Ashland has an intriguing history and our community has produced a number of individuals who merit book-length studies, including Jean Bell Thomas, folk festival promoter and author. Born in 1881, Thomas attended Holy Family School and graduated on June 3, 1899, from Ashland High School. As a young girl, she became interested in the area’s musical tradition.

Later, as a court stenographer who followed the circuit in eastern Kentucky, "the traipsin’ woman" began to gather songs and folklore.

She continued her adventures by moving to New York, where she lived and wrote for thirteen years.

In 1913 she married Albert Hart Thomas, a West Virginian, who worked for his family’s coal interests. The marriage lasted for a year and there were no children.

Following her divorce, her adventures continued. She was a secretary in 1917 to Joe Tinker, manager of the Columbus Senators, a professional baseball team. In 1923 she was a script girl for Cecil B. De Mille’s production "The Ten Commandments." While in New York City, she met Ruby ("Texas") Guinan, nightclub entertainer and owner, and worked for Guinan until 1928.

In 1926, Thomas heard James William Day, a blind fiddler, playing and singing in front of the courthouse in Morehead, Kentucky. Having a background in promotion and entertainment, Thomas signed him to a management contract. She changed his name to Jilson Settles and staged concerts with Settles clothed in homespun attire and with only a ladderback chair and an egg basket for props. She booked him in Kentucky, at Loew’s Theater in New York, and at London’s Royal Albert Hall as the "Singin’ Fiddler from Lost Hope Hollow."

By 1930, Thomas had returned to live in Ashland, where she staged a folk festival in the backyard of her Tudor-style cottage. Two years later, she presented the first American Folk Song Festival, with eighteen acts, on the Mayo Trail, fifteen miles south of Ashland. By 1938 the festival had grown to forty-two acts, playing to 20,000 people. Except for the period 1943-48, Thomas produced the yearly festival until 1972, when ill health forced her to retire.

Thomas died in Ashland on December 7, 1982 and was buried in Rose Hill Mausoleum. Initially her extensive collection of folklore was preserved in her home, as the Jean Thomas Museum which opened in 1979. In the 1980s, her collection was moved to the Kentucky Highlands Museum. A decade later it found a permanent home in the Dwight Anderson Memorial Music Library at the University of Louisville.

In her recent presentation to the Appalachian Women’s Conference, local teacher and librarian Shirley Boyd portrayed Thomas as "a most unconventional woman" who "found her true calling –collecting and preserving Appalachian lore and ballads."

Long active in the cultural life of this community, Boyd is currently writing a biography of Jean Thomas, and she invites local residents to assist her research by providing stories and other information and artifacts.

Shirley Boyd teaches at Ashland Community and Technical College. You can write to her at 1400 College Drive, Ashland, KY, 41101 or call her at 606-326-2136.

I hope the community will help Ms. Boyd present a full accounting of Jean Bell Thomas, an intriguing, and often controversial, local figure.