Jack Johnson, Townsend, Tennessee
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Jack Johnson was an enrollee in the CCC and would probably have been in his 20s when recorded in 1939.
[transcripption copyrigh Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed, 2017]
Jack Johnson, I live at Townsend, in Tuckaleechee Cove, Townsend is my post office address, Blount County, Tennessee.
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J: My name is Jack Johnson, and I live at, in Tuckaleechee Cove, my post office address is Townsend, Tennessee, I heared my brother-in-law tell a tale about his, about a man a-driving mules and horses to South Carolina, he come to a place and called to stay all night, and this, he got to stay all night there, and in the, in the night when he went to bed, why they was a man under the bed with his throat cut, and they come upstairs to kill this man, and he uh, they knocked him in the head, and, and they said he wasn’t a-bleeding, he had tuck the man out from under the bed and crawled under the bed hisself, and so next morning he come downstairs, and they had tied silk cords around a jack’s legs till he couldn’t walk, and it surprised them kindly when he come walking down the stairs, so he went on to another place and told them, they axed him how he could, how he ever got away from there, axed him where he stayed all night, axed him how he ever got away from there, never had been a man went there that stayed all night but what he never was heared tell of no more, and he told them how it was, and they went back then to, they went there then and arrested all of them and took them out of there, but I don’t know what they done with them, that’s all of that.
J: That, me and my brother-in-law one time left the White Oak, Dan Fry, left the White Oak and went to a-, went a-coon hunting one night, we went out to the s-, what’s called the Stocking Holler, it’s in the park now, and my dogs started right in the mouth of the big holler and run up till what’s called the hornet tree on the Defeat Ridge, we catched two kitten coons up there, and we set a big poplar tree afire down in there and burnt one up, I guess, so we come on back home, and you bet we had a mess out of that pie, that’s all of that.
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I: Another one now that you could tell us?
J: My, me and my brother went to the mouth of Devils Nest one time and, on what’s called the West Prong of Little River a-coon hunting, but we never done that much good, we just catched about three coon, two or three possum, and I believe we catched a polecat and killed one turkey on the tree.