Jim Garland

Last updated April 11, 2019

Jim Garland (April 8, 1905 – September 6, 1978) was a miner, songwriter, folksinger, and folk song collector from the coal mining country of eastern Kentucky, where he was involved with the communist-led National Miners Union (NMU) during the violent labor conflicts of the early 1930s called the Harlan County War.

Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content, and, since the 1880s, has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine a pit, and the above-ground structures the pit head. In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine. In the United States, "colliery" has been used to describe a coal mine operation but nowadays the word is not commonly used.

Harlan County War violent labor dispute in Kentucky

The Harlan County War, or Bloody Harlan, was a series of coal mining-related skirmishes, executions, bombings, and strikes that took place in Harlan County, Kentucky during the 1930s. The incidents involved coal miners and union organizers on one side, and coal firms and law enforcement officials on the other. The question at hand: the rights of Harlan County coal miners to organize their workplaces and better their wages and working conditions. It was a nearly decade-long conflict, lasting from 1931 to 1939. Before its conclusion, an indeterminate number of miners, deputies, and bosses would be killed, state and federal troops would occupy the county more than half a dozen times, two acclaimed folk singers would emerge, union membership would oscillate wildly, and workers in the nation's most anti-labor coal county would ultimately be represented by a union.

Garland came to New York City in 1931 with his older half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson and later followed by sister Sarah Ogan where he participated in the Greenwich Village folk music scene.^[1] Two of his best-known songs are "The Death of Harry Simms" and "I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister."

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km²), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

Aunt Molly Jackson was an influential American folk singer and a union activist. Her full name was Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos.

Greenwich Village often referred to by locals as simply "the Village", is a neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, New York City, within Lower Manhattan. Broadly, Greenwich Village is bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village also contains several subsections, including the West Village west of Seventh Avenue and the Meatpacking District in the northwest corner of Greenwich Village.

During World War II he moved, together with Sarah's family, to Vancouver, Washington, to work in the shipyard. In 1944 he founded a broom factory which he ran for many years.^[2] Garland sang at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and can be seen in documentary film footage seated behind and to the right of Bob Dylan as Dylan performs. His sister Sarah Ogan Gunning sang there in 1964. Also, Mr. Garland was a participant at the 1971 and 1974 Smithsonian American Folklife Festivals, held in Washington, D.C.

Vancouver is a city on the north bank of the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, and the largest suburb of Portland, Oregon. Incorporated in 1857, it is the fourth largest city in the state, with a population of 161,791 as of April 1, 2010 census. Vancouver is the county seat of Clark County and forms part of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area, the 23rd largest metropolitan area in the United States. Originally established in 1825 around Fort Vancouver, a fur-trading outpost, the city is located on the Washington/Oregon border along the Columbia River, directly north of Portland. In 2005, Money magazine named it No. 91 on its list of best places in America to live. In 2016, WalletHub ranks Vancouver the 89th best place in the US for families to live.

The Newport Folk Festival is an American annual folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in July 1959 as a counterpart to the previously established Newport Jazz Festival. The festival is often considered one of the first modern music festivals in America and remains a focal point in the ever-expanding genre of "folk" music.

Sarah Ogan Gunning was an American singer and songwriter from the coal mining country of eastern Kentucky, as were her older half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson and her brother Jim Garland. Although she made an appearance in the New York folk music scene of the 1930s, she was overshadowed by her older brother and half-sister. Rediscovered in the 1960s while living in Detroit, she played at folk festivals at Newport in 1964 and the University of Chicago in 1965.

Mr. Garland submitted various reel-to-reel tape recordings of himself, his daughter Betty, friends, neighbors and local church congregations to Folkways Records, Inc. The tapes have been retained, and are archived in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Folkways Records never released any recordings of Jim Garland himself; however, in 1964, Folkways Records issued an LP recording of his daughter, Betty Garland, which was devoted to the Garland family folksong repertory. The album remains available from Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings.

Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.

The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections is housed in the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., United States.

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References

↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=giPeOVLk_r4C
↑ Jim Garland, Welcome the Traveler Home: Jim Garland's Story of the Kentucky Mountains, ed. by Julie S. Audery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

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[1] ttps://books.google.com/books?id=giPeOVLk_r4C

[2] Jim Garland, Welcome the Traveler Home: Jim Garland's Story of the Kentucky Mountains, ed. by Julie S. Audery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.