Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong Shelly Romans
Folklore legend Aunt Molly Jackson grew up a coal miner's daughter in eastern Kentucky. Witness to the terrible strife between miners and mine owners, Molly became a labor activist, writing songs that fused hard experience with rich Appalachian musical traditions to become weapons of struggle.
In 1931, at age fifty, Molly was "dis-covered" by the Dreiser Committee and brought north. There she was sponsored and befriended by an illustrious circle of left-wing intellectuals and musicians, including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger and his son Pete.
Together with Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, her sister Sarah Ogan Gunning, and other transplanted folk musicians, Molly served as a cultural broker, linking the rural working poor to big-city left-wing activism.
Shelly Romalis's multidimensional portrait of Aunt Molly illuminates Southern Appalachia during the early decades of the twentieth cen-tury, New York during the Depres-sion years, and the folk music revival and women's resistance movements.
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