Three young guitar pickers stood on a platform in the center of Pittsburgh last March and led a crowd of 8,000 striking electrical workers in singing union songs. They were rallying there to protest an anti-picketing injunction, and when they sang “Solidarity Forever” and “You Can’t Scare Me, I’m Sticking to the Union,” and “In Spite of Governor Martin, We Shall Not Be Moved” you could hear it all through downtown Pittsburgh. People leaned out of office buildings for blocks down the street to listen.
In a Southern labor school a young millworker moved her classmates to tears one day when she sang a song called “The Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”:
Old Man Sargent, sitting at the desk
The dammed old fool won’t give us no rest.
He’d take the nickels off a dead man’s eyes
To buy a Coca-cola and a Pomo pie.
I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the blues
I’ve got the Winnsboro cotton mill blues ….
Lordy, Lordy, spooling’s hard
You know and I know, I don’t have to tell
You work for Tom Watson, got to Work like hell.
When I die, don’t bury me at all
Just hang me up on the spoolroom wall.
Place a bobbin in my hand
So I can keep on a-working in the promised land,
I’ve got the blues ….
It had been made up by her mother thirty years before, working in the same mill.
SOURCE New Masses, July 16, 1946, 7–9.
In New York City last winter, at an anti-discrimination rally, Josh White shifted his guitar to his knee and sang a song called “The Free And Equal Blues”:
I went down to the doctor’s
And I saw some plasma there
And I up and asks the doctor,
“Was the donor dark or fair?”
It produced practically an ovation; the audience stood up and cheered for minutes. Yet when people asked around, “Where can I buy a copy of that song? Where is it sold, who wrote it?” no one could give an answer. A few thought they had heard that Earl Robinson had made it up. No one knew where a copy could be bought.
These are just three examples of songs which Broadway and Hollywood are not interested in. The heavy hand of the entertainment monopoly is probably more strongly felt in music than in any other field, as anyone who has ever tried to publish a song will tell you. You either write the kind of song generally approved of, and work through the accepted channels, or your song just doesn’t get around. And that’s where the organization “People’s Songs” comes in.
Last December 31, a group of us got together. There were about thirty miscellaneous folk-singers, leaders of choruses, union education leaders, and stray interested persons. We met to organize what is now “People’s Songs.” We chipped in about $135 to get it started. That meeting took place in the cellar of a house where the boards were breaking through because they were rotted from leaky sewage (it’s an old house and the pipe, originally laid before the American Revolution, had worn through). In the midst of all this mess and smell of sewage, friends, relatives and members of the Jefferson Chorus and other outfits began coming in to help address envelopes and do other clerical chores. And from there we began to get out bulletins with news and songs.
Songs like “The Rankin Tree”—an allegory sung by one person with the audience singing each line right after him, a song that tells about the vicious Rankin Tree and how it poisoned everything else on the singer’s farm, and how he finally had to cut it down and burn it up, which “was the only time the damn Rankin Tree ever did any good … when I chopped it up for kindling wood.”
Songs like “Listen Mr. Bilbo”:
Listen Mr. Bilbo, Listen to me
I’ll give you a lesson in history
Listen while I show you that the foreigners you hate
Are the very same folks made America great.
Songs like “Looking For a Home”:
The first time I saw my bedroom
It had just one bed and a chair
The next time I saw my bedroom
There were five guys sleeping there.
I’m a-looking for a home
I’m a-looking for a home.
All these songs are shot out to the members of People’s Songs, wherever they are, in a monthly bulletin which also gives them news of what’s going on in the field: listings of new recordings and songbooks and critical articles, and interviews with union educational directors about what kind of songs they need most, etc.
While at this stage of the game there is a preponderance of folk material, we aim eventually to have People’s Songs cover every kind of musical expression which can be of use to people’s organizations: folk, jazz, popular, or serious cantatas for union choruses. This is an important point. For example, Bob Russell, one of Broadway’s top songwriters (“Don’t Get Around Much Any More”), is on the National Board of People’s Songs. He was approached last January by the CIO Steelworkers and asked to write a song for their coming strike. He took a copy of a pamphlet on the CIO economic program, and turned it into a song—“Money in the Pocket”:
Money in the pocket is food on the table
Food on the table is cash in the till
When the till is loaded, the merchant is able
To fill up the counters he has to refill
This song was recorded for the steelworkers, and the record played over countless soundtrucks during the strike. We printed the song in our second bulletin. Another of his song was made up during the war, for an OWI broadcast, but still stands as a very neat song in a popular style, which says certain important things:
It’s a small world, after all
For our backyard is the China wall
And front yard discussions can be held with the Russians
Any time at all.
Furthermore, we are not restricting the songs in the bulletin solely to topical songs which may be out-of-date in a few years. The democratic struggles of Americans have been told in many a folksong, and in each issue are certain old songs which point up the historical basis of what we are working for. For example, a migrant worker’s song of a hundred years ago:
From New York into Buffalo I tramped it all the way
I slept in brickyards and old log barns until the break of day
My feet being sore, my clothes being tore
But still I didn’t complain I got up
I hoisted my bundle
And I walked the road again.
I worked in the Susquehanna yards
We got one dollar a day
Toiling hard to make a living, boys
I hardly think it pays.
We are not neglecting songs from abroad, either. In the first issue was a song of the famous International Brigade in Spain, “Viva La Quince Brigada” with an English translation. And in this last issue we printed one of the world’s best songs, “Zum Galli Galli.” It is a modern Palestinian song about the young builders and laborers who are working to build the land.
I have heard all of these songs used with terrific effectiveness. While most of the folksongs are best for mass singing, here is an example of what the popular type of song can do. In February a group of well-known Broadway stars went up to Schenectady and put on a show for the union. On the train Larry Stewart, a well-known Broadway singer, figured out some picketline parodies to popular songs. Sample:
We’ll picket once, and picket twice, and picket once again
It’s been a long, long time.
And so on. When he sang them, the crowd went wild. At the end of the show the MC, Howard DaSilva, got up and said to the 5,000 people in the audience, “We’re all going to be out on the picketline tomorrow morning. How many of you are going to be there?” And next morning there were 5,000 people on the picketline.
The union people say that it was the turning point in the strike. They had been scared that General Electric would soon try to start a back-to-work movement, but after that mass picketline, and its spirit, which kept up during the following week, there was no doubt but that the union would win.
We are rapidly building up a membership which is intensely interested in using union songs, topical songs, folk songs, jazz, cantatas, anything which actually says something—and is, in the terminology we use, a song of the people. They receive our bulletin every month with new songs in it.
If, next October, someone makes up a really terrific song about the elections, within a week it can be in the hands of 2,000 people across the country, who will use it at political rallies, etc. That song will really damage the people we want to get out of office.
The important thing about People’s Songs is: we have set up a new technique and organization for getting people’s songs spread, and circumventing the music monopoly of Broadway and Hollywood. The next job is to get as members all union educational directors in the country who want to use songs in building their unions, all ordinary union people who like to sing, all leaders of union choruses, IWO choruses, etc. Right now we’re concentrating on being a service organization, to spread songs. But money is needed, and we are expanding into the concert field to raise funds.
What is our end aim? A singing labor movement. Every meeting, it seems to me, should start and end with a song. When a bunch of people are seen walking down the street singing it should go almost without saying that they are a bunch of union people on the way home from a meeting. When an organizer comes into a new territory to set up a local, the second thing he should think of is, “Who am I going to get to lead the singing?”—just as a minister setting up in a new parish looks around for someone to lead the choir. We hope all organizers will recognize the principle that a song can be as effective as a speech—that music, too, is a weapon.