"The Last Chivaree" by Robert Isbell--Book Review

 

Over the last several months, I have become more interested in Appalachian oral storytelling and traditional Appalachian folk songs than I had ever been.  Although I had never really heard many of the traditional folk tales and Jack tales, I had always been aware of them.  But I became interested in the work of the great deceased Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks and have also learned of the work of Josiah H. Combs and others.  I was gifted a book called "Beech Mountain Man" about a nephew of Ray Hicks named Ronda Lee Hicks and based on audio recordings of Ronda Lee Hicks by the great Appalachian author, professor, and researcher Thomas Burton whom I had met at a large serpent handling church service in Western North Carolina.  I had also obtained, read, and written about "Rosie Hicks And Her Recipe Book" by Donnie Henderson Shedlarz which had also been edited and published by Thomas Burton after the death of Ms. Shedlarz.  All of these things led me to become more interested in Ray Hicks, his life and work.  

 

This book has apparently been produced and published in two different editions and under two different titles for some reason or other.  The author, Robert Isbell, also produced another book under the title "Ray Hicks Master Story Teller Of The Blue Ridge".  But, it seems this was just a reissue of "The Last Chivaree" which might have been done by the publisher, University Of North Carolina Press, in an effort to take advantage of the popularity and/or death of Ray Hicks.  The title, based on the Appalachian practice of the chivaree, may also have been using too obscure a word to increase sales.  A chivaree was a practice of throwing a party or, in come cases, a harassing event after a wedding.  I had heard of the word and the practice as a child from my father, Ballard Hicks, who told of chivaree's being practiced in his early days in the late 1800's and early 1900's in Knott County Kentucky.  Since I am writing more than one hundred years after that time, I probably owe my readers the explanation that my father was sixty-four years old when I was born and I benefited culturally from having him tell me the culturally based events of his early days.  I also benefited from the fact that I grew up in a country store and regularly heard my father and other men his age tell stories about their young days.  As my father described a chivaree, the harassment portion of the event involved a large group of friends, relatives, and neighbors of the bride and groom who showed up at their home for the wedding and threw a party.  But the party would often last all night long and part of the object was to keep the newly married couple up all night and prevent the immediate consummation of the marriage.  My father said this would involve both singing, dancing, story telling and simple noise making when all else failed.  The partiers might even resort to banging on pots and pans or shooting guns off into the night to disturb the newlyweds.  One of my father's favorite stories said that at one such marriage and chivaree that newlyweds had managed to go upstairs into the loft of the old log house to go to bed and the crowd below had dwindled down to only a few tired and quieter people who fell silent.  So his story goes, they suddenly heard the newlyweds talking in bed.  The dialogue went like this: 

Husband: "Well, I'm yours and you're mine."  

Wife: "Yes, we are."

Husband: "Well, you make the first move."  

The chivaree actually plays only a small part in Robert Isbell's book and is discussed only once in a brief section.  But this is an excellent book if you are interested in the life of Ray Hicks or Appalachian folk tales, Jack tales, or folk songs. It also gives an excellent account of life in Watauga County North Carolina in the early to middle twentieth century.  Robert Isbell knew Ray and Rosie Hicks well for many years and recorded numerous encounters with them.  The book is based on those recordings.  The book contains several of Ray Hicks' favorite stories and a few traditional folk songs as well as an excellent accounting of the life of the Hicks family in Watauga County.  Ray Hicks was a fascinating man who had grown up in poverty but was very self sufficient in subsistence farming and a variety of other rural agrarian occupations.  But, despite his fame, he never gained much money in his entire life.  He spent nearly all of his life in the aged farm house in which he was raised and within sight of the home of one set of his grandparents.  His wife Rosie had grown up in walking distance of Ray and their courtship took place almost exclusively on foot.  Ray would walk several miles to the home of Rosie's parents and spend the evenings sitting in front of the large stone fireplace in the little house which is described as "having ground hog hides nailed on the outside walls".  

This is an excellent book for the student of Appalachian Folkways, folk songs, Jack tales, and the rural, mountain lifestyle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  It is easy to locate on most used book websites and is well worth reading.