Sarah Ogan Gunning

Sarah Ogan Gunning (June 28, 1910 – November 14, 1983) was an American singer and songwriter from the coal mining country of eastern Kentucky, as were her older half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson and her brother Jim Garland. Although she made an appearance in the New York folk music scene of the 1930s, she was overshadowed by her older brother and half-sister. Rediscovered in the 1960s while living in Detroit, she played at folk festivals at Newport in 1964 and the University of Chicago in 1965.

She was born Sarah Elizabeth Garland on June 28, 1910, on Elys Branch, Knox County, Kentucky. Her father was coal miner Oliver Perry Garland and her mother Sarah Elizabeth Lucas Garland, his second wife. He had earlier married Deborah Robinson Garland who bore four children, including Mary Magdalene Garland, later better known as Aunt Molly Jackson. After Deborah's death, Oliver married Sarah Lucas, and had eleven more children, including Jim Garland and Sarah Ogan Gunning. The children grew up with little formal education but with strong family ties and a rich tradition of songs and stories. In 1925 the fifteen-year-old Sarah fell in love with Andrew Ogan, a twenty-year-old from Claiborne County, Tennessee, who had come to work in the Fox Ridge coal mine in Bell County, Kentucky. They eloped to Cumberland Gap to marry. They had four children, two of whom died during the Depression. Living conditions were bad in eastern Kentucky by 1931, and many miners responded to the retreat of the United Mine Workers by joining the communist-led National Miners Union (NMU). The ensuing violence and controversy led many NMU leaders to leave the state. By 1935 the Garlands and the Ogans had moved to New York City, with assistance from New York University folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle. In New York, they met many leaders of the folksong revival, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Huddie Ledbetter, and Earl Robinson. But Andrew Ogan had TB, and when the illness worsened he moved back to Brush Creek in Knox County, Kentucky, where he died in August 1938. Sarah married Joseph Gunning, a skilled metal polisher, in August 1941. After the start of World War II they moved to work in the shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, where her brother Jim Garland had also found work. After the war they moved to Detroit, Michigan.

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