A Genuine Granger Song: Reverend Knowles Shaw and "The Farmer Is the Man"

Abstract:

“The Farmer Is the Man,” a balladic statement of farm fundamentalism that resonated with agrarian movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originated as a granger ballad in Kansas in 1874. The original text was first published January 7, 1874 in the Osage Mission Journal, with a clear author attribution: Knowles Shaw, the well-known revivalist preacher and hymn writer. Its message that “the farmer is the man who feeds them all,” with its attendant disparagement of other, lesser occupational classes, was more representative of grassroots grangerism than of Grange leadership. The song is representative not only of the general efflorescence of balladry in the Great Plains during the late nineteenth century but also on the reinterpretation of such literature by scholars such as Louise Pound as folk art rather than anthropological curiosity. During the summer of 2023, youth campers still sang “The Farmer Is the Man” from their official camp songbook.