in a wholly irreverent spirit, which gained the author exceeding unpopularity in England and America.”43
The dissertation gives a good sample of Jackson’s writing style. It displays long sentences that are spun out in an almost sermon-like and poetic manner. Jackson is quite conscious of the rhythm and sound of her words. Her writing is high-toned and passionate. She approaches her subject with authority and certainty. This is a style that she displayed throughout her academic career.
Finally, the scope of the work itself provides a final clue to Jackson’s powers of perseverance. This was a prodigious undertaking. She has nine pages of sources listed in her bibliography, roughly totaling two hundred sources. Her primary sources came from many different locations, including New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New Jersey. In 1905, travel to archives required a significant investment of time and money. Such an effort exemplified great determination, focus, energy, and resourcefulness on Jackson’s part.
Dr. Katherine Jackson French. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
Jackson completed her dissertation in 1905. Though her name was listed in the June 1906 commencement program, she was awarded her degree (with an English major and a comparative literature minor) on February 13, 1906.44
Consider the enormity of this statement: Katherine Jackson was awarded her PhD from Columbia University in 1906. In 1900, three years before Jackson commenced work on her degree, only 204 women in all of the United States held doctorates, 6 percent of a total of 4,000 overall. Moreover, Jackson was, according to her obituary, the first woman from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to earn a doctorate from Columbia University, only the second to do so in the history of the college, and one of the first Kentucky women to earn such a degree from any “standard university.” For this achievement alone, she should be accorded a degree of respectful notoriety. When we add her role as one of the first major ballad collectors in the United States, a century’s worth of disinterest in her becomes all the more puzzling.45
There are possible reasons for the lack of contemporary attention in her home state. For one thing, in 1906, an academically accomplished woman would not necessarily have been deemed admirable by the press or the general public. Then, there is the matter of the southerner (or westerner) “gone north” (or “east”) for her education, again, something that might not have been perceived in a positive way. After the Civil War, resentment of the North grew in Kentucky, which was torn in two by the conflict to begin with; it is unclear whether Jackson’s accomplishments were accepted or resented by the people of London. To complicate matters, after receiving her doctorate, Jackson taught for one year at Bryn Mawr and three at Mount Holyoke, thus completing the Science Hill/Seven Sisters connection, not as a student, but as something more exalted—a faculty member, a full-fledged part of the perpetuation of great northern institutions. During that time, she studied briefly at Yale, the ultimate symbol of elite northern academe. This leads to the question of “getting above her raising,” another possible source of friction. Finally, she had been formerly known in London as a nice young woman of good breeding, one who had often been praised for displaying socially acceptable feminine virtues in what passed for the local paper’s society column. A doctorate from an Ivy League college probably did not fit that comfortable and socially acceptable feminine image. Whatever the reason, Jackson’s academic accomplishments did not garner praise, in her hometown or elsewhere. In fact, she received more attention in London four years earlier when she attended the Grand Hop wearing pink chiffon and diamonds.46
Ballad Seeds
Jackson’s ballad-collecting interest began in her New York years. In addition to her studies in English while at Columbia, Katherine took courses in Spanish literature, which included Spanish and Moorish balladry. In her notes, she writes that the ballad “is a dead form … can’t expect it to yield literary influence.”47 She was also quite taken with El Cid, noting that more ballads had been written about him than any other Spanish figure, some going back as far as 1612. Her interest in balladry was thus already budding when, in 1905, a group of her friends told her they had heard a lecture about uncollected ballads in the hills of Kentucky given by two “instructors” from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Jackson was familiar with Berea. In fact, when she was seven, her family took her there for a visit, during which she caught a cold severe enough to bear mention in the local paper. Perhaps it was that the lecturers were from Berea, or perhaps it was simply the unexpected encounter with a bit of home while so far away, but the subject of Kentucky mountain music caught her attention then and there, in the middle of New York City. “They talked of the many ballads in the mountains of Kentucky, which no one had collected. A nursemaid had taught us Barbara Ellen but no other. I determined to investigate at my first free moment,” she later wrote. In this way, she was moved to undertake a grand expedition, adventuring into the hills of eastern Kentucky when she returned home few years later.48
After she earned her doctorate, Jackson returned to London in June 1905 and gave a party for her friends in August. She returned home again briefly in July 1907 while she was teaching up north. She also engaged in some postgraduate work at Yale University from 1907 to 1908.49
In 1909, Jackson obtained a leave from her position at Bryn Mawr to work on a textbook on Old English. She used some of that time to return home to tend her ailing mother. Maria must have recovered because, in the fall, Jackson’s journeys into the mountains surrounding London to collect the ballads of Kentucky began. These trips, the resulting collection, the five-year quest to publish it, and the question of Jackson’s “stolen thunder” will be examined in part 2.50
3
Act Two
After collecting ballads in 1909, Jackson stayed in Kentucky and worked on getting them published through Berea College. But her world began to change on her marriage to William Franklin French in 1911. Gray eyed and auburn haired, “Frank” French was a dashing, handsome man. He had held the rather glamorous job of mountain mail carrier as a young man, was a graduate of Washington and Lee University and Kentucky Central College, and was a thirty-second-degree Mason. He was in London to do some legal work in 1899, shortly after William Harvey Jackson’s death. It is possible that he worked on executing the terms of Papa Jackson’s will and that he may have seen Katherine Jackson during this time. In fact, the two had known each other since 1893; one photograph shows them on a picnic at Cumberland Falls, and another depicts them in a buggy together, shortly after Jackson’s graduation from Science Hill. It was not until September 11, 1911, that they tied the knot, however.1
After the wedding, Katherine French was still busy with her ballad collection. In 1914, she did some teaching at the Sue Bennett Memorial School, as she had when she had returned to London in 1899–1900, and she became dean there in 1915 for one year. The story of her recruitment is an unusual one. Apparently, her predecessor, a man named Lewis, was “a holy terror.” He favored physical discipline, sometimes punching children in the face. He punished one child so severely that the father took him out of school and built a separate school building in his own yard so that his son never had to look on Lewis again. Lewis was so detested that, at one point, two young men left a cow in the administration building, the resultant effluvia apparently intended as a comment on his reign. Problems with him got so bad that the town fathers informed Belle Bennett, the school’s head, that, if Lewis did not go, she would lose the school.2
William Franklin French. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
At
