Jane Hicks Gentry
[The main source of Jane Hicks Gentry's repertoire was Council Harmon, her grandfather. Jane's mother was Emmoline Harmon (1835-1909) and her father was Ransom Merritt Hicks (1843-1900). Ramson's father was Hiram Hicks (1811-1910) who married Jane Tester (1817-1860). Jane's mother, Emmoline was one of Council and Mary Tester's many children. Jane got songs from both the Hicks and Harmon families, but most of them from Council. Council's father died when he was just 7 so he lived with Susan Harmon and John Mast. He got to know his grandfather on his mother's side, "Big Sammy," who was a repository of many ballads and tales.
Jane Hicks Gentry (1863- 1925) was Cecil Sharp's best informant. She moved with her family to Hot Springs, NC (Madison County) after the Civil War c.1875 (Smith has 1898) -- Jane was 12 at the time. She married Jasper Newton Gentry 1860-1922 and her daughter Maud Long, learned her mother's songs and Maud was recorded and collected.
I recommended reading- Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers by Betty Smith. There are reviews and articles below.
R. Matteson 2014]
Review: Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers.
by Ted Olson
American Music, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 426-428
Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers. By Betty N. Smith. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. ISBN 0813109361 (paper). Pp. xiv + 226. $25.00
Jane Hicks Gentry (1863-1925)-a ballad singer, storyteller, and major informant for English folklorist Cecil Sharp during his World War I-era collecting trips into Appalachia (Sharp's landmark book, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians [1932], included more ballads and songs collected from Gentry than from any other informant)--has been rather widely known in Appalachian folk music revivalist circles for decades. It is thus rather surprising that Betty N. Smith's recent book, Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers, is the first significant study of any length to explore either Gentry's life or her family's verbal folklore traditions.
One of Smith's motivations for studying Gentry was the author's realization that "[collectors of oral materials tend to tell us more about the songs and stories than about the singers and tellers of tales" (xii). Lamenting the tendency of many verbal folklore collections to cite the collector but not the informant, Smith attests that "the most important person must always be the
tradition bearer" (xii). In order to write a biography of this particular tradition bearer, however, she had to contend with the fact that Gentry left virtually no written record (no diary and no letters), so Smith was forced to rely heavily on the recollections of Gentry's friends and children, virtually all whom were advanced in years when interviewed. Smith started her project just in the nick of time.
Unlike previous representations of early-twentieth-century traditional artists that tend to characterize informants as passive, faceless voices from marginalized social backgrounds, Smith's book portrays Gentry as a self-motivated, analytical preserver of traditional culture. Although her various relatives had likewise inherited her family's extensive repertoire of traditional
ballads, songs, and stories (brought to the New World by Gentry's English forebears in the eighteenth century), Gentry, asserts Smith, was singularly aware of the value of those verbal traditions and how they might help people retain a sense of cultural identity in a rapidly changing world.
Jane Hicks Gentry focuses on four primary subjects: Gentry, her ancestors,
Gentry's influence on her descendants, and her family's singing and storytelling
traditions. Smith consciously ignores theoretical examinations, stating,
"I would not want this quiet singer to become lost in the jargon" (xii). Nevertheless,
the author concedes that Gentry's life could readily be interpreted
from a feminist perspective. Indeed, though Smith does not analyze her subject
accordingly, Jane Hicks Gentry effectively illustrates the historical pattern
of women serving as the primary agents of culture in preindustrial America.
"Women on the frontier were the bearers of tradition," Smith writes. "Jane
Gentry was not only a tradition bearer in her own family, she kept the songs
and stories alive by singing and telling them wherever she was" (5).
Despite having been settled by various European Americans years before, Madison County, North Carolina, where Gentry lived, harbored vestiges of
traditional culture well into the twentieth century. After spending her childhood
and early adulthood in rural environments in Watauga (also in North
Carolina) and Madison Counties, in 1898 Gentry moved with her husband
and children to Madison County's resort town, Hot Springs. There, witnessing
the effects of "Progress," Gentry took a preservationist view of her family's
cultural traditions. She began to share her family's ballads, songs, and
stories with a wide range of people-not only in the boardinghouses she operated,
but also at the Dorland Institute, the Presbyterian mission school her
children attended. Although she possessed certain characteristics (such as
dialect and lack of formal education) associated with the "hillbilly" stereotype
that was entrenched in the minds of many "outsiders" of that era, Gentry's
common sense, kindness, handiness, humor, and skill as singer and storyteller
won the respect of many "non-natives," including the Dorland Institute's Northern-born teachers and many Hot Springs tourists (one bestselling
writer even invited Gentry to visit his family in Connecticut, an offer
she accepted).
Jane Hicks Gentry is not necessarily a weaker book for its noninclusion of theoretical infrastructure. Smith has done the important work of recovering information about Gentry; others can analyze it. The book's main weaknesses are occasional lapses in organizational clarity. For example, on page 10 Smith poses an intriguing genealogical question: which of Gentry's lineages- the Hickses or the Harmons--originally transported her family's distinctive verbal traditions from the Old World to Watauga County? Smith does not propose an answer until four chapters later (pp. 56-57), after the author has discussed many other aspects of Gentry's life. Readers, when encountering that answer, might well have forgotten the implications of the original question.
After approximately one hundred pages of biography, Jane Hicks Gentry features an anthology of transcribed ballads, songs, and stories from Gentry's repertoire. The ballad and song transcriptions include notated melody lines as well as lyrics. Among the transcribed stories are a number of Jack Tales; members of Gentry's extended family have been telling stories from this traditional British story-cycle in western North Carolina for at least two centuries (several relatives-most notably, contemporary storyteller Ray Hicks-continue to do so today). Appropriately, given that Gentry's repertoire
constituted a family tradition (which she claimed to have learned from
her mother, Emily Harmon Hicks, though that tradition was also familiar to
Gentry's father, Ransom Merritt Hicks), the anthology section of the book
attempts to demonstrate Gentry's influence on her descendants by comparing
her repertoire with that of her daughter Maud Gentry Long, who was
also a recognized traditional singer and storyteller.
Smith's fascination with Jane Hicks Gentry resulted at least partly from the
fact that Smith is likewise from a family of singers-her father sang ballads
and regularly participated in shape-note singings. Born and raised in the
North Carolina Piedmont, Smith attended college in Greensboro and Atlanta,
then settled in the same rugged Appalachian county in which Gentry had
lived. Since the late 1960s Smith has been one of the more active figures in
the Appalachian folk-music revival, balancing performances and recordings
(generally of traditional British and Appalachian ballads and songs) with educational
roles (she frequently conducts workshops exploring various aspects
of folk-music performance, and she has designed several curriculums utilizing
folk ballads and songs for the teaching of music and cultural history).
Clearly, Gentry has been a role model for Smith. It is to our benefit that,
with the publication of Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers, this inspiring
historical figure has been rendered more accessible to the rest of us.
Ted Olson
East TennesseeS tate University
---------------------
Review: [Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers]
James Porter
Folklore, Vol. 113, No. 1 (Apr., 2002), pp. 107-109
Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers. By Betty N. Smith. With a Foreword Cecilia by Conway. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 226 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-8131-0936-1
This is a welcome addition to studies of individual traditional singers, alive or dead. In this case, the subject of the study, Jane Hicks Gentry (1863-1925), had been dead more than fifty years before Betty Smith, the author, embarked on her research. This is not quite the 200-year gap faced by, for example, Bronson or David Buchan in studying the Scottish singer Anna Brown, nor does it align closely with the synchronic study of more recent traditional singers in Britain and North America. But the author's research is relieved, on the one hand, of the thorny difficulties in distant historical research, and, on
the other, of the ethical and psychological issues in interpreting living performers. Once
a singer has passed on, research into and interpretation of their life, repertoire and
context often become a matter of reminiscence, of anecdote, of faded paper cuttings.
Fortunately, in this instance, though, a phonographed oral tradition from the 1950s
through Maud Long, Jane's daughter, makes the anecdotes and yellowed paper come
dramatically alive as part of a wondrous regional fabric of American folk traditions.
Jane Gentry was one of a large complex of Hicks (or Hix) and Harmon families who
intermarried (diagram, p. 11). Ray Hicks, who has been called a "classic American
storyteller," especially of Jack tales, related that the Hicks family came to North Carolina
from Virginia, and ultimately from England-possibly Northern England, where song
traditions have elements in common with those of the Scottish border. The first member
of the Watauga County line of the Hicks family seems to have arrived in Virginia in
1637. The traditions of this proliferating group of families, at any rate, became the focus
for avid collectors from the 1920s: Robert Winslow Gordon, Bascom Lamar Lumsford,
Frank C. Brown and others were at work gathering lore in the southern mountains. In
1930, the Mellinger Henrys collected traditional songs from Samuel Harmon of Blount
County, Tennessee; Herbert Halpert, too, recorded several of Sam's Jack tales. But Jane
Gentry's fame stems mainly from the collecting activity of Cecil Sharp, who found his
way to Madison County in 1916.
Sharp and Isabel Gordon Carter published Jane Gentry's songs and tales but told us
very little about her. Sharp admired Jane's songs in both quality and quantity, giving
them an honoured place in his English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932),
and Carter described some of her orally-learned narratives in the Journal of American
Folklore 38 (1925) and 47 (1934). The writer, Irving Bacheller (1859-1950), wrote about
Jane Gentry in his novel, The Tower of a Hundred Bells (1916), inviting her to his house
in Greenwich, Connecticut. But until now, a full biography was lacking. Jane was the
first child of Ransom and Emily Hicks, and said about her early years, "My pappy were
a minister, name of Ransom Hicks. Mammy were always peckin' me over the head with
a stick. She were turrible ill and cross, pore woman! I were that foundered with the
peckin' that I declar'd that I would never whup ef God sent me childern. You'll whup
as much into 'em as you whup out o' em." And later, of her life growing up, "Twere like
a three-legged cat's. They didn't show me till I were nine yur old. I used to walk miles
and miles bar'foot in the snow."
In the evening at home, when the supper dishes were done, Emily would join the
family around the fire. Songs, stories, and riddles often accompanied her spinning, and
in this context, Jane learned the songs and tales. When she was sixteen, Jane married
Jasper Newton Gentry, though the parents were against the marriage because of her age.
After bearing nine children, Jane and her family moved to Hot Springs, a small town of
seven hundred people six miles east of the Tennessee border, in 1898. It was here that
Sharp and Maud Karpeles collected seventy ballads and songs from Jane, encouraged by
the indefatigable Olive Campbell, who had collected around 225 ballads before Sharp's
arrival. On Wednesday, 23 August 1916, Sharp and John Campbell caught the train from
Asheville, North Carolina to Hot Springs and on 24 August, he and Maud called on Mrs
Gentry, who sang twenty songs for them, including "The Cherry Tree Carol," "Fair
Annie," "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor," "The Wife of Usher's Well," "Little Musgrave,"
"Johnny Dials," "The Sheffield Apprentice," "Pretty Peggy O," "William and
Polly," "Jack Went A-Sailing," "John Riley," "The Grey Cock," and a humorous song,
"My Mother Bid Me." Sharp visited Jane again in September, taking down fifteen more
songs. Sharp's relations with the singers he interviewed, including Jane, were cordial,
partly because they perceived that he was not another land speculator. But Jane Gentry's
contribution did not exhaust her repertoire, as Maud Long attested; the old hymns in
particular were items overlooked by Sharp and others in their zeal for collecting old
ballads. Jane Gentry died on 29 May 1925.
Betty Smith's book traces the history of the family and the localities in Part I of this
study, while Part II is given over to a transcription of fifteen Jack tales (including that
with the disconcerting title of "Old Stiff Dick") as published by Isabel Gordon Carter in
1925 or, alternatively, recorded by Maud Long for Duncan Emrich in 1947. Part III
consists of Jane Gentry's songs (the music transcribed from Sharp's manuscripts and
Maud Long's tapes by John Forbes of Baker University, Kansas). Sharp collected, for
example, only one tune and one verse of "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor" [sic] from Jane
(p. 147) and this has been supplemented by Maud Long's full text and tune recorded by
Artus Moser in 1944 (pp. 148-9). A similar tack has been taken with Jane's tune for
"Barbara Allen," followed by Maud's full text and tune (pp. 152-3). These comparative
printings are useful for noting the stability of tunes within the family, and their
reproduction in Bronson is duly noted. The "old hymns" mentioned by Maud Long,
however, unfortunately do not appear in the seventy-one songs included here; the
selectivity highlighted by David E. Whisnant in his All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics
of Culture in an American Region (1983) is still evident, and Betty Smith might, I think,
have dug a little deeper to convey the full flavour of Jane Gentry's song repertoire in
particular. Despite the rich historical detail, I also missed a sense of Jane's wider place
in the larger British-American folksong tradition. By and large, however, this is a
valuable study in the growing documentation of traditional singers and their domestic
context.
James Porter, University of Aberdeen, UK
--------------------
Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Michael Yates
Source: Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 5 (1999), pp. 661-664
On Sunday 24 May 1998, I drove to Hot Springs in Madison County, North Carolina,
in company with my wife and Tennessee folklorist Bobby Fulcher. We were going to
'Sunnybank', Jane Gentry's former home, where Betty Smith was to launch her biography
of Mrs Gentry. It was fifteen years since I had last visited that part of western North
Carolina and the changes were quite staggering. The narrow, claustrophobic roads that I
remembered had grown in size with the addition of extra metalled lanes. There was now
a Buddhist Retreat Centre on the edge of town and a vegetarian restaurant in the main
street. Later that day we met many of Mrs Gentry's grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
What, I kept asking myself, would Cecil Sharp have made of all this?
Sharp first visited Mrs Gentry on the morning of
A 1~1h Thursday 24 August 1916, having been ferried across
A m Sg t ithe French Broad River in a punt. It was to be the first
of at least eight visits, and Mrs Gentry was to give him
more songs than any other of his Appalachian singers.
Betty Smith includes seventy-one of these songs, some
from the singing of Mrs Gentry's daughter Maud Long,
including versions of twenty-two Child ballads and
twenty Anglo-American broadsides. With a repertoire
like this, it is easy to see why Sharp visited Mrs Gentry
so often.
Sharp had spent the previous few weeks collecting
in the so-called Laurel Section of Madison County, a
few miles from Hot Springs, and it is interesting to see
how different Mrs Gentry's repertoire was from that of
other nearby singers. Mrs Gentry alone presented Sharp
with versions of 'Fair Annie' (Child 62) and 'The Grey
Cock' (Child 248) whilst she was the only North Carolina singer to give him versions of
'The False Knight Upon the Road' (Child 3), 'Lamkin' (Child 93) and 'Johnny Scott'
(Child 99). Mrs Gentry was also the holder of a number of Jack Tales, some of which were collected from her in 1923 by Isabel Gordon Carter. These are also reprinted by Betty Smith, together with other tales from Maud Long.
I had often wondered why Mrs Gentry's repertoire was so different from the other Madison County singers. And, for that matter, why her Jack Tales were similar to those collected in the vicinity of Beech Mountain, Watauga County, North Carolina, to the north of Hot Springs. Now we have the answer. Cecil Sharp always referred to Mrs Gentry as Jane Gentry. Betty Smith calls her Jane Hicks Gentry and tells us that Mrs Gentry was born Jane Hicks in Watauga County. She was a direct descendant of Council Harmon, a singer and story teller who influenced many generations of Beech Mountain residents. Compare, for example, Mrs Gentry's version of 'Lamkin' with that sung by Frank Proffitt or her version of 'The Grey Cock' with the one collected from Hattie Hicks Presnell. Mrs Gentry's refrain for 'The Two Sisters':
Jury flower gent the roseberry,
The jury hangs over the roseberry.
is also strikingly simnilarto that sung by another Beech Mountain singer, Lee Monroe
Presnell:
Jinny flower jen, a rosemary,
And the jury hangs over the rosemary.
Reviews- Books 663
Betty Smith's book tells us much about Jane Gentry's early life and history. She was,
it seems, a quiet, retiring sort of person who was modest about her achievements. When
she died in 1925 it is unlikely that she would ever have imagined that a later singer would
produce such an excellent tribute to her life. I can add little to what Mrs Smith says,
except to note that the 'unknown singer' photographed with Cecil Sharp and Maud
Karpeles was Mrs Lucindy Pratt of Hindman in Knott County, Kentucky and that the
photograph was taken on 22 September 1917, probably by Elizabeth Watts, who was
with Sharp that day and who later became Director of the Hindman Settlement School.