Please welcome guest author Ian Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick is an accomplished clogger turned ballad singer from Claiborne County, TN. He received his BA from Mars Hill University in Political Science and International Studies in 2017, his MA in Appalachian Studies from Appalachian State University in 2019.  He is the recent recipient of the South Arts In These Mountains: 2020 Folk & Traditional Arts Cross-Border Mentor-Apprentice award, studying under Sheila Kay Adams to learn folk ballads from TN & NC.

She’s been called one of the best Ballad singers in America.  And yet the songs she is most remembered for are the ones she constructed herself.  

Aunt Molly Jackson was a union organizer, midwife, friend of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and a major musical influence of Pete Seeger.  She was the half-sister of Sarah Ogan Gunning and Jim Garland, both highly commendable ballad singers in their own right.  Her experience growing up in the mining region of Clay County, KY led her to write and sing some of the most poignant protest songs of the early 20th century – songs like “I Am A Union Woman”, “Ragged, Hungry Blues”, and “Poor Miner’s Farewell”.  But this article isn’t about any of that.

As a ballad singer, I often struggle with what the more enriching experience is: finding a ballad that I have never heard before, or finding a melodic variant of a well-known ballad that I had previously never heard.  My latest project, working with Sheila Kay Adams as part of a South Arts apprenticeship grant, has challenged me to research the songs of my home community in Claiborne County, TN.  

Ballad collectors have explored this area for more than a century in search of unique and interesting folk songs.  Collectors include Cecil Sharp, Artus Moser, CP Cambiaire, and Claiborne County native folklorist and coal miner Tillman Cadle.  

Cadle and his wife, folklorist and NYU Professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, are largely responsible for discovering the Garland family and helping them move to New York to record their music.  This simple connection is what led me down the archive rabbit hole in search of the Garland family’s more traditional tunes.  What I have found is that exploring the Alan Lomax recordings of Jackson in the Library of Congress archives offers a healthy portion of both new and old songs that calls into question how we define “authentic” folk music.

It was NC ballad singer Bobby McMillon that first introduced me to the story.  In casual conversation, I mentioned to him that I had been looking into the Aunt Molly Jackson ballads.  He seemed interested, but trailed off on a thought.  “She was clever and sharp, but untrustworthy. Just look at her versions of the Robin Hood ballads…”

I had to look up what that meant for myself.  It turns out that before the Lomax recordings, Barnicle gave Jackson a copy of Francis J Child’s acclaimed 1860 book The English and Scottish Popular Ballads hoping to jog her memory of any songs she may have forgotten.  When it was time to sing for Lomax, she sang multiple verses of Robin Hood that she had memorized from the book and altered just slightly to sound like it came from Kentucky. 

The twist is that she didn’t know she was being recorded, and later wrote angry letters to Lomax accusing him of stealing her work.  Such perfectly illustrated the relationship between the collector and the singer, and it forces the listener to take the rest of the recordings with a grain of salt.

Interestingly, though, a good amount of the other ballads in the collection are unremarkable from a collector’s standpoint.  Jackson had a beautifully haunting voice, but her versions of “Wild Bill Jones”, “House Carpenter”, and “Pretty Polly” sound pretty close to most other field recordings of those songs.  A word or phrase may be slightly different here and there, but the tunes are the standard tunes most people know them by.  Others, like “Lady Margaret and Sweet William” or “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” have unique tunes, but the stories themselves are fairly common across the region and don’t conform to a common tune.  So they can’t all be influenced by outside forces, can they?  Should we throw out the whole collection based on one harmless prank?

Ballad collectors call the traditional method of passing ballads down from one generation to the next ‘knee-to-knee.’  NC ballad singer Donna Ray Norton refers to how she learned ballads as ‘knee-to-CD,’ because even as a relative to some of the most famous ballad singers she still had to listen to their recordings to learn the songs. 

There are two different kinds of ballad singers: those who search for every single version of a particular song and those who search for every single song from a particular singer.  I just happen to be an archive crawling, knee-to-CD singing collector of the latter kind, and there are 3 songs in this collection that I find particularly interesting:

1) an American variant of Annachie Gordon (Child 239) she called Archie D.  

2) a lyrical version of Lady Clare by Alfred Tennyson, and

3) A song she claims she wrote herself called Lady Nancy

Annachie Gordon is one of those rare ballads that were collected by folklorists like Francis J Child for their literary value, but that no one really sang anymore by the 20th century rush for folk recordings.  The song itself is a sorrowful tale of the likes of Romeo and Juliet.  The fair young maiden Jean Gordon must choose between the handsome Annachie or the wealthy Lord Saltoun.  Jean’s father forces her to marry the Lord, who has land and money, but instead she commits suicide in defiance for her love of Annachie.  When Annachie returns from sea and finds her dead, he ends his own life in turn.

The song returned to prominence in the 1970s, when English folk singer Nic Jones reconstructed a tune to the lyrics for his album The Noah’s Ark Trap.  It has been said that every subsequent recording of the song was influenced by Jones in some way or another, except for a version by Scottish singer Joe Rae that appears to be traditional. 

If you believe that Jackson learned her version in the oral tradition, then it is quite possibly the oldest traditional recording of Annachie Gordon in existence.  On the other hand, if she read it in Child’s book and changed the name to Archie D for “mountain flavor”, it still speaks to what informed Jackson’s repertoire.  The rejection of wealth for love or happiness is a very compelling narrative that occurs again and again in her music.  

Jackson’s own reputation has deterred much scrutiny of her songs, though.  Upon realizing Archie D was at least an American adaptation of Annachie Gordon, I proceeded to look it up in the Roud Index, a well-known and highly qualified database of about 250,000 versions of almost 25,000 printed and recorded folk songs.  To my surprise, Archie D was listed as a separate song from Annachie Gordon, which had about 15 entries by itself.  I quickly emailed Steve Roud, whom the database is named after, to inform him of my theory.  I was even more surprised to receive a response from him letting me know that my discovery was “well-spotted” and that Archie D would be recognized as an American variant of Annachie Gordon in the next update of the database.

Lady Clare is the story of a wealthy heiress who has arranged to marry her cousin Lord Ronald soon.  When she tells her nurse Alice the news, Alice shares a secret about Lady Clare’s birth.  She says the real Lady Clare died as an infant, and this Lady Clare is really the daughter of Alice the nurse.  Lady Clare worries that her fiance will not marry her once he learns she was “born a beggar.” 

In response to the news, he proclaims that he is the rightful heir to the estate if she is not and that she will still be Lady Clare upon their wedding day.

Once again, we see a class struggle as the main conflict of this story.  Jackson was very well-read, and the alterations from the original text really capture the emotion of the story and highlight the driving forces of the action as it happens.  I have never heard any other singer perform this poem as a song.  Its inclusion in Jackson’s repertoire fits naturally with the rest of her songs and is unique enough to keep the listener’s attention until the resolution.

Lady Nancy tells of a mad king who kills his kitchen boy for sleeping with his daughter.  Jackson says she read the story in a book on English kings, though I have yet to discover which king this might reference.  The king being “mad” may point to King George III, but I am unaware of such a scandal occurring under his reign.  He did, however, make it law that royals could not get married without consent of the king due to multiple male family members’ nuptial transgressions. 

The song, set to Jackson’s tune for “Lady Margaret and Sweet William”, includes colorful descriptions that befit the genre, including “Then the king cut out Fair William’s heart, and put it in a cup of gold. Take that to Lady Nancy he said, for she is fearless and bold.”  Lady Nancy showcases Jackson’s ability to write ballads as well as protest songs.  She had an intimate knowledge of the culture she represented and the music she sang.  Robin Hood be damned.

More articles on ballad collectors/collecting:

Book Excerpt: ‘Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector’(Opens in a new browser tab)

Songcatching “Bolakins”(Opens in a new browser tab)

An interview with the authors of ‘Wayfaring Strangers’(Opens in a new browser tab)

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