Please welcome guest author Elizabeth DiSavino. DiSavino is assistant professor of music at Berea College. She has presented at the Appalachian Studies Association conference and was selected as a spoken word winner for the Women of Appalachia Project. Her work has been published in the Paterson Literary Review, and she has received grants from the Hutchins Library Sound Archives and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her latest book, Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector, newly out from the University of Kentucky Press, is the first-ever publication of Katherine Jackson French’s English-Scottish Ballads from the Hills of Kentucky.

We are fortunate to have the adventure of Katherine Jackson’s 1909 ballad-collecting trip detailed by Katherine Jackson herself in a manuscript entitled “A Fortnight of Balladry.”  An abbreviated version of this was published as “A Fortnight in Ballad Country” in Mountain Life and Work in 1955, three years before her death.  In both the manuscript and published versions, she describes riding off at dawn with a wagon, a team of three mules, and a companion named Lizane, “a carefree widow of sixty.”  Lizane was to serve as guide and as intercessor to the local community on Jackson’s behalf.  “Convinced of the honesty of my journey,” Jackson writes, “she freely offered me her friendship and assistance, which pre-ordained my success.”  The selection of Lizane as a companion was sheer dumb luck.  Jackson had heard that a wagonful of merchandise was to head into the mountains; Lizane was the other passenger, and had no objection to another woman climbing aboard…

In the manuscript version, Jackson lovingly describes the autumn morning of the trip’s first day.  She reminisces, “The first frost had colored the leaves, ripened the apples, the persimmons, and the pawpaws, and had given a crisp tinge to every variety of mountain life.” 

Jackson tells us that the initial leg of the journey was sixty miles into the mountains to Lizane’s house “where I was made comfortable.”  The trip took three days.  Lizane would take no money from Jackson for her keeping, though Jackson did pay for the white and bay mules to be used on their journey.  

The first house visited was “Sister Marthy’s” (Lizane’s sister), fifteen miles up a dry creek bed, as there was no road.  They were greeted by two boys, whom Katherine describes as “fatherless,” and were welcomed “heartily.”  After a simple supper of corn pone bread, bacon fat, and coffee, the singing began.  “Of course the guest sang first, and obtained their confidence,” Jackson records.  “After some persuasion and assurance of friendship, the family unlocked its word-horde, and for two days we had a feast of song.”   As the host, Marthy held court for most of the time, “swaying back and forth in her low, straight chair, singing loudly and clearly.” 

Jackson asked them to sing the songs more than once, no doubt to transcribe them, and remarks “they were glad to repeat them for me” and seemed happy for her interest.  Ever the academic, Jackson noted “the usual landmarks of the ballads – rapidity, change from narrative to dialogue, alliteration, overflow, impure rhyme and assonance, many recurring phrases and epithets, frequent use of the numerals three and seven, a barbaric profusion of silver and gold, and always simple thought, direct and distinct, with that emphasis that springs from the need of expressing in a few words, some deep passion.”  

Marthy and Lizane sang “Lord Thomas” together, and when they sang “Sweet William and Lady Margaret,” Katherine Jackson was “almost overcome with the transport of the centuries.”

Indeed, the song invokes for Jackson the presence of Chaucer, Shakespeare, British Isle collectors Dryden and Percy Sir Walter Scott, and Queen Elizabeth:  “These were my invisible companions,” she says… 

Two days later, Jackson and Lizane got invited to an all-day Quilting Bee, which involved twelve women using a wooden frame to make a sun-dial design quilt.  Jackson describes a sort of potluck of sewing equipment and food; everyone brought gifts for the hostess, and the food included sour milk, molasses, and honey. She describes the gathering as “strikingly homogenous, breathing one unlettered atmosphere, one habit of thought and life, one measure of support and sympathy.”

One wonders if some of this communal feeling was because her subjects were mostly women.    In remote settings, women were often less powerful than men, more subject to the ravages of life.  Every pregnancy was a chance at new life; it was an equal chance at death.  Women of the mountains, all women of the mountains, were bonded by this circumstance regardless of race or heritage.  They were thus more prone to pursue collaboration than competition, and to understand that they counted on each other.   

Interested in a copy? Orders can be placed at at https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813178523/katherine-jackson-french/ (Discount code FB30 gives 30% off)

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