The Musicians of the Mine Wars

EXCERPT FROM THE RABBLE-ROUSERS OF BLOODY HARLAN The Musicians of the Mine Wars________ Dexter Colle« Editor's Note: this is the second in a two-part series researched and written by Dexter Collett and edited by George Brosi, entitled "The Musicians ofthe Mine Wars. " Thefirst part, which appeared in the last issue ofAppalachian Heritage, told how these Appalachian singers gravitated to the nearby coalfields and the experiences which stimulated their song-writing. This final piece takes up the story when they areforced to leave the coalfields, and explores their impact upon the nationalfolk music scene. In November 1931, the Dreiser Committee—a group of progressive writers from the Northeast—came to the Kentucky coalfields to investigate alleged abuses growing out of the struggle to unionize the mines. After they left Harlan, the writers were charged with criminal syndicalism; however, they did not return to Harlan to stand trial. Aunt Molly Jackson—who had entertained the Dreiser Committee at Arjay with "The Hungry-Ragged Blues"—had offended a prominent dignitary in attendance, Judge D. C. Jones. She was subsequently arrested in Harlan and taken to jail. There, Jackson, who had written her first song while incarcerated at the tender age of ten, wrote "Bound Down in Prison." Nevertheless, she secured her release by agreeing to leave the state. She left Harlan on a north bound bus and arrived the next day at Grand Central Station in New York City on December 1, 1931. There, she was welcomed by novelist John Dos Passos, whom she had met on Straight Creek during the Dreiser Committee's trip. She was immediately interviewed by New York Herald Tribune reporter, Ben Robertson, for a story which ran in the paper the next day. Soon after her arrival, Jackson recorded the songs "The Hungry, Ragged Blues" and "Poor Miner Farewell" for Columbia Records. Then, Workers International Relief (WIR) booked Jackson on a thirtyeight state concert tour, singing her songs and telling her stories about the union in Harlan County in order to raise money for the striking miners back in the hills. While on the road, Molly wrote more songs, including "I Love Coal Miners, I Do" and "East Ohio Miners' Strike." 62 Unfortunately, her tour ended prematurely with a crippling bus accident in Ohio early in 1932. She hobbled around and tried to get another job writing songs, this time for the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), but they wouldn't hire her, so she was forced to scrape by on Home Relief. In 1932, Florence Reece, the Harlan County folksinger, who composed "Which Side Are You On?," and her husband, labor organizer Sam Reece, were run out of Harlan by Sheriff J.H. Blair and his deputies. The Reeces went back to Tennessee, from whence they came, this time to Ellistown, TN, in Rutledge County, where they remained active in the labor movement. Jim Garland Jackson's brother, Jim Garland, was one of the leaders of the National Miners Union (NMU) Strike which began on January 1, 1932. Their sister, Sarah Ogan wrote the song "Down on the Picket Line" to celebrate this strike. Then, on February 10, 1932, not even a month and a half after the strike began, the Frank Committee, composed of leftist writers sympathetic to the National Miners Union (NMU)—led by social activist and bilingual author Waldo Frank, and including Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, and five other writers—rolled into Pineville, Kentucky, in Bell County, in three trucks loaded with food to distribute to the striking miners and their families. They wanted to test whether they would be granted their constitutional rights. According to Malcolm Cowley in an article entitled "Coal Town," the Frank Committee discovered immediately that they had no rights whatsoever in Bell County when Waldo Frank and the group's International Labor Defense (ILD) attorney, Alan Taub, were brutally beaten and pistol whipped by a mob of vigilantes that included deputy sheriffs Herndon Evans, the editor of the Pineville Sun, and Cleon K. Calvert, an attorney for the Straight Creek Mining Company. That same day, a nineteen-year-old NMU organizer from New York, Harry Simms, was fatally shot on Brush Creek...