Jean Thomas: The Traipsin’ Woman

Jean's photograph of The Sloane Sisters, Rowan Country Kentucky
Personal Note...
(from Allison Anders)
I created this page to honor an amazing woman from my hometown of Ashland, Ky. Jean Thomas was an independent, eccentric, creative, fascinating woman, completely driven to preserve (and influence) folk songs and lore and local mountain culture in Eastern Kentucky. She started what seems to be the very first folk music festival in the country in 1930, the American Folk Song Festival in Ashland, Kentucky.
Throughout the 1920s Jean interviewed local musicians and taped field recordings of the music they played which became part of the Harry Smith Collection "Anthology Of American Folk Music". She was also a highly gifted photographer. Nearly all of the photographs you see on this page were taken by Jean unless she's in the picture. She had a gifted eye with great warmth and empathy for her subjects and caught such memorable moments in her pictures. Faces we have seldom seen.
Aunt Charity Hooker with Lincoln Portrait, Ashland, Kentucky
In her travels to collect songs and stories from the mountain people of Kentucky, Jean didn't merely take, she brought with her much-needed supplies, medicine and education, including contraception and women's health care information to the women there.
And did I mention -- she also wrote books? Three. AND she had worked as a publicist and script girl for Cecil B. De Mille on "The Ten Commandments" before returning to Ashland to begin her true calling.
In 1971, when I was 16, I went with a horde of Tri-State long-haired freaks to the festival which had come to be held at Carter Caves about 20 miles from Ashland. We pitched tents, hung out getting high and listened to the music days and nights on the hillside. This was a very different event than most folk festivals of the day...it was not a bunch of coffee house intellectuals, this was the seriously real deal. You had to wrap your head around it and get into the sometimes hard-to-groove-on authenticity of the mountain songs. Let me put it this way: it was far more demanding than taking in an Eric Anderson set! I sat on the hill above the stage one night in a vintage frock to my ankles, holding hands with a boy I'd met there, watching a man and his 14 year old daughter perform together, a song which was essentially outlining her dowry! It was an incredibly memorable 3 days for me. I later set the final scenes of my first screenplay at the event.
Jean playing dulcimer
The whole Elizabethan costume thing is a little over the top but it makes me love her all the more, cause it's like it was some fetish of hers. She was an anglo-file for very very old Britain . She claimed the music all came from there and while she is largely correct we know now it's not that simple. Just for starters: the banjo she so dearly loved came from Africa. But Jean was a self taught musicologist/folklorist and she embellished too -- she was not academic. Her life-calling was based on her passion to hear the music and the stories she was told and then, to share them. And as a result of her endless curiosity, we've all benefited from her discoveries. I am so proud that this amazing woman came from my hometown. I only wish they'd not mowed down her house!
Jean at her desk in her "Wee House In The Wood"
Jean and folk singer John Jacob "Jack" Niles at the cabin where the American Folk Song Festival was originally held.
Jean Thomas The Traipsin' Woman Biography
Jean Thomas was born Jeanette Mary Francis de Assisi Aloysius Narcissus Garfield Bell in Ashland, Kentucky on November 14, 1881. 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 exposure to the musical traditions, dialect, folkways, and costumes of the mountain people she encountered, 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 through 1972.
Young Jean the Stenographer outside courthouse
Using money saved from her court reporter wages, Thomas moved to New York, where she took writing classes and continued to work as a stenographer. She married accountant Albert Thomas in 1913, and moved to Logan, West Virginia, but was divorced within a year. She then held a variety of jobs, including work as a script girl for Cecil B. de Mille's film The Ten Commandments, as secretary to the owner of the Columbus Senators baseball team, and as press agent for Ruby "Texas" Guinan, the notorious entertainer and owner of prohibition-era speakeasies.
Jean out in the field interviewing her first 'star' Jilson Setters, 1928
During her years working in eastern Kentucky, and on subsequent visits, Thomas often carried her camera and photographed the musicians and other mountain people with whom she came in contact. She used her portable typewriter to document lyrics and tunes to ballads. In 1926, Jean Thomas met James William Day, a blind fiddler from Rowan County. Using the skills she had acquired as a press agent, she changed his name to Jilson Setters, secured recording contracts, and booked him (as the "Singin' Fiddler from Lost Hope Hollow") in theaters. As Jilson Setters, Day eventually played in London's Royal Albert Hall at the Festival of the English Folk Song and Dance Society, for Thomas subscribed to the belief, also held by many of her contemporaries, that in Appalachia, "the speech, song, and traditions of old England still survived" (Thomas 1940, p. 88). Day/Setters was the subject of Thomas' first book, Devil's Ditties, published in 1931; subsequent books included the semi-autobiographical The Traipsin' Woman (1933) and The Sun Shines Bright (1940).
Inspired by a traditional mountain "Singin' Gatherin'" (wherein musicians got together to perform old songs) she had witnessed, Jean Thomas staged a small folk festival for a group of invited guests at her home in September 1930. Featured performers included Setters and Dorothy Gordon, a singer from New York. Thomas incorporated the American Folk Song Society the following year to plan for an annual festival near her hometown of Ashland, Kentucky. The second American Folk Song Festival was held in 1932 on Four Mile Fork of Gardner, just off the Mayo Trail, and featured eighteen acts, all of whom had learned by oral tradition, per Thomas' stipulation. The stage included a rented log cabin, because "It was my purpose to recreate as accurately as possible the original scene of the Singin' Gatherin'. That had been presented in front of a windowless cabin. But this rented cabin did have a glass window in front; so I covered it with an American flag" (Thomas 1940, p. 198).
American Folk Song Festival at the cabin 1951, already 21 years strong
With the exception of the years 1943-1947, the American Folk Song Festival was held annually until failing health forced Thomas to retire in 1972. From 1934-1949, thanks to a benefactor's gift of land and a windowless log cabin, the festival took place at a site eighteen miles south of Ashland. Beginning in 1950, the festival was held in Thomas' yard in Ashland, moving to a state park in Prestonsburg in 1964, and to the Carter Caves State Park in 1966.
1968. A replica of the cabin stood as backdrop on the stage when the festival was moved to Carter Caves.
The festival followed an unwavering script for many years, intended to show "authentic sequences in America's musical history" (Thomas 1940, p. 262). Volna Fraley or, later, his nephew, would signal the start of the performances by blowing a fox horn that had belonged to "Devil Anse" Hatfield (patriarch of the legendary feuding family of the Kentucky-West Virginia border). Next, a man, woman, and two children would arrive at the stage by covered wagon to be greeted by a woman dressed as a Cherokee Indian, as a representation of the Anglo-American settlement of the Appalachian Mountains. Traditions carried over from the British Isles would then be demonstrated by a dozen children performing an old English country dance accompanied by a piper. A woman in the role of "Narrator" (often played by Thomas herself), attended by "Ladies-in-Waiting" dressed in long black Elizabethan gowns, would read a historical prologue connecting Appalachian customs and music to Elizabethan England. The prologue would conclude with a description of the wedding of a young pioneer couple named Ephraim and Drusilla; the ensuing musical performances were set in the narrative context of their wedding reception, or "Infare." 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.
Actress Beulah Bondi opens the festival in Elizabethan costume.
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.
Jean in shadow and Camilla Broyles
She donated manuscript materials and her photographs to the University of Louisville in 1968. The remainder of her papers came to UofL's Dwight Anderson Music Library in 1990, and are described in an online finding aid. (Most of these photographs came from their library and are available for purchase from the University.)
Jean Thomas died in 1982 at the age of 101.