The Big Red Songbook: Over Sixty Years of Wobbly-lore When the Union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, |
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“Almost every Wobbly hall had a piano,” folklorist Archie Green told me in a recent conversation about the musical legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World. As he approaches ninety, the musicologist, union member, and former shipwright continues to write about the radical “singing union.” Along with co-editors David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno, he has released The Big Red Songbook through the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. It is the first comprehensive collection of IWW songs.
In 1909, the IWW released twenty four old and new labor songs in a book entitled Songs of the Industrial Workers of the World. Since then, The Little Red Songbook—as it later came to be known—has introduced countless labor activists to the songs of Ralph Chaplin, Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim and other Wobbly songsters. While a few of the IWW songs have become mainstays of the labor movement, others have faded into obscurity. Fortunately, The Big Red Songbook presents all the songs from the first 1909 edition to the 1976 edition, along with poems, illustrations, and critical essays.
For Archie Green, The Big Red Songbook is a culmination of his life-long interest in IWW songs. Growing up in Los Angeles, California, Green first heard IWW songs while attending a Workmen’s Circle School in the 1920s. In 1950, he met John Neuhaus, a member of the IWW and the IAMAW (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers).
It was Neuhaus who set him on the path that would eventually lead to the publication of The Big Red Songbook.
“John was a vegetarian, an anarchist, a wonderful man,” Green told me. “He was also a self-taught musicologist and indefatigable collector of IWW songbooks.” Neuhaus’ dream was to bring out a comprehensive IWW songbook. Sadly, Nehaus passed away before he could see his dream realized, but he left Green his collection of IWW songbooks and historical material. The Big Red Songbook, therefore, is a tribute to both the IWW singers and writers who penned the classic material and to the man who began the process of tracking down the original songbooks, source tunes, and biographical information.
Throughout the thick collection of songs, a sense of zany, rebellious humor is ever-present. Parodies of traditional hymns exist alongside sardonic versions of patriotic and popular tunes. When I asked Green why the IWW songwriters embraced humor (unlike many labor and radical organizations past and present), he argued that the IWW possessed an “irreverent spirit.” Opposed to the trappings of bourgeois culture, union members created witty and heretical songs that poked fun at the capitalists and the hair-splitting ideologies of rival organizations.
Green’s favorite IWW song, “The Dehorn Song,” is a great example of how the IWW songwriters used humor to defy tradition, even their own. A cautionary tale about the debilitating effects of alcohol on workers, the chorus of “The Dehorn Song” goes: “Oh dehorn, why don’t you get wise, / And quit the booze and organize? / A sober mind will win the day, / The One Big Union will show the way.” While this song is related to the IWW’s practice of shutting down saloons during a strike to keep workers focused, it is also a parody of the “Red Flag,” a near-religious hymn among radical circles and the first song printed in the original edition of the Little Red Songbook. According to Green, “The ‘Dehorn Song’ shows the ability of the IWW to poke fun at its own music.”
“The Dehorn Song” is one of the many songs and poems written by IWW members that never appeared in any edition of the Little Red Songbook. Green and his co-editors gathered many of these songs and poems and included them alongside the one hundred and ninety “official” songs. Among the re-discovered selections are the songs and poems of women Wobblies, such as “The Maid’s Defiance” by Jane Street and “Revolution” by Laura Payne Emerson. These forgotten tunes beg the question of how the editors chose which songs to include—a question that will hopefully peak the interest of future scholars.
The material in The Big Red Songbook illustrates the challenges in researching working class history and art. The IWW was firmly opposed to the cult of personality that developed in other trade unions and radical organizations. Many of the songwriters signed their work with pseudonyms or just used last names, and many of the songs extol the virtues of the One Big Union while rarely mentioning specific trades. “Lots of these songs,” Green told me, “don’t include references that folklorists usually look for to trace back the history of a song.” Despite the challenges, The Big Red Songbook provides a well-documented text for future scholars who find themselves drawn to these compelling songs and want to keep the search for more lost Wobbly tunes alive.
So how can we keep these wonderful songs alive in the twenty-first century? According to Green, “There’s a need for a good historical album that demonstrates how Wobbly songs sounded when they were first sung.” Listeners today are familiar with the folk revival interpretations of classic IWW songs, but Green noted that they would have been played and sung in a variety of ways, depending on the instruments used and the regional backgrounds of the performers. What did the IWW songs sound like being sung by loggers in the Pacific Northwest, harvest hands in the Midwest, or immigrant workers in New York? Green believes that—with the help of modern recording technology—someone could produce an album that not only authentically recreates the sounds of the early twentieth century, but also shows the evolution of IWW songs over time. As we ended our conversation, Green left me with his most important piece of advice. “Keep singing,” he said.
For generations, many of the songs in The Big Red Songbook have been sung on picket lines, in the fields, and on the shop floor. Green and his co-editors have done all of us in the labor movement a huge service by collecting, researching, and publishing these songs. The next step is up to us!