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Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers
"Winner of the North Carolina Society of Historians Award Jane Hicks Gentry lived her entire life in the remote, mountainous northwest corner of North Carolina and was descended from old Appalachian families in which singing and storytelling were part of everyday life. Gentry took this tradition to heart, and her legacy includes ballads, songs, stories, and riddles. Smith provides a full biography of this vibrant woman and the tradition into which she was born, presenting seventy of Gentry's songs and fifteen of the "Jack" tales she learned from her grandfather. When Englishman Cecil Sharp traveled through the South gathering material for his famous English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, his most generous informant was Jane Hicks Gentry. But despite her importance in Sharp's collection, Gentry has remained only a name on his pages. Now Betty Smith, herself a folksinger, brings to life this remarkable artist and her songs and tales.
240 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 14, 2016
I found this book at the checkout counter in Gentry Hardware in Hot Springs, NC--it turns out the book's subject is the storeowner's great grandmother.
It was my second visit to Hot Springs, an unspoiled mountain town through which runs the French Broad River and the Appalachian Trail. Its natural hot springs are a draw for tourists, but it is decidedly un-touristy: its compact downtown is quite unostentatious, one might think determinedly so, given the wealth of natural attractions amid which it sits.
On my first visit I had noticed a metal historical marker placed on the main downtown street in the vicinity of a sprawling old house with an expansive veranda. The marker mentioned that the English folksong collector Cecil Sharp (of whom I was already well aware) had visited back in 1916 and had blah blah blah. Well, it wasn't until the second visit and the purchase of this book that I appreciated the blah blah blah: it was Jane Hicks Gentry.
Hicks Gentry (I feel compelled to use the maiden name as well since that's the provenance of her wealth of music and stories) was an Appalachian mountain woman whose memory contained a wealth of traditional ballads and stories--Jack tales and Grandfather tales, so-called because they were learned from grandfathers, as Hicks Gentry did from her grandfather.
But more than that, she was herself a memorable person, as Betty Smith portrays her in the biographical portion of this book. For one thing, according to family reminiscence, if she was working, she was singing--and she was almost always working. She raised a family of nine children, first in the mountains (and we're talking mountains--the Max Patch area of North Carolina), then in the resort town of Hot Springs, where she with her farmer husband ran a boarding house for visitors drawn to the springs. It was not just farmwork and housework, it was also doing the innumerable tasks needed to transform home-raised wool into clothes, quilts, and fine tatting and lace. As she did all these things, Hicks Gentry sang and told stories. The stories in particular were apparently her clever way of recruiting her children to help her in the work so that, by entertaining them, they would not regard such an activity as a chore.
She seems to have become known by word-of-mouth, perhaps through the teachers at the Dorland Bell Academy, the Presbyterian "mountain mission" school in Hot Springs--she and her husband moved to town primarily to enable their children to have the formal education that the circumstances of mountain isolation had denied them--at a time when interest in the folk culture was growing. It was Cecil Sharp whose manual transcriptions of her songs succeeded in preserving the musical repertoire that was most meaningful to him, but no doubt her memory encompassed hundreds more songs, most of them hymns, as she was an active churchgoer.
Hicks Gentry (1863-1925) was never a performer as we think of performers--people who seek out an audience for the purpose of delivering a song or a story. However, she was always performing, in a sense, either for her children (as already mentioned) but also for the guests of her boardinghouse, whom she kept entertained after serving them a capacious, delicious family-style dinner. (One wishes that Cecil Sharp could have somehow preserved one of those!) These guests came away thinking her the happiest person in the world.
The week after she died, there was a picture of her in the Asheville Times Citizen. There was no name given, no obituary, and no mention of her death. The caption was simply "Happiest Person."
Betty Smith does a marvelous job reconstructing Hicks Gentry's life from very few records. Hicks Gentry herself left exactly one written document--a letter to Sharp. Smith uses genealogy to plot the kinship web that brought story and song from England to the Appalachians. The best portions though are the renderings of the mountain life drawn from the passed-down memories of Hicks Gentry's immediate family and Smith's own knowledge of mountain nature and culture.
Best of all to bibliophiles is that the book doubles as biography and source material. Part I is the biographical portion; Part II is a collection of Hicks Gentry's Jack Tales as recorded in 1923 by Isabel Gordon Carter; and Part III is a collection of songs (music manuscript of the melody and lyrics) sung by Hicks Gentry and her daughter Maud Long.
It was my second visit to Hot Springs, an unspoiled mountain town through which runs the French Broad River and the Appalachian Trail. Its natural hot springs are a draw for tourists, but it is decidedly un-touristy: its compact downtown is quite unostentatious, one might think determinedly so, given the wealth of natural attractions amid which it sits.
On my first visit I had noticed a metal historical marker placed on the main downtown street in the vicinity of a sprawling old house with an expansive veranda. The marker mentioned that the English folksong collector Cecil Sharp (of whom I was already well aware) had visited back in 1916 and had blah blah blah. Well, it wasn't until the second visit and the purchase of this book that I appreciated the blah blah blah: it was Jane Hicks Gentry.
Hicks Gentry (I feel compelled to use the maiden name as well since that's the provenance of her wealth of music and stories) was an Appalachian mountain woman whose memory contained a wealth of traditional ballads and stories--Jack tales and Grandfather tales, so-called because they were learned from grandfathers, as Hicks Gentry did from her grandfather.
But more than that, she was herself a memorable person, as Betty Smith portrays her in the biographical portion of this book. For one thing, according to family reminiscence, if she was working, she was singing--and she was almost always working. She raised a family of nine children, first in the mountains (and we're talking mountains--the Max Patch area of North Carolina), then in the resort town of Hot Springs, where she with her farmer husband ran a boarding house for visitors drawn to the springs. It was not just farmwork and housework, it was also doing the innumerable tasks needed to transform home-raised wool into clothes, quilts, and fine tatting and lace. As she did all these things, Hicks Gentry sang and told stories. The stories in particular were apparently her clever way of recruiting her children to help her in the work so that, by entertaining them, they would not regard such an activity as a chore.
She seems to have become known by word-of-mouth, perhaps through the teachers at the Dorland Bell Academy, the Presbyterian "mountain mission" school in Hot Springs--she and her husband moved to town primarily to enable their children to have the formal education that the circumstances of mountain isolation had denied them--at a time when interest in the folk culture was growing. It was Cecil Sharp whose manual transcriptions of her songs succeeded in preserving the musical repertoire that was most meaningful to him, but no doubt her memory encompassed hundreds more songs, most of them hymns, as she was an active churchgoer.
Hicks Gentry (1863-1925) was never a performer as we think of performers--people who seek out an audience for the purpose of delivering a song or a story. However, she was always performing, in a sense, either for her children (as already mentioned) but also for the guests of her boardinghouse, whom she kept entertained after serving them a capacious, delicious family-style dinner. (One wishes that Cecil Sharp could have somehow preserved one of those!) These guests came away thinking her the happiest person in the world.
The week after she died, there was a picture of her in the Asheville Times Citizen. There was no name given, no obituary, and no mention of her death. The caption was simply "Happiest Person."
Betty Smith does a marvelous job reconstructing Hicks Gentry's life from very few records. Hicks Gentry herself left exactly one written document--a letter to Sharp. Smith uses genealogy to plot the kinship web that brought story and song from England to the Appalachians. The best portions though are the renderings of the mountain life drawn from the passed-down memories of Hicks Gentry's immediate family and Smith's own knowledge of mountain nature and culture.
Best of all to bibliophiles is that the book doubles as biography and source material. Part I is the biographical portion; Part II is a collection of Hicks Gentry's Jack Tales as recorded in 1923 by Isabel Gordon Carter; and Part III is a collection of songs (music manuscript of the melody and lyrics) sung by Hicks Gentry and her daughter Maud Long.
July 12, 2010
I stayed at a great inn in Hot Springs, North Carolina and asked the host if he had a book that talked about the famous singer that had lived there. He picked this book off one of the overflowing bookshelves (one reason I love this inn, the other is the great cooking). It was a real treat to sit on the porch and let a book transport me back to a time when you could sit on the very same porch and hear Jane Gentry singing ballads as she worked.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews