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EXCERPT FROM THE RABLEROUSERS OF BLOODY HARLAN The Musicians of the Mine Wars________ Dexter Collett Editor's Note: This is an excerptfrom a manuscript being preparedfor publication as a book. Music and social movements are now inextricably linked in the public mind: The Civil Rights Movement, for example, immediately conjures up images of people singing "We Shall Overcome." Early in the 20tn Century, the International Workers of the World, "The Wobblies ," fused music with working class protest quite successfully, but in the 1930s, nowhere was music a more integral part of workers' struggles than among coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky. The trend continues through the present in large part because of the efforts of those who preceded today's activists. One family, the Garlands, produced three outstanding Eastern Kentucky folk singers with roots in the efforts to unionize the mines in Harlan and surrounding counties, particularly Bell and Knox Counties . But it was Florence Reece (1900-1986) who composed the most memorable of all the decade's labor songs, "Which Side Are You On?" All four of these singers grew up near Harlan County, but none were born or raised there. Instead they all were drawn to Harlan County in search of work in the coal mines by the 1920s and stayed into the 1930s, right when the labor struggle was most intense. The topical songs of the Garlands and Reece, were written about events as they unfolded, and set against the backdrop of the mine wars in Harlan County, where the folksingers often walked the picket line themselves and lived through the hard times which they immortalized in their songs. Fighting between the coal operators' hired guards and the union miners killed eight men in 1931 alone—earning the county the nickname, "Bloody Harlan." The texts of their songs were set to hymn tunes and folk melodies which they had known since childhood growing up in the Appalachian folk culture. They were used effectively as weapons of resistance in the struggle against class oppression in the 1930s and later became popular protest songs in the 1950s and 1960s after some of the songs were recorded by Woody Guthrie, Pete 72 Seeger, and other artists during the urban folk song revival. The Garland trio of Southeastern Kentucky folksingers: Jim Garland (1905-1978) his oldest half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960), and his youngest sister Sarah Ogan Gunning (1910-1983), along with a dozen of their siblings comprised the family of Oliver Perry Garland . He was married twice, first to Deborah Robinson Garland, the mother of Aunt Molly Jackson and then to Elizabeth Lucas Garland, the mother ofJim Garland and Sarah Ogan Gunning. Oliver Garland's family, like the Baldridge family in James Still's novel River of Earth, often moved from place to place, as the father searched for work. Oliver Garland and Debora Robinson Garland were both from Clay County, just North of Knox County which adjoins both Bell and Harlan Counties to the North. Oliver farmed until 1883 when Molly was three. Then he moved a few miles west and got into the store business at a coal camp in Laurel County. Often Molly went back to Clay County to stay a week or two with her grandparents on their farm. On one such visit around Christmas when Molly was ten years old, she dressed-up in her grandfather's old clothes, blacked her face to keep people from recognizing her, went over to a neighbor's house and played a childish prank on the family which resulted in her being arrested. She spent ten days in the Clay County Jail at Manchester for disguise. While she was in jail, Molly wrote her very first song entitled , "Mr. Cundiff, Won't You Turn Me Loose?" The song protested her incarceration, and pleaded for the jailor, Mr. Cundiff, to release her. After making a profit for a few years in the store, Oliver finally went broke because he extended too much credit to miners who went out on strike but were not rehired and thus couldn't pay their bills. Not destined to succeed as either a farmer or a merchant, he became a coal miner, and...
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