Author of local-color stories pertaining to folklife in the Kentucky-West Virginia border
region and director of the American Folk Song Festival, held annually near Ashland,
Kentucky, from 1930 until 1972. Jean Thomas was widely known as “The Traipsin’
Woman.”
Born Jeannette Bell in Ashland, Kentucky, on November 14, 1881, she attended
parochial school and won local acclaim as an artistic singer. Upon graduation from high
school, she worked as a legal stenographer, attending circuit court sessions in the
mountains of eastern Kentucky, and it was there she first encountered indigenous folk
music.
Her marriage in 1913 to businessman Albert Hart Thomas ended in divorce a year
later, and she never remarried. She attended Hunter College and the Pulitzer School of
Journalism, and between 1913 and 1925 she maintained various secretarial positions in
Kentucky, Ohio, and New York. Her friendships with Greenwich Village artists and
socialites—and a brief stint as a script girl in Hollywood—gave rise to theatrical
ambitions. Instead of becoming an actress, however, Thomas forged a successful career
as a writer and a presenter of Appalachian folk culture.
Between 1925 and 1930, she supplemented her secretarial work with magazine and
newspaper writing and also began to feel her way as an entrepreneur of folk culture. In
1928 she created a media stir by bringing to New York an aged Kentucky fiddler,
J.W.Day, to perform at the elegant Roxy theater. She presented Day as the rustic “Jilson
Setters,” called him “the last minstrel,” and made much of his repertoire of “Elizabethan”
ballads and fiddle tunes.
Two articles inspired by her experiences in the Kentucky mountains appeared
nationally in American Magazine in 1929 and 1930. One of these told an appealing tale
of “Jilson Setters,” while the other introduced Thomas herself as “The Traipsin’
Woman,” a moniker she eventually adopted as a legal part of her name. The two magazine stories were immensely popular and set the stage for Thomas’ future success as
a writer of books based on Appalachian history and folklife.
In 1930 she gathered a group of friends near Ashland, Kentucky, to hear a concert by
local folk musicians. This “singin’ gatherin’” evolved into the American Folk Song
Festival, an annual event directed byThomas that also became a thread of continuity
through her long life. In conjunction with the festival, Thomas chartered an American
Folk Song Society in 1931. This brought her into conflict with Robert Winslow Gordon
of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, who founded an
organization of the same name at roughly the same time.
Thomas’ first book, published in 1931, was Devil’s Ditties, a collection of mountain
folksongs presented in an unusual descriptive format. This was followed by six other
books within the decade, including Thomas’ autobiographical The Traipsin’ Woman
(1933) and her most famous work, The Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow (1938),
which featured the half-imaginary “Jilson Setters” as its central character. Thomas’
accounts of Kentucky mountain life interwove Appalachian regional history and folklife
with supposed Elizabethan mannerisms, Chaucerian speech, and uplifting but sentimental
plots.
She published no further books after 1942, but instead turned her attention to
producing the American Folk Song Festival and to entertaining visitors at her museum
home, “The Wee House in the Woods,” a brick replica of a Tudorstyle cottage built for
her in Ashland. Her energy seemed boundless, and she continued to direct the festival
until old age took her into a nursing home in 1972. She died there in 1982 at the age of
101.
In retrospect, although Thomas maintained an impressive roster of associates in
American letters, entertainment, and business, her American Folk Song Festival was
anathema to academic folklorists, who still tend to criticize its excessive Anglo-Saxon
emphasis, its staged theatrical aspects, and its pseudo-historical presentation of
Appalachian folk culture. While Thomas possessed a valuable awareness of folklife in
Appalachia, she chose to ignore documentary modes of representation in favor of the
theatrical-pageant tradition and the local-color story. Her failure to provide tangible
sources for her findings undermined the validity of her work in the eyes of many
folklorists. But while academicians have been less than positive about her contributions
to the field, Thomas’ books nevertheless found an enthusiastic readership, and her
American Folk Song Festival remained popular with general audiences for more than
four decades.
Stephen Green
References
Thomas, Jean. 1939. Ballad Makin’ in the Mountains of Kentucky. New York: Holt.
——. 1940. The Sun Shines Bright. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Wolfe, Charles. 1982. Kentucky Country. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, pp. 66–75.