (BRIM), and pictures drawn by children who saw Jack Tale shows over the past fifty years.
The performance began with the folk song “Wild Hog in the Woods,” with banjo and fiddle. After the story theatre dramatization of the Jack Tale, it ended with a lively fiddle tune while Silas demonstrated the flatfoot dancing style common in Franklin County, Virginia. A short video of the dancing is in the Ferrum College Flickr album at the link below.
Throughout the week Emily Blankenship-Tucker worked diligently in the archives of the American Folklife Center while the others from Ferrum explored museums around the National Mall. She even found folklore and music history from Ferrum there, including documents about a Ferrum String Band in the 1930s, as well as Jack Tales she had never heard of before.
Hanlon worked in the archive one day, continuing her research seeking Appalachian folktales with strong female characters. They both found references that they can view digitally or with library resources they can access from home. Hanlon listened to an archive recording that included famous folklorist Bascomb Lamar Lunsford of North Carolina singing “Wreck of the Old 97” in 1935 for Columbia University, a ballad set in southside Virginia that she has heard the Jack Tale Players sing many times.
As Emily Blankenship-Tucker thinks historically and creatively about next steps for the Jack Tale Players after their fiftieth anniversary last fall, this trip to the Library of Congress brought them full circle, because it was one of Rex Stephenson’s first stops when he began archive research. Assisted by Director Emeritus of the BRIM Roddy Moore, he collected tales with a grant from the Virginia Commission of the Arts and began dramatizing them in Ferrum and Callaway with his college students in 1975, soon taking them across Virginia and then to a youth festival in Central Park, and across the country to perform for the USO in veterans’ hospitals.
Mike Ferguson ‘81, one of the “early years” Jack Tale Players and a longtime Ferrum College staff member, wrote “such an amazing honor” when he saw photos from the Library of Congress show. Rachel Blankenship-Tucker wrote after the show, “That’s one for the history books. Today & Always!”
Photographs at Library of Congress Madison Building courtesy of Lee Tucker.
