Ray Hicks

Ray Hicks, North Carolina’s celebrated storyteller, lives atop Beech Mountain, in Watauga County, North Carolina. Though his home is near the College town of Boone, NC, he and his wife Rosa live in a manner more common to the pioneer than the modern mountaineer.

 One is struck first by his physical appearance, his lanky frame approaching seven feet. But the true marvel of the man is his verbal presence. He speaks a dialect of English that retains much of the vocabulary, phrasing, expression and accent of earlier English and Scots-Irish immigrants to the region -- so much so that he was featured on the PBS series “The Story of English.”

 Ray Hicks relishes the spoken word and is a natural storyteller. He moves into a story and is totally engrossed. He talks about the characters as if they’d just stepped “round back of his house”, or gone up the road a piece. Ray is particularly fond of telling a group of stories known as Jack Tales, which are kin to the well-known tales of Jack and The Beanstalk or Jack The Giant Killer.  The tales have ancient antecedents in Celtic and European folklore. In Ray’s interpretations, which may take the better part of an hour to complete, there is a wonderful weave of fairy tale elements with realistic trappings of Southern Appalachian Culture.

 He is also a powerful singer of traditional Appalachian ballads.  In 1983 Ray received the National Heritage Fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992 he received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award. He has appeared in a number of film documentaries and was profiled in New Yorker magazine.

 Ray was still telling stories even from his hospital bed up until his death April 20, 2003.  He was 80 years old.

Media By Ray Hicks