Juneau musician Annie Bartholomew’s new album is a different kind of Alaska survival story

Annie Bartholomew records her “Sisters of White Chapel” album with other artists. (Photo by Rashah McChesney, courtesy of Annie Bartholomew)

Annie Bartholomew’s album, “Sisters of White Chapel,” started out as a song-writing project, then a musical — or a folk opera, as she calls it. In Juneau last summer, local actors and musicians took to stages wearing Victorian gowns and telling reimagined versions of real stories that real women lived over a hundred years ago.

Now she’s releasing the songs as an album.

It’s about the Klondike Gold Rush, from the perspective of the sex workers who worked in the mining towns. 

“I wanted to share how difficult those times were and how little power these women had, but also what they made of it,” Bartholomew said. “And how it is a survival story that you just don’t hear when you think of Jack London or ‘Into the Wild,’ you know?”

Finding nuance in an often whitewashed history

The idea for “Sisters of White Chapel” took root after Bartholomew toured the Red Onion Saloon in Skagway, a restaurant and museum that used to be a brothel. The tour was campy, but it stuck with her. 

“I was just a little bit haunted by the true stories that I heard and the artifacts that I saw,” Bartholomew said.

It shifted her perspective on what sex work meant at the time.

“A lot of the narratives I’ve been told about sex workers and prostitutes were wrong. These women came from all over. These women were smart,” Bartholomew said. “And I really wanted to use music to examine them, and share what I had learned.”

Bartholomew said that some in Southeast Alaska shy away from the brutal choices that these women faced, and that it’s often whitewashed or ignored in tales of the gold rush. 

In “Mountain Dove Song,” she sings:

“They think they can buy my silence / They think what can’t money buy / If they tried to sell me back my virtue / I wouldn’t waste a dollar thinking about the price”

“They are our history. And we’re living with the consequences today,” she said. “I think anywhere you see resource extraction communities, you get all of these other social ills, like man camps and missing and murdered Indigenous women.”

Bartholomew said she worked to balance the exploitation of sex workers with the fact that they had agency and their own wills. 

“My mom said ‘It can’t all have been bad times, Annie.’ And I think if you want to find the trauma and hurt and tragedy, it’s everywhere,” she said. “But they also had good times. And they also were entrepreneurs.”

And in her songwriting, she said it took some work to get at that nuance. 

I think it’s a lot harder to make people feel good in a song than it is to make them feel sad,” she said. “I feel like you have to balance the good and the bad. And it would just be so easy to make it a tragedy.” 

New and old songs

Each song on the album is original, except for one. “The Cuckoo” is rewritten from a traditional folk song. And one song found its inspiration in a miner’s poem from 1900 that was published in the Daily Klondike Nugget. 

“One of the things they did to entertain themselves was write poems and publish them anonymously in the paper,” Bartholomew said. “‘All For the Klondike’s Gold’ was a poem that I had read and kind of absorbed, and then just ended up reworking for this song.”

The song is the lament of a woman whose husband died on the Chilkoot Trail:

“He’s buried in the Yukon’s sand / beneath its angry wave / No headstone in that dismal land / does mark his lonely grave”

Bartholomew went back to the Red Onion to record a video of an early version of one of the songs. She said she finished writing the song while on the ferry to Skagway. 

“It was very magical to finish the song on Lynn Canal with the wind in my hair — and get to practice it as much as I could before having to put on a skirt and a corset and then go record it,” she said.

She recorded the album at a cabin at the Eagle River United Methodist camp with all Alaska artists. Bluegrass musicians Erin and Andrew Heist backed her up on various strings, Marian Call helped with vocals and Kat Moore contributed voice, piano and bass. 

“My producer Justin came in from Gustavus, and drove up everything needed to turn that spot into a full-fledged recording outfit,” Bartholomew said. “And we recorded it in like a week because we had to get out of the cabin because they had reservations.” 

The album officially comes out in June, but Kindred Post in Juneau will sell copies during a pre-release party in the store on Friday from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Bartholomew said she wanted the Alaskans who’ve been supporting her all these years to get a first listen. 

Listen to a special live rendition of “Mountain Dove Song” from the upcoming album, “Sisters of White Chapel,” recorded in the KTOO studio:

Annie Bartholomew is a former KTOO employee. She worked as an arts and culture producer until 2019.

Yvonne Krumrey

Local News Reporter, KTOO

Juneau is built on hidden and assumed layers of power and access, influencing how we interact with identity, with the law and with each other. I bring you stories of the gaps in access to power, and those who are working to close those gaps.

Sign up for The Signal

Top Alaska stories delivered to your inbox every week

Site notifications
Update notification options
Subscribe to notifications