Political Song in America in the Thirties and Sixties by Peter Burton

Labour and political songs have existed since the beginning
of the 19th century ranging from worker and abolitionist songs to
farmers’ laments and spirituals.

The songs tended to appear in broadsides and song sheets as well as labour publications.By the beginning of the 20th century a tradition had been established of using songs for labour organising goals- the ‘Wobbles’ being the organisation most associated with this means of agitating and organising.

Their first publication was ‘Songs of the workers: On the road in the jungles and the shops’ in 1909 . It was better known as “The Little Red song book “ and was designed to fit into a shirt or back pocket .Key songs included- “Casey Jones- The Union scab”, T-Bone Slim- “I’m too old to be a scab “, Ralph Chaplin,” Paint er Red” to the tune of “Marching through Georgia” -not forgetting the Marseillase and ‘The Internationale’. The socialist party also printed songbooks as did various labour unions at this time.

Joe Hill was a key IWW organiser who traveled widely organizing workers and writing and singing political songs. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky", which appeared in his most famous protest song "The Preacher and the Slave (1911). The song calls for "Workingmen of all countries, unite/ Side by side we for freedom will fight/ When the world and its wealth we have gained/ To the grafters we'll sing this refrain." Other notable protest songs written by Hill include "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones--Union Scab".

Another one of the best-known songs of this period was "Bread and Roses" . It was sung in protest en masse at a textile strike in Lawrence during January-March 1912 and has been subsequently taken up by protest movements ever since.

In the Thirties the American CP and individual CIO unions published numerous songbooks-The ‘Red songbook’ of 1932 included IWW songs such as the aforementioned “Preacher and the Slave”, “Hold the Fort” and Aunt Molly Jackson’s “Poor Miners’ Farewell”. And the Spanish Civil war generated many folk-style songs supporting the Republican side- (A Las Barricadas remains a popular song for anarchist militants to this day).

The ‘Brookwood Chautauqua songs’ booklet-from the later 1930’s-published in Katonah,NewYork, with the slogan “A singing army’s a winning army”, began with “Solidarity Forever”, and included “Victory song of the Dressmakers”,
“The Soup Song” and “March Song of the Workers”.

‘Commonwealth labour songs’ appeared in 1938 and included a similar line-up with “The International” and ending with “Old John Lewis “(to the tune of old McDonald had a farm). The goal during the depression was to get catchy folk song style songs that could be easily remembered to spread throughout the country-e.g.' The CIO’s in Dixie' to the tune ‘Dixie’ issued by the Birmingham Industrial union council, and “The Workers Marseillaise”- the steel workers battle hymn (to the tune of hold the fort) did just this.

“Songs for America.-American Ballads, Folk Songs, Marching songs, songs of other lands” appeared in 1939, a rich and varied group of songs that included “The Star Spangled banner , the ‘International,’ Spanish civil war tunes “Kevin Barry” and “The Ballad of the Chicago steel massacre”.

Unions such as the ILGWU published “Everybody sings’ and in 1942 the New York State Federation of Teachers Unions issued “Sing with the Union”.

There were individuals too who promoted rural protest songs that reached the North. Memphis born Bob Miller wrote scores of songs and published a portfolio
“Songs of the Almanac singers” in 42. Poet and journalist Margaret Larkin publicised “The songs and struggles of Ella May Wiggins”, who had been shot in 1929 during the Gastonia textile strike.

Composers and performers Florence Reese, Ella May Wiggins, Jim Garland, his half sister Aunt Molly Jackson, and sister Sarah Ogan Gunning, Woody Guthrie, Agnes Sis Cunningham, Lee Hays and John Handcox captured a mix of radical political songs, working class trials and hardships during the depression years and on into World War 2.These singers identified with the left unions of the time.-The National Miners union, the National Textile Workers Union and the Southern Tenant farmers union.

In addition there were also labour orientated schools, such as the Highlander Folk school in Monteagle, Tennesse, Commonwealth college in Mena, Arkansas, The Southern school for workers near Ashland, North Carolina, and the socialist Brookwood Labour school in Katonah, New York. Hancock wrote “Ragged are We” and “There are mean things happening in this Land” while organising for the Socialist- connected STFU.

By the early forties there were a number of labour records available but it was the ‘Almanac singers’ who were most associated with conscious organising songs .
It was formed by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell in early 1941-it led to
“Songs for John Doe- peace songs” and “Talking Union” – once again labour songs that were written to catch on . “The Almanac singers” lasted only two years but laid the basis for the folk revival in the 1960’s .Other labour orientated groups recorded during WW11 included “The Priority Ramblers and the Union boys” and Woody Guthrie. Alan Lomax was heavily responsible for shaping the careers of Guthrie, Leadbelly, Burl Ives, Josh White, and Peter Seeger – to the point where they were sometimes called “the Lomax Singers”.

A similarly influential folk music band who sang protest songs were ‘The Weavers’, Pete Seeger being its main member. The weavers were the first American band to court mainstream success while singing protest songs, and they were eventually to pay the price for it. While they specifically avoided recording the more controversial songs in their repertoire, and refrained from performing at controversial venues and events (for which the leftwing press derided them as having sold out their beliefs in exchange for popular success), they nevertheless came under political pressure as a result of their history of singing protest songs and folk songs favoring labor unions, as well as for the leftist political beliefs of the individuals in the group.

Despite their caution they were placed under FBI surveillance and blacklisted by parts of the entertainment industry during the McCarthy era, from 1950. Right-wing and anti-Communist groups protested at their performances and harassed promoters. As a result of the blacklisting, the Weavers lost radio airplay and the group's popularity diminished rapidly. Decca Records eventually terminated their recording contract.


Woody Guthrie’s influence was huge and Dylan was only one of many who was inspired by the Oklahoma Bard in the Sixties. Sis Cunningham had been a member of the Almanac singers in the forties with Guthrie, Seeger and Bess Hawes. Together with her husband Gordon Friesen she launched the magazine “Broadside” in New York on the encouragement of Seeger and Malvinas Reynolds in February 1962 (it was subtitled “A handful of songs about our times).

Broadside was seminal because it published the songs that the more mainstream ‘Sing Out’! would not. Its first issue contained Reynolds “ “Come clean Blues and Dylan’s “Talkin John Birch Society blues” about a right-wing racist organisation-it was his first published song. Dylan , Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Len Chandler and Peter LaFarge would meet monthly in Sis and Gordon’s’ cramped apartment and record their new songs, which would be transcribed before then appearing in the magazine. This inspired other political songwriters to send their demos and tapes to Broadside from around the country. The magazine included articles, letters and illustrations capturing the rapidly changing political climate of the 60’s and only folded in the 1980’s.

The civil rights movement in the sixties, as opposed to the labour movement, became the inspiration for organizing songs-with Guy Carawan –the music director of the Highland Folk school in Tennessee being central to this change.. He made field recordings of the civil rights movement and introduced “We shall overcome” in 1960 which rapidly became the Civil rights anthem. It was one of many mass organising tool songs derived from familiar gospel tunes.

Dylan, Odetta, Josh White, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary performed during a pre-march concert on the day of the historic march on Washington in August 1963. Later in the day, Dylan , the Freedom Singers, Peter Paul and Mary , opera
Star Marian Anderson, and gospel star Mahalia Jackson sang to the mass crowd.
Sadly the only black artists directly involved in civil rights actions were Harry Belafonte and Nina Simone. Ray Charles and James Brown represented black consciousness in their music but avoided overt civil rights concerts and events. Berry Gordy, owner of Motown, issued civil rights records , but was slow to urge his acts to get involved.

Civil rights songs were used from the summer of 1964 to encourage voter registration in the South at Civil rights workshops and Folk festivals such as the Northern District Mississippi Folk festival and Greenwood Festival.

The civil rights movement , in turn, led to campus organising and the founding of the S.D.S (Students for a Democratic Society) in 1960 and the University of California Berkeley Free speech movement in 64,with Baez singing “The Times they are a changing” and “We shall overcome” at the initial protest.

As fighting escalated in Vietnam , folk music began to serve as a rallying cry for the mounting peace movement . A ‘sing in for Peace concert’ at Carnegie Hall in mid-65 featured 60 performers including Peter, Paul and Mary , Baez and the Freedom Singers, attracting 5,000 people. Peace songs were used to swell the crowds at
anti –war rallies with 'Broadside' and 'Sing out' publishing both old and new peace songs.

Spanish Civil War Photo essay etc

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/scw/photessay.htm

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/scw/scw.htm

Culture and Revolution in the Thought of Leon Trotsky.

http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/backissu.htm

Volume 7, No. 2, Spring 1999

Culture and Revolution in the Thought of Leon Trotsky.

Editorial

The Culture of the Old World

Leon Trotsky, Ibsen

Leon Trotsky, Two Literary Souls at the Mercy of the Metaphysical Demon

Leon Trotsky, Poetry, the Machine, and the Poetry of the Machine

Leon Trotsky, On the Novel in General and on The Three of Them in Particular

Leon Trotsky, Culture and the Little White Bull

Paul Flewers, Vekhi and the Retreat from Reason

Impressionism: Trotsky in Vienna

Fritz Keller, Trotsky in Vienna

Leon Trotsky, On Death and Eros

Leon Trotsky, A New Year's Conversation about Art

Leon Trotsky, The Vienna Secession of 1909

Leon Trotsky, Two Viennese Exhibitions

Leon Trotsky, On the Intelligentsia

Leon Trotsky, Vienna Secession 1913

The Culture of the Transition Period

John Plant, Trotsky, Art and the Revolution

Antonio Gramsci, A Letter to Leon Trotsky on Futurism

Leon Trotsky, For Quality -- For Culture!

Culture Under the Dictators

Pierre Naville, Trotsky on Art and Literature

Richard Greeman, Did Trotsky Read Serge?

Esther Leslie, Elective Affinities

James T Farrell, A Memoir of Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky, Marcel Martinet

Leon Trotsky, The Attitude of Men of Letters

An Interview with Jean Malaquais

Fritz Keller, Stalinism versus Hedonism

The International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists

Maurice Nadeau, Trotsky and Breton

Leon Trotsky, You Must Not Whisper

Leon Trotsky, Difficulties With Diego

William Blake : Paradise –the Hard Way.

Born in London in 1757 William Blake lived through both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, and witnessed the vicious repression after these events by the British ruling class .Although a deeply spiritual man, he was nevertheless appalled by the conditions of his fellow human beings and laid the blame in his political poems squarely on the twin evils of Church and State.

Blake was part of a group of close-knit skilled artisans who placed more weight on the moral value of their products than the market value. The fierce independence he sought throughout his life manifested itself in his trying to obtain total control over the labour process. He came up with the idea of publishing his own illuminated books, in which the text and illustrations could be printed from a single plate that was etched in relief before being sold direct to the buyers for a fair price. The process was so time consuming that he never gained materially and he never escaped the hated but much needed patronage of patrons.

The other consequence of this desire for independence was his opposition to the encroachments of both Church and State. The evidence for what influenced Blake’s ideas was the appearance of his signature on a document circulated at a Conference of Swedenborgians in Easter 1789. Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish spiritual philosopher. The Swedenborgians stood for a millenarian proclamation of a New Age, hostility to priest craft, a positive view of human sexuality and a visionary reading of the material world. There was a split over the movement’s aim of creating a New Church and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s attitudes to sexuality .(Swedenborg had a vision of an overtly sexual heaven and tolerated concubinage). Blake identified with the expelled minority who opposed this but he also had differences with this expelled minority in turn. He was not a joiner of organisations but stood with the oppressed as an individual.

Opposition to Swedenborg was grouped around his publisher Jacob Johnson and his journal the ‘Analytical review’ .Although all dissenters identified with the French Revolution and Blake was to defend Paine’s Republicanism from reactionary attacks, he also had a lifelong enthusiasm for visionary experiences which gave him a correlative scepticism about the power of Reason .This marked him out from both the Painite Republican Deists and the Johnson circle. Central to the differences were his ideas about the self and his attitudes to sexuality. Blake was willing to put the self into hazard in the interests of his prophetic vision- “Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life” he declared .This contrasted with the Painite idea of the autonomous individual. The modern day equivalent might be a kind of idealist self-help New Age working on oneself in order to liberate humanity.

Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll which seems to project from his own head.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake
Blake saw sexuality as unruly and depicted sexual difference as an unstable rather than a fixed part of human nature (See his ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’) What was shared with Paine was a rough handling of the Bible .In Paines’ ‘ Age of Reason’ the Bible was dismissed as a priestly distortion of Hebrew folk tradition. Blake wrote in his Notebook:
“The Hebrew nation did not write it, Avarice and Chastity did shite it”
(Notebook, E 516).

He supported Paine for the latter’s’ attacks on the Bibles- “Perversions of Christ’s words and acts”. But if radical politics abstracted the individual from the sum of human brotherhood in its stress on the autonomy of the reasoning power , then it would perpetuate , in Blokes’ view, a mystery as destructive of human potential as the “ State religion” it wished to replace.


In ‘Visions of the daughter of Albion (1793), which contains Blake's critique of Judeo-Christian values of marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left) are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon (right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.
Many of Blake’s’ most angry poems were published in his ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’

In the ‘Chimney Sweeper’ Blake contrasts the drudgery and shocking lives of a child chimney sweep with the intoxicating image of a promised afterlife in Toms’ dream of an Angel- a thinly disguised attack on the Church – if you submit to misery and don’t resist oppression we will give you a dream. Its form and language give a sense of fate for the life of the child slave – so it’s a poem that still matters now given the scale of child and sweatshop labour that still exists in the 21st century.

The Chimney Sweeper

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ‘ 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!’
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd like a lamb’s back, was shav'd: so I said
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’


And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

In ‘Holy Thursday’ Blake describes an annual procession, when thousands of the poorest children in London were marched from Charity schools to St Pauls. There they demonstrate their piety while their patrons look on. There is an ironic attack on the ‘wise guardians of the poor’.

Holy Thursday

Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two in red and blue and green,
Grey headed beadles walking before with wands as white as snow;
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.
Oh what a multitude they seemed, those flowers of London town.
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs:
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.
Beneath them sit the agéd men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

The Holy Thursday of Experience makes this more explicit-Blake contrasts the bounty of nature in a rich and bountiful land with the poverty and misery of the children .The disbelief of the speaker serves to emphasize the absurdity of plentiful nature and poverty existing side by side reinforcing its unnaturalness. But the children are also seen as a force and the Holy Thursday of Experience uses plainer imagery to suggest that both anger and nature will end this oppression.
‘Babe can never hunger there’ but only in a different system – Blake though charity almost evil- no tinkering – be honest about the causes and eradicate it.
In the ‘Garden of Love’ the innocence and natural development of childhood that took place in the past has been distorted in the present by priests and their draconian church laws. Every element of the poem-its form, language, repetition and syllables contribute to the portrayal of a world that is full of despair and oppression, the poem becoming darker and darker with each line. The Garden reveals a loss of innocence and a denial of natural sexuality with the graves representing the death of pleasure and beauty- (Note how the imagery of the plate reinforces the message.) -namely his complete opposition to chastity, shame and marriage.




The Garden Of Love

And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

‘London’ is another poem full of anger at the state of society.


London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.


In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The poems’ power lies in the juxtaposition of powerful images as Blake wanders through the streets of London- its key words are ‘Mind forg’d Manacles’ – Blake’s equivalent of Marx’s false consciousness.

People are imprisoned by their fears and false beliefs, ’the cop in all our heads’- this leads to fatalism and false despair. In other words mental imprisonment, manipulation and psychological oppression were not abstract concepts for Blake but as much a prison as bars and steel doors. If you couldn’t imagine a society without oppression and exploitation, you really were in a prison .He attacks the monarchy, militarism and imperialism and their hypocrisy and in the last stanza also has a pop at marriage and its corollary –prostitution.

In the ‘Prophetic books’ Blake continues with these themes. ‘America -a prophecy’ dramatises the Revolutionary war in America , Blake seeing the war as a step forward for world wide liberty and an opportunity for the British ruling class to see the futility it’s militaristic policy. His ‘Europe- a prophecy’ progresses onwards from ‘America’ describing war and revolution in Europe, but with plates illuminated in code because of the fierce political repression of those who identified with the French Revolution. The poem tells the British establishment to head the warning of a failed militaristic policy in America.

In Blake’s ‘famine’ a starving child is portrayed intimately and with chilling dignity in Revolutionary France.The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English poet, and was illustrated by Blake's own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen. Later editions dropped the word "first".

The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake’s mythology who represents alienated reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the "primeval priest", and describes how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and enslaving realm of religious dogma. Los and Enitharmon create a space within Urizen's fallen universe to give birth to their son Orc, the spirit of revolution and freedom. He is symbolic of the French and American revolutions. In form the book is a parody of the Book of Genesis.

Blake moves on from specific instances of oppression and injustice in the Songs to talk about underlying causes. It’s the ruling class that has invented heaven and Church laws with its ‘Thou shall not’ bans , policed by black gowned priests , economic power and slavery in London’s charter’d street, cemented by personal fear and self -imposed limitations in a corrupt world. Fear corrupts the powerful, the individual and society which, in turn, lead to a hardening of the individual and society when the causal repression is not honestly addressed and fought against by us all.

“Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of Religion”. Charity is a crime as it reinforces an unequal status quo and ignores the cause-Capitalism.
“As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys’: ‘Shame is Prides cloak’; ‘A dead body revenges not injuries’; ‘Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity”.- Proverbs of Hell.

Religion, Patriotism, Commerce and war are all hypocritical excuses for a status quo that exploits the poorest and weakest. Its cause, for Blake, was a lack of vision and imagination and an over-emphasis on Reason at the expense of the former.

The prophetic books present a vision of a dynamic, dialectical process in society,
Blake seeing oppression and division followed by revolution as cyclical.
He gives the different energies, forces and desires that exist within societies at different stages of development coded symbolic names, characteristics and stories and saw change occurring as a product of the unfolding of “contraries”. In doing so he revealed eternal truths abut humanity through the specific injustices of his time making Blake a revolutionary.

“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.

Peter Burton
August 08

Beat Poetry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_poetry

The Treason of the Intellectuals and other verse

Most of the 68 pieces collected here appeared over the last two decades in Socialist Organiser, Workers Liberty and Solidarity. They are, most of them, workaday political verse, in the broad sense of political. Some, for instance, “Nina Ruah”, are “personal”. I make no claim that any of this is “poetry”: that belongs to an altogether higher order of things. Nor should little bits of insomniac's verse, dealing in nuance, paradox, mood, ambivalences, passing perplexities, discouragements, be read as political manifestoes.

Sean Matgamna
26 July 2008
Author: Sean Matgamna

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/10958




IRELAND


I am of Ireland:
Long years ago I left it;
It does not leave me;
It does not go from me,
It will not go from me.

I am of Ireland:
Many years am I out of it;
It is not out of me;
It does not leave me,
It does not leave me.

Burns -History

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/scottishhistory/enlightenment/features_enlightenment_radicals.shtml

http://www.freescotland.com/radical.html