Is Old Jack really Richard Chase? (American folktales, Jack tales)

For many scholars and narrators, after Richard Chase published The Jack Tal es in 1943 his name became synonymous with this type of narrative. Chase wa s an inveterate performer and told his collated versions of the tales throu ghout America; in some cases, he supplanted traditional tale tellers int he ir own communities. Though narrative scholars knew from the beginning that Chase's tales were bowdlerized compilations, original texts were not availa ble for purposes of comparing and analyzing Chase's alterations. As a part of the WPA's Virginia Writer's Project, however, twenty-eight Jack tales we re collected in Wise County, Virginia, in 1941 and 1942; these tales--unaff ected by Chase's alterations--were discovered in the early 1980s. When anal yzed in combination with the eleven Jack tales published by Isabel Gordon C arter in 1925, they make it possible to determine the nature of some change s made by Chase in his public presentations of 'Jack tales'. In this articl e, Perdue compares the distribution of particular traits in these published tales and determines that, in a number of ways, Richard Chase's Jack tales are less emblematic of the narrators he claimed to represent and more a re flection of himself.