Subject: Aunt Molly Jackson on songs about gender
From:
Jim Dixon
Date: 30 Sep 11 - 10:02 AM
I thought you'd enjoy this. I ran across it while looking for something else:
Quoted in Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), page 130:
"Women don't like these songs about 'Don't believe in a woman, you're lost if you do.' Women don't like such songs because they cause people to lose confidence in women. I mind me of another they sing, 'When I Was Single'; and that song is another song against the morals of women, and no woman don't like that song.
"Men don't like for women to sing songs like—'They're confined and slaved by their husbands.' They think that causes their women to lose confidence in them. Of course, they don't always get mad; it's owin' to what place they're at. Say, if they're at a party or a dance and it's played, they just pretend to ignore it. Like the song, 'Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies, Be Careful How You Court Young Men.' A lot of times a woman would be singing that and they'd say, 'Oh, sing something else, for there's no truth in that.' Songs that women makes up about men, about their husbands and about their sweethearts and things like that, they think that we've given them the wrong kind of a deal and it's not justice and it's not right and they protest and everly have as far back as I can remember."
--AUNT MOLLY JACKSON (1880-1960)
|
sj
