Aunt Molly Jackson

Aunt Molly Jackson (1880 – September 1, 1960) was an influential American folk singer and a union activist. Her full name was Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos.

Biography Jackson was one of fifteen children born in Clay County, Kentucky, as the daughter of Oliver Perry Garland and Deborah Robinson. Prior to 1883, her father worked as a sharecropper. However, due to the extensive subdivision of land in southeastern Kentucky over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century, her father's profession grew to be inviable. The family moved to East Bernstadt, Kentucky in Laurel County where Oliver opened a general store selling groceries to miners on credit and became a pastor at the Missionary Baptist Church in town. Her father later became a union organizer, which Jackson has said, particularly after her father's death, strongly influenced her work as an activist during her adulthood. After purposefully scaring a neighbor by applying blackface, Jackson was jailed at the age of ten.

She was discovered in November 1931 by the Dreiser Committee, investigating the Harlan County War and workers' living conditions when she spoke and sang her song "Ragged, Hungry Blues" in front of the committee. In December 1931, Jackson traveled to New York City to support and raise money for striking Harlan coal miners, at one point appearing before an estimated crowd of 21,000 at the Bronx Coliseum. Jackson made her recording debut on December 10, 1931. For the next year, she performed in various cities in the north.

Discography Kentucky Miner's Wife, Part 1-2 (Ragged Hungry Blues) - Columbia 15731-D (1931) The Little Dove / Ten Thousand Miles - Library of Congress AAFS-7 (1942) The Songs and Stories of Aunt Molly Jackson, 1960 - Folkways FH-5457 (1961) Aunt Molly Jackson, Library of Congress Recordings, 1939 - Rounder 1002 (1971)

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