Singing and Learning Labor History Mark Abendroth SUNY Empire State College NCSS Presentation, 2019 [email protected] Beyond the White Males among Labor Songwriters Hazel Dickens, “Fire in the Hole” Bev Grant, “We Were There” John L. Handcox, “Roll the Union On” Aunt Molly Jackson, “Hardtimes in Coleman’s Mines” Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Greed” Florence Reece, “Which Side Are You On” Peggy Seeger, “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer” Ella Mae Wiggins, “The Mill Mother’s Lament” Labor Choruses and Singing Groups in US & Canada Charm City Labor Chorus (Baltimore) DC Labor Chorus Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble (Raleigh, NC) Left Coast Labor Chorus (Vancouver) NYC Labor Chorus San Francisco Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus Seattle Labor Chorus Solidarity Singers of NJ Industrial Union Council Twin Cities Labor Chorus Brief Timeline of Singing in US Labor Movement Slavery era Slaves sang to express anguish and hope. Abolitionist movement employed singing. 1871 Fisk Jubilee Singers formed to raise funds for Fisk University. 1886 Knights of Labor published first labor songbook to gain international usage. 1909 First printing of Little Red Songbook by Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). 1912 Bread & Roses Strike of textile workers in Lawrence, MA inspired classic labor song (James Oppenheim). Pre-19th Amendment of 1920 Singing was important in meetings and protests of the movement for women’s suffrage. 1910s to 30s Labor colleges used songbooks to promote singing of labor songs. 1930s Singing became regular part of strikes during the Great Depression, before/during rise of Congress of Industrial Organizations. WWII Almanac Singers shifted from labor and peace songs to pro-war and anti-fascist songs. 1947 Taft-Hartley Act curtailed rights of unions. 1950-53 McCarthyism attacked unions and all artists with pro-labor message. Government revoked Paul Robeson’s passport. 1950s – 1960s Singing had important role in the Civil Rights Movement. 1981 President Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers. 1991 NYC Labor Chorus starts with help from Pete Seeger in finding director. At least six more labor choruses in North America have formed since then. Bibliography for Music in the US Labor Movement Compiled by Mark Abendroth, partial list from the bibliography in his book Song, Struggle, and Solidarity: The New York City Labor Chorus in Its 25th Year (2019, Hamilton Books). Allen, William F., Charles P. Ware, and Lucy M. Garrison (eds.), Slave Songs of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; originally published in 1867 in New York by A. Simpson & Co. Barker, Thomas P. “Spatial Dialectics: Intimations of Freedom in Antebellum Slave Song.” Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 4 (May 2015): 363-383. Brown, William W. (ed.). The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings. 1848. Reprint, e-book, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia. http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/absowwbahp.html. Carawan, Guy and Candie Carawan. Ain’t You Got a Right?: The People of St. Johns Island, South Carolina – Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs. 1967. Reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Carter, David A. “The Industrial Workers of the World and the Rhetoric of Song.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 365-374. Cohen, Ronald D. Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States. Crockett, CA: Carquinez Press, 2010. Darden, Robert. Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Green, Archie, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno (eds.). The Big Red Songbook: 250+ IWW Songs!. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. Honey, Michael K. Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Horton, Kristina. Martyr of Loray Mill: Ella May and the 1929 Textile Workers’ Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. Hurner, Sheryl. “Discursive Identity Formation of Suffrage Women: Reframing the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ through Song.” Western Journal of Communication 70, no. 3 (2006), 234-260. Karpf, Juanita. “For their Musical Uplift: Emma Azalia Hackley and Voice Culture in African American Communities.” International Journal of Community Music 4, no. 3 (2011), 237-256. Litterio, Lisa M. “Bread and Roses Strike of 1912: Lawrence, Massachusetts, Immigrants Usher in a New Era of Unity, Labor Gains, and Women’s Rights,” Labor’s Heritage 11, No. 3 (2001): 58-73. Lomax, Alan (compiler), Woody Guthrie (notes on songs), and Pete Seeger (music transcribed and edited). Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. 1967, Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Lynch, Timothy P. Strike Songs of the Depression. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. McClendon, Aaron D. “Sounds of Sympathy: William Wells Brown’s ‘Anti-Slavery Harp’, Abolition, and the Culture of Early and Antebellum American Song.” African American Review 47, no. 1 (2014), 83-100. Newman, Richard. Go Down Moses: A Celebration of the African-American Spiritual. New York: Roundtable Press, 1998. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. 1958. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Roscigno, Vincent J. and William F. Danaher. The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Rosemont, Franklin. Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture. Oakland: PM Press, 2015. Ross, Robert. “Bread and Roses: Why the Legend Lives On.” In The Great Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912: New Scholarship on the Bread and Roses Strike, edited by Robert Forrant, Jurg K. Siegenthaler, Charles Levenstein, and John Wooding, 219-230. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., 2014. Seeger, Pete, Pete Seeger in His Own Words, with eds. Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012. Volk, Terese M. “Little Red Songbooks: Songs for the Labor Force of America.” Journal of Research in Music Education 49, no. 1 (2001), 33-48. Weissman, Dick. Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution: Music and Social Change in America. New York: Backbeat Books, 2010. .