Up Big Branch
Up Big Branch. That's where I was born. Up Big Branch in Leslie County, Ky. Along around 1972 I drove my aunts from Corbin, Ky to visit their sister, Alifar Jackson, in a little mining camp named Mary Alice, in Harlan County. I was twenty years old. I had a recording unit with me. We met Alifar and her husband, Andrew Jackson. He played banjo and he was nice enough to play and sing Pretty Polly for us. I knew Alifar and her family since I was very little. They lived on Big Branch on a little creek where you followed a footpath to their log home on the hillside. My brother remembered her home. "They had a sod floor. It was neat as a pin."
I had not picked up the banjo at that point. But I was sure glad I had a recording device! I had no idea what I was hearing from Andrew and his banjo. But I kept the recording over the years. Pretty Polly is one of those tunes that is a staple of Appalachian songs, a tragic tale of murder. From England's Portsmouth area, it records a tragic event like many ballads of the era- broadsides that carried news before newspapers were common.
I learned the song when I took up the banjo. Then I listened to this recording again. I noticed that Andrew sang the lyrics while just strumming a chord....and then he threw in a little embellishment after each lyric. I have never heard anybody do this. I learned that it was common at one time to arrange a ballad in this fashon. Listen for it in the recording below. The recording is done in the Jackson's home in Mary Alice. There is a group of family members there with us. The song, as I have reproduced it here, has pictures of the migration of people from Scotland to Ireland to America, to eastern Kentucky. Notice how close Northern Ireland is to Scotland. Then there is a picture of an "American Wake" the night before family members left. A wake- they knew they would not likely be returning. There is a picture of "The Bridge of Sighs", the site of the final farewell. Then to arrive in Philladelphia and follow the Great Wagon Road into Kentucky. The final picture is of my father's family on Big Branch.
There are a lot of ballads where women are victimized, sad to say. I asked my partner, Yoko, and she said that I might think of it as opera. There are plenty of tragic operas, but they are still works of art that you just can't dismiss because they are tragic. Ok, yes, but what about other perspectives on ballad material?
From 1900 to 1950 there was a great flowering of interest in old ballads. Francis James Child of Harvard wrote a voluminous book that catalogued old ballads from England. A growing endeavor followed to compile old ballads here in America. It seems like countless ballad collectors (song catchers) came to eastern Kentucky (Hindman Settlememt School, Pine Mountain Settlement School) to notate and write down ballads- Josiah Combs, Katherine Petit, Evelyn Wells, Josephine McGill, Emma Bells Miles, Lorraine Wyman, Cecil Sharpe, Mary Wheeler, John Jacob Niles, and our own Jean Ritchie from Viper, Ky.
And there was one other. A person whose work was lost in the Berea College archives. Her name was Katherine Jackson French. She was from London, Ky., the first woman doctorate from the south at Columbia University. She wrote a book about her travels collecting ballads in eastern Kentucky in 1909. Somehow it was never published, but moldered in the college archives bound with a leather rope. Professor Elizabeth Disavino recovered it and wrote a book about Ms. French, published in 2020. Some of the things that Katherine Jackson French uncovered were ballads in a variety of modes and time signatures. She also recounted how women would join in special gatherings to share the old songs. In reading Ms. Disavino's book I ran across a ballad with same melody as Pretty Polly, but with a very different story. Now, it is not remarkable that ballads shared some of the same melodies. But it is noteworthy that the ballad I found with this melody has very little reckoning in the work of the song catchers. I have fashioned my own rendering of Ms. French's collection using Uncle Andrew's banjo arrangement. f C F B C tuning. Give a listen.
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