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 a singing union and from the earliest strikes
and job actions after the union’s founding in 1905 music was a
part of meeting, rallies, marches, and picket lines. Nowhere was this truer than in the Pacific Northwest where 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 had become 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.
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.
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 had 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.
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 ‘20’s 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.
Utah
Phillips gathered both touring and
Chicago-based member 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 Rosemount, and Salvatore
Solerno with an introduction by Tom Morello, the Wobbly rocker of Rage Against the Machine and
Audioslave, and a posthumous afterward by
Utah Phillips.
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