Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
"I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground": Contesting the Story of Industrialization
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Folksongs have long raised key questions concerning the relationship between literary text, historical knowledge, and lived experience, and recent scholarship in literary studies suggests a renewed interest in the texts of American folksong. For example, Joanna Brooks has recently argued that just as “all literary texts do, [folksongs] serve as an archive of feeling, documenting and helping us key into bodies of experience and memory” not readily legible in other, more formal historical records or that are accessible to methods of social science research. Such insights are especially useful when considering folksong texts that have resisted easy, tidy interpretations. In this paper, I focus on “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” a song first (and most notably) recorded by North Carolina's Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1924, and argue that “Mole” provides a pathway into a truly “Extreme” Appalachia in the grips of a period of highly concentrated and accelerated capitalist accumulation that uprooted millions of lives and acres, and the effects of which we have yet to completely come to terms. Read in this context, this strange and confusing song – one that has “stumped” a range of significant scholars, from Greil Marcus to Robert Cantwell – makes a new kind of sense. Building on the work of scholars such as Ronald Eller, Joanna Brooks, and Patrick Huber, my paper re-situates “Mole” as a text of industrialization and its contestation, and one that continues to speak to present-day predicaments of life and labor in Appalachia today, if we are willing to listen.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
John Conley holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota, and teaches courses in rhetoric and writing, literature, and cultural studies. He is originally from Buckhannon, WV.
"I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground": Contesting the Story of Industrialization
Folksongs have long raised key questions concerning the relationship between literary text, historical knowledge, and lived experience, and recent scholarship in literary studies suggests a renewed interest in the texts of American folksong. For example, Joanna Brooks has recently argued that just as “all literary texts do, [folksongs] serve as an archive of feeling, documenting and helping us key into bodies of experience and memory” not readily legible in other, more formal historical records or that are accessible to methods of social science research. Such insights are especially useful when considering folksong texts that have resisted easy, tidy interpretations. In this paper, I focus on “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” a song first (and most notably) recorded by North Carolina's Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1924, and argue that “Mole” provides a pathway into a truly “Extreme” Appalachia in the grips of a period of highly concentrated and accelerated capitalist accumulation that uprooted millions of lives and acres, and the effects of which we have yet to completely come to terms. Read in this context, this strange and confusing song – one that has “stumped” a range of significant scholars, from Greil Marcus to Robert Cantwell – makes a new kind of sense. Building on the work of scholars such as Ronald Eller, Joanna Brooks, and Patrick Huber, my paper re-situates “Mole” as a text of industrialization and its contestation, and one that continues to speak to present-day predicaments of life and labor in Appalachia today, if we are willing to listen.
