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Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Joines Family Collection #20037, Southern Folklife Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Acquisitions information unknown (Acc. 102550).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Encoded by: Anne Wells, March 2016

Archival processing of the Joines Family Collection was made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Anecdotes--North Carolina.
• Ballads, English--North Carolina.
• Folk music--North Carolina.
• Folklore--North Carolina.
• Jennings, Jim, 1928-
• Joines, Jerry D.
• Joines, John E.
• Legends--North Carolina.
• Moravian Falls (N.C.)--Social life and customs.
• Musicians--North Carolina--Interviews.
• Newman, Joyce Joines.
• North Carolina--Biography.
• North Carolina--Social life and customs.
• Oral history.
• Storytellers--North Carolina--Biography.
• Storytelling--North Carolina.
• Superstition--North Carolina.
• Tales--North Carolina.
• Tall tales--North Carolina.
• Wilkes County (N.C.)--Biography.
• Wilkes County (N.C.)--Genealogy.
• Wilkes County (N.C.)--Social life and customs.

• Tom Davenport Papers (#20025)
• Folkore Program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Records (#40362)
• Folkstreams.net Collection (#20384)
• Daniel W. Patterson and Beverly Bush Patterson Papers (#20026)
• Southern Folklife Collection Field Notes (#30025)

Traditional storyteller, John Elree Joines, or "Frail," as he was nicknamed and always called, was born in 1914 in in Wilkes County, N.C. He was the fourth of nine children to John Wesley James and Gertrude Brock Joines. Due to his large size as a baby, Frail was nicknamed after a local overweight man named Fraley, and the nickname stuck throughout Joines' life. Other people spelled the nickname as Frale or Fraley, but Joines preferred the spelling of Frail.

Frail reached the eighth grade, excelling in arithmetic, spelling, and geography, but estimates that he actually attended school only four years, and rarely as much as two months a year. His chief schooling was in how to work animals and care for them, to prepare the land, plant, tend, and harvest crops, to cut and haul timber, and to perform other tasks of a farming community. At the age of thirteen Frail left home as a result of a dispute with his father, moved to the home of a married sister, and began to earn his own living. He worked three years for an orchard, eighteen months at a saw mill, two years for a farmer, nine months at a furniture factory, several years breaking mules and horses in Wilkes and neighboring counties, three years logging, and one year at a mirror factory. He was an unusually strong young man. On his eighteenth birthday, he won a bet by carrying five hundred pounds of feed around a store building, one sack under each arm, one on each shoulder, and one grasped in his teeth.

In 1942 he enlisted in the Army and for the first time traveled further than a hundred and fifty miles from home. He trained in Illinois and Colorado and served in England and Scotland as a medic. He crossed the English channel to France seventeen days after the D-Day invasion and was a ward master in a thousand-bed field hospital first in Carentan and then in Commercy. During the Battle of the Bulge he volunteered for the Infantry and was sent to the front as a medic in January 1945. He was on the front lines from then until the end of World War II, in campaigns in northern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. His unit, the 328th Infantry Regiment of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Division of Patton's Third Army, was thirty miles beyond Linz when the war ended on May 8, 1945.

During the war Frail's sister had arranged a correspondence between him and one of her husband's relatives, Blanche Clanton. Frail and Blanche became interested in each other and met when he came home on a furlough in April 1943. They married during his second furlough, on August 9th of that year, just before he went overseas.

Blanche Clanton was born June 19, 1922, on a farm in Iredell County, N.C., a neighboring Piedmont county. Her father left the family when she was two or three, and her mother moved to Kannapolis, N.C. to earn a living taking in mill workers as boarders. She later moved back to a town in Iredell County and remarried. Blanche did not attend school beyond the seventh grade. At fourteen she worked for some months in the spinning room of a cotton mill, but had to leave when the Child Labor Law was passed. From then until her marriage she lived with her mother, helping her to farm and also picking some cotton and sewing for neighbors.

After Frail returned from the war, he and Blanche had three children, Joyce (Newman Joines), Carol (Sivalia), and Jerry. Frail wanted to support his family by farming and was able to buy a farm after the war, but the first of his two back injuries forced him to give it up. Later the inflation of land prices put farm ownership beyond his reach. He consequently worked during these years as manager of an orchard, as caretaker of an estate, as a mechanic in a garage, as a surveyor, and as a landscaper. He retired in 1978, but he and Mrs. Joines enjoyed raising much of their own food in a family garden. Mrs. Joines had worked for Woolworth's department store, for an orchard, and for several florists. Her own effort to set up a flower shop, like her husband's earlier attempt to buy and operate a farm, was ended by sickness. In 1965 she had to stop work because of heart trouble. She continued for many years to live in their home, but in 2003 lives in Carrboro, N.C. Frail died at the age of 67 on April 24, 1982.

All three of Frail and Blanche's children attended universities as honors students and earned graduate degrees. Folklorist and artist, Joyce Newman, has two master's degrees, including a masters in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1978). Her sister Carol Sivalia has an M.S. in genetics, and her brother Jerry Joines has an M.D. and Ph.D. Joyce Newman Joines also played a significant role in the production of Being A Joines: A Life in the Brushy Mountains. Made by Tom Davenport, Allen Tullos, Joyce Joines Newman, and Daniel Patterson in 1981, the documentary film chronicles the life of Frail as a master tale teller, husband, and father. In the film he discusses hunting tales, stories from World War II, and religious narratives. The life stories of Frail and Blanche mirror changes that swept away much of the traditional culture of his Appalachian rural community in a single generation and show the character and values with which his family met these circumstances.

Biography courtesy of Folkstreams.net

The Joines Family Collection consists of 1 audiocassette and 21 open reel recordings that feature John E. "Frail" Joines (1914- ), an Anglo-American traditional storyteller from Moravian Falls, Wilkes County, N.C. Joines' son, Jerry Dale Joines, and daughter, Joyce Joines Newman, compiled these oral history recordings, 1971-1979, which feature their father sharing tall tales, stories from World War II, hunting tales, religious narratives, local anecdotes, ballads, and songs. Jim Jennings (1928- ), an Anglo-American storyteller who has learned from Joines, is included in a few of the recordings performing tales he learned from Joines. John E. Joines was featured in the 1981 documentary film, Being A Joines: A Life in the Brushy Mountains, by Tom Davenport, Allen Tullos, Joyce Joines Newman, and Daniel Patterson.

• Audiocassette (FS-20037/1208)
• Audiotapes (FT-20037/192-201, FT-20037/368-369, FT-20037/432, FT-20037/1208, FT-20037/1234-1235, FT-20037/6060-6064, and FT-20037/6115)
• Field tape notes (Folders 152, 399, 400, 423, 435, and 550 within the Southern Folklife Collection Field Notes #30025)