Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

10. Traditional Form, Subversive Function: Aunt Molly Jackson’s Labor Struggles

159 X 10 Traditional Form, Subversive Function: Aunt Molly Jackson’s Labor Struggles Cassandra Parente Born Mary Magdalene Garland in 1880, Aunt Molly Jackson was ten years old and in jail when she discovered her voice. Attempting to avoid a ten-day sentence for playing a prank, Jackson composed her first folk song, “Mr. Cundiff Turn Me Loose,” and performed it for the sheriff and his wife. Shrewdly playing on Cundiff’s emotions, Jackson portrayed her living conditions as despicable: “The nits and lice they are a-hangin’ to the jiste [joists] / I heard one turn over and say ‘Jesus Christ’” (qtd. in Romalis 70). The lice, she later admitted, were made up to get the sheriff’s attention. They did. Assured that Molly would remove the line, the sheriff invited others over to be entertained. While her protest did not lead to her freedom, it taught her the rhetorical power of song when listeners began leaving gifts and money. As Jackson explains, “At the end of ten days, I had thirty seven dollars and twenty seven plugs of ‘tobaker’ and the jailer’s wife made me a satin dress” (qtd. in Romalis 71). Despite her success, it would be almost twenty years before Jackson composed another original song. In 1911, when Jackson was thirty-one, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad stretched into Harlan County, and the rural area where she workedasamidwifebecameacoal-miningmeccawithapopulationthat Cassandra Parente 160 boomed from ten thousand to sixty-four thousand in twenty years’ time (Lynch 55). Owning everything from the general store to the church, mining companies defined the entire social world for Harlan’s inhabi­ tants and seemed to promise economic stability, but by the late 1920s, profits plummeted due to overproduction and increasing competition from the oil and electricity industries. Workers paid for the market shift with cuts in hours and wages. According to Jackson’s biographer, Shelly Romalis, by 1931, Harlan miners worked only three days a week, earning a total of $4 in scrip (34). Far from providing comfort, a miner’s wages barely afforded survival. So many children suffered from bloody flux (dysentery) that, as Jackson recalls, “blood was running out of the tops of their little feet. . . . You could track them to the soup kitchen by the blood” (qtd. in Greenway, American Folksongs 266–67). Throughout the 1930s, similar economic collapses created a kairotic moment for Appalachian women such as Jackson. Responding to horrid conditions in mines and mills, they turned to an available means of persuasion commonly used by women in their communities: folk music. Using traditional patterns of rhythm and rhyme to convey a new, subversive message, Jackson and other singers gained center stage at strikes and rallies, exerting their rhetorical power to support local workers. To understand how these women made themselves heard, it is necessary, as Barbara Biesecker argues, to “shift the focus of historical inquiry from the question who is speaking . . . to the question what play made it possible for a particular speaking subject to emerge?” (148). This approach is especially valuable for rhetorical studies of folk singing, which, as A. L. Lloyd explains, is less a personal act than a dialectic, a “perpetual struggle for synthesis between the collective and the individual , between tradition and innovation, between what is received from the community and what is supplied out of personal fantasy” (17). In this chapter, I analyze Aunt Molly Jackson’s particular synthesis of tradition and innovation as she uses the rhetorical power of folk music to rally miners and their families and to publicize the dire conditions in 1930s Harlan County. To do so, I first discuss folk music as a rhetorical tradition, then examine its strategies—embodied ethos, adaptation and parody, stock language—at work in Jackson’s Depression-era songs. My analysis of her music and career suggests that it was Jackson’s rhetorical effectiveness that led, paradoxically, to the undoing of her successful balance between the collective and the individual: attempting to capitalize on her embodied ethos, left-wing activists transplanted her body and voice to urban contexts and her Traditional Form, Subversive Function 161 lyrics to print publications—moves that brought her fame but eventually stripped Jackson of the rural, folk ethos that made her part of the communal tradition. Thus, although Jackson became part of public memory, she appears as an individual singer, removed from the larger rhetorical tradition of which she and many other rural women...