Jean Bell Thomas

Jean Bell Thomas (November 14, 1881 – December 7, 1982) was an American photographer and folk festival promoter, who specialized in the music, crafts, and language patterns of the Appalachian region of the United States.

Early life She was born Jeannette Bell in 1881 to William George Bell and Catherine S. Bell, a retired engineer and a schoolteacher, respectively, in Ashland, Kentucky. She earned the nickname "Traipsin' Woman" when, as a teenager in the 1890s, she defied convention to attend business school, learn stenography, and become a court reporter, traveling by jolt wagon to courts in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Her travels from county to county were said to involve "considerable spells of traipsin'". Her exposure to the musical traditions, dialect, folkways, and costumes of the mountain people she encountered in her native Eastern Kentucky, combined with her later work in "show business," led to her avocation as a popularizer of mountain music and as proprietress of the American Folk Song Festival, staged in and near Ashland, Kentucky, from 1930 to 1972. In 1900, she lived at home with her parents; her occupation was stenographer.

Musicians would play traditional stringed instruments such as dulcimer, fiddle, guitar, banjo, and accordion, plus recorder and mouth harp. Homemade varieties, such as fiddles constructed out of corn stalks, and banjos made from gourds, appeared alongside later models. Nostalgic for the 19th century, Thomas costumed festival performers in homespun garments evoking that era: girls wore bonnets and calico dresses; women dressed in linsey-woolsey and wrapped shawls around their shoulders; and men and boys often wore overalls. Characters bore names of people she had met long before ("Emmaline," "Little Chad," and "Little Babe"), or were invented to sound folksy. Props such as hickory chairs and egg baskets, brooms, and drinking gourds were used in photographing performers.

Last years She donated manuscript materials and her photographs to the University of Louisville in 1968. The remainder of her papers came to University of Louisville's Dwight Anderson Music Library in 1990, and are described online. Jean Bell Thomas died in Greenup, Kentucky on December 7, 1982, aged 101 years old.