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Southern Cultures 7.4 (2001) 111-114



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Book Review

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


Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. By Shelly Romalis University of Illinois Press, 1999. 239 pp. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95

Woody Guthrie praised her as "the best ballad singer in the country." Leadbelly counted her among his close friends. She hobnobbed at cocktail parties with Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Clifford Odets, and Sherwood Anderson. A teenaged Pete Seeger blushed at her dirty jokes and later fondly credited her as one of his major musical influences. Alan Lomax recorded her stark, original ballads for the Library of Congress and published them in his acclaimed folksong collections. And, like her friend Guthrie, she used her most famous protest songs, "Poor Miner's Farewell" and "Hungry Ragged Blues," as weapons in the struggle for social justice in Depression-ravaged America.

Her full name was Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos (1880- 1960), but she became better known as Aunt Molly Jackson. She belongs to a long succession of what historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls "disorderly women"--militant female labor activists--stretching from Mother Jones to Ella May Wiggins to Crystal Lee (the model for the fictional Norma Rae), whose experiences and observations led them to become champions of oppressed working people. Jackson was one of a handful of southern grassroots composers most responsible for creating a remarkable new song genre by infusing traditional folk balladry with left-wing politics during the Great Depression. She also participated in a Communist-led labor uprising against union-busting in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931, and then raised funds for striking miners and their families on her speaking tours of northern cities. She influenced the music of Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Seeger, among others, and helped to fuel the growing interest in American folk music in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Remarkably, Shelly Romalis's Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong is the first full-scale biography of this fascinating Appalachian balladeer, folk singer, and labor activist.

Pistol Packin' Mama, a volume in the University of Illinois Press's celebrated [End Page 111] "Music in American Life" series, is immensely valuable for what it tells us about Jackson herself and equally interesting for what it reveals about the leftwing activists and folksong collectors whom she encountered. An associate professor of anthropology at York University in Toronto, Romalis recounts Jackson's long, tangled story in an even-handed and intelligent manner. She skillfully traces Jackson's life from her hardscrabble upbringing in a Kentucky coal-mining family, her stints as midwife, nurse, and miner's wife, her politicization as a labor unionist and balladeer, her complicated role as a "cultural broker" among New York radicals and musicians, and her gradual passage into obscurity. Romalis weaves together a rich harvest of autobiographical writings, interviews, letters, and song lyrics to reconstruct Jackson's life within the broader context of Appalachian coal-mining culture, Popular Front Communism, and American folk music. By doing so, Romalis rescues this largely forgotten labor crusader and feminist from the dustbin of history.

Gender politics are central to Pistol Packin' Mama. In the book's early chapters, Romalis excels at situating Jackson's story within the context of women's roles in southern Appalachian society, particularly their labor militancy in the Kentucky coalfield wars of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Outraged by the exploitative labor practices and miserable living conditions she observed in Harlan County's mining camps, Jackson became a diehard supporter of the National Miners' Union, a Communist trade organization. Like other coal-mining wives and mothers, Jackson distributed clothing and food, organized mass meetings and rallies, walked picket lines, and even resorted to physical violence against scabs and gun thugs. Beginning in the mid-1920s, Jackson also channeled her fury at the coalfield exploitation into such protest ballads as "Poor Miner's Farewell," "I Am a Union Woman," and "Hungry Ragged Blues," and used them to publicize...

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