{"id":1340596,"date":"2023-11-19T14:36:34","date_gmt":"2023-11-19T14:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/11\/iww-protest-songs-new-album-joe-hill-brass-band\/"},"modified":"2023-11-21T10:25:44","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T10:25:44","slug":"a-new-album-of-old-labor-songs-revives-a-forgotten-era-of-class-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/11\/19\/a-new-album-of-old-labor-songs-revives-a-forgotten-era-of-class-struggle\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Album of Old Labor Songs Revives a Forgotten Era of Class Struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

On the anniversary of songwriter and union organizer Joe Hill\u2019s execution by firing squad, a new album revives early 20th-century labor movement songs, capturing the original spirit of loud, raucous brass bands.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Wobblies rally in solidarity with the Laidlaw, Colorado, strikers on May 1, 1914. (Bettmann \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

One hundred and eight years ago today, the great songwriter and union organizer Joe Hill was executed by firing squad in Utah after getting framed on trumped up murder charges. On the anniversary of his death, an album of never-before-recorded songs from the Industrial Workers of the World, as they would have been sung on the street during the union\u2019s heyday, is available for presale<\/a> from PM Press. Starvation Army: Band Music No. 1<\/em> is a historical memory project from conductor Chris Westover-Mu\u00f1oz; the Brass Band of Columbus, Ohio; and Sing in Solidarity, the choir of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member.<\/p>\n

At the height of its power in the early twentieth century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or \u201cWobblies\u201d) was renowned not only as a fighting union, but as a singing union. Joe Hill \u2014 alongside fellow Wobblies Richard Brazier, John Brill, Ralph Chaplin (lyricist of \u201cSolidarity Forever\u201d), and many other now nameless workers \u2014 wrote labor songs that remain popular over a century later. Their Little Red Songbook<\/em> continues to be the<\/em> bible of American labor songs, and is in its thirty-seventh printing 114 years after first publication.<\/p>\n

In the booklet accompanying the new album, conductor Westover-Mu\u00f1oz, quoting Jackson Albert Mann in\u00a0Cosmonaut Magazine<\/i>, describes how The Little Red Songbook <\/em>was repopularized decades after the IWW\u2019s decline by musicians like Pete Seeger during the Popular Front communist folk revival of the 1940s. Consequently, almost all recordings of IWW songs are in the Appalachian folk style popularized in that era. But Wobbly songs were not mountain music \u2014 they were innately urban, intended to be sung on city streets and in noisy union halls. The songs were often accompanied by brass bands, which grew to interest Westover-Mu\u00f1oz, a wind ensemble conductor, and inspired him to create a new album of songs from The Little Red Songbook<\/em> with brass accompaniment.<\/p>\n

The story of how brass instrumentation came to dominate labor music in the early twentieth century goes back to some of the earliest Wobbly direct actions and the origins of their singing culture. In a labor context, the brass band\u2019s volume, militance, and immanent organizational presence sends a strong message. Intimidating and unapologetic, it is a natural accompaniment to IWW songs, which bluntly communicate class struggle in everyday language.<\/p>\n

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IWW organizer and songwriter Joe Hill. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Wobblies wrote original lyrics for classics like \u201cSolidarity Forever,\u201d \u201cPower in a Union,\u201d and \u201cPreacher and the Slave,\u201d they borrowed melodies from the popular songs of their era, choosing songs that average workers already knew. This is a common left-wing folk music evolution, wherein the Christmas carol \u201cO Tannenbaum\u201d became \u201cThe Red Flag\u201d or the traditional Irish song \u201cThe Praties They Grow Small\u201d became the labor song \u201cStep by Step.\u201d The Wobblies took it a step further: true to their reputation as feisty, soapboxing street organizers, they often wrote parodies that deliberately inverted the meaning of an original song.<\/p>\n

These parodies came out of the clash of class enemies and conflicting ideologies that regularly took place at IWW organizing sites. The Wobblies recruited members from among jobless, homeless, and itinerant workers. Unable to find jobs through the existing craft union, the American Federation of Labor, these workers were vulnerable to predatory employers. In Westover-Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s introduction to Starvation Army<\/em>, he describes how in Spokane, Washington, which was home to some of the IWW\u2019s early street battles, unskilled laborers fell prey to employment agencies that would charge them a dollar to place them in logging or construction. The work itself was short term and low paying. Sometimes the agencies would take money for jobs that didn\u2019t even exist. Bosses and employment agencies (\u201cjob sharks\u201d as they were known to the Wobblies) worked in league with each other and would split the money from the workers. The faster the turnover in workers, the more money they made. The high turnover, besides being criminally exploitative, was also designed to prevent workers from forming or joining a union.<\/p>\n

IWW organizer J. H. Walsh went to Spokane in 1908 to grow the local chapter and begin a \u201cDon\u2019t Buy Jobs\u201d campaign. He went to the city\u2019s skid row and \u201csoapboxed\u201d directly to the workers outside the offices of the job sharks. Known as a powerful orator who clapped back at hecklers and commanded his soapbox like a general, he speechified right out on the pavement.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the IWW wasn\u2019t the only group on skid row trying to organize the destitute. The Salvation Army, the evangelizing Protestant charitable organization, competed with the Wobblies for the hearts and minds of the working class. Parking themselves near the employment agencies, with their sharp military uniforms and loud brass band, they fought for the same space and the same workers. In his essay, \u201cThe Story of The Little Red Songbook<\/em>,\u201d IWW lyricist Richard Brazier describes how The Salvation Army \u201cdelighted in trying to break up the IWW street meetings with blare of trumpet and banging of drums.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Salvation Army band would place themselves catty-corner to the soapboxing IWW organizers and try to drown out their speeches with hymns played on brass instruments at ear-splitting volumes. According to Brazier, the IWW\u2019s parodies of traditional hymns or patriotic songs came from this context. When the Salvation Army played, the rambunctious Wobblies sang over them, using the band as accompaniment but changing the words of the hymn into a labor anthem. \u201cAt times we would sing note by note with the Salvation Army at our street meetings,\u201d writes Brazier, \u201conly their words described Heaven above and ours Hell right here \u2014 to the same tune.\u201d<\/p>\n