Katherine Jackson French

Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky's Forgotten Ballad Collector... explores [a] popular fantasy, about unearthing living chunks of the past in some remote place.... Had Jackson French succeeded in publishing her results, DiSavino argues, the study of Appalachian balladry might have been redirected from mythologizing about racial purity into something more accurate and inclusive. This seems to require some wishful thinking (Jackson French, too, had plenty to say on balladry as 'an immemorial record of the pure ancestry of the singer... the spirit and sap of the stock'). Yet the counterfactual scenario DiSavino invokes, in which mountain women and African-American string bands were granted their rightful, central place in early country music, is heartening to entertain.

~Harper's Magazine

The 23 ballads Jackson French collected on her first trip and the three dozen more on later trips are a record of women's work, and DiSavino pays tribute to both those women and Jackson French.

~LA Review of Books

An interesting and enjoyable read.... The mysteries in the story – why were Katherine Jackson French's plans for publication thwarted – opens up the book to a wider readership.... Publishing this collection over a century on from when it should have been published is a significant achievement for Elizabeth DiSavino and a tribute to the regard she has for French.

~Living Tradition

DiSavino's wealth of research contributes to an understanding of the cultural and historical life of our nation, glimpsed through the window of our national song as recorded by Dr. Katherine Jackson French's keen ear and discerning intellect.

~Ron Pen, director emeritus of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music and author of I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles

DiSavino's meticulous scholarship delves into, exposes, and connects a wealth of primary sources to build a three-dimensional portrait of Katherine Jackson French while uncovering the mechanisms that conspired to silence this remarkable early twentieth-century scholar and ballad collector. DiSavino analyzes and compares the ballads collected by Cecil Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell with the French collection in terms of music, style, and representation of singers. French can now take her place alongside Emma Bell Miles and Olive Dame Campbell as a strong woman chronicling life in the Appalachian region just after the turn of the twentieth century, sometimes at odds with institutions and traditional expectations.

~Deborah J. Thompson, assistant professor and Appalachian Studies faculty at Berea College