Mary Magdalene Garland was born October 30,1880 in Clay County Kentucky to O.P Garland and Deborah Delora Robinson.
Aunt Molly Jackson is one of the most overlooked, yet influential, figures in American folk music. Not only was she a contemporary of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, she was also a major influence on Pete Seeger. Unfortunately her recorded output consists of one single, recorded in the early '30s. Born Mary Magdalene Garland in 1880 in the coal mining country of Kentucky, she married in her early teens and became a certified midwife by the time she was 18. Since Jackson was so young when she delivered her first baby, instead of following the custom of the times by calling midwives "Grandma," she insisted being called "Aunt Molly" instead. Jackson was the wife of a miner in the Kentucky coal fields. When the miners decided to strike for better pay and working conditions, she wrote her first song about the experience. In the midst of the strike, a group of writers led by Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos came to Kentucky on a fact-finding tour. Among the interviewed miners and family members, Jackson sang her song, "Hungry Ragged Blues." The impressed committee convinced her to go to New York City and use her singing to raise funds for the strikers, which she did. After the strike was settled, Jackson stayed on in New York City and continued as an activist and singer, where she became known among the folk and radical communities. Her earliest compositions to impress listeners in the radical movement were "Miner's Hungry Ragged Blues" and "Poor Miner's Farewell." By 1960 Jackson was impoverished but nevertheless was working on an LP of original material when she died suddenly. During the 1970s, some of those songs were released on a Rounder anthology. ~ Al Campbell, All Music Guide
Coinciding with the political co-optation of her folk identity, Jackson was "discovered" by musical intellectuals newly interested in the traditional songs of the American folk.
The Composers Collective (which included radical musicians and composers like Charles Seeger, Aaron Copland, and Elie Siegmeister), in the early decade rejected folk music in search of more revolutionary (i.e. dissonant) sounds for the proletariat, but by the mid-1930s had recognized folk music's value in connecting with the people. When Jackson was invited to play at one of their meetings in 1933, the collective's composers and the folksinger were mutually disenchanted with each other's style. But such opinions changed quickly. As Siegmeister recounted often afterward, in 1934 Jackson approached him after a workers' concert and asked if he knew any real American music, and then she shared some with him:
She sang in a squeaky high-pitched voice and couldn't read or write a note of music. But Aunt Molly sang great songs which dealt with her own life in Kentucky, songs of power and feeling. That was one of my first introductions to America singing (Siegmeister, New York Times 11 February 1940).
Siegmeister said that Jackson's music—the American folk music—"yields to no other in its richness, variety, and musical quality." Other musicians and folklorists soon agreed.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, an English and folklore professor at New York University, discovered Jackson's wealth of stories and songs, and eagerly pursued a friendship with the singer. Barnicle became Jackson's patron for a time, inviting the singer to speak to her NYU classes and introducing her to many New York intellectuals. The professor also introduced Jackson to a young man named Alan Lomax, who recorded her songs and, without Jackson's permission (or Barnicle's knowledge), submitted them to the Library of Congress collection. Jackson wrote Lomax many times in later years angrily demanding compensation for her songs.
She was not, in these recording sessions, the only victim of manipulation, however. Barnicle (unwisely, as it turned out) had lent Jackson a copy of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads to jog her memory of any Kentucky versions she might have forgotten. The singer returned soon after and repeated verbatim many stanzas of Robin Hood, an episode John Greenway discusses in detail in his Journal of American Folklore article, "Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation". Lomax wrote later about recording the "false" ballad in Barnicle's apartment:
By the time [Jackson] sat down in front of my microphone she was able to reel off scores of verses of it purely by memory, and interlarded with rich Kentucky-isms. The text, then, was obviously a direct lift from Child, set to favorite Molly Jackson tunes.... that is how the whole thing began—a delightful jape, played on a government folklorist (Lomax 132).
Lomax fails to point out here that he was simultaneously "lifting" Jackson's music, but the parallel is nonetheless evident: singer and folklorist were each, in a manner, using the other.
Jackson's relationship with Barnicle eventually soured; the singer resented Barnicle "messing up" her songs in transcription, and the professor came to doubt the veracity of Jackson's stories. Barnicle shelved, and never returned to, a book she planned to write about Jackson's life.
After these experiences, Jackson, though eager for recognition and money, was increasingly wary of collectors in later years, sure that they would "mess up" or steal her work. She was further disillusioned by an incident with Columbia Records, which recorded, but never released, an album of her songs.
Another musician, Pete Seeger, discovered Jackson in the 1930s, and later he credited her as one of his major influences. When introduced by Charles Seeger to his son, Pete, Jackson sang the traditional Appalachian song "Wedding Dress" and earned his lifelong admiration. The younger Seeger would provide a major impetus for the folk revival movements of the twentieth century. He was a founding member of the Almanac Singers, a group of folk artists including such members as Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, and Sis Cunningham (among others), who traveled the country and wrote songs to instill political consciousness in the masses.
The group hosted hootenannies in a rented loft, events to which anybody might show up; Jackson and her siblings, Leadbelly, the Lomaxes, Burl Ives, and Sonny Terry were some of the regulars (Romalis 112). A benefit concert for agricultural workers, in which Jackson participated, on March 3, 1940—the "Grapes of Wrath" concert—was a pivotal event in shaping the direction of a new folk consciousness, creating a revival impulse when "real" folk and their urban admirers united creatively. While Jackson witnessed and, to some extent, participated in the resulting urban folk revival, most audiences preferred the polished voices of the urban revivalists to her own nasal, high-pitched sound. Jackson was welcomed as a symbol of the movement, and respected for her exemplary role in the class struggle, but invitations to perform became rare (Romalis 113).
The folk music revival movement, initiated in urban centers, obscured definitions of "folk" and "folk music," confusing the supposed boundaries delineating the "authentic" folk from the constructed thing. Traditional songs were learned and performed by the supposedly "nonfolk"—young middleclass intellectuals who dressed in working class garb.
But, as the complicated career of Aunt Molly Jackson reveals, the "authentic" folk identity is a similarly complex construction: Jackson "borrowed" songs, wove tall tales, and changed her stories at every turn. Her exposure to New York City inevitably altered the nature of her experience as "folk"—and, as Charles Seeger points out, problematizes the notion of her place within a folk–non-folk binary:
Put any good 'authentic,' traditional singer before a microphone or on a platform before an audience not of its own kind, and soon the peculiar requirements of the situation produce the typical traits of exhibitionism. To my personal observation, it took Molly Jackson only a few months after her expulsion from Harlan County, Kentucky, to convert herself, when expedient, from a traditional singer, who seemed never to have given any particular thought to whether anyone liked or disliked her singing, into a shrewd observer of audience reaction... (Seeger 339).
One might infer from this assertion that Jackson would have retained her "authentic folk-ness" had she remained in Kentucky and continued performing only before audiences of her "own kind." But Seeger argues even that is impossible, considering that "the avidity of the hillbilly most remote from the city for the city's nonfolkness is quite as self-propelled as that of the city-billy most remote from the country for the country's folkness" (Seeger 339). And thus:
Since each has now exploited the other for a couple of decades in the large frame of the United States, there must exist few, if any, persons left ratable as 100 percent either folk or nonfolk. The vast population lies between these limits, each individual made up of varying proportions of inhibited or released folkness or nonfolkness. (Seeger 339).
Seeger argues here that a pure "folk" can no longer exist untouched by the external influences of culture. At Jackson's death in 1960, Lomax expressed a similar sentiment: "[Jackson] was folklore itself, at its best... We won't see her like ever again, now" (Lomax 132). In this age of mass media, such an argument seems valid.
Jackson herself might disagree; she claimed folksongs were simply what folks sang, and she spent very little time haggling over scholarly definitions. Nor might Jackson have appreciated Seeger's assertion that she compromised her authenticity by performing before a broader audience than her mountain "folk." After all, it was by coming to New York City that Jackson exposed the plight of, and thereby garnered needed money and publicity for, her Kentucky friends and neighbors; while she reveled in the spotlight, the city merely provided a bigger stage for Jackson to continue her life's work struggling against social injustice.
John Greenway explains the singer's creative self-construction in this way:
Aunt Molly survived, and helped countless others to endure, but she succeeded through not worrying over petty bourgeois scruples. When the enemies of her people counted murder a misdemeanor, she could hardly be blamed for prevarication (Greenway, Kentucky Folklore Record 143)
Perhaps this is how Jackson would have liked herself to be explained. Nonetheless, it is a romantic oversimplification of a woman whose complexity underscores the complications of attempting to demarcate clean divisions of authenticity. Whatever the case may be, the "pistol packin' mama" perceived a value in the reconstruction of her own folk identity and actively repackaged it to please any interested listeners and scholars—for reasons both altruistic and self-serving.
It is well known about Molly, that her stories changed depending on who it was listening. The happenings and endings would be different.
I remember looking through the cracks in the planks in the log cabin where I was born, and seeing high banks of snow. The snow had fallen at night while we were asleep. I remember hearing my granddad Garland saying the snow was six foot deep. I was three years old that past October and this snow fell in December, which I will prove to you I was three years old when I started to remember. Yes, I can remember 61 yrs ago, when I saw my granddad Garland dragging a big pine log through the snow. I remember to this day, the color of the scarf that my granddad had tied around his ears, and he was making a road from our log cabin to his by pulling that big pine log through the snow with two big yoke steers, and I remember my mother when she saw this snow so deep she began to cry and weep. Her cheeks were wet with tears because my mother and I were all alone. My father was working away from home. This happened when I was three years old and two months. My daddy was over at my granddad's sisters digging coal in a coal mine. That is when my father became interested in coal mining. Then my daddy sold his farm in Clay County, and we moved in the first coal mines ever in Kentucky.
When Molly was 8 yrs old and John was 5 yrs old they spent carefree moments during that period, hunting rabbits and squirrels in the mountains with their stepmother's youngest brother, 12 years old, Dickie Lucas. Dickie would call Molly " Joe", lend her his old britches, coat and coonskin hat, "so if any other boy met us in the woods when we was out hunting, they would think Molly was another boy. Oliver Garland sired 15 children in all. Only 6 survived to adulthood and only 4 survived when Molly wrote her life story in the 1940's. "
Every 12 or 13 months, my dad's wife would have another baby, and I had to take care of them all. They seemed like my own children instead of my brother and sisters. Although very young girls were expected to care for their siblings, Molly was clearly resentful about her responsibilities, particularly because she felt her stepmother was shrieking her own, and was determined to get an education. My own mother's brother told me that I would grow up to be a fool if my stepmother kept me home to work all the time and would not let me go to school. But I went to school for 3 months after my mother died and I learned to read and write.
Molly's stepmother was 11 years older than Molly, found handling a step-daughter was hard work, especially when my father left the house. Brother John, even though younger than Molly, took it upon himself as her full brother to whip the stuffing out of her when she gave my mother too much of a hard time. He liked my mother. But Molly didn't and would tell all kinds of lies about her, trying to make my father angry at his wife. Once Molly went to a neighbor's house to spend the night, she told these folks that my mother wouldn't let any of the children eat meat. Molly said my mother would take a meat skin and rub it around our mouths to make my father think we had eaten. Molly also claimed Mother would tie a meat skin to a piece of string, force us to swallow the meat, and then pull it back out our throats. Of course this shocked our neighbors, and they told my dad what his daughter had said, he assured them that all the tales were Molly's making up. After he came home and mentioned the pitiful stories, and once John agreed that all them were lies, Dad gave Molly quite a whipping. The next time my father left home, Molly raised a quarrel with my mother about having gotton whipped. When John told Molly to lay off, she turned on him and threatened to leave home. She went outside, mounted old Kick belly, a mare we had at the time and began to ride off. That was until John knocked her off with a ear of corn. He hit her so hard that Molly was out for awhile, my mother thought she was dead, By the time Father returned, Molly was fully consciences and ready to describe every bit how she had been mistreated. As was my Father's habit, he spoke with John for another side of the story.
Once again Dad decided that Molly had gotten exactly what she deserved. With domestic Chores weighing her down, the rebellious Molly needed outlets to have fun. Despite Oliver Perry's warning's that dancing is the devil's activity, she found ways to defy him, and stole away to her first dance party on Christmas Eve, just after her 9th birthday. My dad was peeping in at the window when he heard John call out " Swing your partner and skiptumule". Then my dad jumped in and grabbed me by the hair of my head and drug me out and took me home. He beat me in the head with his fist and then slapped me in the face ‘til I felt dizzy all the next day. But that didn't stop me from slipping out and going to parties and places to dance. I always loved music and dancing. My mother's (Deborah's) father was the best fiddler in Clay County. I used to never be able to keep my feet still when granddad was playing the fiddle. When I was 3 years old, I was afraid to let my dad see me move my feet when granddad was playing. We would go into taverns and restaurant's and dance for money. Someday we would have a pint cup full of silver people would give us. I was between 8 and 9 years old when I would slip out and dance for money, I won prizes for hoe down dancing. My dad was never able to find out about me slipping out and dancing, because we never did offer to dance in the town where we lived. My dad used to think I was going to Mistress Brown's house to help her in the garden and sweep and wash dishes. So after I growed up I realized that I had been forced to lead my life as a lie. Molly constantly worried, however, about the consequences of Oliver Perry's wrath and didn't freely go to parties until she married Jim Stewart, and moved 90 miles away from home and well away from her father's scrutiny. One of Molly's formative and most told experiences, which she tends to elaborate slightly differently depending on her audience, led to the composition of Molly's earliest multi-versed song, At age 10 yrs, while living with her grandparents (Robinson's) farm on Sexton Creek, Molly played a Christmas Prank.
Smearing her face with charcoal, she fashioned horns and donned her grandfather's trousers and rifle. Her grunts and howls terrified the children at a farmhouse down the road, and one actually fainted. His father summoned the Sheriff, and invoking the law against the use of a "disguise", he arrested Molly, sentencing the unruly child to 10 days in jail. In her autobiography, Molly explains how she coped with this experience The county judge married a first cousin of my father, and he felt awful sorry for me, and he asked what on earth caused me to do such a thing as to disguise myself in men's clothing He asked me if I didn't know that was against the law. I told him I didn't know of any such law and that I didn't mean any harm. I only thought that I would have a little fun out of the children on Christmas Eve. Then the judge told me the best he could do was give me the lowest penalty which was 10 days in jail and a $25 fine, and I asked him, " How do you think that I could go to jail, and me the little girl that I was? I told him, " you know there has never been a stain on my whole generations Christian morels, much less go to jail." Then the jailer told me that I would not have to stay in jail, that I could just go to his house and stay with his wife, who was a first cousin of my mother. I decided if I pretended that I had no mind, that she would get sorry for me and have her husband to send me home. So when I went to the house, I began to act foolish like. I then changed my mind and decided on another strategy. I appealed to the Sheriff in a song that I wrote and sang to the jailer and his wife at supper that night. (not the full version) The day before Christmas, I had some fun, I blacked my face and took my gun, I went to Bill Lewis and then made them run, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. The next Monday morning Old Bill Lewis got out a writ, When I found this out, I went and split, Mr. Cundiff, turn me loose. It was just 3 weeks ‘til I come back to pay, Old Cotton arrested me the very next day, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. Then I brought my case would be light, Cotton took me before Judge Wright, Judge Wright told me that I'd done wrong, for blacking my face and putting britches on, Mr. Cundiff turn me loose. He listened to me ‘til I told my tale, then he gave me 10 days in Cundiff's jail. It is believed that the song "Mr. Cundiff" was Molly's first and only pre-strike Harlan Composition.
After her jail episode, Molly began working for Miss Lizzie Jarvis, the wife of the jailer in Barboursville, Knox County Kentucky. Molly did the washing, dishes, floors, for 50 cents a week. Molly remembers; Miss Jarvis took me upstairs and give me baths in the first bath tub I ever saw in my life. Then she shampooed my hair and plaited my hair in braids and tied red bows of ribbon in my hair. Then she dressed my in her little girls clothes and put a nice pair of slippers on my feet. These slippers had silver buckles and I thought they were the prettiest things I had ever saw, in fact they was the first pair of slippers I had ever saw in my life. I had come to town bare footed because no children had any shoes to wear being summer and fall and only well to do families bought shoes for the children at any time in them days. Miss Jarvis gave her a nickname and called her " Patsy". Miss Jarvis became disenchanted with Molly, and fired her for interfering in her relationship with another employee, by the act that Molly saw as simple kindness. She gave a old colored lady, who was Miss Jarvis' wash lady, $2 to buy something to eat for her children, which Molly insists was directly responsible for some of her good fortune and leading her into her future profession as a nurse. Shortly after starting her new job at the county clerk's house, helping to tend 15 children and 12 bedrooms, Molly contracted whooping cough.
Miss Jarvis' grateful washwoman visited Molly, bringing her a compound of honey, garlic, horehound, and whiskey. Molly vowed that this mash cured her and inspired her to take up nursing. She told a story to illustrate how good deeds paid off: I have cured a many cases of whooping cough with the same remedy since I have been a nurse. So you see the $2 I gave this wonderful, kind old colored lady caused her to come and see me and bring a remedy that saved my life, and it taught me how to save many cases of whooping cough, and the desire to become a nurse and by the time I was 18yrs old, I was able to make a first class diploma for a midwife and a nurse. And from that day, I have always done by other's just what that dear ol colored lady done for me.
From Jim Garland: MOLLY'S MARRIAGES When my sister was about 13 years old, she decided that she wanted to marry a neighbor boy not much older than her. Mother tried to talk Molly out of it, explaining that both of them were to young, that they wouldn't have any way to support themselves. Molly wouldn't hear of this. She insisted that no matter how they would have to live, she be determined to get a marriage certificate; Molly though pronounced it "stiffidick". When my dad came home, Mother explained Molly's plans. Immediately Dad went outside and cut a nice long hickory switch, came inside and laid it on the mantel saying " Now right there lays Molly's stiffidick, and if I hear again of her wanting to get married, I intend to give it to her just as long as that lasts. Molly names this boy in her autobiography as Calloway Clance.
When John Mills was courting my half sister, Molly, he spent all night in the Press Hendrickson House (this was the house the Garland's lived in). In the middle of the night, he got scared out of his wits and began hollering " Mr Garland, Mr Garland!" My father thought John Mills was a dimwit but got out of bed anyway to see what was a matter.
Mr Garland, make light, John Mills whispered, " A tall stoop shouldered man was bending over your wife" John Mills, go to sleep, my dad said. " You didnt see anything" Once the house had quieted down again, John Mills a second time began to yell. Mr Garland, Mr Garland, Please get up. The man is back again. My father called out to Mills in the dark. " John, there is nothing there, your just seeing rats. Go to sleep. " But Mr Garland, my eyes dont let me see rats, Can I build a fire? " There's no wood for a fire. " Then Mr Garland can I burn the bed slats? I'll get you new ones in the morning. John Mills sit up all through the night. My father would wake up and find him praying each time or talking to his self. Mills came back to visit Molly, in fact he later married her, but never did again spend the night in the Press Hendrickson house. My brother John spent only one night in the place himself; he was so convinced that he had seen ghosts there that he insisted on moving in with the Bracket and Hindrickson families until my mother and father moved. Both of these families had some very tough older boys. Another Excerpt: As a matter of fact, Molly did marry young, to a man named John Mills.
During their courtship, Mills worked on the Railroad section Gang and boarded in one of the section houses. One evening my father was beginning to think Mills had overstayed his welcome. Dad asked" John don't you think you had better get back? The men will go off and leave you in the morning. " Oh no they wont Mr. Garland, John Mills said.. Right now I have on at least 30 shirts of theirs. Sure enough Mills had put on a shirt of about men in the section gang to make sure they wouldn't take off without him. Once Molly and John married, she found him to be foolish and stingy that he lived on cornbread and jallop. Molly told him one time " John Mills, if you don't get something to eat around here, I'm going to leave you." Lord have mercy honey, her husband said. " I haint got nothing less than a five, and if a man breaks a five dollar bill, its gone in no time. As it happened, Molly didn't eat Jallop much longer. Soon she quit John Mills and married Jim Stewart. In Molly's autobiography, she fails to mention her marriage to John Mills. She denies being married before Jim Stewart, but her brother Jim Garland tells the story the marriage to John Mills, and the marriage is available in the Knox County Marriage Books. In her book, she states that she married Jim Stewart in April 1894. Which is impossible, since she was married to Jim after her marriage to John Mills, and John and Molly were married in 1898. BUT Molly describes her wedding night to Jim Stewart:
Molly finally able to claim independence from Oliver Perry Garland, a still innocent Molly just started to menstruate and claimed to know nothing about sex. When husband Jim raised her nightgown, she would tie it down and jump in her mother in law's bed for protection. At age 15 ½ she bore her first child and at age 17 yrs her second son came. Romalis states that she found no other info on her babies, and that they probably died in infantcy. Molly did raise Jim Stewart's 2 children, Jess Willis Stewart and Lillian Bee, and four of Bill Jackon's children.
Molly remained deeply in love with Jim Stewart.
Bill Jackson's cousin, Jess Baker.. 90 gallon still hid back in the mountains. Bill and Jess gave Molly the nickname, "Pistol Packing Mama". Bill Jackson's nickname was .45 Bill, cause a 45 caliber pistol was his choice of guns.
When Molly was a midwife, she recieved 25. cents for every birth certificate she sent into the state. She received a check once a year.
Never one to keep her mouth shut, Molly often spoke out angrily when she observed instances of social injustice in the community—many times at the cost of her husband's mining job. In one such instance, Jim Stewart was fired after his wife distributed her song "Fare Thee Well, Old Ely Branch" at the spring where the miners' wives came for water. Jim Garland described Jackson's pugnacious nature in this way:
She was at the height of her glory when she was giving someone she thought was no good a hard time. If she believed someone was taking advantage of his or her position in life, whether that was a coal operator, a husband who beat his wife, a man who would not support his family, or a bookkeeper who denied some needy family scrip to buy food with, she made her feelings known. These troublemaking instincts led her to write many a fine song
Jackson's "pistol packin'" reputation was not without a factual basis, however, as brother Jim Garland attested. When Jackson and some other miners' wives were approached on the picket line by scabs in Ross, Kentucky, the women grabbed the gun thugs and stripped them naked. Garland recalled: "After four women had managed to hold down one of the gun thugs, my sister Molly took his pistol and shoved the barrel right up his rectum. Never did this particular gun thug show his face there again" (Romalis 86-87). Despite this recollection, Garland also asserted that his sister's role in the mining strikes had been drastically exaggerated:
Poor Miner's Farewell
* Written about the death of her brother Richard "Dick" Garland, who was killed in the coal mines.
Hungry Ragged Blues
Ten Thousand Miles
"Mr Cunduff Turn Me Loose"
*After blacking her face with charcoal and donning a disguise, Molly spooked the residents of a neighboring farmhouse who reported her to the sheriff. To teach her a lesson, Oliver Garland made his daughter serve the brief jail sentence, during which she composed a song pleading to the jailer for her release.
Molly claimed the song was so well liked around the jail that she was given "thirty-seven dollars and twenty seven plugs of 'tobaker' and the jailer's wife made me a satin dress with 'yeler' butterflies, and she bought me a high top pair of fine button shoes and a handbag" . In other retellings of the incident, perhaps when convenient in establishing her union activist persona, Molly would claim she was jailed for her family's unionizing efforts
Biographer Shelly Romalis notes the significance of the fact that even the usually skeptical Jim Garland confirmed his sister's reputation as a midwife. Garland wrote: "[She] delivered far more babies during those years [1910 to 1932] than did all the doctors on both Horse Creek in Clay County and Straight Creek in Bell County. According to Molly's own estimate, she attended over 5,000 births" (Garland 33). This number, like so much data in Jackson's history, varies widely according to the telling; Jackson told Dreiser Committee interviewers that she had delivered 65 children (Harlan Miners Speak 282), Woody Guthrie was under the impression that "she helped to bring over a hundred little babies into the world" (Guthrie 139), and a New York journalist—presumably sourcing Jackson—put the number at 600 (Robertson 139).
Whatever the gross factual disparities, Jackson's experiences as a midwife provided ample opportunity to witness the impoverished situation of neighboring mining families. Many of Jackson's protest ballads woefully testify about these sick and starving children of Kentucky miners.
"The Death of Harry Sims"
*Written about a young Jewish Man, who was a coal mining union man, who was killed by some gun thugs.
"Little Dove"
"Roll on Buddy"
"Pistol Packin Mama"
* Written by Jess Baker, about Aunt Molly Jackson.
Molly's Funeral:
Aunt Molly Jackson died the last day in August 1960. Shortly before her 80th birthday. Scraps of paper with notes and songs disappeared, most likely discarded with her shabby furniture. Barnicle's dog eared copy of Kitterage and Sargent with the contested "Robin Hood" poem and her photographs of Roosevelt and Pete Seegar proudly placed on her walls. Obituaries in the Sacramento Bee (September 2) and the New York Times
( September 4th), the San Jose News and the St. Louis Post Dispatcher ( September 4th)
all honored the orginal and famous "Pistol Packin Mama" John Greenway in his sing out! Obituary said, "If Molly has made it to heaven I am sure her fight goes on" the songs she is singing is nothing the heavingly choir ever heard before.
Molly's funeral was held in the Sacramento Memorial Garden Chapel, arranged by her neice Lula Holcom, drew a suprisingly respectable crowd of about 50 assorted people. Writer Alice McLerran lovingly remembers the mountain woman as she lay in a open lavender and blue casket, with withered, hawklike features, still haunting, despite the softening efforts of the embalmers. Molly's final theater would have brought her joy, the wafting soulful organ music, rocks and streams decorating the front of the chapel. She would have distained the minister who grabbed the opportunity to warn mourners that they too might fall from grace , as he orated "In my father's house, their was many mansions", Alice could almost see Molly rise and proclaim. "Mansion", my mother never saw a mansion. My grandmother never saw one either. And my great grandmother! They none of them saw a mansion, and they was just as fine of women that pissed through hair! And Mary Magdalene (Garland) (Mills) (Stewart) Jackson would have certainly written!
Aunt Molly Jackson is one of the most overlooked, yet influential, figures in American folk music. Not only was she a contemporary of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, she was also a major influence on Pete Seeger. Unfortunately her recorded output consists of one single, recorded in the early '30s. Born Mary Magdalene Garland in 1880 in the coal mining country of Kentucky, she married in her early teens and became a certified midwife by the time she was 18. Since Jackson was so young when she delivered her first baby, instead of following the custom of the times by calling midwives "Grandma," she insisted being called "Aunt Molly" instead. Jackson was the wife of a miner in the Kentucky coal fields. When the miners decided to strike for better pay and working conditions, she wrote her first song about the experience. In the midst of the strike, a group of writers led by Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos came to Kentucky on a fact-finding tour. Among the interviewed miners and family members, Jackson sang her song, "Hungry Ragged Blues." The impressed committee convinced her to go to New York City and use her singing to raise funds for the strikers, which she did. After the strike was settled, Jackson stayed on in New York City and continued as an activist and singer, where she became known among the folk and radical communities. Her earliest compositions to impress listeners in the radical movement were "Miner's Hungry Ragged Blues" and "Poor Miner's Farewell." By 1960 Jackson was impoverished but nevertheless was working on an LP of original material when she died suddenly. During the 1970s, some of those songs were released on a Rounder anthology. ~ Al Campbell, All Music Guide
Coinciding with the political co-optation of her folk identity, Jackson was "discovered" by musical intellectuals newly interested in the traditional songs of the American folk.
The Composers Collective (which included radical musicians and composers like Charles Seeger, Aaron Copland, and Elie Siegmeister), in the early decade rejected folk music in search of more revolutionary (i.e. dissonant) sounds for the proletariat, but by the mid-1930s had recognized folk music's value in connecting with the people. When Jackson was invited to play at one of their meetings in 1933, the collective's composers and the folksinger were mutually disenchanted with each other's style. But such opinions changed quickly. As Siegmeister recounted often afterward, in 1934 Jackson approached him after a workers' concert and asked if he knew any real American music, and then she shared some with him:
She sang in a squeaky high-pitched voice and couldn't read or write a note of music. But Aunt Molly sang great songs which dealt with her own life in Kentucky, songs of power and feeling. That was one of my first introductions to America singing (Siegmeister, New York Times 11 February 1940).
Siegmeister said that Jackson's music—the American folk music—"yields to no other in its richness, variety, and musical quality." Other musicians and folklorists soon agreed.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, an English and folklore professor at New York University, discovered Jackson's wealth of stories and songs, and eagerly pursued a friendship with the singer. Barnicle became Jackson's patron for a time, inviting the singer to speak to her NYU classes and introducing her to many New York intellectuals. The professor also introduced Jackson to a young man named Alan Lomax, who recorded her songs and, without Jackson's permission (or Barnicle's knowledge), submitted them to the Library of Congress collection. Jackson wrote Lomax many times in later years angrily demanding compensation for her songs.
She was not, in these recording sessions, the only victim of manipulation, however. Barnicle (unwisely, as it turned out) had lent Jackson a copy of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads to jog her memory of any Kentucky versions she might have forgotten. The singer returned soon after and repeated verbatim many stanzas of Robin Hood, an episode John Greenway discusses in detail in his Journal of American Folklore article, "Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation". Lomax wrote later about recording the "false" ballad in Barnicle's apartment:
By the time [Jackson] sat down in front of my microphone she was able to reel off scores of verses of it purely by memory, and interlarded with rich Kentucky-isms. The text, then, was obviously a direct lift from Child, set to favorite Molly Jackson tunes.... that is how the whole thing began—a delightful jape, played on a government folklorist (Lomax 132).
Lomax fails to point out here that he was simultaneously "lifting" Jackson's music, but the parallel is nonetheless evident: singer and folklorist were each, in a manner, using the other.
Jackson's relationship with Barnicle eventually soured; the singer resented Barnicle "messing up" her songs in transcription, and the professor came to doubt the veracity of Jackson's stories. Barnicle shelved, and never returned to, a book she planned to write about Jackson's life.
After these experiences, Jackson, though eager for recognition and money, was increasingly wary of collectors in later years, sure that they would "mess up" or steal her work. She was further disillusioned by an incident with Columbia Records, which recorded, but never released, an album of her songs.
Another musician, Pete Seeger, discovered Jackson in the 1930s, and later he credited her as one of his major influences. When introduced by Charles Seeger to his son, Pete, Jackson sang the traditional Appalachian song "Wedding Dress" and earned his lifelong admiration. The younger Seeger would provide a major impetus for the folk revival movements of the twentieth century. He was a founding member of the Almanac Singers, a group of folk artists including such members as Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, and Sis Cunningham (among others), who traveled the country and wrote songs to instill political consciousness in the masses.
The group hosted hootenannies in a rented loft, events to which anybody might show up; Jackson and her siblings, Leadbelly, the Lomaxes, Burl Ives, and Sonny Terry were some of the regulars (Romalis 112). A benefit concert for agricultural workers, in which Jackson participated, on March 3, 1940—the "Grapes of Wrath" concert—was a pivotal event in shaping the direction of a new folk consciousness, creating a revival impulse when "real" folk and their urban admirers united creatively. While Jackson witnessed and, to some extent, participated in the resulting urban folk revival, most audiences preferred the polished voices of the urban revivalists to her own nasal, high-pitched sound. Jackson was welcomed as a symbol of the movement, and respected for her exemplary role in the class struggle, but invitations to perform became rare (Romalis 113).
The folk music revival movement, initiated in urban centers, obscured definitions of "folk" and "folk music," confusing the supposed boundaries delineating the "authentic" folk from the constructed thing. Traditional songs were learned and performed by the supposedly "nonfolk"—young middleclass intellectuals who dressed in working class garb.
But, as the complicated career of Aunt Molly Jackson reveals, the "authentic" folk identity is a similarly complex construction: Jackson "borrowed" songs, wove tall tales, and changed her stories at every turn. Her exposure to New York City inevitably altered the nature of her experience as "folk"—and, as Charles Seeger points out, problematizes the notion of her place within a folk–non-folk binary:
Put any good 'authentic,' traditional singer before a microphone or on a platform before an audience not of its own kind, and soon the peculiar requirements of the situation produce the typical traits of exhibitionism. To my personal observation, it took Molly Jackson only a few months after her expulsion from Harlan County, Kentucky, to convert herself, when expedient, from a traditional singer, who seemed never to have given any particular thought to whether anyone liked or disliked her singing, into a shrewd observer of audience reaction... (Seeger 339).
One might infer from this assertion that Jackson would have retained her "authentic folk-ness" had she remained in Kentucky and continued performing only before audiences of her "own kind." But Seeger argues even that is impossible, considering that "the avidity of the hillbilly most remote from the city for the city's nonfolkness is quite as self-propelled as that of the city-billy most remote from the country for the country's folkness" (Seeger 339). And thus:
Since each has now exploited the other for a couple of decades in the large frame of the United States, there must exist few, if any, persons left ratable as 100 percent either folk or nonfolk. The vast population lies between these limits, each individual made up of varying proportions of inhibited or released folkness or nonfolkness. (Seeger 339).
Seeger argues here that a pure "folk" can no longer exist untouched by the external influences of culture. At Jackson's death in 1960, Lomax expressed a similar sentiment: "[Jackson] was folklore itself, at its best... We won't see her like ever again, now" (Lomax 132). In this age of mass media, such an argument seems valid.
Jackson herself might disagree; she claimed folksongs were simply what folks sang, and she spent very little time haggling over scholarly definitions. Nor might Jackson have appreciated Seeger's assertion that she compromised her authenticity by performing before a broader audience than her mountain "folk." After all, it was by coming to New York City that Jackson exposed the plight of, and thereby garnered needed money and publicity for, her Kentucky friends and neighbors; while she reveled in the spotlight, the city merely provided a bigger stage for Jackson to continue her life's work struggling against social injustice.
John Greenway explains the singer's creative self-construction in this way:
Aunt Molly survived, and helped countless others to endure, but she succeeded through not worrying over petty bourgeois scruples. When the enemies of her people counted murder a misdemeanor, she could hardly be blamed for prevarication (Greenway, Kentucky Folklore Record 143)
Perhaps this is how Jackson would have liked herself to be explained. Nonetheless, it is a romantic oversimplification of a woman whose complexity underscores the complications of attempting to demarcate clean divisions of authenticity. Whatever the case may be, the "pistol packin' mama" perceived a value in the reconstruction of her own folk identity and actively repackaged it to please any interested listeners and scholars—for reasons both altruistic and self-serving.
It is well known about Molly, that her stories changed depending on who it was listening. The happenings and endings would be different.
I remember looking through the cracks in the planks in the log cabin where I was born, and seeing high banks of snow. The snow had fallen at night while we were asleep. I remember hearing my granddad Garland saying the snow was six foot deep. I was three years old that past October and this snow fell in December, which I will prove to you I was three years old when I started to remember. Yes, I can remember 61 yrs ago, when I saw my granddad Garland dragging a big pine log through the snow. I remember to this day, the color of the scarf that my granddad had tied around his ears, and he was making a road from our log cabin to his by pulling that big pine log through the snow with two big yoke steers, and I remember my mother when she saw this snow so deep she began to cry and weep. Her cheeks were wet with tears because my mother and I were all alone. My father was working away from home. This happened when I was three years old and two months. My daddy was over at my granddad's sisters digging coal in a coal mine. That is when my father became interested in coal mining. Then my daddy sold his farm in Clay County, and we moved in the first coal mines ever in Kentucky.
When Molly was 8 yrs old and John was 5 yrs old they spent carefree moments during that period, hunting rabbits and squirrels in the mountains with their stepmother's youngest brother, 12 years old, Dickie Lucas. Dickie would call Molly " Joe", lend her his old britches, coat and coonskin hat, "so if any other boy met us in the woods when we was out hunting, they would think Molly was another boy. Oliver Garland sired 15 children in all. Only 6 survived to adulthood and only 4 survived when Molly wrote her life story in the 1940's. "
Every 12 or 13 months, my dad's wife would have another baby, and I had to take care of them all. They seemed like my own children instead of my brother and sisters. Although very young girls were expected to care for their siblings, Molly was clearly resentful about her responsibilities, particularly because she felt her stepmother was shrieking her own, and was determined to get an education. My own mother's brother told me that I would grow up to be a fool if my stepmother kept me home to work all the time and would not let me go to school. But I went to school for 3 months after my mother died and I learned to read and write.
Molly's stepmother was 11 years older than Molly, found handling a step-daughter was hard work, especially when my father left the house. Brother John, even though younger than Molly, took it upon himself as her full brother to whip the stuffing out of her when she gave my mother too much of a hard time. He liked my mother. But Molly didn't and would tell all kinds of lies about her, trying to make my father angry at his wife. Once Molly went to a neighbor's house to spend the night, she told these folks that my mother wouldn't let any of the children eat meat. Molly said my mother would take a meat skin and rub it around our mouths to make my father think we had eaten. Molly also claimed Mother would tie a meat skin to a piece of string, force us to swallow the meat, and then pull it back out our throats. Of course this shocked our neighbors, and they told my dad what his daughter had said, he assured them that all the tales were Molly's making up. After he came home and mentioned the pitiful stories, and once John agreed that all them were lies, Dad gave Molly quite a whipping. The next time my father left home, Molly raised a quarrel with my mother about having gotton whipped. When John told Molly to lay off, she turned on him and threatened to leave home. She went outside, mounted old Kick belly, a mare we had at the time and began to ride off. That was until John knocked her off with a ear of corn. He hit her so hard that Molly was out for awhile, my mother thought she was dead, By the time Father returned, Molly was fully consciences and ready to describe every bit how she had been mistreated. As was my Father's habit, he spoke with John for another side of the story.
Once again Dad decided that Molly had gotten exactly what she deserved. With domestic Chores weighing her down, the rebellious Molly needed outlets to have fun. Despite Oliver Perry's warning's that dancing is the devil's activity, she found ways to defy him, and stole away to her first dance party on Christmas Eve, just after her 9th birthday. My dad was peeping in at the window when he heard John call out " Swing your partner and skiptumule". Then my dad jumped in and grabbed me by the hair of my head and drug me out and took me home. He beat me in the head with his fist and then slapped me in the face ‘til I felt dizzy all the next day. But that didn't stop me from slipping out and going to parties and places to dance. I always loved music and dancing. My mother's (Deborah's) father was the best fiddler in Clay County. I used to never be able to keep my feet still when granddad was playing the fiddle. When I was 3 years old, I was afraid to let my dad see me move my feet when granddad was playing. We would go into taverns and restaurant's and dance for money. Someday we would have a pint cup full of silver people would give us. I was between 8 and 9 years old when I would slip out and dance for money, I won prizes for hoe down dancing. My dad was never able to find out about me slipping out and dancing, because we never did offer to dance in the town where we lived. My dad used to think I was going to Mistress Brown's house to help her in the garden and sweep and wash dishes. So after I growed up I realized that I had been forced to lead my life as a lie. Molly constantly worried, however, about the consequences of Oliver Perry's wrath and didn't freely go to parties until she married Jim Stewart, and moved 90 miles away from home and well away from her father's scrutiny. One of Molly's formative and most told experiences, which she tends to elaborate slightly differently depending on her audience, led to the composition of Molly's earliest multi-versed song, At age 10 yrs, while living with her grandparents (Robinson's) farm on Sexton Creek, Molly played a Christmas Prank.
Smearing her face with charcoal, she fashioned horns and donned her grandfather's trousers and rifle. Her grunts and howls terrified the children at a farmhouse down the road, and one actually fainted. His father summoned the Sheriff, and invoking the law against the use of a "disguise", he arrested Molly, sentencing the unruly child to 10 days in jail. In her autobiography, Molly explains how she coped with this experience The county judge married a first cousin of my father, and he felt awful sorry for me, and he asked what on earth caused me to do such a thing as to disguise myself in men's clothing He asked me if I didn't know that was against the law. I told him I didn't know of any such law and that I didn't mean any harm. I only thought that I would have a little fun out of the children on Christmas Eve. Then the judge told me the best he could do was give me the lowest penalty which was 10 days in jail and a $25 fine, and I asked him, " How do you think that I could go to jail, and me the little girl that I was? I told him, " you know there has never been a stain on my whole generations Christian morels, much less go to jail." Then the jailer told me that I would not have to stay in jail, that I could just go to his house and stay with his wife, who was a first cousin of my mother. I decided if I pretended that I had no mind, that she would get sorry for me and have her husband to send me home. So when I went to the house, I began to act foolish like. I then changed my mind and decided on another strategy. I appealed to the Sheriff in a song that I wrote and sang to the jailer and his wife at supper that night. (not the full version) The day before Christmas, I had some fun, I blacked my face and took my gun, I went to Bill Lewis and then made them run, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. The next Monday morning Old Bill Lewis got out a writ, When I found this out, I went and split, Mr. Cundiff, turn me loose. It was just 3 weeks ‘til I come back to pay, Old Cotton arrested me the very next day, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. Then I brought my case would be light, Cotton took me before Judge Wright, Judge Wright told me that I'd done wrong, for blacking my face and putting britches on, Mr. Cundiff turn me loose. He listened to me ‘til I told my tale, then he gave me 10 days in Cundiff's jail. It is believed that the song "Mr. Cundiff" was Molly's first and only pre-strike Harlan Composition.
After her jail episode, Molly began working for Miss Lizzie Jarvis, the wife of the jailer in Barboursville, Knox County Kentucky. Molly did the washing, dishes, floors, for 50 cents a week. Molly remembers; Miss Jarvis took me upstairs and give me baths in the first bath tub I ever saw in my life. Then she shampooed my hair and plaited my hair in braids and tied red bows of ribbon in my hair. Then she dressed my in her little girls clothes and put a nice pair of slippers on my feet. These slippers had silver buckles and I thought they were the prettiest things I had ever saw, in fact they was the first pair of slippers I had ever saw in my life. I had come to town bare footed because no children had any shoes to wear being summer and fall and only well to do families bought shoes for the children at any time in them days. Miss Jarvis gave her a nickname and called her " Patsy". Miss Jarvis became disenchanted with Molly, and fired her for interfering in her relationship with another employee, by the act that Molly saw as simple kindness. She gave a old colored lady, who was Miss Jarvis' wash lady, $2 to buy something to eat for her children, which Molly insists was directly responsible for some of her good fortune and leading her into her future profession as a nurse. Shortly after starting her new job at the county clerk's house, helping to tend 15 children and 12 bedrooms, Molly contracted whooping cough.
Miss Jarvis' grateful washwoman visited Molly, bringing her a compound of honey, garlic, horehound, and whiskey. Molly vowed that this mash cured her and inspired her to take up nursing. She told a story to illustrate how good deeds paid off: I have cured a many cases of whooping cough with the same remedy since I have been a nurse. So you see the $2 I gave this wonderful, kind old colored lady caused her to come and see me and bring a remedy that saved my life, and it taught me how to save many cases of whooping cough, and the desire to become a nurse and by the time I was 18yrs old, I was able to make a first class diploma for a midwife and a nurse. And from that day, I have always done by other's just what that dear ol colored lady done for me.
From Jim Garland: MOLLY'S MARRIAGES When my sister was about 13 years old, she decided that she wanted to marry a neighbor boy not much older than her. Mother tried to talk Molly out of it, explaining that both of them were to young, that they wouldn't have any way to support themselves. Molly wouldn't hear of this. She insisted that no matter how they would have to live, she be determined to get a marriage certificate; Molly though pronounced it "stiffidick". When my dad came home, Mother explained Molly's plans. Immediately Dad went outside and cut a nice long hickory switch, came inside and laid it on the mantel saying " Now right there lays Molly's stiffidick, and if I hear again of her wanting to get married, I intend to give it to her just as long as that lasts. Molly names this boy in her autobiography as Calloway Clance.
When John Mills was courting my half sister, Molly, he spent all night in the Press Hendrickson House (this was the house the Garland's lived in). In the middle of the night, he got scared out of his wits and began hollering " Mr Garland, Mr Garland!" My father thought John Mills was a dimwit but got out of bed anyway to see what was a matter.
Mr Garland, make light, John Mills whispered, " A tall stoop shouldered man was bending over your wife" John Mills, go to sleep, my dad said. " You didnt see anything" Once the house had quieted down again, John Mills a second time began to yell. Mr Garland, Mr Garland, Please get up. The man is back again. My father called out to Mills in the dark. " John, there is nothing there, your just seeing rats. Go to sleep. " But Mr Garland, my eyes dont let me see rats, Can I build a fire? " There's no wood for a fire. " Then Mr Garland can I burn the bed slats? I'll get you new ones in the morning. John Mills sit up all through the night. My father would wake up and find him praying each time or talking to his self. Mills came back to visit Molly, in fact he later married her, but never did again spend the night in the Press Hendrickson house. My brother John spent only one night in the place himself; he was so convinced that he had seen ghosts there that he insisted on moving in with the Bracket and Hindrickson families until my mother and father moved. Both of these families had some very tough older boys. Another Excerpt: As a matter of fact, Molly did marry young, to a man named John Mills.
During their courtship, Mills worked on the Railroad section Gang and boarded in one of the section houses. One evening my father was beginning to think Mills had overstayed his welcome. Dad asked" John don't you think you had better get back? The men will go off and leave you in the morning. " Oh no they wont Mr. Garland, John Mills said.. Right now I have on at least 30 shirts of theirs. Sure enough Mills had put on a shirt of about men in the section gang to make sure they wouldn't take off without him. Once Molly and John married, she found him to be foolish and stingy that he lived on cornbread and jallop. Molly told him one time " John Mills, if you don't get something to eat around here, I'm going to leave you." Lord have mercy honey, her husband said. " I haint got nothing less than a five, and if a man breaks a five dollar bill, its gone in no time. As it happened, Molly didn't eat Jallop much longer. Soon she quit John Mills and married Jim Stewart. In Molly's autobiography, she fails to mention her marriage to John Mills. She denies being married before Jim Stewart, but her brother Jim Garland tells the story the marriage to John Mills, and the marriage is available in the Knox County Marriage Books. In her book, she states that she married Jim Stewart in April 1894. Which is impossible, since she was married to Jim after her marriage to John Mills, and John and Molly were married in 1898. BUT Molly describes her wedding night to Jim Stewart:
Molly finally able to claim independence from Oliver Perry Garland, a still innocent Molly just started to menstruate and claimed to know nothing about sex. When husband Jim raised her nightgown, she would tie it down and jump in her mother in law's bed for protection. At age 15 ½ she bore her first child and at age 17 yrs her second son came. Romalis states that she found no other info on her babies, and that they probably died in infantcy. Molly did raise Jim Stewart's 2 children, Jess Willis Stewart and Lillian Bee, and four of Bill Jackon's children.
Molly remained deeply in love with Jim Stewart.
Bill Jackson's cousin, Jess Baker.. 90 gallon still hid back in the mountains. Bill and Jess gave Molly the nickname, "Pistol Packing Mama". Bill Jackson's nickname was .45 Bill, cause a 45 caliber pistol was his choice of guns.
When Molly was a midwife, she recieved 25. cents for every birth certificate she sent into the state. She received a check once a year.
Never one to keep her mouth shut, Molly often spoke out angrily when she observed instances of social injustice in the community—many times at the cost of her husband's mining job. In one such instance, Jim Stewart was fired after his wife distributed her song "Fare Thee Well, Old Ely Branch" at the spring where the miners' wives came for water. Jim Garland described Jackson's pugnacious nature in this way:
She was at the height of her glory when she was giving someone she thought was no good a hard time. If she believed someone was taking advantage of his or her position in life, whether that was a coal operator, a husband who beat his wife, a man who would not support his family, or a bookkeeper who denied some needy family scrip to buy food with, she made her feelings known. These troublemaking instincts led her to write many a fine song
Jackson's "pistol packin'" reputation was not without a factual basis, however, as brother Jim Garland attested. When Jackson and some other miners' wives were approached on the picket line by scabs in Ross, Kentucky, the women grabbed the gun thugs and stripped them naked. Garland recalled: "After four women had managed to hold down one of the gun thugs, my sister Molly took his pistol and shoved the barrel right up his rectum. Never did this particular gun thug show his face there again" (Romalis 86-87). Despite this recollection, Garland also asserted that his sister's role in the mining strikes had been drastically exaggerated:
Poor Miner's Farewell
* Written about the death of her brother Richard "Dick" Garland, who was killed in the coal mines.
Hungry Ragged Blues
Ten Thousand Miles
"Mr Cunduff Turn Me Loose"
*After blacking her face with charcoal and donning a disguise, Molly spooked the residents of a neighboring farmhouse who reported her to the sheriff. To teach her a lesson, Oliver Garland made his daughter serve the brief jail sentence, during which she composed a song pleading to the jailer for her release.
Molly claimed the song was so well liked around the jail that she was given "thirty-seven dollars and twenty seven plugs of 'tobaker' and the jailer's wife made me a satin dress with 'yeler' butterflies, and she bought me a high top pair of fine button shoes and a handbag" . In other retellings of the incident, perhaps when convenient in establishing her union activist persona, Molly would claim she was jailed for her family's unionizing efforts
Biographer Shelly Romalis notes the significance of the fact that even the usually skeptical Jim Garland confirmed his sister's reputation as a midwife. Garland wrote: "[She] delivered far more babies during those years [1910 to 1932] than did all the doctors on both Horse Creek in Clay County and Straight Creek in Bell County. According to Molly's own estimate, she attended over 5,000 births" (Garland 33). This number, like so much data in Jackson's history, varies widely according to the telling; Jackson told Dreiser Committee interviewers that she had delivered 65 children (Harlan Miners Speak 282), Woody Guthrie was under the impression that "she helped to bring over a hundred little babies into the world" (Guthrie 139), and a New York journalist—presumably sourcing Jackson—put the number at 600 (Robertson 139).
Whatever the gross factual disparities, Jackson's experiences as a midwife provided ample opportunity to witness the impoverished situation of neighboring mining families. Many of Jackson's protest ballads woefully testify about these sick and starving children of Kentucky miners.
"The Death of Harry Sims"
*Written about a young Jewish Man, who was a coal mining union man, who was killed by some gun thugs.
"Little Dove"
"Roll on Buddy"
"Pistol Packin Mama"
* Written by Jess Baker, about Aunt Molly Jackson.
Molly's Funeral:
Aunt Molly Jackson died the last day in August 1960. Shortly before her 80th birthday. Scraps of paper with notes and songs disappeared, most likely discarded with her shabby furniture. Barnicle's dog eared copy of Kitterage and Sargent with the contested "Robin Hood" poem and her photographs of Roosevelt and Pete Seegar proudly placed on her walls. Obituaries in the Sacramento Bee (September 2) and the New York Times
( September 4th), the San Jose News and the St. Louis Post Dispatcher ( September 4th)
all honored the orginal and famous "Pistol Packin Mama" John Greenway in his sing out! Obituary said, "If Molly has made it to heaven I am sure her fight goes on" the songs she is singing is nothing the heavingly choir ever heard before.
Molly's funeral was held in the Sacramento Memorial Garden Chapel, arranged by her neice Lula Holcom, drew a suprisingly respectable crowd of about 50 assorted people. Writer Alice McLerran lovingly remembers the mountain woman as she lay in a open lavender and blue casket, with withered, hawklike features, still haunting, despite the softening efforts of the embalmers. Molly's final theater would have brought her joy, the wafting soulful organ music, rocks and streams decorating the front of the chapel. She would have distained the minister who grabbed the opportunity to warn mourners that they too might fall from grace , as he orated "In my father's house, their was many mansions", Alice could almost see Molly rise and proclaim. "Mansion", my mother never saw a mansion. My grandmother never saw one either. And my great grandmother! They none of them saw a mansion, and they was just as fine of women that pissed through hair! And Mary Magdalene (Garland) (Mills) (Stewart) Jackson would have certainly written!
Mary Magdalene Garland was born October 30,1880 in Clay County Kentucky to O.P Garland and Deborah Delora Robinson.
Aunt Molly Jackson is one of the most overlooked, yet influential, figures in American folk music. Not only was she a contemporary of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, she was also a major influence on Pete Seeger. Unfortunately her recorded output consists of one single, recorded in the early '30s. Born Mary Magdalene Garland in 1880 in the coal mining country of Kentucky, she married in her early teens and became a certified midwife by the time she was 18. Since Jackson was so young when she delivered her first baby, instead of following the custom of the times by calling midwives "Grandma," she insisted being called "Aunt Molly" instead. Jackson was the wife of a miner in the Kentucky coal fields. When the miners decided to strike for better pay and working conditions, she wrote her first song about the experience. In the midst of the strike, a group of writers led by Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos came to Kentucky on a fact-finding tour. Among the interviewed miners and family members, Jackson sang her song, "Hungry Ragged Blues." The impressed committee convinced her to go to New York City and use her singing to raise funds for the strikers, which she did. After the strike was settled, Jackson stayed on in New York City and continued as an activist and singer, where she became known among the folk and radical communities. Her earliest compositions to impress listeners in the radical movement were "Miner's Hungry Ragged Blues" and "Poor Miner's Farewell." By 1960 Jackson was impoverished but nevertheless was working on an LP of original material when she died suddenly. During the 1970s, some of those songs were released on a Rounder anthology. ~ Al Campbell, All Music Guide
Coinciding with the political co-optation of her folk identity, Jackson was "discovered" by musical intellectuals newly interested in the traditional songs of the American folk.
The Composers Collective (which included radical musicians and composers like Charles Seeger, Aaron Copland, and Elie Siegmeister), in the early decade rejected folk music in search of more revolutionary (i.e. dissonant) sounds for the proletariat, but by the mid-1930s had recognized folk music's value in connecting with the people. When Jackson was invited to play at one of their meetings in 1933, the collective's composers and the folksinger were mutually disenchanted with each other's style. But such opinions changed quickly. As Siegmeister recounted often afterward, in 1934 Jackson approached him after a workers' concert and asked if he knew any real American music, and then she shared some with him:
She sang in a squeaky high-pitched voice and couldn't read or write a note of music. But Aunt Molly sang great songs which dealt with her own life in Kentucky, songs of power and feeling. That was one of my first introductions to America singing (Siegmeister, New York Times 11 February 1940).
Siegmeister said that Jackson's music—the American folk music—"yields to no other in its richness, variety, and musical quality." Other musicians and folklorists soon agreed.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, an English and folklore professor at New York University, discovered Jackson's wealth of stories and songs, and eagerly pursued a friendship with the singer. Barnicle became Jackson's patron for a time, inviting the singer to speak to her NYU classes and introducing her to many New York intellectuals. The professor also introduced Jackson to a young man named Alan Lomax, who recorded her songs and, without Jackson's permission (or Barnicle's knowledge), submitted them to the Library of Congress collection. Jackson wrote Lomax many times in later years angrily demanding compensation for her songs.
She was not, in these recording sessions, the only victim of manipulation, however. Barnicle (unwisely, as it turned out) had lent Jackson a copy of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads to jog her memory of any Kentucky versions she might have forgotten. The singer returned soon after and repeated verbatim many stanzas of Robin Hood, an episode John Greenway discusses in detail in his Journal of American Folklore article, "Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation". Lomax wrote later about recording the "false" ballad in Barnicle's apartment:
By the time [Jackson] sat down in front of my microphone she was able to reel off scores of verses of it purely by memory, and interlarded with rich Kentucky-isms. The text, then, was obviously a direct lift from Child, set to favorite Molly Jackson tunes.... that is how the whole thing began—a delightful jape, played on a government folklorist (Lomax 132).
Lomax fails to point out here that he was simultaneously "lifting" Jackson's music, but the parallel is nonetheless evident: singer and folklorist were each, in a manner, using the other.
Jackson's relationship with Barnicle eventually soured; the singer resented Barnicle "messing up" her songs in transcription, and the professor came to doubt the veracity of Jackson's stories. Barnicle shelved, and never returned to, a book she planned to write about Jackson's life.
After these experiences, Jackson, though eager for recognition and money, was increasingly wary of collectors in later years, sure that they would "mess up" or steal her work. She was further disillusioned by an incident with Columbia Records, which recorded, but never released, an album of her songs.
Another musician, Pete Seeger, discovered Jackson in the 1930s, and later he credited her as one of his major influences. When introduced by Charles Seeger to his son, Pete, Jackson sang the traditional Appalachian song "Wedding Dress" and earned his lifelong admiration. The younger Seeger would provide a major impetus for the folk revival movements of the twentieth century. He was a founding member of the Almanac Singers, a group of folk artists including such members as Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, and Sis Cunningham (among others), who traveled the country and wrote songs to instill political consciousness in the masses.
The group hosted hootenannies in a rented loft, events to which anybody might show up; Jackson and her siblings, Leadbelly, the Lomaxes, Burl Ives, and Sonny Terry were some of the regulars (Romalis 112). A benefit concert for agricultural workers, in which Jackson participated, on March 3, 1940—the "Grapes of Wrath" concert—was a pivotal event in shaping the direction of a new folk consciousness, creating a revival impulse when "real" folk and their urban admirers united creatively. While Jackson witnessed and, to some extent, participated in the resulting urban folk revival, most audiences preferred the polished voices of the urban revivalists to her own nasal, high-pitched sound. Jackson was welcomed as a symbol of the movement, and respected for her exemplary role in the class struggle, but invitations to perform became rare (Romalis 113).
The folk music revival movement, initiated in urban centers, obscured definitions of "folk" and "folk music," confusing the supposed boundaries delineating the "authentic" folk from the constructed thing. Traditional songs were learned and performed by the supposedly "nonfolk"—young middleclass intellectuals who dressed in working class garb.
But, as the complicated career of Aunt Molly Jackson reveals, the "authentic" folk identity is a similarly complex construction: Jackson "borrowed" songs, wove tall tales, and changed her stories at every turn. Her exposure to New York City inevitably altered the nature of her experience as "folk"—and, as Charles Seeger points out, problematizes the notion of her place within a folk–non-folk binary:
Put any good 'authentic,' traditional singer before a microphone or on a platform before an audience not of its own kind, and soon the peculiar requirements of the situation produce the typical traits of exhibitionism. To my personal observation, it took Molly Jackson only a few months after her expulsion from Harlan County, Kentucky, to convert herself, when expedient, from a traditional singer, who seemed never to have given any particular thought to whether anyone liked or disliked her singing, into a shrewd observer of audience reaction... (Seeger 339).
One might infer from this assertion that Jackson would have retained her "authentic folk-ness" had she remained in Kentucky and continued performing only before audiences of her "own kind." But Seeger argues even that is impossible, considering that "the avidity of the hillbilly most remote from the city for the city's nonfolkness is quite as self-propelled as that of the city-billy most remote from the country for the country's folkness" (Seeger 339). And thus:
Since each has now exploited the other for a couple of decades in the large frame of the United States, there must exist few, if any, persons left ratable as 100 percent either folk or nonfolk. The vast population lies between these limits, each individual made up of varying proportions of inhibited or released folkness or nonfolkness. (Seeger 339).
Seeger argues here that a pure "folk" can no longer exist untouched by the external influences of culture. At Jackson's death in 1960, Lomax expressed a similar sentiment: "[Jackson] was folklore itself, at its best... We won't see her like ever again, now" (Lomax 132). In this age of mass media, such an argument seems valid.
Jackson herself might disagree; she claimed folksongs were simply what folks sang, and she spent very little time haggling over scholarly definitions. Nor might Jackson have appreciated Seeger's assertion that she compromised her authenticity by performing before a broader audience than her mountain "folk." After all, it was by coming to New York City that Jackson exposed the plight of, and thereby garnered needed money and publicity for, her Kentucky friends and neighbors; while she reveled in the spotlight, the city merely provided a bigger stage for Jackson to continue her life's work struggling against social injustice.
John Greenway explains the singer's creative self-construction in this way:
Aunt Molly survived, and helped countless others to endure, but she succeeded through not worrying over petty bourgeois scruples. When the enemies of her people counted murder a misdemeanor, she could hardly be blamed for prevarication (Greenway, Kentucky Folklore Record 143)
Perhaps this is how Jackson would have liked herself to be explained. Nonetheless, it is a romantic oversimplification of a woman whose complexity underscores the complications of attempting to demarcate clean divisions of authenticity. Whatever the case may be, the "pistol packin' mama" perceived a value in the reconstruction of her own folk identity and actively repackaged it to please any interested listeners and scholars—for reasons both altruistic and self-serving.
It is well known about Molly, that her stories changed depending on who it was listening. The happenings and endings would be different.
I remember looking through the cracks in the planks in the log cabin where I was born, and seeing high banks of snow. The snow had fallen at night while we were asleep. I remember hearing my granddad Garland saying the snow was six foot deep. I was three years old that past October and this snow fell in December, which I will prove to you I was three years old when I started to remember. Yes, I can remember 61 yrs ago, when I saw my granddad Garland dragging a big pine log through the snow. I remember to this day, the color of the scarf that my granddad had tied around his ears, and he was making a road from our log cabin to his by pulling that big pine log through the snow with two big yoke steers, and I remember my mother when she saw this snow so deep she began to cry and weep. Her cheeks were wet with tears because my mother and I were all alone. My father was working away from home. This happened when I was three years old and two months. My daddy was over at my granddad's sisters digging coal in a coal mine. That is when my father became interested in coal mining. Then my daddy sold his farm in Clay County, and we moved in the first coal mines ever in Kentucky.
When Molly was 8 yrs old and John was 5 yrs old they spent carefree moments during that period, hunting rabbits and squirrels in the mountains with their stepmother's youngest brother, 12 years old, Dickie Lucas. Dickie would call Molly " Joe", lend her his old britches, coat and coonskin hat, "so if any other boy met us in the woods when we was out hunting, they would think Molly was another boy. Oliver Garland sired 15 children in all. Only 6 survived to adulthood and only 4 survived when Molly wrote her life story in the 1940's. "
Every 12 or 13 months, my dad's wife would have another baby, and I had to take care of them all. They seemed like my own children instead of my brother and sisters. Although very young girls were expected to care for their siblings, Molly was clearly resentful about her responsibilities, particularly because she felt her stepmother was shrieking her own, and was determined to get an education. My own mother's brother told me that I would grow up to be a fool if my stepmother kept me home to work all the time and would not let me go to school. But I went to school for 3 months after my mother died and I learned to read and write.
Molly's stepmother was 11 years older than Molly, found handling a step-daughter was hard work, especially when my father left the house. Brother John, even though younger than Molly, took it upon himself as her full brother to whip the stuffing out of her when she gave my mother too much of a hard time. He liked my mother. But Molly didn't and would tell all kinds of lies about her, trying to make my father angry at his wife. Once Molly went to a neighbor's house to spend the night, she told these folks that my mother wouldn't let any of the children eat meat. Molly said my mother would take a meat skin and rub it around our mouths to make my father think we had eaten. Molly also claimed Mother would tie a meat skin to a piece of string, force us to swallow the meat, and then pull it back out our throats. Of course this shocked our neighbors, and they told my dad what his daughter had said, he assured them that all the tales were Molly's making up. After he came home and mentioned the pitiful stories, and once John agreed that all them were lies, Dad gave Molly quite a whipping. The next time my father left home, Molly raised a quarrel with my mother about having gotton whipped. When John told Molly to lay off, she turned on him and threatened to leave home. She went outside, mounted old Kick belly, a mare we had at the time and began to ride off. That was until John knocked her off with a ear of corn. He hit her so hard that Molly was out for awhile, my mother thought she was dead, By the time Father returned, Molly was fully consciences and ready to describe every bit how she had been mistreated. As was my Father's habit, he spoke with John for another side of the story.
Once again Dad decided that Molly had gotten exactly what she deserved. With domestic Chores weighing her down, the rebellious Molly needed outlets to have fun. Despite Oliver Perry's warning's that dancing is the devil's activity, she found ways to defy him, and stole away to her first dance party on Christmas Eve, just after her 9th birthday. My dad was peeping in at the window when he heard John call out " Swing your partner and skiptumule". Then my dad jumped in and grabbed me by the hair of my head and drug me out and took me home. He beat me in the head with his fist and then slapped me in the face ‘til I felt dizzy all the next day. But that didn't stop me from slipping out and going to parties and places to dance. I always loved music and dancing. My mother's (Deborah's) father was the best fiddler in Clay County. I used to never be able to keep my feet still when granddad was playing the fiddle. When I was 3 years old, I was afraid to let my dad see me move my feet when granddad was playing. We would go into taverns and restaurant's and dance for money. Someday we would have a pint cup full of silver people would give us. I was between 8 and 9 years old when I would slip out and dance for money, I won prizes for hoe down dancing. My dad was never able to find out about me slipping out and dancing, because we never did offer to dance in the town where we lived. My dad used to think I was going to Mistress Brown's house to help her in the garden and sweep and wash dishes. So after I growed up I realized that I had been forced to lead my life as a lie. Molly constantly worried, however, about the consequences of Oliver Perry's wrath and didn't freely go to parties until she married Jim Stewart, and moved 90 miles away from home and well away from her father's scrutiny. One of Molly's formative and most told experiences, which she tends to elaborate slightly differently depending on her audience, led to the composition of Molly's earliest multi-versed song, At age 10 yrs, while living with her grandparents (Robinson's) farm on Sexton Creek, Molly played a Christmas Prank.
Smearing her face with charcoal, she fashioned horns and donned her grandfather's trousers and rifle. Her grunts and howls terrified the children at a farmhouse down the road, and one actually fainted. His father summoned the Sheriff, and invoking the law against the use of a "disguise", he arrested Molly, sentencing the unruly child to 10 days in jail. In her autobiography, Molly explains how she coped with this experience The county judge married a first cousin of my father, and he felt awful sorry for me, and he asked what on earth caused me to do such a thing as to disguise myself in men's clothing He asked me if I didn't know that was against the law. I told him I didn't know of any such law and that I didn't mean any harm. I only thought that I would have a little fun out of the children on Christmas Eve. Then the judge told me the best he could do was give me the lowest penalty which was 10 days in jail and a $25 fine, and I asked him, " How do you think that I could go to jail, and me the little girl that I was? I told him, " you know there has never been a stain on my whole generations Christian morels, much less go to jail." Then the jailer told me that I would not have to stay in jail, that I could just go to his house and stay with his wife, who was a first cousin of my mother. I decided if I pretended that I had no mind, that she would get sorry for me and have her husband to send me home. So when I went to the house, I began to act foolish like. I then changed my mind and decided on another strategy. I appealed to the Sheriff in a song that I wrote and sang to the jailer and his wife at supper that night. (not the full version) The day before Christmas, I had some fun, I blacked my face and took my gun, I went to Bill Lewis and then made them run, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. The next Monday morning Old Bill Lewis got out a writ, When I found this out, I went and split, Mr. Cundiff, turn me loose. It was just 3 weeks ‘til I come back to pay, Old Cotton arrested me the very next day, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. Then I brought my case would be light, Cotton took me before Judge Wright, Judge Wright told me that I'd done wrong, for blacking my face and putting britches on, Mr. Cundiff turn me loose. He listened to me ‘til I told my tale, then he gave me 10 days in Cundiff's jail. It is believed that the song "Mr. Cundiff" was Molly's first and only pre-strike Harlan Composition.
After her jail episode, Molly began working for Miss Lizzie Jarvis, the wife of the jailer in Barboursville, Knox County Kentucky. Molly did the washing, dishes, floors, for 50 cents a week. Molly remembers; Miss Jarvis took me upstairs and give me baths in the first bath tub I ever saw in my life. Then she shampooed my hair and plaited my hair in braids and tied red bows of ribbon in my hair. Then she dressed my in her little girls clothes and put a nice pair of slippers on my feet. These slippers had silver buckles and I thought they were the prettiest things I had ever saw, in fact they was the first pair of slippers I had ever saw in my life. I had come to town bare footed because no children had any shoes to wear being summer and fall and only well to do families bought shoes for the children at any time in them days. Miss Jarvis gave her a nickname and called her " Patsy". Miss Jarvis became disenchanted with Molly, and fired her for interfering in her relationship with another employee, by the act that Molly saw as simple kindness. She gave a old colored lady, who was Miss Jarvis' wash lady, $2 to buy something to eat for her children, which Molly insists was directly responsible for some of her good fortune and leading her into her future profession as a nurse. Shortly after starting her new job at the county clerk's house, helping to tend 15 children and 12 bedrooms, Molly contracted whooping cough.
Miss Jarvis' grateful washwoman visited Molly, bringing her a compound of honey, garlic, horehound, and whiskey. Molly vowed that this mash cured her and inspired her to take up nursing. She told a story to illustrate how good deeds paid off: I have cured a many cases of whooping cough with the same remedy since I have been a nurse. So you see the $2 I gave this wonderful, kind old colored lady caused her to come and see me and bring a remedy that saved my life, and it taught me how to save many cases of whooping cough, and the desire to become a nurse and by the time I was 18yrs old, I was able to make a first class diploma for a midwife and a nurse. And from that day, I have always done by other's just what that dear ol colored lady done for me.
From Jim Garland: MOLLY'S MARRIAGES When my sister was about 13 years old, she decided that she wanted to marry a neighbor boy not much older than her. Mother tried to talk Molly out of it, explaining that both of them were to young, that they wouldn't have any way to support themselves. Molly wouldn't hear of this. She insisted that no matter how they would have to live, she be determined to get a marriage certificate; Molly though pronounced it "stiffidick". When my dad came home, Mother explained Molly's plans. Immediately Dad went outside and cut a nice long hickory switch, came inside and laid it on the mantel saying " Now right there lays Molly's stiffidick, and if I hear again of her wanting to get married, I intend to give it to her just as long as that lasts. Molly names this boy in her autobiography as Calloway Clance.
When John Mills was courting my half sister, Molly, he spent all night in the Press Hendrickson House (this was the house the Garland's lived in). In the middle of the night, he got scared out of his wits and began hollering " Mr Garland, Mr Garland!" My father thought John Mills was a dimwit but got out of bed anyway to see what was a matter.
Mr Garland, make light, John Mills whispered, " A tall stoop shouldered man was bending over your wife" John Mills, go to sleep, my dad said. " You didnt see anything" Once the house had quieted down again, John Mills a second time began to yell. Mr Garland, Mr Garland, Please get up. The man is back again. My father called out to Mills in the dark. " John, there is nothing there, your just seeing rats. Go to sleep. " But Mr Garland, my eyes dont let me see rats, Can I build a fire? " There's no wood for a fire. " Then Mr Garland can I burn the bed slats? I'll get you new ones in the morning. John Mills sit up all through the night. My father would wake up and find him praying each time or talking to his self. Mills came back to visit Molly, in fact he later married her, but never did again spend the night in the Press Hendrickson house. My brother John spent only one night in the place himself; he was so convinced that he had seen ghosts there that he insisted on moving in with the Bracket and Hindrickson families until my mother and father moved. Both of these families had some very tough older boys. Another Excerpt: As a matter of fact, Molly did marry young, to a man named John Mills.
During their courtship, Mills worked on the Railroad section Gang and boarded in one of the section houses. One evening my father was beginning to think Mills had overstayed his welcome. Dad asked" John don't you think you had better get back? The men will go off and leave you in the morning. " Oh no they wont Mr. Garland, John Mills said.. Right now I have on at least 30 shirts of theirs. Sure enough Mills had put on a shirt of about men in the section gang to make sure they wouldn't take off without him. Once Molly and John married, she found him to be foolish and stingy that he lived on cornbread and jallop. Molly told him one time " John Mills, if you don't get something to eat around here, I'm going to leave you." Lord have mercy honey, her husband said. " I haint got nothing less than a five, and if a man breaks a five dollar bill, its gone in no time. As it happened, Molly didn't eat Jallop much longer. Soon she quit John Mills and married Jim Stewart. In Molly's autobiography, she fails to mention her marriage to John Mills. She denies being married before Jim Stewart, but her brother Jim Garland tells the story the marriage to John Mills, and the marriage is available in the Knox County Marriage Books. In her book, she states that she married Jim Stewart in April 1894. Which is impossible, since she was married to Jim after her marriage to John Mills, and John and Molly were married in 1898. BUT Molly describes her wedding night to Jim Stewart:
Molly finally able to claim independence from Oliver Perry Garland, a still innocent Molly just started to menstruate and claimed to know nothing about sex. When husband Jim raised her nightgown, she would tie it down and jump in her mother in law's bed for protection. At age 15 ½ she bore her first child and at age 17 yrs her second son came. Romalis states that she found no other info on her babies, and that they probably died in infantcy. Molly did raise Jim Stewart's 2 children, Jess Willis Stewart and Lillian Bee, and four of Bill Jackon's children.
Molly remained deeply in love with Jim Stewart.
Bill Jackson's cousin, Jess Baker.. 90 gallon still hid back in the mountains. Bill and Jess gave Molly the nickname, "Pistol Packing Mama". Bill Jackson's nickname was .45 Bill, cause a 45 caliber pistol was his choice of guns.
When Molly was a midwife, she recieved 25. cents for every birth certificate she sent into the state. She received a check once a year.
Never one to keep her mouth shut, Molly often spoke out angrily when she observed instances of social injustice in the community—many times at the cost of her husband's mining job. In one such instance, Jim Stewart was fired after his wife distributed her song "Fare Thee Well, Old Ely Branch" at the spring where the miners' wives came for water. Jim Garland described Jackson's pugnacious nature in this way:
She was at the height of her glory when she was giving someone she thought was no good a hard time. If she believed someone was taking advantage of his or her position in life, whether that was a coal operator, a husband who beat his wife, a man who would not support his family, or a bookkeeper who denied some needy family scrip to buy food with, she made her feelings known. These troublemaking instincts led her to write many a fine song
Jackson's "pistol packin'" reputation was not without a factual basis, however, as brother Jim Garland attested. When Jackson and some other miners' wives were approached on the picket line by scabs in Ross, Kentucky, the women grabbed the gun thugs and stripped them naked. Garland recalled: "After four women had managed to hold down one of the gun thugs, my sister Molly took his pistol and shoved the barrel right up his rectum. Never did this particular gun thug show his face there again" (Romalis 86-87). Despite this recollection, Garland also asserted that his sister's role in the mining strikes had been drastically exaggerated:
Poor Miner's Farewell
* Written about the death of her brother Richard "Dick" Garland, who was killed in the coal mines.
Hungry Ragged Blues
Ten Thousand Miles
"Mr Cunduff Turn Me Loose"
*After blacking her face with charcoal and donning a disguise, Molly spooked the residents of a neighboring farmhouse who reported her to the sheriff. To teach her a lesson, Oliver Garland made his daughter serve the brief jail sentence, during which she composed a song pleading to the jailer for her release.
Molly claimed the song was so well liked around the jail that she was given "thirty-seven dollars and twenty seven plugs of 'tobaker' and the jailer's wife made me a satin dress with 'yeler' butterflies, and she bought me a high top pair of fine button shoes and a handbag" . In other retellings of the incident, perhaps when convenient in establishing her union activist persona, Molly would claim she was jailed for her family's unionizing efforts
Biographer Shelly Romalis notes the significance of the fact that even the usually skeptical Jim Garland confirmed his sister's reputation as a midwife. Garland wrote: "[She] delivered far more babies during those years [1910 to 1932] than did all the doctors on both Horse Creek in Clay County and Straight Creek in Bell County. According to Molly's own estimate, she attended over 5,000 births" (Garland 33). This number, like so much data in Jackson's history, varies widely according to the telling; Jackson told Dreiser Committee interviewers that she had delivered 65 children (Harlan Miners Speak 282), Woody Guthrie was under the impression that "she helped to bring over a hundred little babies into the world" (Guthrie 139), and a New York journalist—presumably sourcing Jackson—put the number at 600 (Robertson 139).
Whatever the gross factual disparities, Jackson's experiences as a midwife provided ample opportunity to witness the impoverished situation of neighboring mining families. Many of Jackson's protest ballads woefully testify about these sick and starving children of Kentucky miners.
"The Death of Harry Sims"
*Written about a young Jewish Man, who was a coal mining union man, who was killed by some gun thugs.
"Little Dove"
"Roll on Buddy"
"Pistol Packin Mama"
* Written by Jess Baker, about Aunt Molly Jackson.
Molly's Funeral:
Aunt Molly Jackson died the last day in August 1960. Shortly before her 80th birthday. Scraps of paper with notes and songs disappeared, most likely discarded with her shabby furniture. Barnicle's dog eared copy of Kitterage and Sargent with the contested "Robin Hood" poem and her photographs of Roosevelt and Pete Seegar proudly placed on her walls. Obituaries in the Sacramento Bee (September 2) and the New York Times
( September 4th), the San Jose News and the St. Louis Post Dispatcher ( September 4th)
all honored the orginal and famous "Pistol Packin Mama" John Greenway in his sing out! Obituary said, "If Molly has made it to heaven I am sure her fight goes on" the songs she is singing is nothing the heavingly choir ever heard before.
Molly's funeral was held in the Sacramento Memorial Garden Chapel, arranged by her neice Lula Holcom, drew a suprisingly respectable crowd of about 50 assorted people. Writer Alice McLerran lovingly remembers the mountain woman as she lay in a open lavender and blue casket, with withered, hawklike features, still haunting, despite the softening efforts of the embalmers. Molly's final theater would have brought her joy, the wafting soulful organ music, rocks and streams decorating the front of the chapel. She would have distained the minister who grabbed the opportunity to warn mourners that they too might fall from grace , as he orated "In my father's house, their was many mansions", Alice could almost see Molly rise and proclaim. "Mansion", my mother never saw a mansion. My grandmother never saw one either. And my great grandmother! They none of them saw a mansion, and they was just as fine of women that pissed through hair! And Mary Magdalene (Garland) (Mills) (Stewart) Jackson would have certainly written!
Aunt Molly Jackson is one of the most overlooked, yet influential, figures in American folk music. Not only was she a contemporary of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, she was also a major influence on Pete Seeger. Unfortunately her recorded output consists of one single, recorded in the early '30s. Born Mary Magdalene Garland in 1880 in the coal mining country of Kentucky, she married in her early teens and became a certified midwife by the time she was 18. Since Jackson was so young when she delivered her first baby, instead of following the custom of the times by calling midwives "Grandma," she insisted being called "Aunt Molly" instead. Jackson was the wife of a miner in the Kentucky coal fields. When the miners decided to strike for better pay and working conditions, she wrote her first song about the experience. In the midst of the strike, a group of writers led by Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos came to Kentucky on a fact-finding tour. Among the interviewed miners and family members, Jackson sang her song, "Hungry Ragged Blues." The impressed committee convinced her to go to New York City and use her singing to raise funds for the strikers, which she did. After the strike was settled, Jackson stayed on in New York City and continued as an activist and singer, where she became known among the folk and radical communities. Her earliest compositions to impress listeners in the radical movement were "Miner's Hungry Ragged Blues" and "Poor Miner's Farewell." By 1960 Jackson was impoverished but nevertheless was working on an LP of original material when she died suddenly. During the 1970s, some of those songs were released on a Rounder anthology. ~ Al Campbell, All Music Guide
Coinciding with the political co-optation of her folk identity, Jackson was "discovered" by musical intellectuals newly interested in the traditional songs of the American folk.
The Composers Collective (which included radical musicians and composers like Charles Seeger, Aaron Copland, and Elie Siegmeister), in the early decade rejected folk music in search of more revolutionary (i.e. dissonant) sounds for the proletariat, but by the mid-1930s had recognized folk music's value in connecting with the people. When Jackson was invited to play at one of their meetings in 1933, the collective's composers and the folksinger were mutually disenchanted with each other's style. But such opinions changed quickly. As Siegmeister recounted often afterward, in 1934 Jackson approached him after a workers' concert and asked if he knew any real American music, and then she shared some with him:
She sang in a squeaky high-pitched voice and couldn't read or write a note of music. But Aunt Molly sang great songs which dealt with her own life in Kentucky, songs of power and feeling. That was one of my first introductions to America singing (Siegmeister, New York Times 11 February 1940).
Siegmeister said that Jackson's music—the American folk music—"yields to no other in its richness, variety, and musical quality." Other musicians and folklorists soon agreed.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, an English and folklore professor at New York University, discovered Jackson's wealth of stories and songs, and eagerly pursued a friendship with the singer. Barnicle became Jackson's patron for a time, inviting the singer to speak to her NYU classes and introducing her to many New York intellectuals. The professor also introduced Jackson to a young man named Alan Lomax, who recorded her songs and, without Jackson's permission (or Barnicle's knowledge), submitted them to the Library of Congress collection. Jackson wrote Lomax many times in later years angrily demanding compensation for her songs.
She was not, in these recording sessions, the only victim of manipulation, however. Barnicle (unwisely, as it turned out) had lent Jackson a copy of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads to jog her memory of any Kentucky versions she might have forgotten. The singer returned soon after and repeated verbatim many stanzas of Robin Hood, an episode John Greenway discusses in detail in his Journal of American Folklore article, "Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation". Lomax wrote later about recording the "false" ballad in Barnicle's apartment:
By the time [Jackson] sat down in front of my microphone she was able to reel off scores of verses of it purely by memory, and interlarded with rich Kentucky-isms. The text, then, was obviously a direct lift from Child, set to favorite Molly Jackson tunes.... that is how the whole thing began—a delightful jape, played on a government folklorist (Lomax 132).
Lomax fails to point out here that he was simultaneously "lifting" Jackson's music, but the parallel is nonetheless evident: singer and folklorist were each, in a manner, using the other.
Jackson's relationship with Barnicle eventually soured; the singer resented Barnicle "messing up" her songs in transcription, and the professor came to doubt the veracity of Jackson's stories. Barnicle shelved, and never returned to, a book she planned to write about Jackson's life.
After these experiences, Jackson, though eager for recognition and money, was increasingly wary of collectors in later years, sure that they would "mess up" or steal her work. She was further disillusioned by an incident with Columbia Records, which recorded, but never released, an album of her songs.
Another musician, Pete Seeger, discovered Jackson in the 1930s, and later he credited her as one of his major influences. When introduced by Charles Seeger to his son, Pete, Jackson sang the traditional Appalachian song "Wedding Dress" and earned his lifelong admiration. The younger Seeger would provide a major impetus for the folk revival movements of the twentieth century. He was a founding member of the Almanac Singers, a group of folk artists including such members as Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, and Sis Cunningham (among others), who traveled the country and wrote songs to instill political consciousness in the masses.
The group hosted hootenannies in a rented loft, events to which anybody might show up; Jackson and her siblings, Leadbelly, the Lomaxes, Burl Ives, and Sonny Terry were some of the regulars (Romalis 112). A benefit concert for agricultural workers, in which Jackson participated, on March 3, 1940—the "Grapes of Wrath" concert—was a pivotal event in shaping the direction of a new folk consciousness, creating a revival impulse when "real" folk and their urban admirers united creatively. While Jackson witnessed and, to some extent, participated in the resulting urban folk revival, most audiences preferred the polished voices of the urban revivalists to her own nasal, high-pitched sound. Jackson was welcomed as a symbol of the movement, and respected for her exemplary role in the class struggle, but invitations to perform became rare (Romalis 113).
The folk music revival movement, initiated in urban centers, obscured definitions of "folk" and "folk music," confusing the supposed boundaries delineating the "authentic" folk from the constructed thing. Traditional songs were learned and performed by the supposedly "nonfolk"—young middleclass intellectuals who dressed in working class garb.
But, as the complicated career of Aunt Molly Jackson reveals, the "authentic" folk identity is a similarly complex construction: Jackson "borrowed" songs, wove tall tales, and changed her stories at every turn. Her exposure to New York City inevitably altered the nature of her experience as "folk"—and, as Charles Seeger points out, problematizes the notion of her place within a folk–non-folk binary:
Put any good 'authentic,' traditional singer before a microphone or on a platform before an audience not of its own kind, and soon the peculiar requirements of the situation produce the typical traits of exhibitionism. To my personal observation, it took Molly Jackson only a few months after her expulsion from Harlan County, Kentucky, to convert herself, when expedient, from a traditional singer, who seemed never to have given any particular thought to whether anyone liked or disliked her singing, into a shrewd observer of audience reaction... (Seeger 339).
One might infer from this assertion that Jackson would have retained her "authentic folk-ness" had she remained in Kentucky and continued performing only before audiences of her "own kind." But Seeger argues even that is impossible, considering that "the avidity of the hillbilly most remote from the city for the city's nonfolkness is quite as self-propelled as that of the city-billy most remote from the country for the country's folkness" (Seeger 339). And thus:
Since each has now exploited the other for a couple of decades in the large frame of the United States, there must exist few, if any, persons left ratable as 100 percent either folk or nonfolk. The vast population lies between these limits, each individual made up of varying proportions of inhibited or released folkness or nonfolkness. (Seeger 339).
Seeger argues here that a pure "folk" can no longer exist untouched by the external influences of culture. At Jackson's death in 1960, Lomax expressed a similar sentiment: "[Jackson] was folklore itself, at its best... We won't see her like ever again, now" (Lomax 132). In this age of mass media, such an argument seems valid.
Jackson herself might disagree; she claimed folksongs were simply what folks sang, and she spent very little time haggling over scholarly definitions. Nor might Jackson have appreciated Seeger's assertion that she compromised her authenticity by performing before a broader audience than her mountain "folk." After all, it was by coming to New York City that Jackson exposed the plight of, and thereby garnered needed money and publicity for, her Kentucky friends and neighbors; while she reveled in the spotlight, the city merely provided a bigger stage for Jackson to continue her life's work struggling against social injustice.
John Greenway explains the singer's creative self-construction in this way:
Aunt Molly survived, and helped countless others to endure, but she succeeded through not worrying over petty bourgeois scruples. When the enemies of her people counted murder a misdemeanor, she could hardly be blamed for prevarication (Greenway, Kentucky Folklore Record 143)
Perhaps this is how Jackson would have liked herself to be explained. Nonetheless, it is a romantic oversimplification of a woman whose complexity underscores the complications of attempting to demarcate clean divisions of authenticity. Whatever the case may be, the "pistol packin' mama" perceived a value in the reconstruction of her own folk identity and actively repackaged it to please any interested listeners and scholars—for reasons both altruistic and self-serving.
It is well known about Molly, that her stories changed depending on who it was listening. The happenings and endings would be different.
I remember looking through the cracks in the planks in the log cabin where I was born, and seeing high banks of snow. The snow had fallen at night while we were asleep. I remember hearing my granddad Garland saying the snow was six foot deep. I was three years old that past October and this snow fell in December, which I will prove to you I was three years old when I started to remember. Yes, I can remember 61 yrs ago, when I saw my granddad Garland dragging a big pine log through the snow. I remember to this day, the color of the scarf that my granddad had tied around his ears, and he was making a road from our log cabin to his by pulling that big pine log through the snow with two big yoke steers, and I remember my mother when she saw this snow so deep she began to cry and weep. Her cheeks were wet with tears because my mother and I were all alone. My father was working away from home. This happened when I was three years old and two months. My daddy was over at my granddad's sisters digging coal in a coal mine. That is when my father became interested in coal mining. Then my daddy sold his farm in Clay County, and we moved in the first coal mines ever in Kentucky.
When Molly was 8 yrs old and John was 5 yrs old they spent carefree moments during that period, hunting rabbits and squirrels in the mountains with their stepmother's youngest brother, 12 years old, Dickie Lucas. Dickie would call Molly " Joe", lend her his old britches, coat and coonskin hat, "so if any other boy met us in the woods when we was out hunting, they would think Molly was another boy. Oliver Garland sired 15 children in all. Only 6 survived to adulthood and only 4 survived when Molly wrote her life story in the 1940's. "
Every 12 or 13 months, my dad's wife would have another baby, and I had to take care of them all. They seemed like my own children instead of my brother and sisters. Although very young girls were expected to care for their siblings, Molly was clearly resentful about her responsibilities, particularly because she felt her stepmother was shrieking her own, and was determined to get an education. My own mother's brother told me that I would grow up to be a fool if my stepmother kept me home to work all the time and would not let me go to school. But I went to school for 3 months after my mother died and I learned to read and write.
Molly's stepmother was 11 years older than Molly, found handling a step-daughter was hard work, especially when my father left the house. Brother John, even though younger than Molly, took it upon himself as her full brother to whip the stuffing out of her when she gave my mother too much of a hard time. He liked my mother. But Molly didn't and would tell all kinds of lies about her, trying to make my father angry at his wife. Once Molly went to a neighbor's house to spend the night, she told these folks that my mother wouldn't let any of the children eat meat. Molly said my mother would take a meat skin and rub it around our mouths to make my father think we had eaten. Molly also claimed Mother would tie a meat skin to a piece of string, force us to swallow the meat, and then pull it back out our throats. Of course this shocked our neighbors, and they told my dad what his daughter had said, he assured them that all the tales were Molly's making up. After he came home and mentioned the pitiful stories, and once John agreed that all them were lies, Dad gave Molly quite a whipping. The next time my father left home, Molly raised a quarrel with my mother about having gotton whipped. When John told Molly to lay off, she turned on him and threatened to leave home. She went outside, mounted old Kick belly, a mare we had at the time and began to ride off. That was until John knocked her off with a ear of corn. He hit her so hard that Molly was out for awhile, my mother thought she was dead, By the time Father returned, Molly was fully consciences and ready to describe every bit how she had been mistreated. As was my Father's habit, he spoke with John for another side of the story.
Once again Dad decided that Molly had gotten exactly what she deserved. With domestic Chores weighing her down, the rebellious Molly needed outlets to have fun. Despite Oliver Perry's warning's that dancing is the devil's activity, she found ways to defy him, and stole away to her first dance party on Christmas Eve, just after her 9th birthday. My dad was peeping in at the window when he heard John call out " Swing your partner and skiptumule". Then my dad jumped in and grabbed me by the hair of my head and drug me out and took me home. He beat me in the head with his fist and then slapped me in the face ‘til I felt dizzy all the next day. But that didn't stop me from slipping out and going to parties and places to dance. I always loved music and dancing. My mother's (Deborah's) father was the best fiddler in Clay County. I used to never be able to keep my feet still when granddad was playing the fiddle. When I was 3 years old, I was afraid to let my dad see me move my feet when granddad was playing. We would go into taverns and restaurant's and dance for money. Someday we would have a pint cup full of silver people would give us. I was between 8 and 9 years old when I would slip out and dance for money, I won prizes for hoe down dancing. My dad was never able to find out about me slipping out and dancing, because we never did offer to dance in the town where we lived. My dad used to think I was going to Mistress Brown's house to help her in the garden and sweep and wash dishes. So after I growed up I realized that I had been forced to lead my life as a lie. Molly constantly worried, however, about the consequences of Oliver Perry's wrath and didn't freely go to parties until she married Jim Stewart, and moved 90 miles away from home and well away from her father's scrutiny. One of Molly's formative and most told experiences, which she tends to elaborate slightly differently depending on her audience, led to the composition of Molly's earliest multi-versed song, At age 10 yrs, while living with her grandparents (Robinson's) farm on Sexton Creek, Molly played a Christmas Prank.
Smearing her face with charcoal, she fashioned horns and donned her grandfather's trousers and rifle. Her grunts and howls terrified the children at a farmhouse down the road, and one actually fainted. His father summoned the Sheriff, and invoking the law against the use of a "disguise", he arrested Molly, sentencing the unruly child to 10 days in jail. In her autobiography, Molly explains how she coped with this experience The county judge married a first cousin of my father, and he felt awful sorry for me, and he asked what on earth caused me to do such a thing as to disguise myself in men's clothing He asked me if I didn't know that was against the law. I told him I didn't know of any such law and that I didn't mean any harm. I only thought that I would have a little fun out of the children on Christmas Eve. Then the judge told me the best he could do was give me the lowest penalty which was 10 days in jail and a $25 fine, and I asked him, " How do you think that I could go to jail, and me the little girl that I was? I told him, " you know there has never been a stain on my whole generations Christian morels, much less go to jail." Then the jailer told me that I would not have to stay in jail, that I could just go to his house and stay with his wife, who was a first cousin of my mother. I decided if I pretended that I had no mind, that she would get sorry for me and have her husband to send me home. So when I went to the house, I began to act foolish like. I then changed my mind and decided on another strategy. I appealed to the Sheriff in a song that I wrote and sang to the jailer and his wife at supper that night. (not the full version) The day before Christmas, I had some fun, I blacked my face and took my gun, I went to Bill Lewis and then made them run, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. The next Monday morning Old Bill Lewis got out a writ, When I found this out, I went and split, Mr. Cundiff, turn me loose. It was just 3 weeks ‘til I come back to pay, Old Cotton arrested me the very next day, Mr Cundiff turn me loose. Then I brought my case would be light, Cotton took me before Judge Wright, Judge Wright told me that I'd done wrong, for blacking my face and putting britches on, Mr. Cundiff turn me loose. He listened to me ‘til I told my tale, then he gave me 10 days in Cundiff's jail. It is believed that the song "Mr. Cundiff" was Molly's first and only pre-strike Harlan Composition.
After her jail episode, Molly began working for Miss Lizzie Jarvis, the wife of the jailer in Barboursville, Knox County Kentucky. Molly did the washing, dishes, floors, for 50 cents a week. Molly remembers; Miss Jarvis took me upstairs and give me baths in the first bath tub I ever saw in my life. Then she shampooed my hair and plaited my hair in braids and tied red bows of ribbon in my hair. Then she dressed my in her little girls clothes and put a nice pair of slippers on my feet. These slippers had silver buckles and I thought they were the prettiest things I had ever saw, in fact they was the first pair of slippers I had ever saw in my life. I had come to town bare footed because no children had any shoes to wear being summer and fall and only well to do families bought shoes for the children at any time in them days. Miss Jarvis gave her a nickname and called her " Patsy". Miss Jarvis became disenchanted with Molly, and fired her for interfering in her relationship with another employee, by the act that Molly saw as simple kindness. She gave a old colored lady, who was Miss Jarvis' wash lady, $2 to buy something to eat for her children, which Molly insists was directly responsible for some of her good fortune and leading her into her future profession as a nurse. Shortly after starting her new job at the county clerk's house, helping to tend 15 children and 12 bedrooms, Molly contracted whooping cough.
Miss Jarvis' grateful washwoman visited Molly, bringing her a compound of honey, garlic, horehound, and whiskey. Molly vowed that this mash cured her and inspired her to take up nursing. She told a story to illustrate how good deeds paid off: I have cured a many cases of whooping cough with the same remedy since I have been a nurse. So you see the $2 I gave this wonderful, kind old colored lady caused her to come and see me and bring a remedy that saved my life, and it taught me how to save many cases of whooping cough, and the desire to become a nurse and by the time I was 18yrs old, I was able to make a first class diploma for a midwife and a nurse. And from that day, I have always done by other's just what that dear ol colored lady done for me.
From Jim Garland: MOLLY'S MARRIAGES When my sister was about 13 years old, she decided that she wanted to marry a neighbor boy not much older than her. Mother tried to talk Molly out of it, explaining that both of them were to young, that they wouldn't have any way to support themselves. Molly wouldn't hear of this. She insisted that no matter how they would have to live, she be determined to get a marriage certificate; Molly though pronounced it "stiffidick". When my dad came home, Mother explained Molly's plans. Immediately Dad went outside and cut a nice long hickory switch, came inside and laid it on the mantel saying " Now right there lays Molly's stiffidick, and if I hear again of her wanting to get married, I intend to give it to her just as long as that lasts. Molly names this boy in her autobiography as Calloway Clance.
When John Mills was courting my half sister, Molly, he spent all night in the Press Hendrickson House (this was the house the Garland's lived in). In the middle of the night, he got scared out of his wits and began hollering " Mr Garland, Mr Garland!" My father thought John Mills was a dimwit but got out of bed anyway to see what was a matter.
Mr Garland, make light, John Mills whispered, " A tall stoop shouldered man was bending over your wife" John Mills, go to sleep, my dad said. " You didnt see anything" Once the house had quieted down again, John Mills a second time began to yell. Mr Garland, Mr Garland, Please get up. The man is back again. My father called out to Mills in the dark. " John, there is nothing there, your just seeing rats. Go to sleep. " But Mr Garland, my eyes dont let me see rats, Can I build a fire? " There's no wood for a fire. " Then Mr Garland can I burn the bed slats? I'll get you new ones in the morning. John Mills sit up all through the night. My father would wake up and find him praying each time or talking to his self. Mills came back to visit Molly, in fact he later married her, but never did again spend the night in the Press Hendrickson house. My brother John spent only one night in the place himself; he was so convinced that he had seen ghosts there that he insisted on moving in with the Bracket and Hindrickson families until my mother and father moved. Both of these families had some very tough older boys. Another Excerpt: As a matter of fact, Molly did marry young, to a man named John Mills.
During their courtship, Mills worked on the Railroad section Gang and boarded in one of the section houses. One evening my father was beginning to think Mills had overstayed his welcome. Dad asked" John don't you think you had better get back? The men will go off and leave you in the morning. " Oh no they wont Mr. Garland, John Mills said.. Right now I have on at least 30 shirts of theirs. Sure enough Mills had put on a shirt of about men in the section gang to make sure they wouldn't take off without him. Once Molly and John married, she found him to be foolish and stingy that he lived on cornbread and jallop. Molly told him one time " John Mills, if you don't get something to eat around here, I'm going to leave you." Lord have mercy honey, her husband said. " I haint got nothing less than a five, and if a man breaks a five dollar bill, its gone in no time. As it happened, Molly didn't eat Jallop much longer. Soon she quit John Mills and married Jim Stewart. In Molly's autobiography, she fails to mention her marriage to John Mills. She denies being married before Jim Stewart, but her brother Jim Garland tells the story the marriage to John Mills, and the marriage is available in the Knox County Marriage Books. In her book, she states that she married Jim Stewart in April 1894. Which is impossible, since she was married to Jim after her marriage to John Mills, and John and Molly were married in 1898. BUT Molly describes her wedding night to Jim Stewart:
Molly finally able to claim independence from Oliver Perry Garland, a still innocent Molly just started to menstruate and claimed to know nothing about sex. When husband Jim raised her nightgown, she would tie it down and jump in her mother in law's bed for protection. At age 15 ½ she bore her first child and at age 17 yrs her second son came. Romalis states that she found no other info on her babies, and that they probably died in infantcy. Molly did raise Jim Stewart's 2 children, Jess Willis Stewart and Lillian Bee, and four of Bill Jackon's children.
Molly remained deeply in love with Jim Stewart.
Bill Jackson's cousin, Jess Baker.. 90 gallon still hid back in the mountains. Bill and Jess gave Molly the nickname, "Pistol Packing Mama". Bill Jackson's nickname was .45 Bill, cause a 45 caliber pistol was his choice of guns.
When Molly was a midwife, she recieved 25. cents for every birth certificate she sent into the state. She received a check once a year.
Never one to keep her mouth shut, Molly often spoke out angrily when she observed instances of social injustice in the community—many times at the cost of her husband's mining job. In one such instance, Jim Stewart was fired after his wife distributed her song "Fare Thee Well, Old Ely Branch" at the spring where the miners' wives came for water. Jim Garland described Jackson's pugnacious nature in this way:
She was at the height of her glory when she was giving someone she thought was no good a hard time. If she believed someone was taking advantage of his or her position in life, whether that was a coal operator, a husband who beat his wife, a man who would not support his family, or a bookkeeper who denied some needy family scrip to buy food with, she made her feelings known. These troublemaking instincts led her to write many a fine song
Jackson's "pistol packin'" reputation was not without a factual basis, however, as brother Jim Garland attested. When Jackson and some other miners' wives were approached on the picket line by scabs in Ross, Kentucky, the women grabbed the gun thugs and stripped them naked. Garland recalled: "After four women had managed to hold down one of the gun thugs, my sister Molly took his pistol and shoved the barrel right up his rectum. Never did this particular gun thug show his face there again" (Romalis 86-87). Despite this recollection, Garland also asserted that his sister's role in the mining strikes had been drastically exaggerated:
Poor Miner's Farewell
* Written about the death of her brother Richard "Dick" Garland, who was killed in the coal mines.
Hungry Ragged Blues
Ten Thousand Miles
"Mr Cunduff Turn Me Loose"
*After blacking her face with charcoal and donning a disguise, Molly spooked the residents of a neighboring farmhouse who reported her to the sheriff. To teach her a lesson, Oliver Garland made his daughter serve the brief jail sentence, during which she composed a song pleading to the jailer for her release.
Molly claimed the song was so well liked around the jail that she was given "thirty-seven dollars and twenty seven plugs of 'tobaker' and the jailer's wife made me a satin dress with 'yeler' butterflies, and she bought me a high top pair of fine button shoes and a handbag" . In other retellings of the incident, perhaps when convenient in establishing her union activist persona, Molly would claim she was jailed for her family's unionizing efforts
Biographer Shelly Romalis notes the significance of the fact that even the usually skeptical Jim Garland confirmed his sister's reputation as a midwife. Garland wrote: "[She] delivered far more babies during those years [1910 to 1932] than did all the doctors on both Horse Creek in Clay County and Straight Creek in Bell County. According to Molly's own estimate, she attended over 5,000 births" (Garland 33). This number, like so much data in Jackson's history, varies widely according to the telling; Jackson told Dreiser Committee interviewers that she had delivered 65 children (Harlan Miners Speak 282), Woody Guthrie was under the impression that "she helped to bring over a hundred little babies into the world" (Guthrie 139), and a New York journalist—presumably sourcing Jackson—put the number at 600 (Robertson 139).
Whatever the gross factual disparities, Jackson's experiences as a midwife provided ample opportunity to witness the impoverished situation of neighboring mining families. Many of Jackson's protest ballads woefully testify about these sick and starving children of Kentucky miners.
"The Death of Harry Sims"
*Written about a young Jewish Man, who was a coal mining union man, who was killed by some gun thugs.
"Little Dove"
"Roll on Buddy"
"Pistol Packin Mama"
* Written by Jess Baker, about Aunt Molly Jackson.
Molly's Funeral:
Aunt Molly Jackson died the last day in August 1960. Shortly before her 80th birthday. Scraps of paper with notes and songs disappeared, most likely discarded with her shabby furniture. Barnicle's dog eared copy of Kitterage and Sargent with the contested "Robin Hood" poem and her photographs of Roosevelt and Pete Seegar proudly placed on her walls. Obituaries in the Sacramento Bee (September 2) and the New York Times
( September 4th), the San Jose News and the St. Louis Post Dispatcher ( September 4th)
all honored the orginal and famous "Pistol Packin Mama" John Greenway in his sing out! Obituary said, "If Molly has made it to heaven I am sure her fight goes on" the songs she is singing is nothing the heavingly choir ever heard before.
Molly's funeral was held in the Sacramento Memorial Garden Chapel, arranged by her neice Lula Holcom, drew a suprisingly respectable crowd of about 50 assorted people. Writer Alice McLerran lovingly remembers the mountain woman as she lay in a open lavender and blue casket, with withered, hawklike features, still haunting, despite the softening efforts of the embalmers. Molly's final theater would have brought her joy, the wafting soulful organ music, rocks and streams decorating the front of the chapel. She would have distained the minister who grabbed the opportunity to warn mourners that they too might fall from grace , as he orated "In my father's house, their was many mansions", Alice could almost see Molly rise and proclaim. "Mansion", my mother never saw a mansion. My grandmother never saw one either. And my great grandmother! They none of them saw a mansion, and they was just as fine of women that pissed through hair! And Mary Magdalene (Garland) (Mills) (Stewart) Jackson would have certainly written!
Gravesite Details
Daughter of Oliver Perry Garland & Deloria Robinson, wife of John Mills, Jim Stewart, Bill Jackson, Tom Stamos
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