Chase, Richard (1904–88), American folklorist and storyteller. As a young schoolteacher, he was one of the first to record the traditional tales and songs of the southern Appalachian mountains. They were published as The Jack Tales: Told by R. M. Ward and his Kindred in the Beech Mountain Section of Western North Carolina and by Other Descendants of Council Harmon (1803–1896) Elsewhere in the Southern Mountains: With Three Tales from Wise County, Virginia (1943), Grandfather Tales: American‐English Folk Tales (1948), and Hullabaloo, and Other Singing Folk Games. As Chase noted, many of the stories he collected were modernized and Americanized versions of popular European fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The Brave Little Tailor’. In ‘Jack and Old Tush’, for instance, the hero ends up not with a princess and half a kingdom, but with a pretty girl and ‘a pretty house and some good land and a thousand dollars’.

Chase's best‐known work, American Folk Tales and Songs (1956), includes many remarkable tales of magic, humorous tales, legends, songs, and ballads from his collections and those of other folklorists. His notes include the names of the original storytellers and singers, and discuss European parallels. The book has been criticized for sometimes combining several recorded versions of a story or song into one, but it is still in print and widely read and admired.

— Alison Lurie