Mrs. Mae Jenkins Phillips

Mrs. Mae Jenkins Phillips

Folk singers--North Carolina--Biography

Bobby McMillon

Bobby McMillon Collection, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill University

Southern Appalachian Archives, Liston B. Ramsey Center for Appalachian Studies, Mars Hill University

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English

Mrs. Mae Jenkins Phillips
From this lady comes another side of the Cosby story, for this lady was born and raised out of peculiar circumstances. She is my father’s oldest brother’s mother-in-law and is a sort of third grandma to me (I have around ten).

The Phillipses of Tennessee were (and are) probably one of the biggest bunches on Cosby, and, tho you wouldn’t say on the other side of the tract (from a religious standpoint), they were less cumbered beneath the Calvinistic burden than most families, loved to visit and sing, were more carefree (tho they had their share of burdens) and rambunctious, and thus happier than a lot. The Phillips were clannish and there was a lot of cousin marriages and inter-breeding back yonder. (For some reason or other my fathers people disdain kin-marriages, and refer to the age old belief that it causes insanity, sickliness, slim-assedness, punyness, and handicaps such as blindness (actually they didn’t have much to say about it for it is characteristic of the McMillons not to run their mouth (except among themselves) but this is part of their feelings about inter-marriage, for those beliefs are common). Not that I know of any craziness occurring. Interbreeding of families was quite common among isolated and mountain communities. More times, brains are born out of distant cousin weddings.
Anyway Maw Maws mother stayed with an old man [when her parents was dead (wrong)] to have a place to stay and ultimately had an illegitimate child by him, Maw Maw.

Jenkins who loved her married Maw Maws [page 2] mother (before she was born—wrong), thus Maw Maw had a daddy when she was born, tho her real father was always good to her and her mother. Maw Maws children always referred to their two grandaddy’s as grandpa up the road and (confused with Grandpa Phillips) grandpa down the road. Maw Maw had to tough it coming up tho, for she had to stay with different people to work and earn board and get schooling such as it was in those days. It was thru this travelling and seeing all kinds of different people and peoples habit of singing snatches as they worked, that years ago in the wagon days, Maw Maw Phillips learned many traditional ballads and folksongs. At a young age she married Walter Phillips who played the banjo some, and played such ditties as “Coffey Grows on White Oak Sprouts,” “Free a Little Bird,” “Johnson Boys,” and “Poor Ellen Smith.” She had a tough time raising a family too, for often Walter get into fights (Grandpa nearly killed him one time) and Maw Maw didn’t even know if he would get home alive or not. She said when they were growing up, the young boys when they were mad, would sing “how in the hell did the old folks know, I like sugar in my coffee-o?” My father said they used to sing “the old grey mare she shat on the swingle tree.”
Because Mae was unsheltered all her life and knew it, the cold hard way for what it was, perhaps her love for her family was deeper in a sense than those whose lives were strictly controlled by severe intolerant families.

[page 3]
And it was thru her being around all kinds of situations that music, most likely a comfort to her oftimes in periods of loneliness and hurt, that the old songs grew to be a part of her. She can sing the ancient and the modern. “The War Is A Raging,” “The Soldier and His Lady,” “Wagoners Lad,” “A Maid Being Young,” “500 Miles,” “Dark is the Color of my True Loves Hair,” “Will Weaver-O,” “Railroad Lover,” and many other ballads and love songs, the “Sailor Boy” for instance and the “House Carpenter” and “Black Jack David.”

Handwritten text on unnumbered pages of a blue double-entry ledger.