Appalachian Figures
In November 1937 a young Kentucky miner’s wife stepped up to a Library of Congress microphone in a New York studio. She introduced herself simply as Sarah Ogan, then poured out songs about starvation wages, dead children, and coal camp sheriffs who answered to company bosses instead of the law. Alan Lomax filed the discs away as part of the Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle collection. Decades later, when the tapes resurfaced, singers and scholars realized that this soft-spoken woman from the Cumberland coalfields had created some of the most searing labor songs in American history.
Sarah Ogan Gunning spent much of her life in the shadows of more famous relatives like her half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson and brother Jim Garland. Yet her small catalog of songs, especially “Come All You Coal Miners” and “I Hate the Capitalist System,” distilled the hard truths of Depression-era mining camps in eastern Kentucky.
Today her voice threads through documentaries, songbooks, and mining-song anthologies whenever people look for the sound of Appalachian women staring down company power.
Elys Branch or Bell County
Like many coalfield stories, even Sarah’s birthplace is a little disputed. Most English-language reference works, following The Kentucky Encyclopedia and similar sources, give her birth as June 28, 1910 in Bell County, Kentucky.
But when folklorist Archie Green sat down to write the liner notes for her 1965 album Girl of Constant Sorrow, he dug deeper. Green describes “Sarah Elizabeth Garland (born June 28, 1910) from an Elys Branch, Knox County, Kentucky, coal camp,” and other Folkways materials echo that wording. The German-language biography of Gunning, which leans heavily on Green and the Encyclopedia entries, likewise places her birth in Elys Branch, Knox County.
Modern maps still show Elys Branch and the ruins of an Elys Branch school in Knox County, just across the river from Bell County camps. Put together, the primary and near-primary sources suggest that she was born in a Knox County coal camp at Elys Branch, then spent her childhood moving between camps in Knox and neighboring Bell as her father followed work.
Her father, Oliver Perry Garland, was a coal miner, early union man, and Baptist preacher who had already raised a family with his first wife, Deborah Robinson Garland, before marrying Sarah’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth Lucas. The children from both marriages grew up in crowded company houses along new mine branches, absorbing hymns, ballads, and comic pieces from parents and older kin. One half-sister, Mary Magdalene Garland, would become famous as Aunt Molly Jackson. One brother, Jim Garland, turned his own experiences into topical songs. Sarah, the younger sister, listened closely.
“A Miner’s Wife” In The Nadir Of The Coalfields
Around 1925 a teenaged Sarah met Tennessee miner Andrew Ogan at the Fox Ridge mine in Bell County. They eloped across the line to Cumberland Gap, Virginia, and she traded the role of miner’s daughter for miner’s wife. Four children followed. Two died during the grinding poverty of the early thirties, when coal demand collapsed and “you could strike and starve or you could work and starve,” as one miner put it in the later documentary Dreadful Memories: The Life of Sarah Ogan Gunning.
In Bell and Knox counties the National Miners Union (NMU), a communist-led rival to the United Mine Workers, launched an organizing drive in 1931 that brought pitched battles, evictions, and blacklists. Dreadful Memories and its transcript preserve the recollections of Sarah’s sister Hazel and fellow miner Tillman Cadle describing deputies beating strikers, arresting anyone who tried to feed hungry families, and charging people with “banding and confederating” simply for gathering in small groups.
Those years cost Sarah almost everything. Hazel Garland recalls the baby who starved because there was no milk, the second child who died, and Andrew’s worsening tuberculosis in a shack too poor to keep out the wind. County officials told Sarah she should make her sick husband sleep under the floor rather than help get him into a hospital. Andrew eventually returned to Brush Creek in Knox County and died there in 1938.
These tragedies would become the raw material of songs that sounded less like compositions and more like testimony.
Barnicle, Lomax, And New York City
In the mid-thirties New York University folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle traveled through the southeastern Kentucky coalfields recording singers like Jim Garland and Aunt Molly Jackson. Struck by the Ogans’ poverty, she eventually brought Sarah, Andrew, and their children to New York City, where they joined the swirl of left-wing artists and organizers on the Lower East Side.
There Sarah met Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and other figures of the prewar folk revival. Seeger later remembered visiting the Garland-Ogan apartment, a cramped walk-up where the food, talk, and songs made it feel like “a little piece of Kentucky” in the middle of Manhattan.
Alan Lomax, working with Barnicle, recorded Sarah in New York on November 13, 1937, for the Library of Congress. The Lomax Digital Archive and the Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings site list at least a dozen titles from that session, including “Come All You Coal Miners” (AFS 1944A), “I Hate the Capitalist System” (AFS 1943A), “Thinking Tonight of an Old Southern Town” (AFS 1943B), “Down on the Picket Line,” and “I’m Goin’ to Organize, Baby Mine.”
These discs are our earliest direct record of her voice. They show a young woman singing unaccompanied in an older mountain style while delivering words that belong squarely to the politics of the Great Depression.
Old Hymns, New Words
Archie Green later argued that Sarah did not begin composing topical songs until New York, when homesickness, grief, and contact with left-wing activists pushed her to put her stories into verse. Rather than write entirely new melodies, she almost always laced her words onto familiar hymn tunes, ballads, or spirituals.
The German biography of Gunning, drawing on Green’s notes, points out that “Down on the Picket Line” grew out of the spiritual “Down in the Valley to Pray” and was inspired by the 1931 NMU strike in Bell County. Other songs recast Emry Arthur’s “Man of Constant Sorrow” into “I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow,” or turned existing revival hymns into union anthems.
In Dreadful Memories she tells the filmmakers that “everything you hear in my songs is the truth,” and the verses bear her out. “I Hate the Capitalist System” walks through the causes of her husband’s illness, her mother’s pellagra, and the baby who “starved to death for milk,” then ends with a call to join the union. On tape she laughs about record executives who told her the title was too radical and advised her to rename it “I Hate the Company Bosses.” After reading up on what “capitalist system” actually meant, she decided the original title fit better.
Green, who spent time with her in Detroit, called her “the best of such living bards,” praising the way she fused an old-time delivery with “journalistic” new lyrics about class struggle.
From Hard-Hit People To Girl Of Constant Sorrow
Even before she ever made an LP, Sarah’s songs circulated in print. Commentary in the Lomax archive notes that “Come All You Coal Miners” and related pieces were later transcribed in the songbook Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People by Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, a key bridge between Library of Congress field recordings and the postwar folk revival.
Her signature “I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow” appeared in the People’s Song Bulletin and then in John Greenway’s 1953 volume American Folksongs of Protest, one of the first scholarly treatments to take mining ballads and union songs seriously as historical evidence.
By the early sixties Sarah and her second husband, metal worker Joe Gunning, were living in a steamy Detroit basement apartment where Joe worked as custodian. Folklorist Archie Green, tipped off by his work with Aunt Molly in California, visited her there in 1963. With Wayne State University colleagues Ellen Stekert and Oscar Paskal, he recorded extensive sessions in early 1964 at WDET and in the United Auto Workers’ Solidarity House studio.
From those tapes Folk-Legacy Records assembled Girl of Constant Sorrow, released in 1965 and now reissued through Smithsonian Folkways. The album presents both her coalfield compositions and the older ballads, hymns, and love songs she learned from family. The Topic Records UK reissue, A Girl of Constant Sorrow: Songs from the Kentucky Coalfields, carried Green’s liner notes and helped introduce British audiences to a working-class Appalachian woman whose politics and singing cut against hillbilly stereotypes.
Festival Stages And A Second Career
Once Girl of Constant Sorrow was in circulation, invitations followed. Sarah sang at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, then gave what Green called her “most extended performance” at the January 1965 University of Chicago Folk Festival, where she alternated topical coal songs with traditional ballads and religious pieces.
She would go on to perform at Carnegie Hall and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and to share stages with labor leader Walter Reuther and writer Michael Harrington at a Detroit conference on poverty. Yet, as Pete Seeger later observed, she never made a steady living from her music, even while more commercially successful revival singers adopted songs she had written or refashioned.
In 1988 Appalshop filmmaker Mimi Pickering released Dreadful Memories: The Life of Sarah Ogan Gunning, 1910–1983, blending archival footage, interviews, and performance clips. The film and its Folkstreams transcript are now among the richest near-primary sources for her life history, threading her songs together with family commentary and analysis from Green, Seeger, and others.
The documentary ends with Sarah singing “I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow” and reflecting on her legacy: she says she is glad to leave something for young people to listen to and wants friends to “always sing my songs.”
Coal Miners’ Wives, Protest Songs, And Memory
Modern historians of Appalachia often read Sarah’s work alongside that of Florence Reece, Aunt Molly Jackson, and later figures like Hazel Dickens. Articles such as Sue Massek’s “Herstory of Appalachia: Three Centuries of Oppression and Resistance” and studies in collections like Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism highlight Gunning as an example of coalfield women who shouldered both household labor and public activism.
Scholars of balladry and protest music have pointed to the way her songs use motherhood and domestic scenes to frame questions of class and power. A thesis comparing Appalachian ballads to Mexican corridos, for instance, notes how Gunning and Jackson build a “class-focused discourse based on motherhood,” rather than the more masculine heroics common in other labor song traditions.
The Encyclopedia of Appalachia entry on Gunning and various protest song guides describe “Come All You Coal Miners,” “I Hate the Company Bosses,” “Dreadful Memories,” and “That Twenty-Five Cents You Paid” as key texts in the canon of mining songs, especially for how they bind religious language to union organizing and for how brutally honest they are about starvation, disease, and company power.
Her compositions now show up in anthologies like Music of Coal and in recent projects like Working-Class Heroes, which celebrate the fact that many of the sharpest “political songs” did not come from big-city intellectuals but from people like Gunning who had watched children starve and husbands die of dust and poverty.
Hearing Sarah Today
For anyone exploring the history of the Kentucky coal wars and Appalachian protest music, Sarah Ogan Gunning offers a voice that is both historically grounded and emotionally immediate. Her field recordings in the Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle collection can be streamed through the Lomax Digital Archive and the Lomax Kentucky Recordings project, complete with AFS disc numbers and catalog information.
Girl of Constant Sorrow, now available from Smithsonian Folkways, gathers her Detroit sessions into a single portrait of a woman who could move from dark mining laments to old religious pieces in the space of a few tracks.
The Appalshop film Dreadful Memories and its Folkstreams transcript supply context that no written biography fully captures: the cadence of her voice, the way her siblings remember the camps, and the humor that coexists with her harshest lyrics.
Listen closely and it becomes clear why Green insisted that her life was not “only constant sorrow.” Her songs hold rage at avoidable suffering, but they also hold stubborn hope that miners could organize, that poor families could demand better, and that truth telling in song might help nudge the world in that direction.
Sources & Further Reading
Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle Collection, AFC 1938/008, Library of Congress; especially “Come All You Coal Miners” (AFS 1944A), “I Hate the Capitalist System” (AFS 1943A), and related items, Lomax Digital Archive and Lomax Kentucky Recordings. Cultural Equity Archive+3Lomax Kentucky Recordings+3Lomax Kentucky Recordings+3
Girl of Constant Sorrow (Folk-Legacy FSA-26 / Smithsonian Folkways CD-26) with liner notes by Archie Green. Folkways Media+1
Mimi Pickering, Dreadful Memories: The Life of Sarah Ogan Gunning, 1910–1983 (Appalshop, 1988) and Folkstreams transcript. Folkstreams+2Folkstreams+2
Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (original 1967 edition and later reprints). Lomax Kentucky Recordings+1
John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (1953), including “I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow.” Folkstreams+1
Judi Jennings, “Gunning, Sarah (Garland) Ogan,” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992). Wikipedia+1
“Sarah Ogan Gunning,” Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2006), as cited in Appalachian studies bibliographies and protest-song resources. Protest Song Lyrics+2Home+2
Archie Green, “Archie Green on Sarah Ogan Gunning,” Folkstreams context essay. Folkstreams
Sue Massek, “Herstory of Appalachia: Three Centuries of Oppression and Resistance,” Appalachian Journal 42, no. 3-4 (2015). WVRHC+1
Studies of Appalachian protest music and women’s activism, including B. Duvall-Irwin, “Comparing New World Traditions: Appalachian Balladry and …” (2017), and Krystal Carter, “Women’s Grassroots Activism in Appalachia” (MA thesis, 2023). NC DOCKS+1