Luna Kellie and the Farmer’s Alliance Songbook
Imagine a farm protest movement strong enough to win statewide elections against both Republicans and Democrats.
It happened in the 1890s. The People’s Party (aka the Populists) grew out of the Farmers Alliance, which sought to protect farmers from domination by banking and railroad interests.
Luna Kellie was State Secretary of the Nebraska Farmers Alliance. A farm wife and mother of 11, she was one of Nebraska’s most important political leaders never to hold public office. (Like all women, she could not vote.) Kellie was an organizational leader, journalist, speaker… and songwriter. Reform movements, labor unions, and churches all used group singing to build inspiration and solidarity.
Some of Kellie’s lyrics expressed the bitterness of the times. In “But the Mortgage Was the Hardest,” she writes:
Whatever we kept from it
Seemed almost as a theft.
It watched us every minute;
It ruled us right and left.
Writing in Nebraska History, Dan Holtz says:
Kellie wholeheartedly joined the fray by the summer of 1890. She wrote an opinion piece titled “To the Christian Women of Nebraska—Come up to the Help of the Lord Against the Mighty,” which appeared in the September 20, 1890, issue of the Farmers’ Alliance. “Do not be scared out with a cry of ‘women must not meddle in politics.’ This is not politics—it is religion,” Kellie wrote, going on to say that people must “make industrial and moral worth, not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness.”
- Read more about Kellie’s songs in “The Folk Songs of Great Plains Homesteading” in Nebraska History (PDF)
- In 1926 Kellie wrote a reminiscence that was later printed in Nebraska History (PDF). She describes her efforts and how she eventually became discouraged, sold her newspaper, and ended her activism.
–David Bristow, 5/28/25
