Woody at 100 – “See what your greed for money has done.”
We started our centennial celebration week with Woody Guthrie by listening to his “Philadelphia Lawyer”, a classic Country and Western song that he set to the tune of an older murder ballad. But, despite (or more accurately because of) the murdered lawyer, that song was meant to be funny. Usually though when Woody dealt with death in one of his songs, the stakes were higher. We’ll explore that today particularly, and later this week in two more posts – one on the personal side and one decidedly political.
As in many traditional murder ballads like “Omie Wise“, murder in most of Woody’s songs is both cautionary and a moral signpost. Unlike “Omie Wise”, murder for Woody usually points beyond personal safety and morality. While “Philadelphia Lawyer” is famous, it’s atypical – usually when killing is done in one of Woody’s songs, the context is a well-defined sense of political, economic, and social justice. And we can see that context quite sharply and expertly drawn in Woody’s songs about miners.
Struggle
According to his liner notes for the re-released Struggle, Moses Asch put out a six song album with that title in 1946. Woody wanted to help document the great struggle of working people and the Labor Movement in America, and Asch as always was down with that! Now, Asch of course over the years recorded many more than six of Woody’s songs dealing with the theme. So in 1976, in honor of the Bicentennial and to continue to realize the vision of creating a ‘people’s history in song’, Asch released an expanded version of Struggle. (Here is Smithsonian-Folkways’ re-re-release from 1992 on Spotify.)
Eight of the twelve songs on that expanded album could be used to illustrate the way Woody treats death in his music, and four tracks deal explicitly with miner’s lives and struggles. Two of these four were written after the fact, based on a primary source account of the murder of union strikers and their families. They are among Woody’s most powerful ballads. While we often stretch to explore the edges of the genre, in this case I believe these two songs sit squarely within the murder ballad tradition. They are our focus today.
“I hung my head and cried…”
Woody’s words regarding “Ludlow Massacre” and “1913 Massacre” are included in the liner notes, but I’ll put them here before each track because they are a must read…
“I made up these like I was there on the spot, the day, and the night that it happened. This is the best way to make up a song like this. When you read the life work of Mother Ella Reeves Bloor “We Are Many” you will see this story of the Ludlow Massacre, you will be there, you will live it. Ludlow Massacre was one of the hundreds of battles fought to build trade unions. I want to sing a song to show our soldiers that Ludlow Massacres must not ever come back to us to kill 13 children and a pregnant woman, just to force you to work for cheap wages.”
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 to the history of labor relations and law in America. But rarely do we study it in our schools, perhaps because the spectre of armed workers clashing with armies of the state is yet too much for Americans to take. This Wikipedia link is a good start, though there’s plenty more depth to the story than that. (I wonder if we might all be a bit less vitriolic today in our politics if, as Woody hoped, we actually went back and studied just how out of balance things were 100 years ago.)
Anyway, Woody wasn’t primarily after that intellectual understanding. He wanted you to feel it in your gut – and if you follow the story in this ballad and hear the passion in his voice (particularly in that last line), you will.
Well, maybe a few historians will keep the whole story alive thanks to Woody…
“See what your greed for money has done.”
“1913 Massacre” is one of Woody’s hardest hitting songs. It tells the story of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan on Christmas Eve, 1913. Strange – ‘Disaster’ makes it sound like it was an accident doesn’t it? But, based on Mother Bloor’s account, Woody calls it how the miners saw it, as a ‘massacre’; and the evidence suggests they were right.
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| Italian Hall was torn down in 1984. The original arch of the main door remains. |
The details are still disputed, some even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – you can start with the Wikipedia article if you’re interested, but this Facebook ‘resource center’ is well-researched and engaging.
The second floor of Italian Hall was crowded with striking copper miners and their families having a Christmas party. Eight eyewitnesses swore under oath that the man who yelled “fire” in the room and caused a stampede that killed over 70 people (mostly children) wore the emblem of the local anti-union “Citizen’s Alliance”, a group funded by the mine owners.
“1913 Massacre” is then, essentially, a mass murder ballad. Here is Woody’s explanation.
“Copper Miner Christmas – also from the life of Mother Bloor is another incident they lived through. Copper miners made less than a dollar a day. They had a Christmas Ball at Calumet, Michigan to raise money for strikers and union families. Copper boss thugs yelled ‘fire’ in the door and seventy-three children smothered to death on the stairs.”
People around the world can relate to what Woody was singing. China admits to well over 2,000 deaths in its coal mines annually, and many believe the number is much higher. In many places, technologies that could be applied to make the mines safer are simply deemed too expensive. Even in the United States, where unions have helped win some of the best protections and regulations in the world, man-made ‘disasters’ still happen. The relatives waiting at the gate at any mine have something horrible in common.
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| June 2010 – Relatives of a Columbian coal miner killed in an explosion mourn by his body. |
But “Ludlow Massacre” and “1913 Massacre” go deeper. They are true political murder ballads. The horror one feels at realizing what heartless men did to other men, women, and particularly children is profound. It may not feel as purely personal as with “Down in the Willow Garden“, or feel as terrifyingly senseless as with “Deep Red Bells“. But we can’t write it off as the inevitable result of war, as in “Hiram Hubbard“. These people, mine owners and their hired thugs, made a *conscious choice* to murder. It was not their duty; it was their pleasure. They saw union men, women, and children as little more than draft animals – and they were more than willing to resort to violence to keep the brutes in line.
A union man or woman was not a working person trying to make a better life – s/he was a ‘red’, a ‘socialist’, a ‘communist’, and deserving of whatever s/he got.
So study up on Woody’s lessons. Seems to me that we’ve got another test coming soon.
(Have I just revealed my political leanings? Oh, darn… It’s impossible to listen to Woody and not at least know which side you’re on when you’re done.)