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Not Forgotten b y A n ne t t e C ox The most famous of Ella May Wiggins's twenty-plus strike songs is the blues ballad "The Mill Mother's Song." Phil Blank, Mill Mother's Lament, 2015, from the series Southern Insurrections. While doing research on textiles during the Great Depression, I found this poem about Ella May Wiggins on the March 8, 1932 editorial page of the Greensboro Daily News in a regular column titled "Shucks and Nubbins." The author signed the piece with the initials S. A. J., but did not provide any other information about the poem. During the 1929 strike at Gastonia's Loray Mill, Wiggins became the campaign's "poet laureate" through the ballads she composed using melodies from contemporary hillbilly music. Her murder by a mill thug made her a martyr for the cause and led proletarian novelist Mary Heaton Vorse to transform her into a heroic figure. Folk music collector Margaret Larkin took her songs north where they became inspiration for Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. This poem offers an unusual point of view. It is a lament from a fellow striker that Wiggins's death did not bring any resolution of the workers' complaints.
Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Oct 4, 2015
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