Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong

Abstract

Packin' Mama: Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. By Shelly Romalis. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xi + 239 pp.; photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960) was the only person to record for both Columbia's 15000-D hillbilly record series of 1924-32 and also the Library of Congress's Archive of Folksong. Although Molly was the wife of a Kentucky coal miner and spent her later years fighting for justice for the oppressed working classes, her commercial as well as her field recordings were made in the vicinity of New York City after she had left the state of her birth never to return again. How these recordings came to be made-Aunt Molly's relationship to Mary Elizabeth Barnicle and Alan Lomax, the folklorists responsible for her recordings, and why she was so upset with them as a result is only one episode of Shelly Romalis's captivating account of the life and struggles of Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos. Packin' Mama is a biography of a remarkable woman embedded in a study of the left wing folksong revival of the 1930s. material is divided into three parts. first, The Appalachian Context, provides historical and cultural background on coal mining in Kentucky and the National Miners Union's efforts at unionizing a disgracefully exploited occupation. To publicize and counteract the violence and bloodshed that accompanied the NMU's activities, a circle of leftist writers formed the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Several members, including Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, journeyed to Kentucky to see first hand the hardships the miners were forced to endure. During their hearings in Pineville, Kentucky in November, 1931, the Committee met Molly and heard her relate her experiences and sing some of the songs she had composed about the plight of the miners. Molly's vivid narratives and stark, harsh singing awed the writers, and they urged her to come north to assist in fund raising for the miners' benefit. Two chapters of the central section of the book are devoted to Molly's biography, respectively prior to and subsequent to her relocation to New York City in December 1931. third chapter focuses on Molly's half sister, Sarah Ogan Gunning (1910-83). A full generation younger than Molly, Sarah's milieu in Kentucky was significantly different from her half sister's. That difference, coupled with a dissimilarity in personalities stark as night and day, made Sarah a completely different sort of informant from Molly. While both were women of great inner strength, active bearers of traditional mountain lore and also creators of new material within that tradition, Molly was alternately charming and devious, self aggrandizing and selfless, whereas Sarah was modest and unassuming. Molly crossed paths with a succession of folklorists-Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, Alan Lomax, John Greenway, and Archie Green-and one after another they threw up their hands, exasperated by her inconsistencies if not outright dishonesty. She insisted that she alone had composed Only a Miner, though at best she had modified an older song. She repeatedly asserted that she was the real subject of Al Dexter's 1943 country western hit, Pistol Packin' Mama, though the negative evidence was substantial. Among the more than a gross of songs she recorded for various folklorists were several Robin Hood ballads, including three that had never been collected outside of England. Greenway concluded that Molly learned these ballads from Barnicle's copy of the one-volume edition of Child Ballads and then modified them and set them to traditional tunes; she insisted she had learned them in her youth (Greenway 1956) . Molly was certainly not the first informant to tailor her repertoire to the obvious wants of her collectors, but the measure of her inventiveness was monumental. …