Patrick
O'Sullivan sings Aunt Molly Jackson's Christmas Eve on the East Side
I have been
asked if I have a second song ready to contribute to the traditional UK
Autoharps Advent Calendar...
As it so
happens, we have been looking at the life and work of Aunt Molly Jackson - and
one of her songs has the word 'Christmas' in the title.
So... that qualifies?
Here we
go...
Patrick
O'Sullivan sings Aunt Molly Jackson's Christmas Eve on the East Side
Video link
https://youtu.be/Slwx88LVBp0
1.
Aunt
Molly Jackson
There is
much information out there about Molly Jackson, some of it trustworthy. I will try to be brief here - but I will
revisit if you think I have been too brief...
Molly
Jackson, 1880-1960, was a nurse, midwife, trade union activist and folksinger
in early twentieth century Kentucky, USA - campaigning for safer working
conditions, decent wages, decent housing, health care...
The story
is that, in Kentucky, midwifes were usually called 'Granny' - Molly did not
want to be a 'Granny', but did accept the honorific 'Aunt'.
There is a
book...
Pistol
Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. By Shelly
Romalis, University of Illinois Press, 1999.
The title
is a bit daft - but we accept the point being made by the author, Shelly Romalis. It is a good book, tippytoeing through difficult research.
If you put
that book title into a search engine, you will find reviews, comment and
further information.
Then... Information about Molly Jackson comes to us
from many directions. I will mention
some sources as I go, but I home in on one song performance, and one
ballad.
2.
Song
Aunt Molly
Jackson appears, briefly, in the standard works on folk music song discovery
and revival, and folk's influence on the politics of mid twentieth century USA,
and elsewhere - so her influence on Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger...
Reaching
for the books to hand...
I met Molly
Jackson in Will Kaufman's books...
Kaufman,
Will. 2011. Woody Guthrie, American Radical. The University of Illinois Press.
Kaufman,
Will. 2022. American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War 2: A Cultural
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://www.uclan.ac.uk/academics/will-kaufman
(Will
Kaufman is based at the University of Central Lancashire, just across the
Pennines from my home. Sometimes, he can
be persuaded to put on the hat, pick up the guitar, and channel Woody Guthrie.)
Molly
Jackson is mentioned in standard works, like
Cohen,
Ronald D. 2006. Folk Music: The Basics. Basics. Routledge.
They key
moment is in 1931, when Theodore Dreiser, and the 'Dreiser Committee',
representing the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners,
investigate conditions in Harlan County, Kentucky.
And, for
the Committee, Molly Jackson sings her song, Ragged, Hungry Blues.
Molly
Jackson then comes to the attention of Alan Lomax and his Library of Congress
projects, and to the attention of what would become the folk music revival...
3.
Ballad
In another
part of the forest, we look at the Francis Child Ballads - the collections by
Francis James Child, published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads,
1860 and 1882–98.
I now
summarise many conversations, over the years - for example with my friend and
colleague here in Bradford, Stephanie Hladowski. And with our friends in the Glasgow Ballad
Workshop.
In recent
years I have found myself always speaking of 'The Child Ballads' as ‘The Francis
Child Ballads' - just to put an obstacle in the way of the recurring
misunderstanding that the ballads are about children or written for
children. (Things get even worse when
Child is spelt 'Childe', guided, most probably, by the medievalisations of
Robert Browning and George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron.)
So,
'Francis Child Ballads' it is.
Francis
Child's project was a paper, book, and library project. As far as I can make out it did not occur to
him to seek out melodies for his texts, or to wonder if the ballads were still
being sung by living people in his own time.
Francis Child gave us a CANON, of 305 ballads, and a CORPUS, the same
305 ballads. With textual
variants... So, 305 songs, each with a
Francis Child collection number, the 'Child Ballads'.
See, for
example…
Francis
James Child and The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
By Stephen
D. Winick
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196779/
Child Ballads Concordance by Cathy Lynn Preston, University
of Colorado
https://www.colorado.edu/faculty/preston/child-ballads-concordance
There has
been much rumination about Francis Child's own selection procedures – why only
305, why that 305? Let us not get bogged
down.
The
influence of that Harvard approach to anthropology spread out, to a number of
overlapping disciplines and approaches - researchers would visit people in
remote areas and listen to them. There
came a point when the technology changed.
Instead of visiting people and writing down on paper what they said, or
sang, audio equipment was moved. And
people spoke, or sang, for the machine.
The most
intriguing example, for people like me, is the work of Milman Parry - whose
1930s field recordings in Bosnia suggested to him that he was listening, two
and a half thousand years later, to the still living techniques of Homer, and
the culture-shaping ancient Greek epic poems.
Specifically, the use of formulaic phrases that will slot into the verse
- familiar phrases like 'rosy fingered dawn' or 'wine-dark sea', much analysed
by scholars, and poets, over the centuries.
So, there
is a process through which oral poets improvise, or create, or re-create poetry,
on the hoof - and this explains why orally improvised poetry, or written poetry
deriving from traditions of oral improvisation, has the characteristics that it
does have.
I leave out
a lot of detail here... Let us move on
to the next landmark text, Cecil Sharp, English Folk-Songs from the Southern
Appalachians, first published in 1932.
Researchers, anthropologists, folklorists had entered remote areas - the
Appalachian Mountains, for example - had listened to the people, and had found
that some of the people were still singing songs already canonised by the
Francis Child collection. So, the CANON
and the CORPUS now had a TRADITION, with AUTHENTICITY.
In other
words - thinking about the commodification of culture – for researchers, some
songs had greater value than others.
Bertrand
Harris Bronson built on this, doggedly following the researchers, tracking down
the melodies for the 305 songs, and publishing his 4 volumes, The Traditional
Tunes of the Child Ballads, dated 1957, 1962, 1966, 1973. Princeton University Press, loyally,
doggedly, stuck with him, over those decades.
See...
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691652634/the-traditional-tunes-of-the-child-ballads-volume-1
...etc...
One of
those researchers - it was Mary Elizabeth Barnicle - showed Molly Jackson a
copy of a Francis Child volume - it was the 1904 Sargent and Kittredge selection…
English and
Scottish popular ballads, edited from the collection of Francis James Child,
Sargent,
Helen Child; Kittredge, George Lyman,
https://archive.org/details/englishscottishp1904chil/page/n11/mode/2up
…and Molly
Jackson produced a version of Francis Child Ballad Number 102, The Birth of
Robin Hood, very like the Peter Buchan text in Sargent and Kittredge. A song which - Molly said - she had learnt
from her grandmother. And the researcher
was deeply suspicious...
Molly
Jackson’s melody is there in Bertrand Harris Bronson’s Volume 2, pages 509-510 –
Bronson’s immediate source is the John Greenway recording.
4.
John
Greenway
This is the
John Greenway page on the Smithsonian…
https://folkways.si.edu/aunt-molly-jackson-and-john-greenway/the-songs-and-stories-of/american-folk-struggle-protest/music/album/smithsonian
The Songs
and Stories of AUNT MOLLY JACKSON
Stories
told by Aunt Molly Jackson/Songs sung by John Greenway
These are
the John Greenway sleeve notes…
https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/FW05457.pdf
In one of
his articles, page 37, John Greenway calls Molly Jackson a ‘folk composer’…
Greenway,
John. 1956. “Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation.”
The Journal of American Folklore 69 (271): 23–38.
An article
that is really worth reading, as a folklorist and singer works through the
complexities I have outlined here…
'Molly has
her deficiencies as a model of the folk composer and adapter: she has had too
much contact with urban culture to be acceptable as a pure representative of
the American folk; her association with labor organizers and agitators, for
instance, has colored nearly all the songs she sings. Nevertheless she is a woman whose early
environment and deepest influences were as purely "folk" as it is
possible to be in this country and in this century, whose knowledge of the
traditional ballad rivals that of any informant yet discovered, and whose
talent as a folk composer - if that identification can be accepted for anyone -
is far from contemptible...'
John
Greenway gives the impression that, in her later years, Molly Jackson was
hiding from folklorists – perhaps fearful that past connections with socialism
and communism would endanger her small state pension…
5.
Singing
This is an
aside, for music friends…
There is a
special skill to singing long narrative songs - for example, the Francis Child Ballads…
The Stephanie
Hladowski sections of Will Hodgkinson’s book are built around Stephanie’s performance
of Willie O Winsbury, Francis Child Ballad Number 100 – spooky, focussed,
maintaining momentum and interest…
Friends who have attended Stephanie Hladowski’s performances at Cecil
Sharp House will know what I mean.
Hodgkinson,
Will. 2009. The Ballad of Britain: How Music Captured the Soul of a Nation.
Portico.
I do not
detect any great involvement with the Francis Child Ballads within the autoharp
communities – which is a shame, because I think that the autoharp could
maintain musical interest and momentum, as the story unfolds. But the Francis Child Ballads do enter the
repertoire, through long folkloric roads.
And a lovely example of the possibilities is still there on YouTube,
from, much-missed, Bob Fish…
Pretty Fair
Maid In The Garden - Bob Fish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVuICtuO7mk
6.
Aunt
Molly Jackson's Christmas Eve on the East Side
Let us
begin with the title…
On the Library
of Congress web site we can clearly see the original Lomax catalogue file card,
which clearly says…
‘Christmas
Eve in the East Side’
And we can
see that the LOC cataloguer has over-ruled the file card and has typed
‘Christmas
Eve on the East Side’
https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.8629
When we
listen to The Lomax Kentucky recordings
Performer Jackson,
Aunt Molly
Date
Recorded 1939-27-05
Collection Alan
Lomax Recording of Aunt Molly Jackson, May 27 1939
We can hear
Molly sing
‘I'm in the
slums on the East Side’
Christmas
Eve On the East Side (part 1)
https://lomaxky.omeka.net/items/show/1354
Christmas
Eve On the East Side (part 2)
https://lomaxky.omeka.net/items/show/1356
We think that
the LOC cataloguer is right – we are ‘in slums’, …’on the East Side…’
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais200703/viewer
Molly Jackson’s
lyric works – in Homeric fashion – by placing formulaic, standard phrases onto
the metric structure. Some phrases, ‘a cup
of tea’, come from commonplace conversation.
Others, ‘fellow workers’, ‘hard-working masses’, ‘Workers’ Alliance’,
come from ‘her association with labor organizers and agitators…’
And I have
signalled this in my little video.
Most of
what we know about the Workers’ Alliance comes from the FBI archives…
Guide to
the Workers Alliance of America Records, 1931-1999 AIS.2007.03
‘The
Workers Alliance of America (WAA) was formed in 1935 as a merger of
predominantly socialist and communist-led unemployment councils, unemployment
leagues and independent state organizations throughout the country…’
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9f4fc6e0-73f0-0136-1b7d-1dc8fcda4f3b
My opening
image of a ‘rear window tenement’ is from the New York Public Library…
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9f4fc6e0-73f0-0136-1b7d-1dc8fcda4f3b
But, in
Diaspora Studies, we are cautious about slum photographs…
‘Slum
photography was at the heart of progressive campaigns against urban poverty.
And it was a weapon against poor people…
Sadie Levy
Galeis a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at
Cardiff University, Wales’
https://aeon.co/essays/slum-photos-were-weaponised-against-the-people-they-depict
…and my
video follows Molly Jackson’s text elsewhere, into the snowy woods.
The song is
a Complaint, a Holler, and a Come-All-Ye.
We tried
various ways of presenting the song, but settled on the Come-All-Ye. I am not at all clear what key Molly Jackson
is singing in. Musician friends can
listen to the original recording.
I sing it in
C – and the chords are C and G and that’s it.
Anyone with a C chord can join in the Come-All-Ye – with a bit of G at
the end of lines 2 and 4 of the 4-line verse.
Now… You might think that this is a lot of
background to a 3 minute song… Well, yes,
it is – but I do not make the rules.
Patrick
O'Sullivan sings Aunt Molly Jackson's Christmas Eve on the East Side
Video link
https://youtu.be/Slwx88LVBp0
My thanks to Helen Slade and Jan Brodie, of UK Autoharps, for help and encouragement...
Patrick O’Sullivan
Bradford
December
2024
