Pistol Packin' Mama

At the end of her biography of the Appalachian folksinger Aunt Molly Jackson, Romalis imagines her late subject warning her to ""be careful now of not talking high falootin' language."" It seems Romalis didn't heed the warning: what might have been a fascinating look at a minor but curious figure in the history of folk music comes out as an intermittently intriguing, often flat-footed academic study. Jackson was a tough-as-nails activist in the Kentucky coal-mining class wars of the 1930s. After she sang her ""Hungry Ragged Blues"" at a hearing in 1931, she became an early example of radical chic: embraced and patronized by the intellectual left as an example of backwoods authenticity, she was eventually abandoned when she was no longer useful to them. Though she wrote a few other well-circulated songs about miners and unions, Jackson seems to have spent most of the rest of her days trying to pump up her legend--the book's title, for instance, comes from the Tin Pan Alley tune that she claimed had actually been written about her--and the last 15 years of her life occupy a mere six pages here. Romalis, who teaches anthropology at York University in Toronto, throws in a short section on Jackson's younger sister, Sarah Ogan Gunning, also a singer, who participated in the folk revival of the 1950s and '60s, and distracting autobiographical detours into feminist scholarship and activism, declaring at one point, ""I, too, cross boundaries by singing Molly's songs in academic settings."" Photos. (Dec.)