Ferrum, VA, December 11, 2025 — This year the Ferrum College Jack Tale Players proudly celebrate their 50th anniversary. Since the first official show at Callaway Elementary School on December 11, 1975, the group founded by Professor Emeritus R. Rex Stephenson has entertained over a million people in thirty-four states and several other countries with his lively adaptations of Appalachian folktales and foot-stomping traditional music.
The Jack Tale Players will perform again at Callaway School on December 18. Gail Epps ’77, from the first group of Stephenson’s players, will return from Schuyler, Virginia for that show as she has for past reunions. She remembers “practicing in the dusty basement where his theater is now” and traveling to shows in a rickety yellow van where they “laughed and sang, cried and fussed like a family on vacation.”
Four new members (in the photo) said in October that they were thrilled to join the troupe and participate in the anniversary celebrations. They are Ferrum College students Nick Gore, Sarah Montgomery, and Michael Tate-Blanks, as well as community member Robyn AbshireSims. Current students Django Burgess and Danielle Wilburn became Jack Tale Players over the past two years.
Alumni who have been performing recently include Gage Shelton ‘25, a Financial Aid Counselor at the College; Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Rebecca Crocker ‘02; TJ Baker ‘24, who returned from Australia for Homecoming Week; and Kristina Stump ‘97, who has performed since about 1990 in Jack Tale shows and plays with Stephenson and the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre (which he founded in 1979). Referring to the animal roles in “Jack and the Robbers,” Stump told her co-workers in 1996, “You can learn a lot about acting by being a donkey on stage.”
Other longtime and continuing members of the troupe include Professor Emerita Jody Brown, who began in the late 1970s, and Rachel Blankenship-Tucker, who started in 2010. Silas Blankenship-Tucker, who is now 9, became the youngest Jack Tale Player ever when he began performing three years ago. This fall he graduated from wearing overalls to colorful suspenders with jeans, one of the hallmarks of the Jack Tale Players along with their gingham shirts.
Although Stephenson died on August 13 at age 81, he was still teaching theatre part-time, performing, and directing earlier in the year, participating in a Jack Tale show at Snow Creek Elementary on March 20. Led by Program Coordinator of Music and Theatre Emily Blankenship-Tucker, who joined in 2001, the Jack Tale Players began celebrating the 50th anniversary at their Homecoming reunion in October, performing and reminiscing with joy, exuberance, and nostalgia as well as grief.
They visited several schools that week and presented three mainstage Homecoming shows on campus. At Ferrum Elementary School, teacher Tressa Holland Moore, ‘04, ‘05, a former Jack Tale Player, stepped into the show as she has done several times since her college graduation (in a long skirt and hat in the photograph).
Other alumni from different decades since the first shows in 1975 also performed that week, or enjoyed watching the shows, sharing stories with each other, and viewing memorabilia on display in the Rex Stephenson Theatre. Kristy Bell Sawyer ’12 brought her four-year-old to Homecoming and wrote afterwards, “Bringing my daughter to a Jack Tale show and being able to perform for her is truly one of the highlights of my life.”
Ferrum College President Mirta Martin said, “Today we celebrate not only fifty years of the Jack Tale Players, but the enduring spirit of storytelling that has shaped Ferrum College for generations. Dr. R. Rex Stephenson gave our community a living legacy—stories that warm the heart, music that lifts the spirit, and performances that unite generations. Though we miss him dearly, his light shines through every student, alumnus, and friend who steps on the stage. We are profoundly grateful to all who carry this beautiful and treasured tradition forward.”
The discipline and work ethic that Jack Tale Players are grateful for having to develop while working with Stephenson demand that they absorb the tales and songs orally and physically, learning them from each other rather than memorizing lines from a script. Burgess commented this fall that he tried studying a script once but it “messed up” his performance. In this ensemble method of storytelling based on the oral traditions of folklore, actors are so well prepared that they say sometimes Stephenson told them while riding to a show which role they would play that day.
Professor of English Tina Hanlon attended a production of Stephenson’s Jack Tales in 2006 at a community children’s theatre in Tennessee. She expected that it would be strange to see his tales produced in a different style, but was surprised that the performance seemed so familiar. It turned out that the director, Kathleen Buttolph, had learned the tales from Todd Necessary, who learned the tales by performing with Rex Stephenson. When Buttolph heard that Hanlon worked with Stephenson, she asked her to talk to the young performers about these connections after the show.
Another family tree of performers has developed over the past few decades. Django Burgess, from Danbury, North Carolina, performed in Jack Tales from age five to his last year of high school with former Jack Tale Player Christina Boyd Holland ’99, one of his teachers before he enrolled at Ferrum College. She and her husband Peter Holland produce original plays for adults and young people, including folktale adaptations, in their company called Once Upon a Blue Ridge. They also taught drama to Rachel Blankenship-Tucker from Patrick County, having a major influence on her career in theatre, and now most of her family has been involved in Stephenson’s Jack Tale shows. Boyd Holland said of her two former students that she is “so proud of them every day” and wrote in August that Stephenson “taught me a lot about life, the theatre, and teaching.”
The discipline required to be a Ferrum Jack Tale Player also included demanding travel schedules in some stages of Stephenson’s career. In May, 2006, for example, he scheduled 47 shows in 23 days, including visits to each Franklin County elementary school. Todd Necessary, a drama teacher who finished his teaching degree at Ferrum in 1994 after becoming a Jack Tale Player in 1989, wrote that actors called Stephenson The Boss (as some of them still do today). Describing Stephenson as “my mentor, director, teacher, friend, and a brother,” Necessary said, “He told us when it is time to ‘Rock and Roll.’ Some of us said about being a Jack Tale Player that there is no parole from ‘Rock and Roll.’ I am a proud lifer without parole. I have spent my professional career majoring in Rex Stephenson.”
Stephenson was inspired to start dramatizing Jack Tales in 1975 when his daughter Janice Stephenson Watkins, currently a College staff member, brought The Jack Tales by Richard Chase home from her fourth-grade class at Ferrum Elementary School and asked him to read the tales to her. Watkins later performed with her father and appeared in one Homecoming show this fall, as well as a reunion show at the 50th annual Blue Ridge Folklife Festival in 2023. Chase’s books published in the 1940s made Appalachian folktales collected from the Hicks-Harmon-Ward family of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, as well as storytellers in southwestern Virginia and elsewhere, popular all over North America.
Stephenson said in a 2016 interview, “I recognized the value of these stories and believed that Virginia children should be exposed to these stories of their culture. I went searching for scripts and could find none, so I wrote a grant to the Virginia Commission of the Arts to allow me to research and dramatize these wonderful stories in Virginia. I’ve been doing that since December 11, 1975, performing with more than 400 college students and professional actors” in more than 3300 shows.
Many Appalachians, including Watkins and Professor of English Lana Whited, remember their teachers reading Jack Tales in school. Many others, especially around Franklin County, say that their favorite experience in elementary school was a visit from the Ferrum Jack Tale Players. Emma Brubaker ’23 made that comment when she attended a 2022 storytelling workshop at the Franklin County Public Library in Rocky Mount (a project funded by a Humanities for the Public Good grant from the Council of Independent Colleges), where she ended up playing a sheep in an audience participation scene in the noodlehead tale “Quare Jack.” Using the story theatre method of performance, Stephenson’s dramatizations are interactive and playful, with fast-paced action and innovative staging.
Stephenson did all the jobs along with teaching his players all aspects of running a theatre company. He appeared in many roles over the years with actors who might play a human or animal character, or an inanimate object such as a tree or door. He was often the narrator but might also appear as a dumb robber, a king, a devil, an old beggar man who was a magic helper in disguise—or even an ugly mean sister in “Mutsmag.”
Stephenson also had a sharp eye for audience reactions. He said that he knew he had a hit early on when they performed in the round and children blocked all four aisles because they were eager to get close to the action. While visiting Hanlon’s college English classes, he often enjoyed telling about a show when teachers had pressured the students so much to remain quiet and still that the atmosphere in that school cafeteria became too subdued. In the middle of the show he told the actors to run on the tables in the next scene. John VanPatten ’81, who performed in this year’s Homecoming shows, said he remembered how that surprising action stirred up some excitement in the audience.
Known widely as a dynamic storyteller, Chase visited Ferrum more than once in the late 1970s (on the right in the photograph with Stephenson), to advise the Jack Tale Players. Because his publishers would charge too much money for Stephenson to dramatize tales directly out of Chase’s books for schools and community groups, Stephenson had searched for archive copies of folktales. He found the James Taylor Adams Collection of folklore in Wise County, with tales and songs collected by Chase and others as a project of the Works Progress Administration, when Adams’ widow told Stephenson and his colleagues to look at the local college, where the 13,000 typed pages were stored in uncataloged boxes. A copy of that archive is now housed at the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum at Ferrum College. Director Emeritus Roddy Moore and Director Bethany Worley were involved with acquiring and cataloging the collection.
When Chase visited, he told “Wicked John” to Stephenson orally so he wouldn’t have to pay for the right to adapt it. The Appalachian version of a folktale known worldwide about a mean blacksmith who outwits the devil is still one of the most popular stories dramatized by the Jack Tale Players, along with a variety of trickster tales about adventures of the younger and friendlier folk hero Jack. The full-length Homecoming shows included “Wicked John” as well as “Jack and the Hainted House,” “Jack and the Robbers,” and “Hardy Hard Head.”
Berkeley Williams, Jr., who illustrated some of Chase’s books, created the iconic drawing on the cover of The Jack Tales (1943). It shows young Jack striding across the rural mountain landscape seeking adventure. Williams lived in Richmond, Virginia before he died in 1977. Because his widow gave the original drawing and a model of Jack’s head to Stephenson, the Jack Tale Players are able to use the illustration as their logo.
When the theatre arts program renovated the lower level of Schoolfield Hall and dedicated The Rex Stephenson Theatre in April 2023, graphic artist Mary Turner and Jack Tale Player Rachel Blankenship-Tucker painted a copy of the drawing on a wall in the lobby. They added the words “Welcome to The House that Jack Built,” after a sign that had been on the campus years ago. In the photograph Logann Gavey ’06, a former Jack Tale Player, posed at the wall when she visited from California in July.
Stephenson said in 2016 that at first school principals were not interested in what they perceived as hillbilly stories, so he “had to prove to administrators that these wonderful stories of a young man taking on challenges, and through his quick wit and dumb luck always succeeding, had a value far beyond what they expected.” He often mentioned that after Richmond reporter Katherine Calos wrote an article in early 1976 with the headline “Simple Jack Tales Educate,” he “had no trouble booking shows.”
Wanda Edwards Cook ’77 was an upperclass work study student assigned to the theatre just after the College began offering four-year programs and Stephenson started the Jack Tale shows. Like so many others over the years, she was then persuaded to perform. She wrote after his death, “I grew to love the stage. Especially playing in front of thousands of children in the round. Rex brought such imagination to the stage. What a blessing and privilege it was to grow under his magical wisdom he shared.”
The Jack Tale Players became a USO stateside touring group from 1978 to 1982, performing in sixty veterans’ hospitals from Boston to California, and New York to Florida. Willette Thompson, one of the first graduates of the drama major in 1982 and a theatre professional who returned many times to work with Stephenson, told Hanlon some years ago about how she handed her parents her diploma after graduation and got in a van to start one of the eight cross-country tours. “I think the best time I had with Jack Tales was the USO tours,” she said. “Performing for the veterans was one of the most fulfilling times in my career…. It really shows the power of the performing arts and the Jack Tale Players, a tradition that has stood the test of time.”
Some Jack Tale Players have been students at Ferrum from around the world—from Russia, South Korea, and Australia, for example. Stephenson took his Jack Tales to England when he taught in a summer program at Bretton Hall Academy of the Performing Arts. Former Jack Tale Player Thomas Townsend was surprised that Jack Tales became such a successful teaching tool, with physical action helping students understand the story and language, when he spent 2005 teaching English majors at Dongying Vocational College, in eastern China. Barbara Jenkins ’96 has said many times how proud she is that she took Jack Tales to Pskov University in Russia during an exchange program created by the late Professor Emerita Sasha Saari.
By 1998, Hanlon’s research on strong women in Appalachian folktales prompted Stephenson to begin dramatizing tales with spunky girls as the main characters, similar to Jack, who outwit giants and villainous guardians and siblings, such as “Mutsmag,” “Ashpet,” and “Catskins.” Although his scripts usually do not place music within a folktale, his music director Emily Blankenship-Tucker wrote music that he incorporated into “Catskins” in 2007. Another “strong women” script with comic appeal for older audiences is “The Three Old Women’s Bet,” about a contest to see which woman can make her husband look more foolish.
Most of Stephenson’s folktale dramatizations and adaptations of classic novels have been published and performed by other schools and theatre companies. Several have also been reprinted in books such as Nellie McCaslin’s Creative Drama in the Classroom; The United States of Storytelling, edited by Dan Keding; and Crosscurrents of Children’s Literature, co-edited by Hanlon with J. D. Stahl and Elizabeth Keyser. Council High School won awards up to the state level by performing his Jack Tales in 2019. Stephenson, Hanlon, and Stump surprised director Melanie Stevens’ students by attending the state drama competition in Charlottesville, where the young actors were thrilled to meet the playwright.
Creative drama expert Nellie McCaslin, Stephenson’s mentor in his doctoral work at New York University, wrote about this “extraordinary Jack Tales troupe” that “theatre for children and theatre for adults are enriched by the outstanding work of Rex Stephenson, and students are fortunate to have studied with him.”
The honors conferred on Stephenson for his folktale adaptations included winning a Floyd (VA) Community Theatre Guild Playwriting Competition in 2017, for Stories My Kinfolk Told to Me, and the IUPUI National Youth Theatre Playwriting Competition award for excellence in 1996 for Jack’s Adventures with the King’s Girl. In 2007 he received the prestigious Sara Spencer Child Drama Award from the Southeastern Theatre Conference.
When Stephenson retired from full-time work in 2012 and the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre closed as a summer theatre, he continued telling the tales, often with alumni or other performers, using the name Jack Tale Storytellers. From 2014 to 2018, he taught drama classes for the Ferrum College Summer Enrichment Camp. In one week he would teach middle-school-aged children how to retell fairy tales with paper-bag puppets they made, and how to stage a lively Jack Tale show for the camp community to enjoy on the last day (in 2015 in the photo). In 2022-23 he returned to part-time college teaching and the Jack Tale Players were reinstated as the professional company in residence for the College’s theatre arts program.
In 2023 the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre was granted a special license to stage a recent adaptation of Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, based on Jim Henson’s 1977 television special. The musical with a score by Paul Williams was produced that year only in Ferrum and one Chicago theatre, and only in Ferrum did the four characters in the jug-band play their own instruments as well as singing. Most of those jug-band characters have been Jack Tale Players and most of them have been college students in the three December productions since 2023. One reason that the Ferrum music and theatre faculty were successful in their daring request for special permission to produce it is the Jack Tale Players’ many years of experience performing folk songs with traditional instruments such as a washtub bass, washboard, spoons, and kazoos, as well as fiddles, guitars, and banjos.
In a 2023 book called Fairy Tales of Appalachia, Stacy Sivinski wrote that the long history of Rex Stephenson’s Jack Tale Players of Ferrum College “has also made a significant impact in ensuring that contemporary Appalachians remain invested in oral folklore traditions…. His plays also make a purposeful effort to draw attention to stories that feature strong Appalachian girls and women. Stephenson’s efforts—along with other festivals and university projects—illustrate that storytelling continues to hold a special place in Appalachian culture and still plays a role in maintaining and recreating regional identity.”
Photos from the 50th Anniversary mainstage shows at Homecoming
Photos from 2025 Jack Tale Players program at Inquiring Minds
Photos from 50th anniversary show at Callaway Elementary
Video of three Jack Tales performed at a school in 1990
Character sketch of Rex Stephenson by former teenage Jack Tale Player
Interview with Rex Stephenson on the Jack Tale Players by Tina Hanlon, 2016
