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Book Review
Revolutionary Songs:
Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People
Compiled by Alan Lomax, notes on the songs by Woody Guthrie, music edited with a new afterword by Pete Seeger, forward by John Steinbeck, publisher’s foreword by Irwin Silber, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1999, 373 pp., Photos, Index, $19.95, paper.
Reviewed by Charles Walker
This book is about the hard times of the Great Depression (1929-1939). But more importantly the book itself is a piece of the Great Depression; like a rent-party flier, a box of relief groceries, a picket sign, or a CIO local union charter. Most of its nearly 200 songs (with music transcriptions) came to life during the hardscrabble 1930’s, when economic terror devastated daily life. The Depression–era songs make tangible the struggle and determination of working class folks to survive—and survive with their self-respect in one piece. Imagine clinging to self worth with all your might, while contending with, “Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat.” Get uppity and you’d find that, “You’re Bound to get Lousy in the Lousy Old Jail.” But you do get uppity, lay down your tools and join “The Fisher Strike.” Or if you’re a cotton farmer and find the merchants in the way, you just “Roll the Union On.” As a newly organized worker you take pride in seeing that “The CIO is Bigger Than It Used To Be.” And you tell others they’d “Better Go Down and Jine the Union.”
There are some Wobbly tunes included that I first heard when I was barely into my teens, still in junior high. I heard them at a free speech site perched on a pier that pointed across the Pacific Ocean. The city of Long Beach formally called the spot with its covered speaker’s stand and gray wooden benches the “University By the Sea.” But to everyone else it was the “Spit and Argue Club.” I don’t recall any spitting, but there was plenty of arguing to arouse or amuse the hundreds that gathered for the tuition-free lectures and lessons. It seemed that every religious and secular ideology, every harebrained notion or cockeyed opinion was on display; if not one afternoon, then another. And of course, there were the songs, especially the Wobbly songs. Oh how those Wobblies seemed to love to torment the assorted “Bible punchers” by singing about longhaired preachers promising “pie-in-the-sky when you die. (That’s a lie!).”
This collection of folk poetry—much of it laced with pithy insights, street smarts and cautionary experiences—is a gem. There are chain gang songs, boll weevil songs, dust bowl songs, picket line songs, and songs that laugh and moan. But there’s much more, for the book has a lot of talk not only by Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, but also about “just plain old Woody.” John Steinbeck wrote, “Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings.” Alan Lomax remembered, “He was a person of genius, as productive and unpredictable in his own idiom as Picasso is in his.”
And the volume contains an autobiographical sketch by Guthrie that he supplements as he comments on most of the songs. His remarks are a bit of folk poetry, too. For example, referring to a 1937 song written by an autoworkers women’s auxiliary about the sit-in battles, Guthrie wrote, “Goody Goody was a love song to start with, but its purty hard to love at a high speed when you’re hungry. Real honest to goodness love, though, grows faster and produces a better stalk in a fight for bread and butter than at a dance, or when you’re curled up with a good book. As I recollect, it was a fair tune when it come out first, but it was only a little seed then. Here it is full-grown, full-blossomed and loaded down with real fruit.”
The hired thugs ran like a striped ass zebra
“Come On Friends and Let’s Go Down” is preceded by Guthrie recalling, “Sara told me she sung this song to the folks around town and they all got up and walked with her down to the railroad tracks that run down to the mine. The hired thugs and deputies and scabs come down the tracks after a little bit, and when they heard the workers a singing this song, the thugs, deputies, guards, and the whole dam litter turned tail and run like a striped ass zebra.” Both of these statements feel like they could be set to a melody.
This wonderful book almost never saw the light of day. Started near the end of the 1930’s, the compilation was put on a shelf after Pearl Harbor. In 1961, Lomax revived the project using notes, because the original manuscript was lost. Then a carbon copy turned up. Lomax and others finally got the collection published in 1967.
The present edition contains everything found in the 1967 edition, including photos by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn and the like. Plus the new edition has an epilogue by Pete Seeger. He says, in part, “If there is a human race still here in two hundred years, music is one of the things that will save us. Future songwriters can learn from the honesty, the courage, the simplicity, the frankness of these hard hitting songs. Not just songwriters. We can all learn.”
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