Gee’s Bend Quilts, ‘boro’ fabrics, and Soul music

Missouri Pettway, “Blocks and Strips Work-Clothes Quilt” (1942), cotton, corduroy, and cotton sacking, 90 × 69 inches, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Gee’s Bend, a predominantly Black settlement on the banks of the Alabama River, has long been known for its quiltmakers; generations of mothers and daughters have passed on a tradition that is still alive and active. Early pieces were made as utilitarian textiles for humble households, but over time Gee’s Bend quilt stitching has come to be seen primarily as a form of creative expression, both for the Black women of the past who lived in harsh social and economic conditions, and subsequently for their successors, many of whom are related to the enslaved people who were compelled to work at the cotton plantation set up by Joseph Gee in 1816. The examples at ‘Kith & Kin’, a current exhibition at Dublin’s IMMA, borrowed from the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, are attractive pieces, inspired by established quilting techniques, with many of them perceptibly influenced by Modernist art. IMMA, unsurprisingly, stresses the work’s political and social context, underplaying the quilts’ associations with traditional craft.

Stitching Love and Loss, a book about Gee’s Bend and its quilts by Lisa Gail Collins, takes a multi-layered approach to the subject, focussing on its personal and emotional aspects, and concentrating on a particular family, as well as on a specific piece. It begins with the history of the community and of the Pettway family, describing the tribulations of Black slavery and the dispossession of land from the Muscogee people that were suffered by the impoverished farming community in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The main thread of the narrative is the story of Missouri Pettway, who, while mourning the death of her husband, Nathaniel, in 1942, began to make a quilt from pieces of his old work clothing. ‘Blocks and Strips Work-Clothes Quilt’, as it is now called, comprises rectilinear pieces of white plain weave cotton, red corduroy, blue denim, and grey cotton fabric, all of them taken from trousers and shirts that Nathaniel wore while farming. Collins views Pettway’s quilt from various perspectives: she sees it as a heartfelt and personal memorial, a comforting way of keeping people warm in bed on chilly Alabama winter nights, a covering for a draughty floor in a wooden cabin - and as an artwork for display at museums. These days, new quilts from Gee’s Bend, which are not inexpensive, are made for different reasons, one of the most significant being the generation of income for their makers, an option that was not open to their early predecessors.

Many older Gee’s Bend pieces, which are not exhibited at IMMA, have a pronounced sense of hard-won authenticity, and in that light it can be illuminating to consider them in relation to the rural ‘boro’ fabrics of Japan. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, impoverished farming families in remote regions of the country needed to reuse their work clothing, and these carefully mended garments, known as ‘boro noragi’, also embodied something of the Japanese idea of ‘mottainai’, the prolonging of an object’s life through recycling and repurposing. The concept, which derives from the religious teachings and moral precepts of Japanese Shinto and Buddhism, is still respected today. Shinto holds that every material object possesses a spirit or ‘kami’ and deserves reverence; Buddhist teachings suggest that wastefulness and self-indulgent lifestyles are opposed to its ethical values.

‘Boro’, a Japanese word meaning ‘ rags’, is a term that is frequently used to describe patched and repaired cotton clothing and bedding. In order to gather pieces of fabric for reuse, worn-out garments and other household textiles were painstakingly unstitched and taken apart; a large proportion of them were reassembled and used as futon covers. The resulting textiles are rougher and less considered than the Gee Bend quilts, and they seem to have had no purpose other than practicality; their aesthetics amounted to little other than an instinctive sense of balance and harmony. Nonetheless, many are beautiful, and in the last decade or two they have become widely collected and exhibited. Today they are often re-presented, like the quilts, in a radically different context, some being used as fashionable pieces of interior decor, their uncomfortable juxtaposition with contemporary life partially obscured by a resemblance to aspects of Modernist design and their admirable quality of ‘sustainability’.

Stitching Love and Loss emphasises the communal and shared activity of traditional quilt-making, which it also relates to singing and religion; Collins, for instance, quotes Georgiana Pettway’s memories of her mother’s generation: ‘That’s all they do - sit around the quilt and sing, pray, and read the Bible. Old souls. They were old souls. They quilt, they quilt, and they pray their prayer, and they sung their song, and they ate what they could eat - around the quilt’. This sense of relaxed social intimacy and faith came to mind while I was listening to ‘Can’t Lose My (Soul)’, a new album by a group called Annie & the Caldwells. Annie’s band is her family, and they generally play at weekends, as they all have day jobs. Annie herself runs a clothing store called Caldwell Fashions, which for many years has helped women dress for COGIC (Church Of God In Christ) convocations and other festivities. As the reviewer in ‘The Guardian’ remarks, its songs are strong, vibrant, and moving, in large part due to their plain and stripped-back production, and perhaps also because they were recorded live, without an audience, in a church in the band’s home town of West Point, Mississippi. The lyrics avoid the sermonising which can be common in Southern gospel, and while there are impassioned accounts of hard times - bereavement, grief, miraculous escapes, both spiritual and physical - their message is fundamentally one of hope, which in these often gloomy days can be uplifting and inspiring. The recording reflects the full expression of raw emotion, evoking memories of soul and gospel music of the past; another especially enthusiastic reviewer suggests that the album recalls ‘the swing of Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, the search for ecstasy of the Family Stone at Woodstock, the power of Aretha Franklin at LA’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church and the fervour of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival’.

For further exploration:

IMMA, ‘Kith & Kin’: https://imma.ie/whats-on/gees-bend-quiltmakers/

Gee’s Bend: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/history-gees-bend

Gee’s Bend quilts: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers

Boro: https://hali.com/news/japanese-boro-exhibition-at-somerset-house/

Annie & the Caldwells: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/mar/13/annie-and-the-caldwells-cant-lose-my-soul-review

Image on index page: Annie & the Caldwells; photo by Adam Wissing

A child’s ‘boro’ futon cover