Jim Garland was a songwriter and a member of the National Miners Union, which had communist ties and saw him involved in the bloody Harlan County War as the labour conflicts of that area reached a climax in the 1930s. Interest in folk music was already becoming widespread across the U.S. East coast in the 30s via radio shows such as WNYC Kentucky Folk Ballads, where he performed together with his wife Hazel Garland, and they continued to regularly sing together in the future. Hazel worked in the same shipyard as her husband as an electrician on board ships during the Second World War before the two of them purchased and ran a broom factory. Their entry into the business owning class was somewhat a premonition of a change towards commercialism in their musical community. He appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 where his sharing of such a respected stage with Bob Dylan shows the contradictions of the movement.
I don't know that the folk revival crowd was ready for jaw harp. When Jim and Hazel Garland appeared on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest in 1966 the show had it's co-option of Appalachian song and banjo culture interrupted by a brief interlude of utterly unprofitable childhood when Jim took out his harp and played Turkey In The Straw. Rainbow Quest and Seeger have been much discussed, criticized, defended, revered, and reviled by the musicians and scholars of music who have existed in their sphere of influence. The show and the American folk revival in general often appeared as a push and pull between party communist driven interest in presenting a wide reaching and romantic working class culture, and the capitalist concerns of the commercial music and television industry which platformed it. In the interlude that came from his jaw harp playing both the mythologizing self seriousness of the shows socialist aspect and its marketability would be smashed for a brief moment of beautiful chaos as the union ballads audiences tuned in for stopped and something utterly ridiculous and free reached through the television screen to audiences everywhere.
The instrument does not match tuning to the key of the banjo playing, so it sounds bizarre against the instrument. However, he plays through the melody coherently at the harps actual pitch. Thus it only feels semi-melodic together with the banjo. This misunderstanding from those who attempt to play together with a jaw harp is very common and at times causes it to be perceived as non-musical. A wave of joy and hilarity comes with the tune nonetheless and upends the hierarchy between music and non-music. He also explains one of many questionable folk etymologies connected to the instruments name.
There's A Wild Hog On This Mountain
Here Jim uses the instrument rhythmically to break up his singing. It clashes just as much against the key of his singing yet feels the same. It adds whimsy to an already lighthearted singing exercise that is difficult to attribute to anything other than a free-spirited need to feel a powerful and absurd beat within.