Katherine Jackson French : Kentucky's forgotten ballad collector

Summary: "In 1917, Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp released their momentous collection of ballads, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, establishing the precedent for all other ballad publications to follow. Yet this genre-defining collection only became as influential as it did because of a broken promise seven years earlier. Katherine Jackson French, an accomplished musician and the second woman in history to earn a PhD, had been promised by Berea College to have her collection of ballads published in 1910. Unfortunately, they never followed through with this publication. A woman who perpetually lived with one foot in two worlds, French was a bridge between eras and regions, continually going back and forth between the world of the rural South and Northern academia. Had her volume been published in 1910, the crucial first impression of Appalachian balladry would have been drastically different. Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky's Forgotten Ballad Collector answers the many questions surrounding the life and work of Katherine Jackson French. In part one of the manuscript, author Elizabeth DiSavino shares French's life story for the first time in its entirety. The second half of the manuscript is devoted to the discussion and analysis of French's ballads. The first section relates the history of French's interest and beginnings in the genre, the next details her attempts at publishing her collection of ballads, and the final chapter compares her ballads with those published in Campbell and Sharp's compilation. DiSavino concludes the manuscript with the claim that, had French's work been published at Berea in 1910 as originally promised to her, the defining features of Appalachian folk music would look very different than they do today. Katherine Jackson French would likely have gone down in history as the mother of American balladry"--