Jean Bell Thomas (November 14, 1881 – December 7, 1982) was an American folk festival promoter, author and photographer who specialized in the music, crafts, and language patterns of the Appalachian region of the United States.
She was born Jeanette Mary Francis de Assisi Aloysius Narcissus Garfield Bell in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1881. She earned the nickname "Traipsin' Woman" when, as a teenager in the 1890s, she defied convention to attend busin...
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Jean Bell Thomas (November 14, 1881 – December 7, 1982) was an American folk festival promoter, author and photographer who specialized in the music, crafts, and language patterns of the Appalachian region of the United States.
She was born Jeanette Mary Francis de Assisi Aloysius Narcissus Garfield Bell in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1881. She earned the nickname "Traipsin' Woman" when, as a teenager in the 1890s, she defied convention to attend business school, learn stenography, and become a court reporter, traveling by jolt wagon to courts in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Her exposure to the musical traditions, dialect, folkways, and costumes of the mountain people she encountered, combined with her later work in "show business," led to her avocation as a popularizer of mountain music and as proprietress of the American Folk Song Festival, staged in and near Ashland, Kentucky, from 1930 through 1972.
Using money saved from her court reporter wages, Thomas moved to New York, where...
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