Knowledge is Power
“Like hymns and patriotic songs, union songs are songs with a message. Tens of thousands of such ballads, anthems, and ditties have been composed by American union members. Put together, they would tell the history of the American labor movement.”--Pete Seeger, liner notes to The Original Talking Union & Other Union Songs.
Songs of the labor movement celebrate victories and mourn losses; protest long hours, low wages, and unsafe workplaces; document strikes (and the often violent measures taken to suppress them); memorialize union heroes, heroines, and martyrs; lampoon bosses; educate and inspire. Taken together these songs make up a rich cultural heritage that can empower working people as they fight to improve the conditions of their lives through organization.
Within the lyrics of these songs the history of past labor struggles is preserved – what songwriter Utah Phillips called “the long memory.” Some songs shine a light on the working conditions faced by current and previous generations of workers, hardships and injustices that inspired them to organize – for example, sharecropper John Handcox’s “There is Mean Things Happening in This Land,” Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” and Sweet Honey in the Rock’s “More Than a Paycheck.” Others document specific strikes and other incidents in labor history, keeping alive memories that otherwise might disappear from our shared cultural life: “Sit Down” from the crucial General Motors Strike of 1936-37, and Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” are two examples. Finally, a labor song can illuminate the way the reigning economic and social system leads to unjust relationships of wealth and power, as in the Wobbly hymn-parody “The Preacher and the Slave” (aka “Pie in the Sky”). Or it can serve as a kind of how-to manual for organizing, like the Almanac Singers’ “Talking Union,” which ends with the following sage advice: …if you don't let red-baiting break you up, And if you don't let stoolpigeons break you up, And if you don't let vigilantes break you up, And if you don't let race hatred break you up, You'll win. What I mean, take it easy, but take it!