9. “English-Scottish Ballads from the Hills of Kentucky”

and Keywords to be supplied.

A Comparison of the Ballads of Katherine Jackson and Olive Dame Campbell/Cecil Sharp

The question of how our initial view of Appalachian balladry might have been different had Jackson published first is explored in detail. Jackson’s ballads are compared to Campbell and Sharp’s 1917 collection. Sharp’s musical claims to the pentatonic mode constituting proof of a connection to older Anglo music is debunked and the possible influence of other ethnicities upon Appalachian music is examined. Jackson’s emphasis on women as ballad keepers is discussed in detail, as is Sharp’s willful non-awareness of it. A detailed musical comparison between the two collections is given, and reasonable conclusions drawn as to how our understanding of balladry might have been different had Jackson published first.

Young Lady from London

Jackson teaches for a year, and then attends Ohio Wesleyan University, where she excels academically. Her personality emerges from records of her activities, and it’s clear she is an energetic and enterprising young woman. She earns not the usual degree women did, but the regular B.A. degree, graduating with the same credentials men did. Jackson teaches, then returns home when her father dies. She returns to Ohio Weslyan and earns a masters degree. She attends Columbia University and earns a Ph.D., only the second woman in the history of the college to do so. Her life as a female Ph.D. student and Southerner in a great Northern city is discussed. While at Columbia, Jackson studies balladry in her Spanish Literature class, and hears about ballads being sung in the Kentucky hills from two classmates, who in turn learned of this from two lecturers from Berea College.

“The Spirit and Sap of the Stock”

Katherine Jackson is born in London, KY in 1875 to a First Family of America. Her father is a well-off merchant and both parents supported her education. She attends the Laurel Academy and was schooled at home. She attends the prestigious Science Hill Female Academy, a preparatory institution for one of the Seven Sisters northern colleges (Welleley). Science Hill’s intense and advanced curriculum is contrasted with the average Southern girls’ preparatory of school of the day.

7. Introduction by Elizabeth DiSavino

By at least one account, Katherine Jackson had, by 1909, accumulated over sixty ballads (five more than were included in Campbell and Sharp’s 1917 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians) and set about compiling them in a scholarly manner. Sadly, a large number of those ballads were lost over the years, and fewer than half remain today. I have included everything that remains of the collection, a total of twenty-eight ballads (twenty-five of British origin and three native) in forty-three variants, one thirteenth-century song, and one Appalachian tune. Four versions of Jackson’s ballad collection can be found in the Berea College Special Collections and Archives, and almost all the ballads printed in this book can be found in one of those four versions. A few had migrated to other collections, including those of Gladys Jameson, James Watt Raine, and E. C. Perrow. I have noted the collection or collections from which each song comes, and I have edited Jackson’s introduction by weaving together parts from several versions of her manuscript....

Introduction

Every study begins with a question and ends with many others. When A. J. Bodnar and I began a fellowship project at Berea College in 2012, the name of Katherine Jackson French was unknown to us. We entered the vast vault of the Berea College Special Collections and Archives at Hutchins Library and entrusted ourselves to the tender mercies of the archivists Harry Rice and Shannon Wilson....

Berea Beloved

(Jackson) French approaches Berea College to ask for their support in publication of her ballads. Eleanor Frost is enthused, and President William Goodell Frost promises help. French prematurely shares her ballads with Hubert Shearin and Josiah Combs, and they eclipse her as the claimants to primacy of Kentucky ballads. She continues to wait on Frost to seek a publisher for her, knowing she must depend on a male champion, but five years go by and the ballads are never published. Meanwhile, the Ballad Wars are raging, and others vie for the title of Appalachian Ballad Authority. The web of intrigue, jealousies, delays, miscommunications, and ruthlessness is explored in detail. Elizabeth Peck, college historian, finds Jackson’s ballads 42 years later and engineers the reconciliation of Berea and Jackson, and the founding of the Katherine Jackson French Collection at Berea College.

Act Two

Jackson marries William Frank French in 1912. She becomes Dean of the Sue Bennett School for Girls. The Frenches move to Shreveport where Jackson co-founds the Woman’s Department Club. A brief history of types and function of women’s clubs is given. French becomes one of the clubs pillars, guiding them through the day-to-day workings of the club, and lecturing for free once a week for seventeen years. In 1924, French joins the English faculty at Centenary College. She joins and becomes President of the Louisiana AAUW during the outbreak of World War ll. Jackson’s relationship with her daughter is examined. She dies in 1958 and all Shreveport mourns.

“A Fortnight of Balladry”

Jackson returns home to London, Kentucky, and goes collecting ballads in the East Kentucky Mountains. Lizane Begley Napier is her guide and intercessor. Jackson finds the banjo being played in the backcountry. She also discovers that for the most part, it is the women who keep the ballads, and she ruminates fully on that connection. Like other early collectors, her focus is on British Isle ballads, and this bias causes her to neglect other kinds of music.

8. Introduction by Katherine Jackson French

This little volume has a modest, though distinctly unique, purpose—the securing of these quaint renditions of the old English and Scottish ballads for future generations; these, journeying across the seas to Virginia and the Carolinas, were later hidden away in the Kentucky hills for 150 years. They are peculiarly Anglo-American, most characteristic of the traditional history and spirit of their composers of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and likewise, after generations of contact, made to be a part of the blood, bone, and sinew of the settlers in the remote land. Though told in their own homely household speech and illustrative of their own crude life, withal they are poems of the highest art—because they are not artful. They have lived because they were loved, and, with this excuse for existence, they have played for ages on free, generous, and impulsive minds. This, then, becomes an immemorial record of sentiment, loyalty, principle—a conserver of their love for poetry of song. Ballads are then an immemorial record of the pure ancestry of the singer and an undoubted proof of the sturdiness and truth of song in having been sufficient for another period of long yesterdays....