Alexis Luckey
April 28, 2005
Folklore
'Authentic' Folksinger, Coalminer Diva:
Aunt Molly Jackson in New York City
In a life spanning eighty years, Aunt Molly Jackson (1880–1960) assumed a variety of identities: miner's wife, mother, widow, midwife, union organizer, political activist, and ballad singer. Briefly popular for her role as a political symbol and folksinger in 1930s New York City, Jackson's name has since drifted into relative obscurity. Nonetheless the Kentucky woman was once called "one of America's best native ballad singers" by the man usually credited with that honor, Woody Guthrie.[1] Invited to New York to sing about the plight of the 'Bloody Harlan' strikers in 1931, Jackson lived in that city for much of the decade and participated in Greenwich Village's urban folk revival in the pre-war years. She came to be perceived by intellectuals of the time as an "authentic" representative of the American folk. Her folk identity, initially recognized and co-opted by writers of the political left, was later crafted for symbolic purchase by political groups, folk collectors, and, most importantly, Jackson herself. A creative storyteller who delighted in the limelight, Jackson was an active and willing participant in the production of her folk identity. Notorious for her tendency to embellish and prevaricate, she confused and frustrated folk collectors and biographers by telling contradictory stories and falsely claiming authorship of others' songs. This habit, though it branded Jackson as a problematic informant in folk collection circles, reveals a fascinating aspect of the process of identity construction: a pattern of mutual manipulation between the subject and the researcher. The complicated nature of this relationship is evident in the rich stories—though sometimes of ambiguous veracity—told of Jackson's life.
A ninth-generation Kentuckian, Mary Magdalene Garland (whose name would later grow to include Mills, Stewart, Jackson, and Stamos) was born in 1880 in Clay County and wrote her first song at the age of four. She remembered sitting on the lap of her ninety-two-year-old great grandmother, Nancy Mac Mahan, and learning the songs of her ancestors, such as "The Gypsey Davey" and "Lord Thomas." From her great grandmother, Jackson acquired a repertoire of more than 100 old songs, which folk collector Alan Lomax would later record her singing for the Library of Congress archive. When Jackson was six, her mother died, and she took over much of the responsibility of caring for her siblings. Her father, Oliver Garland, later remarried a woman named Elizabeth; but his young daughter resented her new stepmother. Jim Garland, Jackson's younger stepbrother, provides the earliest example of Jackson's tendency to make up stories. He says she "claimed [her stepmother] would tie a meat skin to a piece of string, force us to swallow the meat, and then pull it back out of our throats."[2]
By all accounts Jackson was something of a troublemaker in her youth; later she often recounted—"elaborat[ing] slightly depending on her audiences"[3]—the story of her arrest at age ten (or twelve, according to Jim Garland[4]). After blacking her face with charcoal and donning a disguise, Jackson spooked the residents of a neighboring farmhouse who reported her to the sheriff. To teach her a lesson, Oliver Garland made his daughter serve the brief jail sentence, during which she composed a song pleading to the jailer for her release. Each stanza ended "Mr. Cundif, turn me loose." Jackson claimed the song was so well liked around the jail that she was given "thirty-seven dollars and twenty seven plugs of 'tobaker' and the jailer's wife made me a satin dress with 'yeler' butterflies, and she bought me a high top pair of fine button shoes and a handbag."[5] In other retellings of the incident, perhaps when convenient in establishing her union activist persona, Jackson would claim she was jailed for her family's unionizing efforts.[6]
According to her brother Jim Garland, Jackson briefly married a man named John Mills, though she never mentioned him to the folk researchers interested in her history. At thirteen, she married Jim Stewart, and soon bore two children who probably died in infancy. She raised two of Stewart's children from a previous marriage, and four of a later husband, Bill Jackson.[7] Presumably, it was one of these stepchildren about whose death in the coal mines Jackson would later sing of "her son" dying.
Jackson became a midwife at twelve; she nursed and delivered babies at Clay County Hospital for ten years before setting up her own practice in Harlan County. Young for her profession, Jackson was called "Aunt" Molly instead of the usual mountain term for midwives: "Granny." Biographer Shelly Romalis notes the significance of the fact that even the usually skeptical Jim Garland confirmed his sister's reputation as a midwife. Garland wrote: "[She] delivered far more babies during those years [1910 to 1932] than did all the doctors on both Horse Creek in Clay County and Straight Creek in Bell County. According to Molly's own estimate, she attended over 5,000 births."[8] This number, like so much data in Jackson's history, varies widely according to the telling; Jackson told Dreiser Committee interviewers that she had delivered 65 children,[9] Woody Guthrie was under the impression that "she helped to bring over a hundred little babies into the world,"[10] and a New York journalist—presumably sourcing Jackson—put the number at 600.[11] Whatever the gross factual disparities, Jackson's experiences as a midwife provided ample opportunity to witness the impoverished situation of neighboring mining families. Many of Jackson's protest ballads woefully testify about these sick and starving children of Kentucky miners.
Never one to keep her mouth shut, Jackson often spoke out angrily when she observed instances of social injustice in the community—many times at the cost of her husband's mining job. In one such instance, Jim Stewart was fired after his wife distributed her song "Fare Thee Well, Old Ely Branch" at the spring where the miners' wives came for water. Her brother recalled Jackson's pugnacious nature:
"She was at the height of her glory when she was giving someone she thought was no good a hard time. If she believed someone was taking advantage of his or her position in life, whether that was a coal operator, a husband who beat his wife, a man who would not support his family, or a bookkeeper who denied some needy family scrip to buy food with, she made her feelings known. These troublemaking instincts led her to write many a fine song."[12]
In one of Jackson's most famous escapades, which would later cause ballad scholar John Greenway to liken her to the fabled Robin Hood, she pulled a pistol on the clerk of the company store, demanding that he allow her to take food for her neighbors' starving children. Significantly, this was a story Jackson often told about herself, an act epitomizing what biographer Romalis calls Jackson's "savior self-image."[13] In a similarly self-aggrandizing vein, Jackson (falsely) identified herself as the inspiration for the 1943 Tin Pan Alley song "Pistol Packin' Mama" composed by Dexter Green.[14] Jackson's "pistol packin'" reputation was not without a factual basis, however, as brother Jim Garland attested. When Jackson and some other miners' wives were approached on the picket line by scabs in Ross, Kentucky, the women grabbed the gun thugs and stripped them naked. Garland recalled: "After four women had managed to hold down one of the gun thugs, my sister Molly took his pistol and shoved the barrel right up his rectum. Never did this particular gun thug show his face there again..."[15] Despite this recollection, Garland also asserted that his sister's role in the mining strikes had been drastically exaggerated:
The Dreiser people were so impressed by her that they thought she was just about the whole Kentucky strike. In fact, she had done very little in the strike aside from going down into Knox County a time or two to solicit vegetables for the community kitchen."[16]
Whatever the level of Jackson's involvement in the strikes, many accounts (including, of course, her own self-promoting myths) reveal her intense desire to speak out against a system of injustice—especially when this garnered attention in the spotlight.
The Dreiser Committee, mentioned above, was a self-appointed group of left-leaning writers who came from the north to witness the desperate situation of striking Kentucky miners in November 1931, when the Communist-led National Miners Union rivaled the United Mine Workers of America for a dominant union role. Officially calling themselves the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, the writers (including Theodore Dreiser, Lewis Mumford, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson) listened to various members of the mining communities—the oppressed—in order to learn about this vivid example of class warfare, and place it in the context of international class struggle. In front of the group, on November 7, 1931, at a church in Bell County, Kentucky, appeared Aunt Molly Jackson to provide testimony of the tragic living conditions of her fellow Appalachian workers. She told the Dreiser Committee: "The people in this country are destitute of anything that is really nourishing to the body. That is the truth. Even the babies have lost their lives, and we have buried from four to seven a week all along during the warm weather."[17] Then Jackson performed a song she had composed recently called "Kentucky Miners' Wives Ragged Hungry Blues." Dreiser's group was so captivated by Jackson's song that they included it at the very beginning of their published report, Harlan Miners Speak. Additionally, they invited Jackson to New York City to sing her song and speak about the miners' plight.
If, as Jim Garland suggested, Jackson's participation in the Harlan strikes was exaggerated, it is still not surprising that she was singled out by the writers' group. Jackson was a compelling symbol of her neighbors' struggle: an aging miner's wife, gaunt but fierce, who had lost many friends and family members in the mines, and, most importantly, who possessed the will and the voice to tell about it. To the Dreiser committee, perhaps to some extent shamed by their bourgeois intellectual backgrounds, Jackson represented the "real" thing, the "authentic" character and voice of the people. Moreover, she was a creative font burgeoning with songs and stories—many probably embellished or stolen, but "authentic" nonetheless. New York intellectuals would soon embrace her for this very reason.
Jackson's arrival in the city was announced in a December 2, 1931, New York Herald-Tribune article, which presents the Kentucky woman's Southern style and speech as appropriately quaint and charming for a member of the "folk" class to which she belonged. The journalist's use of quotation marks indicates his intention to reveal Jackson's authentic folk-ness:
She said the men and women in the mountains 'were powerful thankful' to Mr. Dreiser and his party 'for the foreign help' they had given them.... Mrs. Jackson's conversation was enriched with allegory, with frequent idiom and colloquialisms from her section. She drew many similes from the woods and from the Bible.
The article then comments on Jackson's public behavior and unusual, though charming, manners:
She calls Mrs. Walker "Miss Adelaide" in old-fashioned Southern style. It is no startling thing to Aunt Molly that she is visiting on Park Avenue.... She crossed her hands on her lap when she spoke.[18]
Amusingly, Jackson—always the self-promoter—fibbed to the reporter about her age, saying, "I am almost ashamed to tell you how old I am—I look so old. I was forty-six years old the 30th day of last month."[19] In fact, she was fifty. Although, in 1960, folk scholar Archie Green praised this article about Jackson, writing "it honors both the subject and the author", its tone might be read as condescending by the modern reader.[20] Moreover, such accounts of Jackson—on good behavior before polite society—became a rarity; many stories in the following decade chronicle her irreverent spirit and defiant actions—a reputation Jackson encouraged. Jackson's presence in New York, and her authentic folk-ness, as the New York Herald-Tribune article suggests, were a trendy novelty to New York elite in the coming months.
On December 6, 1931, Jackson appeared before an audience of 3,000 at the "Harlan (Ky.) Terror Mass Meeting" at the Star Casino on Park Avenue and 107th Street, where she sang her "Hungry Ragged Blues" and another song composed for the occasion. Many members of Dreiser's committee spoke, including Sherwood Anderson, who blamed the silent apathy of the "speakeasy generation" for the triumph of machines over the brains of men and the resulting societal fear. He said:
We writers ought to quite thinking so much of money and fame and social position and safety and line up with the under dogs.... It is a machine world.... It has got out of our hands.... We are afraid of one another. Millionaires are afraid, workers are afraid, merchants, doctors, lawyers, school teachers, preachers, newspaper writers and publishers—almost without exception we are all afraid. Fear is what is ruling now in Harlan County, Ky.[21]
Jackson, sharing the stage with Anderson, was just such an "under dog" for the writers' group to symbolically embrace and "line up with." While the writers co-opted Jackson's folk identity for their own interests in the workers' struggle, her own cause profited, too. Of the meeting, she wrote: "I collected hatfuls of bills that night, and my youngest brother, Jim Garland, pulled off his two socks and filled them full of silver, and next morning we sent over $900 to the starving miners and their families."[22]
In the coming months and years, Jackson and her brother Jim were in the busy center of New York political activities, raising money and publicity for the miners' cause. For a short period, until an injury from a bus accident forced her back to New York the following year, Jackson traveled around the country speaking and singing to groups to raise money. Though she visited Kentucky briefly, Jackson remained in New York for much of the decade, a witness to—and subject of—the New Deal's cultural awakening among the artistic elite. In these same years, living in an apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Jackson learned that poverty, squalor, and worker injustice were not problems singular to her native Kentucky; she became an outspoken demonstrator for social justice in the city, too, writing songs like "My Disgusted Blues" about her troubles there.
The famously outspoken and irreverent singer was a popular dinner guest at the homes of wealthy radicals and intellectuals, and was notorious for telling dirty jokes at these events to shock her hosts. Jackson apparently resented being "treated as a token representative of the oppressed" and vocalized this sentiment often and loudly enough for her hosts to hear. Fellow Kentuckian Tillman Cadle remembered her saying, "Them goddam bourgeous [sic] shits think they know more than me, don't they? ... Well, I'll show em!"[23] Many such stories of Jackson's encounters with the New York elite reveal her frustration with class attitudes toward her.
Despite her popularity, Jackson found Depression-era times hard in New York, and she was often forced to seek help from her new friends, from the state welfare system, and apparently in more creative ways. It was claimed that Jackson acted as a madam for a Kentucky friend named Elizabeth Baldwin in an apartment on Third Street, while Jim Garland played harmonica downstairs to muffle the noise. Additionally, Woody Guthrie claimed Jackson ran a whorehouse in the early 1940s.[24] Family tensions also arose in these years, most of them rooted in Jackson's selfish protection of her newfound celebrity. Jackson was jealous of attention paid to her brother Jim Garland and sister, Sarah Ogan Gunning (also a singer and songwriter), upon their arrival in the city. Jackson claimed authorship of her siblings' songs and generally mistreated them—one time she and her husband Gus Stamos ate the Christmas dinners sent from benefactors to be shared with the rest of the family.[25] Despite the care she showed her family at other times—she delivered Jim's children and nursed them in illness—Jackson in these years revealed her capacity for deceit when she deemed it necessary for survival, or self-promotion.
Coinciding with the political co-optation of her folk identity, Jackson was "discovered" by musical intellectuals newly interested in the traditional songs of the American folk. The Composers Collective (which included radical musicians and composers like Charles Seeger, Aaron Copland, and Elie Siegmeister), in the early decade rejected folk music in search of more revolutionary (i.e. dissonant) sounds for the proletariat, but by the mid-1930s had recognized folk music's value in connecting with the people. When Jackson was invited to play at one of their meetings in 1933, the collective's composers and the folksinger were mutually disenchanted with each other's style. But such opinions changed quickly; as Siegmeister recounted often afterward, in 1934 Jackson approached him after a workers' concert and asked if he knew any real American music, and then she shared some with him: