Union History - Tumblr Posts
Introduction
hi! american folk revival is my special interest and i wanted to make a blog dedicated to it. I'm mainly going to talk about american folk music between the years 1940-1979, and im mainly going to talk about music that addressed social injustices or was influential in the civil rights movement or if it was good old union music.
I LOVE DOING RESEARCH ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF FOLK SONGS OR COUNTRY SONGS!! it is like enrichment to me and i say yippee! whenever anyone asks about it, so you should ask me about the origins of folk/country/blues songs 😁 i will make a post about it
genres you can expect to see
-blues
-jazz
-bluegrass
-soul
-gospel
-old country
-traditional folk
-folk
resources
folk history archive list
Roud Folk song index
Smithsonian folkways
Spotify master playlist
YouTube master playlist
ok!! thanks for reading!!
my plan is to post aesthetic pictures of Bob dylan for fellow queers to reblog to lure them into following my blog, where they will have to learn the history of folk music as a a traditional tool for protest and labor and the many leftist origins of folk and the ways this is often overlooked and erased especially when it comes to black artists
oh hey, unrelated, check out this cool song by paul robeson in 1924 :)
or this rendition of Strange Fruit by Josh White (1964)
or this song by Odetta in 1957
or this song by lead belly in 1936
or this Gospel song by the Freedom Singers in 1961
or this song 1961
or this song by Nina Simone in 1965
"Born to Win By Woody Guthrie" by Ricardo Levins Morales / Northland Poster Collective 1979
people's songs newsletter 1947-8
A singing union is a winning union
Song of the day
(do you want the history of your favorite folk song? dm me or submit an ask, and I'll do a full rundown like here)
"Bread and Roses"
Judy Collins, 1976
since its labor day i thought we could talk about some good ol' IWW labor history
in 1911, Helen Todd gave a speech about women's suffrage and ended it
"Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice."
James Oppenheim, inspired by this speech, created the poem "Bread and Roses" in 1911, whose words would later become the lyrics for the judy collins song.
in 1912, 30,000 immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike due to poor working conditions and poor pay. this strike was led by the International Workers of the World and was comprised mostly of women. the phrase "bread and roses" was all over signs and became the slogan of the strike, with it even being called the "Bread and Roses Strike". like many strikes in the USA it was absolutely brutal for the strikers, and several people died, but they were able to win some of their demands.
in 1970, the James Oppenheim poem was put to music by mimi fariña, and then covered by judy collins. my favorite cover is by Utah Phillips in 1983 , where he explains the history of the textile strike and the meaning of the slogan
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses 🌹
Song of the day
(do you want the history of your favorite folk song? dm me or submit an ask and I'll do a full rundown)
"This Land Is Your Land" Woody Guthrie, 1940
the melody is originally based on "When the World's on Fire" by the Carter family, 1933, which was based on the older song and melody "What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire" by the Birmingham Jubilee Singers, 1928
woody Guthrie's song was written in response to the song "God Bless America" by Irving Berlin in 1938 (the original version was written in 1918) and performed by Kate Smith. He was tired of hearing it on the radio.
Like many of Woody's songs, "This Land is Your Land" is explicitly pro-worker and anti-exploitation. You could even argue that it's explicitly anti-private property. As this song got sanded down for the mainstream, its more radical themes and messages were somewhat forgotten, and it became a general patriotic song for children and adults to enjoy, the very thing that Guthrie sought to criticize in the first place.
there are many covers of this song for many different countries, but my favorite version is the live one by Pete Seeger performed in 1976, where he talks about its history as a socialist song and invites the audience to sing along with him.
Song of the Day
do you want to know the history of a folk song? submit an ask or dm me and I'll cover it
"Great Historical Bum" Odetta, 1960
Originally written in 1941 by Woody Guthrie for his Columbia River Song collection. That time when Woody Guthrie (a socialist) was commissioned by the US federal government (at the recommendation of Alan Lomax. to write folk songs in support of the Coulee Dam in 1941. Woody Guthrie was in poverty at the time and was happy to finally have a job. During the month he traveled through Oregon and wrote a song every day, including "Pastures of Plenty" and "Roll on Columbia".
the lyrics in these songs, including this one, include radical themes like working-class rights, unions, anti-fascism, and anti-capitalism. because of this and because Woody Guthrie was an anti-capitalist, the songs and the documentary they were made for were ordered destroyed by the Eisenhower administration. luckily the recordings were saved by a proletarian comrade: a former employee of the Bonneville Power Administration, who decided to keep a copy of the film and recordings.
this song may also be inspired by another traditional song recorded in 1928 by Harry McClintock , but I'm not sure.
I like this cover by Odetta quite a bit. I think she does the original one justice.
Paul Schumach. Cesar Chavez, Pete Seeger in Washington DC. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University 1974
Pete Seeger and Cesar Chavez in DC, 1974