LABOR SONG OF THE MONTH
A playlist of songs about work and workers curated by Dan Graff, Director of the Higgins Labor Program
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Midnight Special” (1969)
John Prine, Grandpa Was a Carpenter” (1973)
Arthur Roberts, “Take Away Your Billion Dollars” (1946)
Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” (1971)
Alejandro Escovedo, “Silver City” (2018)
“Harry Bridges” (multiple versions since 1941)
Margo Price, “Pay Gap” (2017)
Jason Isbell, “Something More Than Free” (2015)
Tom Petty, “Something Good Coming” (2010)
Stevie Wonder, “Living for the City” (1973)
Mavis Staples, “Action” (2016)
The Choral Group of Aljustrel Miners, “The Miners’ Hymn” (date unknown)
Dolly Parton, “9 to 5” (1980)
Tacocat, “I Hate the Weekend” & “Leisure Bees” (2016)
“Which Side Are You On?” (multiple versions since 1931)
The Avett Brothers, “Hard Worker” (2004)
Amy Rigby, “Knapsack” (1996) | Bottle Rockets, “Gas Girl” (1993) | The Silos, “The Only Story I Tell” (1990)
Los Lobos, “A Matter of Time” (1984)
Billy Bragg, “There is Power in a Union” (1986)
Tom Breiding, “River, Rails or Road” (2015)
Sarah Neuberger, “These Hands” (2015)
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, “People Don’t Get What They Deserve” (2014)
Merle Haggard, “Big City” (1981) | Iris Dement, “Big City” (1994)
Sleater-Kinney, “Price Tag” (2015)
Cut #28, Higgins Labor Songs Playlist
Adam Gustine, D. Min., Assistant Director, Social Concerns Seminars
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL, “MIDNIGHT SPECIAL”
Track 8 (Side B, Track 3) from the LP Willy and the Poor Boys (1969, Fantasy)
In 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) released their fourth LP, Willy and the Poor Boys, a record with a number of major hits for CCR including “Down on the Corner” and “Fortunate Son.” Taking those tracks along with others such as “Cotton Fields” (a Leadbelly blues cover), “Poorboy Shuffle,” and our featured song “Midnight Special,” it is clear that John Fogarty and the the band were wrestling with economic issues at the critical intersection of race, class, and big government machines like the military and the prison system. The result was a classic and compelling protest album that dealt with major themes in CCR’s signature style.
Because of the overwhelming popularity of “Down on the Corner” and “Fortunate Son,” it’s possible to overlook the contributions other tracks made to the record, specifically “Midnight Special.” A blues/folk cover, also originally attributed to Leadbelly, “Midnight Special” “shines a light” on life in industrial prison camps and the communities of people impacted by the complex of incarcerated labor.
The song starts with a haunting call — Fogarty’s vocal evoking the sound of the very thing he sings about —
Well, you wake up in the morning/
You hear the work bell ring/
And they march you to the table/
You see the same ole thing.
While these opening lines reveal the image of the prison, the lyrical adjustments Creedence made to the original Leadbelly recording suggest an intentional blurring of the lines between the song’s historic labor prison roots and the lived realities of the poor and working classes on the “outside.”
Ain’t no food upon the table/
There’s no pork up in the pan/
But you better not complain boy/
You get in trouble with the man.
It’s also now clear that this is a song dealing with the racialized implications of the American prison system. “You better not complain boy” is no throwaway line, it’s a slogan of white supremacy in the United States, and the prison system — prison labor in particular — is one of its primary agents of enforcement and coercion. Infamous labor prisons, such as Parchman Prison in Mississippi or Angola Prison in Louisiana, function(ed) as legal extensions of the slave labor system which, particularly in the South, allow(ed) for both government and private business to thrive economically on the forced (free or cheap) labor of overwhelming numbers of black Americans.
So, while the opening lines could easily be applied to industrial factories in a northern city or a West Virginia coal mine, it’s clear that the psychological and economic impact of the prison labor system are in focus. But, importantly, that impact extends to those outside the prison system as well, as the second verse makes clear:
Yonder come Miss Rosie/
How in the world did you know?
By the way she wears her apron/
And the clothes she wore.
Umbrella on her shoulder/
Piece of paper in her hand/
She come to see the governor/
She want to free her man.
Miss Rosie is the everywoman — and the hero — in this song, experiencing life on the outside with “her man” locked up in the industrial prison complex. She is on a mission, not just to survive, but to find freedom.
Her situation becomes clearer as the verse progresses. Her mission that day is to visit the governor, the piece of paper in her hand — a clemency petition. Yet, with such an important appointment in front of her, a few details help to fill in the bleak economic situation she faces. Rosie’s apron suggests that she works in the service industry, perhaps as a domestic, and the state of her clothes implies she doesn’t have much in the way of “appropriate” dress to visit the governor’s mansion. That she has an umbrella on her shoulder seems to mean that she walked to this meeting as well.
Rosie is symbolic of so many early twentieth-century working-class black females who walked to, and worked, in contexts foreign to where they raised their families. Prepared for anything — inclement weather or the need to get her husband out of prison — Rosie is making it work, and is missing work to make it happen.
As the song turns to verse 3, we come to understand that the entire song is as much a warning as a lament:
If you ever in Houston/
Oh you better do right
You better not gamble/
You better not fight.
Or the sheriff will grab ya/
And the boys will bring you down/
The next thing you know, boy/
Oh, you’re prison bound.
Highlighting the razor thin line between life outside and inside the prison system, and the tenuous nature of life for the black community because of that, the narrator of our song (locked up himself) warns his listeners not to step out of line, or the system — designed to extract labor from black bodies as cheaply as possible — will work its machinations on you, adding to their labor force and creating yet another Miss Rosie.
The song’s chorus, “Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me,” is a repetitive line, prayerful in content yet despairing in tone. The line itself refers to a railroad running alongside the prison, which has a train that rambles by in the middle of the night every night. From inside the prison, the light of the train comes through the bars on the windows, stirring the desire to ride away from this hell to wherever that train is going. It’s worth noting that the imagery of trains as an escape from harsh conditions, particularly economic, is a hallmark of the American folk and blues tradition, finding its way into gospel songs (the Impressions’ “People Get Ready”) and country music (Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”) as well. In “Midnight Special,” to be found “in the light” of the train is to escape the prison in which our narrator finds himself; it is the freedom he longs for and the freedom for which Miss Rosie fights.
Let the Midnight Special, shine her light on me
Let the Midnight Special, shine her light on me
Let the Midnight Special, shine her light on me
Let the Midnight Special, shine her ever loving light on me.
June 2020. Have an idea for a future Labor Song of the Month? Email Dan Graff.
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Cut #27, Higgins Labor Songs Playlist
Dan Graff, Director, Higgins Labor Program
JOHN PRINE, “GRANDPA WAS A CARPENTER”
Track 8 (Side B, Track 2) from the LP Sweet Revenge (1973, Atlantic)
The great John Prine, a victim of the coronavirus last week, spent a career penning and performing songs about his own death, many of them winningly whimsical, from 1973’s “Please Don’t Bury Me” to 2018’s “When I Get to Heaven.” Prine’s vision of death was irreverent, and over a half-century of songwriting he optimistically anticipated an afterlife filled with wonderful encounters and experiences straight out of … well, the best John Prine songs.
“Please Don’t Bury Me(link is external),” from his third LP, Sweet Revenge (released in 1973, when he was just twenty-seven years old), is a young man’s sarcastic kiss-off to the long goodbye, with his reported last words forming the song’s chorus:
Please don’t bury me/
Down in that cold, cold ground/
No, I’d rather have ‘em cut me up/
And pass me all around
Throw my brain in a hurricane/
And the blind can have my eyes/
And the deaf can take both of my ears/
If they don’t mind the size
Mixing the serious with the silly, he offers his arms to the Venus de Milo, his love to Rose, and his stomach to Milwaukee, “if they run out of beer.” And he begs the listener to “put my socks in a cedar box, just get ‘em out of here!”
“When I Get to Heaven(link is external),” by contrast, from his final LP, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, reflects a much older man’s vision, one informed by seventy-plus years of loving and losing family. Prine can’t wait to see them all, from “mom and dad, and good old brother Doug,” to “cousin Jackie” and “all my mama’s sisters, ‘cause that’s where all the love starts.” But the song is neither maudlin nor sober. After first shaking God’s hand, he sings, “I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock-n-roll band,” and then “open up a nightclub called The Tree of Forgiveness,” to which “I might even invite a few choice critics, those syphilitic parasitics.” The raucous chorus celebrates Prine’s anticipation of a joyful afterlife:
And then I’m gonna get a cocktail, vodka and ginger ale/
Yeah, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long/
I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl/
‘Cause this old man is goin’ to town
Some of Prine’s most poignant songs share memories of faces and places long gone, including the wistful yet angry “Paradise,” from his 1971 eponymous debut, and the loving tribute “Grandpa Was a Carpenter,” another classic from 1973’s Sweet Revenge.
“Paradise(link is external)” focuses on the fond recollections of childhood visits to “a backwards old town” in “western Kentucky where my parents were born.” Since those days, however, “the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel, and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.” Now Paradise — the town’s actual name — no longer exists, because “Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
Despite the destruction, though, Prine’s attraction to the site endures, and in the song’s conclusion he croons:
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River/
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam/
I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin’/
Just five miles away from wherever I am
In Prine’s afterlife, you reunite with both long lost loved ones and long lost loved landscapes, a delightful prospect.
And two of those lost loved ones Prine would undoubtedly most hope to remeet in heaven would be his grandparents, the subjects of 1973’s “Grandpa Was a Carpenter,” our current featured Labor Song of the Month.
A ditty less about death itself than the living memory of loved ones lost, “Grandpa Was a Carpenter” perfectly presents a child’s patchwork perception of those quirky, affectionate, and exotic creatures known as grandparents, who can seem both so close and similar to us and yet so weird and different.
In just over two minutes of goofy singing, Prine captures the fusing of the mundane and the sublime, the banal and the strange, that forges the unique relationships uniting family members two generations apart. From what they wore to how they spoke, from what they sang to how they fixed things, and from where they took him to what they gave him, Prine weaves a word portrait of their lovable, ordinary oddness observed through his childlike eyes. And mixed into those memories is his mentioning of their labor — what they did for a living — revealing his recognition of their work. As he sings in the chorus:
Grandpa was a carpenter/
He built houses, stores, and banks/
Chain smoked Camel cigarettes/
And hammered nails in planks/
He was level on the level/
And shaved even every door/
And voted for Eisenhower ‘cause Lincoln won the war*
Though mostly focused on his grandfather, Prine also sings affectionately of his grandmother, testifying to the importance of both her paid and unpaid labor, including childcare, though again it’s showcased through a child’s experience:
Now my Grandma was a teacher/
Went to school in Bowling Green/
Traded in a milking cow for a Singer sewing machine/
Well, she called her husband “Mister”/
And she walked real tall and proud/
And used to buy me comic books after Grandpa died
Clearly Prine takes pride in his grandparents’ identities as working people, but their labor is set down alongside their other traits, just one part of what makes them special to him. And, really, that is how we should all aim to think about work — meaningful, valued, and more equitably divided and compensated. In this moment where we’re all reminded of the essential value of the too-often-underappreciated paid and unpaid labor sustaining our households, our communities, and our entire economy, John Prine’s wry and affectionate songs can act as a bridge to both our past and our potential future.
“Grandpa Was a Carpenter” is my favorite John Prine tune, probably because it conveys in a nutshell that paradox of the best popular music: the more singular and specific the storyteller’s songs — from Prine through Prince to current favorite Lilly Hiatt(link is external) — the greater it resonates with our own uniquely individual experiences, flooding us with feelings and memories of our own “Crooked Piece of Time(link is external)” (another gem, this one from 1978’s Bruised Orange).
As Hiatt put it in a touching tribute to her musician hero in the wake of his passing, “There is a John Prine album for everyone(link is external)” Go find yours, listen to it on repeat, tally up the wisdom in the songs, and then make good use of it when social distancing finally ends.
*The line about his grandfather’s affiliation with the GOP is another nice little touch, a nod to the older man’s connection to his own grandparents, and a reminder of an era when political party preferences endured over lifetimes and generations.
April 2020. Have an idea for a future Labor Song of the Month? Email Dan Graff.
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Cut #26, Higgins Labor Songs Playlist
Chris Temple, Assistant Registrar & PhD Candidate in History, University of Notre Dame
Note: Notre Dame alum Chris Temple (BSEE ‘92; MA ‘15) is researching/writing a dissertation titled “Becoming a Catholic Research University: Leveraging Science and Technology at the University of Notre Dame, 1842-1967.”
ARTHUR ROBERTS, “TAKE AWAY YOUR BILLION DOLLARS”
Arthur Roberts’ “Take Away Your Billion Dollars,” written in 1946 and published in the journal Physics Today(link is external) in 1948, questions the enthusiastic embrace of military research funding and the influence of that support on dictating the research agenda for American physicists.
During World War II, the United States military had proven to be a new and powerful patron for American science. The federal government effectively mobilized scientists for wartime research at universities through financial contracts coordinated by the engineer and scientist-administrator Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Research scientists at places like MIT, Cal Tech, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Chicago became the earliest beneficiaries, while those at other schools such as Stanford quickly recognized the need to maneuver for maximum institutional advantage.
Vannevar Bush believed in the fundamentally meritocratic nature of science. After the war, Bush authored an important report, Science – the Endless Frontier, which outlined a postwar role for the federal government to continue fostering American science. Bush wanted to dismantle the OSRD and replace the successful wartime bureaucracy with a new federal agency which would fund basic science research while minimizing the potential for political interference. Congressional debate delayed the formation of what would become the National Science Foundation until 1950.
In the absence of a federal agency formally designated to support basic research, American scientists embraced other research funding opportunities which emerged in the late 1940s. The Manhattan Project passed supervision of its operations to the Atomic Energy Commission to fund nuclear research, and the Office of Naval Research became a significant source of support for university-based research. Some scientists questioned the wisdom of accepting military patronage, wondering if it was possible to do so without serving military goals.
Some of that questioning took musical form, as in the case of Arthur Roberts, (1912-2004), a professor of physics at the University of Iowa. “Take Away Your Billion Dollars” offers an insightful parody on the federal government’s growing role in scientific research funding after World War II. As historian of science David Kaiser has argued(link is external), the song became very popular with physicists, who “delighted in quoting from the song at American Physical Society (APS) meetings over the course of the next year, often slipping in a line or two without needing to give any reference.”
This recording(link is external) of the song was made by faculty and students of the “State University of Iowa” (now the University of Iowa) in 1947. As you listen(link is external), you can read along to the lyrics pasted below (reprinted from Haverford College’s “Physics Songs” website(link is external)):
Upon the lawns of Washington the physicists assemble,
From all the land are men at hand, their wisdom to exchange.
A great man stands to speak, and with applause the rafters tremble.
“My friends,” says he, “you all can see that physics now must change.
Now in my lab we had our plans, but these we’ll now expand,
Research right now is useless, we have come to understand.
We now propose constructing at an ancient Army base,
The best electronuclear machine in any place, — Oh
It will cost a billion dollars, ten billion volts ’twill give,
It will take five thousand scholars seven years to make it live.
All the generals approve it, all the money’s now in hand,
And to help advance our program, teaching students now we’ve banned.
We have chartered transportation, we’ll provide a weekly dance,
Our motto’s integration, there is nothing left to chance.
This machine is just a model for a bigger one, of course,
That’s the future road for physics, as I hope you’ll all endorse.”
And as the halls with cheers resound and praises fill the air,
One single man remains aloof and silent in his chair.
And when the room is quiet and the crowd has ceased to cheer,
He rises up and thunders forth an answer loud and clear.
“It seems that I’m a failure, just a piddling dilettante,
Within six months a mere ten thousand bucks is all I’ve spent.
With love and string and sealing wax was physics kept alive,
Let not the wealth of Midas hide the goal for which we strive. –Oh
“Take away your billion dollars, take away your tainted gold,
You can keep your damn ten billion volts, my soul will not be sold.
Take away your army generals; their kiss is death, I’m sure.
Everything I build is mine, and every volt I make is pure.
Take away your integration; let us learn and let us teach,
Oh, beware this epidemic Berkelitis***, I beseech.
Oh, dammit! Engineering isn’t physics, is that plain?
Take, oh take, your billion dollars, let’s be physicists again.
*** “Berkelitis” refers to the infectious enthusiasm among physicists for so-called Big Science projects typified by such institutions as the growth of the Ernest Lawrence’s laboratories at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1930s and during the Manhattan Project during World War II.
The concerns expressed in “Take Away Your Billion Dollars” proved to be particularly insightful and even prophetic, as an American obsession with so-called Big Science and military-focused projects during the Cold War drove the research agenda for many scientists at American universities – particularly in the post-Sputnik era. Two decades after this song was published and fifty years ago this month, students at MIT demonstrated on March 4, 1969, against the Vietnam War and against their school’s work on military-related research. The campus disturbance disrupted the work at some laboratories.
Historians Stuart Leslie(link is external) and Rebecca Lowen(link is external) have told the stories of how MIT and Stanford became “Cold War universities” and highly integrated parts of the military-industrial-academic complex by prioritizing federal government-funded scientific research. In the twentieth century overall, research universities became the pace-setting role model institutions of American higher education, and the expensive demands of scientific research made government funding an operational necessity after World War II and during the Cold War. The song “Take Away Your Billion Dollars” offers the listener an opportunity to pause and reflect on the effects of government research funding and its role in determining the agenda of American scientific labor.
March 2019. Have an idea for a future Labor Song of the Month? Email Dan Graff.
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Cut #25, Higgins Labor Songs Playlist
Tom Kellenberg, Executive Director, Notre Dame Washington Program
Note: Notre Dame alum Tom Kellenberg (PLS, ECON ’80) directs Notre Dame’s study-in-DC program, where he teaches courses in law, public policy, and human rights. A graduate of Harvard Law School who has worked as a labor and employment attorney, Tom is also the executive director of International Human Rights Advocates (IHRA)(link is external), a non-governmental, nonprofit organization that provides legal support, lobbying assistance, and government relations services to individuals and human rights groups in the United States and abroad. He is a longtime supporter and friend of the Higgins Labor Program. — Dan Graff
MARVIN GAYE, “INNER CITY BLUES (MAKE ME WANNA HOLLER)”
Track 9 (or Track 3, Side 2) from the LP What’s Going On (1971, Motown Records)
In some neighborhoods in Washington, DC, where I’ve worked for the past twenty years, you can’t sit in a barber chair for long without hearing a Marvin Gaye song playing on the overhead speakers. With a clientele that is largely older, and African American, those barbershops are often anchors for the black community, preserving the history and culture of the people who have lived there with photographs, newspaper clippings, and yellowing concert posters hanging from the wall. (Quincy Mills(link is external), Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Vassar College [and a former research fellow at Notre Dame in 2005-06], provides a fascinating look into the political and social role of those neighborhood barbershops in his wonderful Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press 2013).
Marvin Gaye was born and raised in Washington, DC, where he is still revered as a cultural icon and a much loved son, and where his image graces several large murals and a monument in Marvin Gaye Park, named in his honor. His soulful music resonates here in large part because his songs speak to the conditions lived by so many city residents, even thirty-five years after his untimely death in 1984. Perhaps no song is more evocative than “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” from his landmark 1971 LP What’s Going On.
With a silky voice, and a three- (some say four-) octave range, and backed by legendary Motown studio band The Funk Brothers, Marvin Gaye sketches a harrowing portrait of urban hopelessness and despair set to a powerful rhythmic groove.
Hang ups, let downs/
Bad breaks, setbacks/
Natural fact is/
I can’t pay my taxes.
…
Crime is increasing/
Trigger happy policing/
Panic is spreading/
God knows where we’re heading.
For many District residents, those lyrics unfortunately mirror an appalling economic reality. According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, a local think tank which focuses on issues affecting low- and moderate-income families, Washington, DC has deeper income inequality than any state, with households “in the top 20 percent of income having 29 times more income than the bottom 20 percent.(link is external)” At 18.6 percent, the District also has one of the highest rates of poverty in the United States, trailing only Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico.
Make me wanna holler/
And throw up both my hands/
Yeah, make me wanna holler/
And throw up both my hands.
Much of that inequality is rooted in an entrenched ethnic divide, and a long legacy of racism and segregation. A recent report by the Urban Institute, The Color of Wealth in the Nation’s Capital(link is external), found that “white households in DC have a net worth 81 times greater than Black households.(link is external)” The median income for African American households is $42,000, compared to $134,000 for white households; and while the poverty rate for white residents is 7.9 percent, it is nearly 30 percent for the African American community. In Ward 8, the poorest of DC’s wards, located east of the Anacostia River and overwhelmingly African American, the statistics are even grimmer. There the median household income is only $31,000, more than 50% of children live in poverty, and the unemployment rate is three times the national average.
Make me wanna holler/
The way they do my life/
This ain’t livin’, this ain’t livin’/
No, no baby, this ain’t livin’.
Employment discrimination, whether overt or resulting from unconscious bias, exacerbates existing income and wealth disparities between the city’s black and white residents. Professor David Phillips, an economist affiliated with Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, found that DC job applicants with “black-sounding names receive a 6.0 percentage point lower callback rate than those with ambiguous or white names.(link is external)” The D.C. Policy Center(link is external), another local think-tank, notes that racial bias is particularly prevalent “in the rapidly growing, customer-facing service market, which is disproportionately a source of employment for people of color in D.C.(link is external)”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops(link is external) has condemned this systemic racism — citing enormous racial disparities in income, wealth and employment — in various pastoral letters, perhaps most comprehensively Brothers and Sisters to Us(link is external), from 1979:
Racism is not merely one sin among many; it is a radical evil that divides the human family and denies the new creation of a redeemed world. To struggle against it demands an equally radical transformation, in our own minds and hearts as well as in the structure of our society.
…
The structures of our society are subtly racist, for these structures reflect the values which society upholds. They are geared to the success of the majority and the failure of the minority. Members of both groups give unwitting approval by accepting things as they are. Perhaps no single individual is to blame. The sinfulness is often anonymous but nonetheless real. The sin is social in nature in that each of us, in varying degrees, is responsible. All of us in some measure are accomplices.
If Marvin Gaye were alive today, he might feel the same sense of hopelessness and despair that he felt when writing “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” Despite advances in the political and legal spheres brought about by the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s, there is still much work to be done to fulfill the promise of that movement, most critically in the economic sphere. Indeed, a recent paper by economists Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles, “Divergent Paths: A New Perspective on Earnings Differences Between Black and White Men Since 1940(link is external),” concludes that “after narrowing consistently from 1940 to 1970, the black-white difference in median annual earnings among all men has since widened substantially, growing by the end of the Great Recession to its size in 1950.” Only when that deep-seated, structural injustice is eliminated will Marvin Gaye’s cry for peace, justice, and equality in “Inner City Blues” be finally answered.
February 2019
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Cut #24, Higgins Labor Songs Playlist
Dan Graff, Director, Higgins Labor Program, and Professor of the Practice in History
ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO, “SILVER CITY”
Track 13 on The Crossing (Yep Roc Records, 2018)
I write this in the midst of the longest government shutdown in US history — 25 days and counting — idling 800,000 federal workers, disrupting public services, and threatening to push the economy into recession. How did we get here? Well, essentially, it boils down to this: a presidential administration has decided to hold the country hostage to a campaign promise by contriving a national security “crisis” inflaming long-standing American fears of foreigners. Or, as a historian from Mexico spending the year at Notre Dame put it, “Every day I wake up to the fact that people don’t want me here, that they don’t want brown people here.”
He shared these thoughts at a recent session of the Labor Café, where folks come together to talk about work and the politics of work. Heading into the annual Martin Luther King holiday, this particular gathering focused on MLK’s life, labor, and legacy. Several in the room argued that if King were alive today, he would likely be protesting the persecution of asylum seekers and the separation of families on our southern border.
I think they’re probably right, and it got me thinking about the importance of music to the civil rights movement, from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” What shall be the soundtrack to this moment in the ongoing freedom struggle? Surely it should include Alejandro Escovedo’s 2018 cover of the Joe Ely classic “Silver City,” a fable about an optimistic migrant searching for work and gradually awakening to the rude realization he is unwanted in a land of plenty and promise.
Alejandro Escovedo is a criminally underappreciated rocker who’s been toiling in relative obscurity for over thirty years. His newest album, The Crossing, teems with stunning stompers and beautiful ballads mostly penned by him (and his bandmates). So it seems a little odd — or even downright disrespectful — to choose a cover from the new LP as the Labor Song of the Month.
But Escovedo’s version of Joe Ely’s “Silver City” is so beautiful, so haunting, and so perfectly-timed — I’m hard-pressed to find a song more poignant for our moment. Track thirteen on a concept album about immigrant punk rockers from Mexico and Italy confronting the full fire and fury of Trump’s America, “Silver City” is a bittersweet riposte to the fusillade of family separations, tear-gassing, and racism-by-tweet unleashed upon migrants and asylum seekers at the US-Mexican border by our current commander-in-chief.
Written decades ago by Escovedo’s friend and fellow Texan Joe Ely, who included it on his 1987 honky tonk classic Lord of the Highway, “Silver City” presents the universal tale of a poor migrant leaving home in search of opportunity whose optimism crashes after he’s robbed, then ignored, later arrested, and finally imprisoned (Ely briefly explained the song ’s origin during a 2014 live performance(link is external).) Covered by Escovedo thirty years later, the unaltered lyrics seem to me less about the protagonist’s stubborn naivete and more about our country’s shameful pride in proclaiming itself the most coveted land on earth while violating not only its own laws but also international norms of human decency. As Escovedo sings:
I honestly believed/That I would be received/With the golden key to the Silver City.
But my first night on the town/Bandits knocked me down./They welcomed me to the Silver City.
Must’ve been a freak mistake/I said as I did wake/In the gutter of the Silver City.
With a throbbing head/I begged for my bread/Half-smiling as I bled in the Silver City.
Oh, how can there ever be/Such misery in the streets?/How can it ever be in the Silver City?
But soon enough I saw/How easy it was to fall/And not be seen at all in the Silver City.
It’s fitting that alt-country crooner Ely sings harmony on rocker Escovedo’s cover, reminding us that the best music bends, blurs, and blows up boundaries, thereby exposing the arbitrary falsity of segregating songs and the people who play and purchase them into commercially viable, race-coded categories (rock, country, rhythm and blues, tejano, e.g.).
Moreover, just like desperate people in search of work, the most exciting music insistently jumps the lines arbitrarily drawn on maps to divide nations. By synthesizing novel sounds, stories, and songs with familiar ones, border-crossing music has historically worked to heal the pain of homesickness, loneliness, and separation from loved ones while helping migrants forge new identities intertwined with the new melodies and rhythms born from new experiences. This was how the blues, country, and rock and roll were created in the 20th-century US — the musical fruits of working-class Americans’ engagement with the migration, increased pace, commodities, and alienation associated with the industrialized economy.
These, indeed, are the subjects of many of The Crossing’s tracks — the lure of economic opportunity, the seduction of new experiences, the longing for lost loved ones, and the danger of being different and undocumented in today’s USA. Sometimes the sentiment is wistful, as on “Waiting for Me,” when Escovedo sings, “So if you see her/Please tell her I blew her a kiss/It will be landing when the wind shifts.” At other times, as on “Fury and Fire,” the anger is palpable: “Whatever happened to the promise of a better life?/They wanna tear it down/They wanna tear it down.” Meanwhile, the music on the LP genre-hops, from Mexican and American folk to rock, and from twang to spoken-word poetry.
Apple Music categorizes The Crossing as “Americana,” whatever that means — though I guess that’s the point. A native of Texas born to Mexican immigrants, Alejandro Escovedo is as American as Bruce Springsteen or Aretha Franklin — and, like them, he’s a national treasure — even if you wouldn’t know it from his near-invisible media presence (A recent New Yorker piece(link is external) offers a nice introduction to his career and his new album).
“Silver City,” in fact all the songs from The Crossing, tell a most urgent American story, and do so in the most American way possible — with voice, guitar, bass, and drums. Give it a listen, and you just may join the caravan of the converted.
“This is the America I wanna be!” to quote Escovedo (from “Sonica USA”).
January 2019
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Cut #23, Higgins Labor Songs Playlist
Peter Cole, Professor of History, Western Illinois University
“HARRY BRIDGES” (multiple artists and versions since 1941)
Note: Labor historian Peter Cole is a longtime friend of the Higgins Labor Program. An expert on dockworkers and their struggles, he is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia(link is external) (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area(link is external) (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming fall 2018). He’s also a fan and follower of working-class culture, here made manifest in music. — DG
Nowadays, the name Harry Bridges elicits no response from the average American. Some San Francisco Bay Area residents might connect his name to the large plaza outside the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero running alongside the bay.
Yet there was a time, a long time ago — half a century — when Harry Bridges was a household name. He was known across the land as the president of the International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU)(link is external), perhaps the most militant, powerful, left-wing union in twentieth-century America.
He was so respected that Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, two of America’s greatest songwriters, each penned tunes in his honor. For good measure, Rancid, part of the Bay Area’s thriving 1990s punk scene, also wrote a song for him.
…
An Australian immigrant, Harry Bridges helped create the ILWU, a union of dockworkers born out of the now-fabled “Big Strike” of 1934(link is external) that shut down every West Coast port for nearly three months. The strike’s pivotal event occurred on July 5th, “Bloody Thursday,” when San Francisco police killed a striker and strike supporter and wounded many more; four other strikers died at the hands of police during the strike. After a bruising conflict that helped define worker militancy in the 1930s, the dockworkers won. Their still-powerful union, the ILWU, emerged soon thereafter. Though not the leader at its start, by the end of the Big Strike Bridges led workers on the San Francisco waterfront. He remained the union’s president until 1977.
The ILWU transformed tens of thousands of workers on the West Coast from “wharf rats” into “lords of the docks.” They commanded the highest wages among manual laborers. They killed the much-hated hiring system, the “shape-up,” that many compared to a slave auction, because workers had to gather on the docks each day to see if an employer would hire them. In its place, they instituted a system called “low man out” in which the worker with the fewest hours worked in that quarter of the year got the first job; truly, the last was first in the ILWU.
The ILWU also voluntarily integrated its ranks in the 1930s. Local 10 of the SF Bay Area, Bridges’ home branch, might have been the most thoroughly integrated institution in the nation in the mid-twentieth century. As Cleophas Williams, Local 10’s first African American president, recalled, “When I first came on the waterfront [1944], many black workers felt that Local 10 was a utopia.” Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King, Jr., both were honorary members.
Bridges’ name also was familiar because he suffered relentless persecution from the US government for more than twenty years. Political conservatives and Cold Warriors considered him a Communist though Harry denied the charge. He did, however, regularly admit that he agreed with the Communist Party line 95% of the time. To labor unionists and progressive allies alike, Harry was a hero attacked for his socialist beliefs and effective leadership that improved the lives of tens of thousands.
No less than US Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy agreed, writing in a 1945 Supreme Court opinion, “Seldom if ever in the history of this nation has there been such a concentrated and relentless crusade to deport an individual because he dared to exercise that freedom which belongs to him as a human being and is guaranteed him by the Constitution.” Harry joked at the time: “I don’t deny that I’ve had due process. I’ve had all the due process I want.”
…
Given his importance, it comes as little surprise that songs have been written about Harry. The legendary Almanac Singers released the first, in 1941, as “Song of Bridges” (sometimes called “Ballad of Harry Bridges”):
The Almanac Singers stood at the heart of a burgeoning leftist folk music scene in the era, with one foot in New York City and another walking the backroads of rural America. The Almanac Singers’ lineup consisted entirely of all-stars: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays(link is external), and Millard Lampell(link is external). Seeger sang the recorded version. Later, in honor of the seventh-fifth anniversary of the Big Strike, he lovingly recounted the first time the Almanacs performed it(link is external), to Harry Bridges and other ILWU members, in Frisco town.
Also in 1941-42, now legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax(link is external) joined Woody and Pete in writing Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People(link is external), a collection of tunes in book form. For unknown reasons, it was not published until 1967(link is external). To this day, it remains a treasure trove for lovers of music, Americana, and history.
This classic tome includes a song called “Harry Bridges,” by Woody Guthrie, with lyrics different from the original (though it follows the same chronology as the Almanac Singers’ version). Woody’s lyrics, as with other songs in the book, are preceded by comments in his unique, homespun, radical voice: “The trouble Harry Bridges had on the west coast took place while I was making various noises on the radio there in Los Angeles [late 1930s] and, well, I just sort of thought that they ought to be some kind of little song wrote up about old Harry and the tough old human race for which he stands.” This statement is a little different from what Seeger said, much later, but may be equally true.
The Almanacs’ version is more detailed and much longer. It contains more specific references to the dramatic, largely forgotten events of the San Francisco waterfront in the 1930s, along with Bridges’ trials. Here are that version’s final two stanzas:
The bosses brought a trial to deport him over the sea/
But the judge said, “He’s an honest man, I got to set him free.”/
Then they brought another trial to frame him if they can/
But right by Harry Bridges stands every working man!
Oh, the FBI is worried, the bosses they are scared/
They can’t deport six million men, they know./
And we’re not going to let them send Harry over the sea/
We’ll fight for Harry Bridges and build the C.I.O.
Compare the final two from Woody’s version:
Well, they carried him away to Angel’s Island/
It was there they had his trial/
They wept and sighed and lied and cried/
But Harry licked ‘em with a smile.
This is a song about Harry Bridges/
And the Union battle he did fight./
Said, “Unionism is Americanism.”/
Well, I figure he’s just about right.”
In 2008, the Harry Bridges Project(link is external) recorded Woody’s son, Arlo Guthrie, singing a version:
There is no evidence that Woody ever recorded his song. It first appeared in 1967, in the aforementioned book, coincidentally the same year Woody passed away. From the mid 1950s onward, Woody was incapacitated with the debilitating Huntington’s disease that ultimately killed him. In 2008, Sarah Lee Guthrie, one of his granddaughters, beautifully covered Woody’s song with a tune different from the Almanac’s original:
Since Harry Bridges was punk before punk rock music, perhaps it is unsurprising that Rancid, the Berkeley-based punk band, contributed their own song, “Harry Bridges”:
These punk rockers grew up in Albany, one of Berkeley’s working-class neighbors, just across the bay from San Francisco. Unlike most Americans, the members of Rancid know their labor history! While sounding quite different from Woody and Pete, they also discuss Bloody Thursday and the Big Strike of 1934, name check two other prominent 1934 strikes, and fast forward to late twentieth-century American deindustrialization. Here are the opening lines of their 1994 song:
Bloody Thursday was July 5th/
The pigs killed 3 workers Harry Bridges grabbed the mic/
The city shut down July 5th/
The workers outrage it was a general strike.
The media claimed that the commies were taking over/
And some believed it was true/
3 uncompromising strikes paved the way/
Minn, SF and Toledo.
…
Today, nearly every one of the 35,000 workers who belong to the ILWU knows Harry Bridges. They simply call him “Harry.” And they still love him.
The rest of us could learn a thing or two from these songs. As the legendary Wobbly songster Joe Hill once wrote, “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is only read once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.” Even better when a labor leader has not one or two but three songs about his storied life.
September 2018. Have an idea for a future Labor Song of the Month? Email Dan Graff.
