Joel Chandler Harris worked for a plantation newspaper owner, where he heard Black people telling the stories of Bre'r Rabbit and others. These stories' origins are in Western Africa, and were the remembered tellings from the time before enslavement.
Harris listens to the stories and then takes them, writing them in "Georgia Black dialect" (as he heard it) and bringing them to a broader white audience. In particular, Harris "creates" the Uncle Remus storytelling authority, relying on a mix of racist caricatures to depict the elder.