Warbling Wobblies Are a Singing Union With the Little Red Songbooks

                             

A vintage edition of the IWW Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent a/k/a The Little Red Songbook.  This version featured a cover illustration by Ralph Chaplin based on the poster for the Patterson Pageant in 1913.

There have been at least 38 editions of the working people’s hymnal popularly known as the Little Red Songbook since it appeared in 1909.  Here is the story of those remarkable little books.

The Wobblies—members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—were always part of a singing union.  From the earliest strikes and job actions after the union’s founding in 1905 music was a part of meetings, rallies, marches, and picket lines.  Nowhere was this truer than in the Pacific Northwest for early organizing drives among lumber workers who were often called timber beasts because of their ragged appearance and often near starving conditions. 

Unable to effectively get to remote logging camps, IWW organizers relied on street meetings in cities like Spokane, Washington to protest the job shark hiring agencies that dispatched men to the camps collecting fees from the ax men and employers alike.  They found that songs helped attract crowds for the union’s soapbox orators. When Salvation Army Bands were often sent to drown out the meetings workers would sing the old hymns with new words.

The Spokane local issued a song card featuring four selections in 1906.  The sold for a penny, but most were probably handed out for free at the street meeting.  The card featured already familiar labor songs and one original— Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  McClintock was a former Texas cowboy, harvest worker, and hobo who became a lumber worker while also working as a musician in saloons.  The song was originally written in the 1890’s but was popular with all sorts of migratory workers.  McClintock also penned another popular Hobo song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

                                                A rare and battered copy of the Songbook's first edition published by the Spokane, Washington IWW local.

The song cards were so successful that the local decided to assemble and sell a small songbook designed to easily fit into a shirt pocket.  It sold for 10¢, not an insignificant sum in those days when a dime could generally buy a meal at Skid Road diners, but not a prohibitive one.  The first edition did not have the now familiar red cover but did have red lettering.  The songbook hit the streets in January of 1909 and was an immediate success. The book’s official title was a mouthful—Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops – Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Subsequent editions shortened that to Songs of the Workers and/or Songs of the IWW to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Three editions were printed in Spokane over the next three years and were bound in heavy red stock, giving it the enduring nickname, The Little Red Song Book.  But that title appeared on only two of the subsequent 38 official editions.

Each new songbook added new songs like the labor standards The Red Flag sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum, the global Socialist anthem The Internationale, and the easily adapted Civil War song Hold the Fort.

When the Spokane local was under siege during aftermath the 1909 Free Speech Fight, issuing and printing new editions shifted to Seattle.  It was in an early Seattle edition that Joe Hill’s song The Preacher and the Slave was published in 1911.  Mac McClintock claimed to be the first to sing it at a street meeting because Hill was too shy to perform publicly.  

                                    

                                                            Carlos Cortez's linocut poster tribute Wobbly bard and martyr Joe Hill.

Joel Hägglund a/k/a Joseph Hillstrom and Joe Hill was a young Swedish-born itinerate worker who had been involved with the IWW for a few years.  Several of his songs were added to editions of the Songbook including The Tramp, Stung Right, Where the River Frazier Flows, There is Power in a Union, Mr. Block, and Casey Jones Union Scab all of which have become labor standards.  Hill was famously framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah.  While being held he was inspired by young IWW orator Elizabeth Gurly Flynn who worked tirelessly on his defense committee and who visited him in jail to write The Rebel Girl.

After Hill’s execution by firing squad on November 19, 1915 his poem Final Will was included in all subsequent editions of the Songbook.  At least two later versions of the book were officially named Joe Hill Memorial Edition, including one issued by the Cleveland Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 in the early 1950’s.  By popular demand later editions have also included I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson which was popularized by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs’ long ballad Joe Hill.

Industrial Worker editor Ralph Chaplin wrote the enduring labor anthem Solidarity Forever.

Other notable early additions to the Songbook included Dump the Bosses off Your Back by John Brill.  Industrial Worker editor and commercial artist Ralph Chaplin’s rousing Solidarity Forever was included in a 1916 edition and has become the leading labor anthem of all time.  Chaplin’s illustrations were also used on the covers of several editions.  The powerful We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years with words by an “Unknown Proletarian” and music by Rudolph Von Liebich appeared in 1919.

Somewhat surprisingly, a song closely associated with the IWW’s 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike did not make it into the Songbook until 1984 although it appeared in the union magazine Industrial Pioneer in 1946.  James Oppenheimer’s Bread and Roses was first published as a poem in the American Magazine in December of 1911 shortly before the strike.  The mostly women mill workers adopted Bread and Roses as their strike slogan.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Carolyn Kohlsatt adapted the song to the melody most Wobblies still sing, although an alternative tune by Mimi Fariña in 1976 is gaining popularity.  In the 1970’s the song became a Women’s Liberation anthem as much as a labor one, and it has even been included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.

Production of the Songbooks moved to IWW General Headquarters in Chicago and resumed after the great post-World War I Red Scare sent most Wobbly leaders, including Ralph Chaplin, to prison.  The ‘20s saw the appearance of another notable contributor, Matt Valentine Huhta, who signed is contributions T-Bone Slim including The Popular Wobbly, Mysteries Of A Hobo’s Life, and The Lumberjack’s Prayer.

Editions of the Songbook have also included labor songs from other sources notably Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid with an updated final verse by Nancy Katz, The Banks are Made of Marble by Lee Rice and popularized by the Almanac Singers with more contemporary lyrics added, Which Side are You On by Florence Resse, and the old British rouser The Black Leg Miner as sung by Billy Brag.

 

                                        The "double tall" 1995 36th edition featured music from around the world as well as old favorites an music for each song.

In 1995 the union issued an unusual “double tall” International Edition, one of only two editions to use the words Little Red Songbook on the cover.  In addition to most of the standard songs included more modern music and songs from around the world including songs in Spanish.  It also included for the first and only time the full musical notation of each song.

Wobblies have continued to add new songs and adapted old ones, especially with more gender inclusive language.  Bruce “Utah” Phillips was the union’s popular balladeer, philosopher, storyteller, and inveterate agitator who died much loved and mourned in 2008.  His contributions to the book included Larimer Street, Starlight on the Rails, and All Used Up.  He also introduced the music from the Songbook to whole new generations.  

Bruce "Utah" Phillips introduced the IWW and its songs to new generations.

Other newer contributors include Anne Feeney, Scabs and Whatever Happened to the Eight Hour Day; Kathleen Taylor, The LIP Song and Soul Stealers; Goddard Graves, Go I Will Send Thee; Leslie Fish, Babylon Updated and Freedom Road; Carlos Cortez, Outa Work Blues; Darryl Cheney, Where Are We Gonna Work When the Trees Are Gone and Who Bombed Judi Bari; and Tom Morello, Union Song.

Hell, even I made an appearance under the moniker The Irish Cowboy with a rock & roll picket line song Roll the Hours Back and The Dark and Dreary Slum Where I Was Born, a take-off on Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma Hills.

Rebel Voices was the realization of a long cherished dream to produce a "Little Red Record."

Utah Phillips gathered both touring and Chicago-based members of the IWW’s Entertainment Workers Industrial Union #630 for a concert performance at Holstein’s on Lincoln Avenue to record a long dreamed of “Little Red Record.”  Released under the title Rebel Voices in 1988 the record included performances by Phillips, Faith Petric, Fred Holstein, Bruce Brackney, Marion Wade, Bob Bovee, Jeff Cahill, Kathleen Taylor, J. B. Freeman, Robin Oye, Eric Glatz, and Mark Ross.  It is still available on CD or by Download.

Almost all of the songs included in the first 36 editions of the Songbook are included in The Big Red Songbook published by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

In 2007 noted folklorist Archie Green published The Big Red Songbook which included 250 songs culled from the various editions of the IWW songbook.  In 2016 a new edition was co-edited by Green, labor historian David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Solerno with an introduction by Tom Morello, the Wobbly rocker of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, and posthumous afterward by Utah Phillips.

 

It Was the Day Things Turned Up for a Battered Britain

 

Britain was a bleak place in the early '60s and young men like these faced dim prospects of unemployment and life on the Dole.

Looking back on it October 5, 1962 was an exceptionally good day for our cousins across the Pond.  And they really needed it.  Things had been going downhill there for a long time.  Two World Wars  killed off huge swaths of two generations.  London, and to a lesser extent, other cities were still trying to rise from the rubble of bombs dropped more than two decades before. 

British industrial infrastructure was largely ageing and obsolete.  The supremacy it once enjoyed was being challenged, largely by modern facilities and high levels of engineering from a Europe rebuilt on the American Marshall Plan dime—aid the prideful Brits had turned down.  Unemployment was high and seemingly permanent.  Intellectuals fretted over the effects of generational dependency on the dole.

Class resentments ran high in both directions.  British theater and cinema, once symbolized by the sophisticated drawing room comedies by the likes of Noel Coward, were now the province of the Angry Young Men and their, bitter, hopeless working class perspectives.

The Empire upon which once “the sun never set” was crumbling, its jewels—India and Pakistan—long gone and remaining possessions in Africa, Asia, and around the Caribbean either in open rebellion or restive.

But two events that by delightful happenstance occurred on the same day changed a lot of that.  Or at least they energized British culture and opened the way for a decade of cultural flowering when swinging, Mod London once again seemed the center of the universe and the world was spending money on British music, fashion, design, and cinema.

Both events, somewhat ironically, owed a lot to the very Americans who had replaced them as the undisputed power of the world.  Now, if they could not regain past glory entirely, they could, in a phrase much used later in the decade, at least be the new Greeks to the new Roman Empire.

Ian Fleming's spy adventures with their lurid pulp covers were a popular sensation in Britain.  They and books  like them would be the later inspiration for the song Paperback Writer.  In this printing of the book issued when tabloid gossip about casting James Bond for the movie, a bottom banner was added to the original illustration.  Note the more than casual resemblance of the spy to David Niven, then mentioned as one of the candidates for the role.

Dr. No, the first of what would go on to be a fabulously successful film franchise, opened in London on October 5, 1962 at the Pavilion Theater.  The film was based on a spy novel by Ian Fleming, himself a former World War II secret agent.  James Bond was a popular paperback hero in the UK and in Europe but was relatively unknown in the U.S.

While nominally a British production of Eon Productions, it was essentially brought to the screen by a partnership of Canadian Harry Saltzman and hustling American entrepreneur Albert R. Broccoli, better known as Cubby.  Saltzman had obtained the rights to Dr. No, the second book in the Bond series, while Broccoli had obtained rights to the series from Fleming.  When Saltzman refused to sell out to Broccoli, a production partnership was formed that included Eon Productions and a holding company, Danjaq, LLC, which owned the copyrights, trademarks, and marketing licensing for the series. The partnership endured through several films and ended amid acrimony and complicated lawsuits when a bitter Saltzman was forced to sell his half of Dajaq to United Artists, the film’s distributor.  That left Broccoli, and later his family heirs, in complete control of the franchise.

Dr. No was shot on a relatively low $1 million budget mostly at England’s Pinewood Studios with extensive location shooting in the Bahamas and elsewhere.  The script largely by Richard Maibaum took extensive liberties with Fleming’s novel and injected considerable wry humor, mostly as a way of softening the violence and hyper-sexuality that the producers feared would make it a target of the still active American film censors.

Casting the critical lead was a problem.  Everyone thought that the obvious choice for Bond was the suave Cary Grant.  And Grant was interested in doing the part.  But he would only commit to one film and Broccoli already envisioned a long running series.  David Niven was considered but thought to be too old.  Niven ended up playing one of several Bonds in the spoof film Casino Royal—Fleming had earlier sold the rights to his first Bond book separately.  Fleming was said to be pushing Richard Todd.  Patrick McGoohan, who already had success as a spy in the British television series Danger Man, was also in the running.

In the end Broccoli settled on Sean Connery, a scruffy, working class Scott personally totally unfamiliar with the high rolling, tuxedo clad world of the Bond novels but who exuded masculine energy and charismatic charm.  Connery’s only major film role had been as a cheerful Irish peasant in Disney’s fantasy, Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Director Terrance Young put Connery through a quick introduction to Bond’s world and made sure he was well tailored and coiffed.

Hyper masculine Sean Connery and hot babes like Ursula Andress in a bikini instantly made James Bond a bankable film franchise and a cultural icon.

The film introduced all of the elements that would become hallmarks of the franchise—the stylized opening sequence to a pop power ballad, Bond as the suave ruler of the casino and irresistible seducer of women, the technical gadgets, and maybe above all the Bond Girls. Ursula Andress was the first, emerging from the sea in a Bikini with a knife at her belt.

Dr. No and subsequent Bond films made England sexy and chic all over again. Meanwhile four other scruffy young men made their recording debut the same day.

Love Me Do, the first single from a quartet that was setting the dingy clubs of Liverpool afire, was released by EMI on October 5, 1962.  The B side was P.S. I Love You.

The Beatles' first U.K release in its original sleeve.  Parlophone was a less prestigious label for recording giant EMI.

As auspicious as it seems now, the first release by the Beatles did not attract quite so much attention as the premier of Dr. No.  But it was successful, reaching #17 on the British charts and launching the recording career of the band with a solid hit.  The same recording was re-released in England two years later when the Lads were top stars and went to #4.  Its 1964 release in the United States became one of the bands many #1 hits.

The A side was written mostly by Paul McCartney when he was about 16 years old.  By that time, he already had an agreement with John Lennon to share credit on all songs.  Typically, one or another of them would work something up and they would try it out.  The other one would often add elements, work on lyrics, or arrange it for the band.  Only occasionally would they, at this point sit down together to write.  But the process worked well and sometimes if the original pages scrawled in school notebooks were lost, even the boys had a hard time remembering who contributed what.

In this case John contributed the middle eight bars when the key and tempo shift.  He also worked out a bluesy mouth harp part.  American rock & roll was their inspiration.  In this case they drew on the Everly Brothers for the tight two-part harmonies that were becoming a trademark of the developing band.  John frankly credited the harmonica riffs to folk bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee—the same performers who were influencing young Bobby Zimmermann about the same time.

On the flip side, P.S. I Love You was penned exclusively by Paul a few years later while the band was playing in Hamburg.  Neither Lennon nor McCartney could recall any contribution by John.  And Paul later denied rumors that it was written for a German girlfriend.  Instead, he wanted to use a letter as a hook and do a song about separated love similar to The Shirelles’ big hit earlier in 1962 Solider Boy.

Paul wanted P.S. I Love You to be saved for later release as an A side, but was told that there were other songs that had used the same title and that the label would only consider it for a B side and later inclusion in an album.

Both sides were cut at EMI London Abby Road Studios in September sessions with George Martin producing.

The Beatles in 1963.  Ringo Starr had just been added to the band and barely made their first hit recording.  The Lads' haircuts and fashion helped establish the Mod look which became the lucrative symbol for swinging London.

The sessions came as the band was in turmoil.  Martin did not think long time Beatles drummer Pete Best was good enough for recording.  He suggested bringing in a studio drummer as replacement.  But Lennon and McCartney had already fired Best and were bringing on journeyman band drummer Ringo Starr.  Love Me Do was actually recorded three times.  The first with Best in his last session with the band in a demo made in June, then with Ringo behind the drum kit, and finally with studio musician Andy White.   Martin was also unimpressed with Ringo’s performance.  In the final session Ringo was reduced to playing tambourine to White’s sticks.

In the end Martin must have decided that Ringo was good enough after all because that was the take put on the final release.  White’s version turned up later in albums released in both Britain and the US.

That final recording session with White was used for P.S. I Love You, this time with Ringo playing the maracas.

Over the next year, however, the Beatles appeared on several BBC programs both live and taped in  studios.  In each case Ring did the drumming on both numbers, as he did at the band’s live shows.  He was quickly working his way into the heart of the band with unflashy, but rock-solid drumming.

Within a year the Beatles scored multiple hits on the British charts, seemingly climbing higher with each new 45 issued.  They were playing to sellout crowds of screaming female fans.  The records did just as well in Europe.  The band was well on its way to international stardom.  The lads bowl cut hairdos, collarless suit coats, and pointed toe ankle boots set fashion trends. Beatlmania was well on its way by the time the boys arrived in New York to introduce themselves to American audiences in late 1963.

By the middle of the decade tax revenue from Beatles recordings, films and associated merchandise and memorabilia was pouring into the Exchequer.  And the Beatles were just the tip of the spear.  It turned out that there were more young bands inspired by American blues and rock and roll ready to break out as well.  In the States the British Invasion nearly blew America rockers out of the water. 

The Carnaby Street look set fashion around the world and helped fuel a British cultural and economic comeback.

The youth culture represented by the Beatles would inspire the Mods, as the Rolling Stones would their motorcycle-riding rivals the Rockers.  Both would contribute a new British sense of style.  Britain, famous for tweeds and shapeless woolens, and a long-mocked symbol of frumpiness was soon the center of the fashion world as the Carnaby Street look swept the world.

And the big come back owes a lot to what happened on October 5, 1962.

The Translator of the First English Bible in Print Faced a Rocky Road

 

                                 Miles Coverdale, maker of Bibles.

On this day in 1535 the first complete printed English translation of the Bible into was published.  Because its translator, Miles Coverdale was on the lam in Europe for some years due to religious turmoil at home, the book was printed on the Continent.  For many years the exact printer and his location were in dispute but has fairly recently been established to be Merten de Keyser in Antwerp.  The book was evidently financed by leading Low Countries Reformers.

Coverdale himself was born in Yorkshire around 1488.  He was ordained a priest in Norwich, a hotbed of religious fervor.  In 1514 he joined the scholarly convent of Austin friars at Cambridge where he was also allowed to pursue his studies at the University.  He was a supporter of Prior Robert Barnes who was sympathetic to the Reformation on the continent.  Barnes was tried for heresy in 1526, and Coverdale was active in his defense.

He left the convent to resume preaching shortly thereafter but was forced to flee the country in as pressure mounted against dissenters in the English Church.  Whether he had already begun his work on a Bible translation is unknown.  But once in Europe, where making the Word of God available in the languages of the people was considered essential to Reform, he was undoubtedly encouraged and financed in his efforts. 

 

                                       

                                                     The title page of the Coverdale Bible.

The trouble for Coverdale was that although scholarly by bent, he was far from well-equipped to undertake such a massive translation.  Although proficient in Latin, he was barely competent in Greek and knew only rudimentary Hebrew.  That meant that he had to rely on either Latin texts or other translations into modern language instead of working from near original material.  He claimed to have consulted “five soundry interpreters” in Latin, English and German as source texts.

His main sources were German texts including Luther’s Bible and the Swiss-German version Zürich Bible of Zwingli.  That meant he was working from sources several times removed from original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts.

In fact, Coverdale also drew heavily on both the Latin Vulgate, a more recent translation from the Greek made possible by the research of Erasmus and the early Humanists, and on the translation of the New Testament and a handful of Old Testament books into English by William Tyndale which was printed in 1525. 

                                  

                                                 John Wycliffe, a suppressed earlier translator, in his study.

He did not claim to have used the infamous Wycliffe’s Bible, translated into Middle English way back around 1390.  That had circulated only hand to hand in manuscript and had resulted in the execution of several churchmen over a number of decades who possessed or passed it along.

But Coverdale helped himself to big chunks, barely disguised from Tyndale.  Tyndale himself ran afoul of the Counter Reformation and was executed by strangulation as a heretic in 1536, the year after Coverdale’s version first appeared.

                    

                                   Henry VIII, painted here in 1431, sponsored Coverdale's two Bible translations before turning on him.

Obviously, things were getting dangerous in Europe for Bible translators.  On the other hand, things were becoming more congenial back home in England.

Coverdale managed to dash back to Cambridge in 1531 to finish his bachelor’s degree at the University and managed to make it back to Antwerp with his head still attached to his body.  Then in 1534 Henry VIII, the former Defender of the Faith—Catholicism—broke with the Roman Church over certain domestic matters and established a new national Church with himself at its head.

Originally, it was expected that the new Church would simply continue Catholic practice and usage intact.  But almost from the beginning Reformers sought to make the church over in the manner of the Lutherans and other Protestants.  When Henry decided to break up the Monasteries and appropriate their lands and wealth for the Crown, he found more reason than ever to be sympathetic to that trend.

Coverdale arrived back in England to find himself a favorite of the King in 1539.  His Bible was printed for the first time in the country in folio and quarter-folio editions, carried the Royal license and was therefore the first officially approved Bible translation in English. 

For better or worse Coverdale's fortunes were linked to his patron, Thomas Cromwell who fell from Henry VIII's favor.

He was already editing yet another new version of the Bible known as the Great Book. This version drew even more strongly on Tyndale than his first effort under the sponsorship of Thomas Cromwell, the king’s first minister. Henry was so enthusiastic in fact that he ordered every parish in England to procure a copy and keep chained but publicly available in every chapel so the any literate person would have direct access to the Scripture in the vernacular.

Despite the success of the newer version, Coverdale’s first version continued to be printed in new editions through 1553.

But the favor of the mercurial monarch was a hard thing to hold.  In 1440 Coverdale’s friend and main sponsor at court, Thomas Cromwelllost his head. Cromwell was also the leading voice for remaking the Church of England along Protestant lines.  With the balance of power swinging back to the Anglo-Catholic party, Coverdale had to return to Europe for this own safety.

He lived in impoverished exile in the German states.  From 1543 to 1547 he was a pastor and schoolmaster at Bergzabern in the Palatinate Electorate. 

Winds of change blew fortunate for Coverdale when Henry’s son Edward VI assumed the throne.  He was made personal chaplain to the boy king and then appointed Bishop of Exeter in 1653.

 

Coverdale prospered briefly as chaplain to the Boy King Edward VI and as Bishop of Exeter.  The young king's heir, his very Catholic sister Mary, was not amused.

When Henry’s daughter Mary, who remained a good Catholic, assumed the throne in 1657, Coverdale was ousted from his See and once again went into exile.  For the next several years he bounced around Europe.

It was safe to return again 1654 but he was unable to reclaim his Bishopric.  He served a modest parish as Rector of St. Magnus’s, near London Bridge and increasingly drawn to Puritanism.  He died, however, still in the good graces of the Church of England.

The Anglican Church still has a soft spot in its heart for the old maker of Bibles.  It still uses his translation of the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer.

Want to know what Coverdale’s work sounded like?  First here is the familiar VIII Psalm as he rendered it in The Coverdale Bible:

 

The Lord is my shepherde, I can wante nothinge. He fedeth me in a grene pasture, ād ledeth me to a fresh water. He quickeneth my soule, & bringeth me forth in the waye of rightuousnes for his names sake. Though I shulde walke now in the valley of the shadowe of death, yet I feare no euell, for thou art with me: thy staffe & thy shepehoke cōforte me. Thou preparest a table before me agaynst mine enemies: thou anoyntest my heade with oyle, & fyllest my cuppe full. Oh let thy louynge kyndnes & mercy folowe me all the dayes off my life, that I maye dwell in the house off the LORD for euer.

And here it is in the Book of Common Prayer Psalter:

The Lord is my shepherd therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert my soul and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness, for his Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that trouble me thou hast anointed my head with oil, and my cup shall be full. But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Not yet the majestic cadences of the King James Version but getting there.