study begins with a question and ends with many others.
When A. J. Bodnar and I began a fellowship project at Berea College in 2012, the name of Katherine Jackson French was unknown to us. We entered the vast vault of the Berea College Special Collections and Archives at Hutchins Library and entrusted ourselves to the tender mercies of the archivists Harry Rice and Shannon Wilson.
It was Harry who first told us about Katherine Jackson French. I was intrigued. She was a woman who had attempted to publish a large collection of ballads (over sixty by some accounts) seven years before Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp’s landmark English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917).1 She was one of the first women from Kentucky to earn a PhD, the second woman to earn one from Columbia University, and the first from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to do so. Paradoxically, she was a southern woman who studied and taught in the North but kept returning home.
The more I learned about her, the more questions arose. Why had this girl from London, Kentucky, gone north and east for her education? As one of eight children, why had she—a girl—been singled out for higher education at the end of the nineteenth century? What influences did she encounter in her youth that led her to this calling? How did her family, friends, and neighbors react to her northern relocation (to New York City, of all places)? What led her to collect folk songs? Why did she continue to return to her hometown? Why did she finally settle in Shreveport, Louisiana? Why, though she lived out her life there and later died in South Carolina, is she buried in London? What did she have to say on topics other than folk songs? In short, just who was Katherine Jackson French?
Of all the questions that arose, the most vexing was, why did Berea College offer to help publish Jackson’s folk-song collection in 1910 and then not see it done? And, if the collection had been published, would her depiction of early Appalachian balladry have painted a different picture than the one in Campbell and Sharp’s genre-establishing English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians? How might that crucial first impression of Appalachian balladry in particular and Appalachian folk music in general been different if Jackson had published first? As a professor of music education and music at Berea, I felt a personal responsibility to examine these issues and to see her story told.
The story of Katherine Jackson French is, like many stories, more complex than it initially appears. She was a woman who perpetually had a foot in two worlds. Born a scant ten years after the end of the Civil War, Jackson represented a bridge between eras and regions, between the rural South and northern academe, between academe and rural folk music, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, between what women’s limitations were according to the mores of her time and what she knew they should not be. Her education and travels constitute an impressive vita but did not diminish her love of home. She was a proper southern wife and mother, but she also held a doctorate and was an author and a professor. Her attempt to publish her collection of Kentucky ballads through Berea was a signal failure in a lifetime of professional achievements. Had she succeeded, hers would have been the first large and scholarly collection of southern Appalachian balladry ever published.2
All these things led to a fascination with Katherine Jackson French on my part, resulting in my determination to uncover and tell her story and see her collection of ballads finally published with the support of Berea College. The college—in the persons of Dean Chad Berry and Chris Green, the director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center—agreed, and that collection is now finally appearing here.
The songs included in the last chapter of this biography mark the completion of a project begun by Katherine Jackson in 1909. It has taken over a hundred years for her manuscript to see print, and it has been my honor to oversee that task. Indeed, I felt it imperative that it be a Berean who finally saw to it that Berea’s promise was fulfilled and Jackson’s story told.
And, thus, here is her work, and here is her story. It is a tale that has never before been told in its entirety. This unremembered life and this unremembered work deserve appropriate notoriety, both for the sake of equity and for what we can learn from them.
There are many people to thank. Thank you first to Anne Dean Dotson, Ashley Runyon, and the University Press of Kentucky for their interest in this project. Thank you to four rounds of careful readers for the Press who insisted that Jackson’s story be told cleanly but with enough context to position this tale within the times, issues, and places that are its setting. At Berea College I want to thank Chad Berry for his permission to publish the ballads and for his support of this project; Chris Green, who steered me toward examination of the role of George Lyman Kittredge during the early Ballad Wars, supported funding of the separate commemorative publication of the ballads, and spent many tedious hours proofreading the same; Loyal Jones for his interest, collegiality, inspiration, and example; my wonderful colleagues in the music program, including my department chairs Dr. Stephen Bolster, Dr. Kathy Bullock, and Dr. Javier Clavere; and Professor Mark Calkins, whose interest in Jackson’s “Barbara Allen” nudged me back into her collection. Also thanks to my partners in traditional music mischief at Berea College Al White, Dr. Kathy Bullock, Dr. E. J. Stokes, and Tripp Bratton; Deborah Thompson for her insights into women and other hidden voices in Appalachian music; Division Heads Dr. Rick Meadows, Dr. Carol de Rosset, and Billy Wooten for their encouragement and support; and the Hutchins Library Sound Archives Fellowship Program along with its special, anonymously funded trust and its facilitators, Terri Thompson, Rachel Roberts Lakes, Mark Calkins (again), and Ethan Hamblin.
I would be remiss not to sing the praises of the staff of the Berea College Special Collections and Archives at Hutchins Library and thank them for their diligence and help: the sound archivist Harry Rice, who can magically lay his hand on any text, recording, or artifact, no matter how obscure; the archivist Sharyn Mitchell and her keen eye for periodical articles pertaining to the subject at hand; Shannon Wilson, formerly of the Berea College Archives, for his excellent history of Berea College; and Rachel Vagts for heading one of the best collections of southern Appalachian materials in the world. Thanks also to Susan Henthorn for information regarding women holding doctorates in Kentucky.
Also, I owe a huge thank you to Mary Katherine (Kay) Tolbert Buckland for her generosity with time and material; Ron Pen, formerly of the University of Kentucky, for his support and wonderfully detailed suggestions; Chris Brown, an archivist with Centenary College, for miraculously digging up not one but three former students and colleagues of Dr. French’s; Shirley Kelley and the Shreveport Woman’s Department Club for their interest, information, and enthusiasm; Betty Smith for her deep knowledge and love of balladry and her willingness to share it; Emily K. Gattozzi, curator of the Ohio Wesleyan University Historical Collection at the L. A. Beeghly Library; Jocelyn K. Wilk, associate university archivist at Butler Library, Columbia University; Michael Frost at the Sterling Memorial Library Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University; the Filson Historical Society; the good-hearted folks at the Laurel County Historical Society who kept offering me lunch; of course Arpi, who was (as always) my companion during the first round of research that led to this book and offered his unending love and support; and, last, Berea College itself for finally enabling the publication of this story and collection.
PART 1
“THIS SPEAKING SOUL”
The keeping alive of such verse shows a wholesome and sane effort to meet a needed demand, and is the result of a distinct poetic gift, applied to all subjects and all sorts of spirits and made most effective when some passionate mind is aroused…. This speaking soul is an effective possession, increasing [the mountain balladeers’] love for liberty, their endurance, their restraint, and manliness, all expressive of the spirit and sap of the stock.
Katherine Jackson French
1
“The
