Songs of Solidarity, Songs of Struggle
A Brief Introduction to Songs of Civil Rights and Labor Movements
Thanks for taking the time to check out this newsletter. Things are hopping here! Before I dive into detailing this episode, a request to follow the podcast wherever you like (Apple, TuneIn, Google, Spotify etc.), and where possible, to give it a top rating and a review. That, as well as telling someone in person about this series, are two of the easiest and quickest ways to help us grow and continue this work, and to help music artists profiled here flourish as well.
A couple of weeks ago, I could not have predicted that I would come upon another way of crafting a Southern Songs and Stories podcast in this fashion. Regular or even casual listeners will be familiar with the go-to format of documentary style profiles of and interviews with music artists in this series; those of you who listen a lot will probably be familiar with some of the less traveled paths we have taken here as well, which include a remembrance for a friend and colleague who passed away unexpectedly, a survey of how western NC folks in the music business were coping in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, as well as an old school, comedic Christmas radio drama, among others. Add to that list this episode, which is a live podcast, at least for part of it. And we are talking about a subject that is incredibly deep and wide, a subject which could easily fill a year’s worth of episodes. It is a subject that I will revisit again in more depth in coming months — perhaps not here, but at least in person. More on that in the following transcript of the podcast itself, which I hope you enjoy as much as I did in making it.
Examining several anthems of the labor and civil rights movements, excerpting from and delving deeper into a recent live presentation
[“Gastonia Gallop” by David McCarn, from Gastonia Gallop: Cotton Mill Songs and Hillbilly Blues, continuing as bed]
Wherever bombs drop and landmines explode, you can witness what is called “trümmerflora", which translates to "rubble plants" or "rubble flowers". For urban areas that have suffered war, the bomb blasts plow everything randomly into the earth below while blasting out whatever was in the soil. The earth as a rule typically contains seeds that remain dormant for years; these seeds can grow in the new rubble in a process known as first succession ecology. It is a phenomenon born of trauma and which yields to a ragged but ultimately beautiful irony.
The seeds of this episode were planted in similar fashion; the broader origin for this podcast is in the explosions, both literal and metaphorical, of America’s civil rights and labor rights conflicts in particular, and social movements in general. The more specific catalyst for getting here is found in our 2024 episode titled “When Praise and Worship Is Also a Really Good Time: Trombone Shout Bands”, which focuses on the brass, or shout band subgenre of gospel music. Historian Tom Hanchett was central to that episode, and it was Tom who recommended me to Queens University in Charlotte for a presentation to their Senior Scholars series.
“Be careful what you wish for” is a phrase that comes to mind now. I had been dreaming up a live taping of this podcast for some time, when suddenly I got an unexpected invitation to do that -- in a way. To everyone present, this podcast was likely an afterthought, if a thought to begin with, because what I presented stood on its own: a 45 minute overview with music excerpts, conceived and intended primarily for them, the live audience, with a Q&A to round out the hour.
This episode presents the podcast in a new way, excerpting two parts of that original talk, with additional commentary, music, and new avenues of exploration for the topic, which is essentially the impact from music born of social movements, especially as it relates to radio. It was a lot. But the talk went well enough, and I got to catch up with two former guests of the podcast along the way. More on that later, after we hear from my time at Queens, a talk ranging from hillbilly music from a 1930s cotton mill man whose instrumental “Gastonia Gallop” is playing now, to a 1960s folk anthem from a then young, complete unknown, and more. I am your host Joe Kendrick, welcoming you to “Songs of Solidarity, Songs of Struggle” on Southern Songs and Stories.
[house music and intro from Steve Lauer from PRMC 1-17-25, excerpt]
To give you a better idea of how I came to unexpectedly veer away from my usual format of documentary style essays about and interviews with music artists, and quickly venture into yet another divergent style of podcast, which we hinted at just now with that bit of introduction, let’s back up a bit. On a cold January weekend, this email pops up, inviting me to talk about “how music can be and has been used in a broader, societal context, especially in social movements” on that coming Friday, going on to say that this talk is ahead of a three day engagement at a retreat in the high country of NC in the spring, presenting about the same topic.
And as you can guess I said yes, and perhaps it won’t come as a surprise either that afterward I almost instantly panicked at the thought of approaching this unimaginably wide and deep subject. But, that retreat at the 1000 acre place in the spring, the stirrings of a thought about doing this very podcast, the whispers of hubris naming a ready handful of songs and anecdotes related to this wild beast of a subject -- all of that circulated and percolated in my mind, in a kind of anticipatory euphoria.
After flailing at search engines and pestering my librarian for resources that came back to me in great volumes, all of which readily revealed that I should have done this in graduate school a long time ago if I really wanted to cover this stuff, I had to improvise and take a step back. “Radio, that’s it,” I thought. Why not focus on example songs and artists from various social movements over the 20th century and give a brief overview of each? Bingo.
00:07:10 Joe Kendrick
“All right, let's dive into it. Starting with the labor movement. Famous song. That is a great example that has lasted through the generations that is associated with the labor movement. The song is which side are you on? Was written by this person.
Florence Reese in Kentucky in 1931. If you know about the coal mining strikes in Kentucky in the 1930s, they are. A lot of great resources that you can read about. There is a wonderful documentary called Harlan County USA, but this is a big part of the history of of the labor movement. Is is.And. In that area of the country. Another example that is not exactly historical, but I like to reference that ties directly to that is the movie called Matewan, which is a 30 or 40 years old now.
All right, so the brief history of what was going on in Harlan County, the Harlan County Coal Operators Association reduced their employees wages, which were already as at a subsistence level in 1931, by 10%. So the miners responded by forming a union, and that led to the Harling County War. What is often referred to simply as Bloody Harlan. The Sheriff's Department were the enforcers for the coal mine.
Now, Sam Reese was an organizer for the National Minors Union, and Sheriff J.H. Blair and his men came looking for Sam Reece at his home. But he wasn't there. Had run away to hide and they found his wife, Florence Reece, and the children whom they terrorized. The next morning, Florence was so beside herself that she tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall and wrote a new lyric to an old melody. And it was the Baptist hymn “lay the Lily low”.
And a lot of hymns and spirituals have woven their way into songs that are associated with the civil rights movement.”
Ah yes. Obscure Baptist hymns, and drawing outward to gospel music as an overall massive wellspring of inspiration for not only the civil rights movement, but also extending into labor rights, and environmentalism to name just a handful.
Being a brief survey, as I titled it, the talk spent two or three minutes on each song -- 13 in all, covering the 45 minutes of time allotted -- so I raced past this milepost of history, but will add to that here, and surely even more when I am delving into this for the retreat.
First, some more detail on the origination for the melody to “Which Side Are You On?” -- the song drew first from the British ballad “Jack Munro”, which uses a portion of “Lay The Lily Low’ as a refrain. Ah yes. Those British Isles and all their songs that found a foothold in Appalachia, living longer in many cases than in their country of origin. Granted, they were often changed much or in part, but here we are with a melody that transcends eras and cultures. Even wrapped in defiance, as it is here, it is a melody that has lived quite well for quite a long time, because as you will hear, it is one of many examples of an anthem replicating and reinventing itself generation after generation.
A note about gospel music and its place in this arena: it is the common root, the guiding hand and the safe harbor for all varieties of socially conscious or morally compelling music. Gospel music and songs addressing social inequities, inequalities and injustice are made for each other. Beyond the basic themes of loving your neighbor, helping those in need, and rejecting the prevailing and historic, secular worldview for one where we treat each other as equals, both music from the church, and by extension, the songs that tie to it directly, sync up perfectly with progressive social movements. Another overlap stems from institutional norms, and the prevailing culture of the early to mid 20th century generally, both being firmly pro-church in at least their outward facing day to day. In an America where a great many more people than now were compelled to listen to the gospel every Sunday, there was a massive, nationwide potential audience primed to hear these messages not just in the pews but in popular music, too. And so this music carried much more weight from note one than album crates full of other types of music, while its themes could be played in any style and context, even in music not originally made for the church.
But while the establishment being there for gospel was a given, it was not there for gospel and gospel inspired theme songs becoming the greatest hits for the opposition, as the 1960s and 1970s would show time and time again. The establishment was more comfortable with mandatory church as a rule than with the progressive gospels of Jesus as a rule, if you will.
In a similar phenomenon, ambiguity works its way into how we treat mass media -- radio in our example -- versus commerce -- 78 rpm records, to be exact. That kind of cognitive dissonance will be on display later on with our focus on labor movements, and that’s coming up after we get back to my talk, which benefits here from having me clarify Pete Seeger’s version of “Which Side Are You On?” was recorded in 1955 not 1950, and noting that Si Kahn’s version of that song is actually two songs, "I Am a Union Woman/Which Side Are You On?" from his 1986 album Carry It On.
All right, so here, let's go ahead and preview the song. We're going to hear Pete Seeger's. It was originally put on record by the Almanac Singers, which was Pete Seeger's band with. Woody Guthrie. And let's. I'll find my. Oh, wait, Woody Guthrie as well as Lee Hayes and Millard Lampel.
So the story of how Pete Seeger got ahold of the song is. That Jim. Jim Garland, who was another organizer and songwriter there in Kentucky. He had taken it to New York to play for a fundraiser for the striking miners, and this is one example of how powerful music is in these kind of contexts, he said, “In the course of such fights, song songs expressed people's feelings in a manner that allowed them to stand together rather than walking up to a gun thug and saying you're a *******. Which might have resulted in a shooting. We could express our anger much more easily in unison with song lyrics.”
So that, that speaks to the emotional aspect of social movements and a lot of these movements tend to be born from a struggle against injustice against adversity. They're inherently fueled by emotions and music. Songs tap into express and transmit emotion incredibly well and make it much more relatable. I took the song from this. Excellent. Smithsonian Folkways collection of Pete Seeger's music. If I had a hammer and it was recorded, I think in 1950.
[“Which Side Are You On?” by Pete Seeger, from If I Had A Hammer, excerpt]
00:12:29 Joe Kendrick
“That song never made it on the radio. The Almanac Singers version, especially if you remember anything about that era where folk singers like Pete Seeger were marginalized and essentially blacklisted and labeled as communists. In the 1950's the folk explosion and that rebirth of all forms of music that people had forgotten about or rediscovered helped put that back into the national consciousness. This it's been covered over and over again, and since then it has gotten on the radio in many, many different forms. Si Kahn -- singer, artist here from Charlotte, NC -- is one of those artists who. Covered it. We'll get to more modern version and you'll see the malleability of a song like this, how it can be reinterpreted generations later from an artist like Ani DiFranco.
[shows photo of a young Ani Difranco with shaved head]
I mean, she's just got establishment written all over her, right? All right, let's go to her 2012 version of “which side are you on?”
[“Which Side Are You On?” by Ani Difranco, from Which Side Are You On?, excerpt]
00:14:51 Joe Kendrick
So you'll notice that you know it's a far different sound entirely than the original acoustic folksy banjo driven song, and the lyrics have changed, too. And that's. Guess one of the wonderful things about an enduring song is that it can have so many interpretations and can can live on well past its origination.
Now we turn to right next door in Gaston County. Stay with the labor movement here. And we are going to go to a song from David McCarn.
The song is “Cotton Mill Colic” and It's not like a colicky baby, but colic would be referring to grousing or complaining. So McCarn never probably never was making a pointed statement about any kind of social movement -- when he wrote the song and he was like I just said, he was merely grousing. Was just complaining about the fact that it was so difficult to make a living in cotton mills. It however exploded and has lived on ever since. The class consciousness that exploded during that era between 1929 and 1931 -- if you know any of the history of the cotton mill strikes locally, it's a really dark and bloody subchapter of the overall story of the labor movement in that era.
So what it did originally is that it spread through phonograph records, not necessarily getting played on the radio, but we'll get to that. It became later on a protest song. In folk revival circles in the 50s and 60s. And it was also beyond the phonograph records when it started, it was passed on orally. People singing it without even the records. In the South and it spread that way.
A month after the song released, there was a strike at Riverside and Dan River, Cotton Mills Company in Danville, VA. Now there’s a record store owner. Luther B Clark. Had promoted the record in his store and arranged to have it played on the local radio station. So you see you see here a little bit of the tension between commercial records being sold, but also the message in those records. In response to hearing this song on the Radio, HR Fitzgerald, President of Dan River Mills, pressured the local media to suppress the song on the grounds that it was degrading to cotton millwork.
And in deference, the local radio stations, including WBTM, stopped playing the record. Found this on a wonderful compilation which has got a lot of the history of what was going on in Gaston County; Gastonia Gallop. And here's a bit of the song.
[“Cotton Mill Colic” by David McCarn, from Gastonia Gallop, excerpt]
00:19:24 Joe Kendrick
So David McCarn, he had been playing country music for a. He was like the only member of his family that was really into music and he recorded this song in Memphis when he was hitchhiking around the country. So everybody was desperate to get out of the cotton mills, right? So music was. One avenue where you could have a much better future. You might have been here for a presentation from Mary Beth Martin from the Earl Scrugg Center talking about. Earl Scruggs, favorite son from Cleveland County NC, from Flint Hill, just down the road from where I live.
Earl Scruggs worked in the mills, too, and it's interesting that he picked up the idea for a banjo tuner. Sort of like a capo for your banjo from his work in the mills from watching the looms and sort. Emphasizing the mechanical goings on inside the mill with what he could do for the banjo.
So it's too much to get into now, but that the story of Loray Mills in Gaston County, death of Unionist, Ella, May Wiggins, Police Chief Aderholt, it's just a really deep story. And something I might be able to get into a lot more in depth at Wild Acres. David McCarn was quoted as saying, “Well, if you're lucky enough to have a job you didn't make too much very much and well, in other words, the wages didn't compare with the prices of food. Food was always higher than the wages. In other words, if the cotton mill announced that they meant to raise, give a raise of a few cents, groceries would automatically go way up before the race came, so there was no point. in a raising, it didn't help any. The wages probably made it a little worse.”
So the impact of “Cotton Mill Colic", it's a song that I really wasn't familiar with, but it had a lasting effect on the consciousness of the labor movement and the, the music involved with that for future generations.”
[“Cotton Mill Colic” by Mike Seeger, from Classic Labor Songs, excerpt]
A bit of Mike Seeger’s version of “Cotton Mill Colic”, recorded in 1966 and taken from the Smithsonian Folkways compilation Classic Labor Songs. “Cotton Mill Colic has been recorded by around a dozen artists, including David McCarn’s fellow North Carolinians, J.E. Mainer, and the Blue Sky Boys, as well as the ever present Pete Seeger.
Spend any time analyzing what themes music presents most commonly, and there’s love, growing up, perhaps friendship, parties, travelling. Mostly love. Protest songs and music that preaches social consciousness or calls you to action are way, way down this list. These songs cling to a tiny sliver of the space carved out of a lyrical discourse steered by the indefatigable forces of commerce, so why be surprised, right?
But here’s the flip side of that coin: in a world ruled by love songs and pablum, anything real or raw or righteous stands out that much more. All the other human emotions need to find an outlet in songs, too, and there are ears ready to hear them, and elevate them. In a world of popular music full of shiny, happy music artists, no one writes “Many Rivers To Cross” or “We Shall Overcome”, but the real world of socio political struggles, racism, war and poverty inspires courage to sing songs that speak truth to power, songs that seek to unite, songs that seek to heal. Sometimes they become popular, too. Many were controversial, and remain so -- at times there is a line that even the most compelling song pays a price to cross.
Fast forward in my live presentation where I get to Eleanora Fagan and Robert Zimmerman, better known as Billie Holiday, and Bob Dylan:
00:26:02 Joe Kendrick
“Now we turn to civil rights. Boy, this you could just go on and on and I could do all day. Tomorrow too, just on the civil rights movement. We go back to the song that has been credited by Ahmet Erdogan, cofounder of Atlantic Records, as the beginning of the civil rights movement.
This is still a controversial song. Someone that I respected and I considered a mentor once told me not to play the song on WNCW. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. It is in the National Recording registry. By the Library of Congress. It eventually sold 1,000,000 copies. In 1939. It was the biggest selling recording of Billie Holiday's career.
She played it at almost every performance as the closer for every performance and a lot of people would get up and walk out. Time magazine called it the Best Song of the Century in 1999. Let's hear a little bit of the song.
[“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, excerpt]
00:29:23 Joe Kendrick
All right, there's no mistaking what she's talking about there. You'll see that as you look back in the history of songs like. That songs that are in very specific and very pointed and talk about one example of of a person or a place, sometimes those. Have a little bit more difficulty with longevity as opposed to a much more ambiguous and open-ended.
Like from our friend Bob Dylan. A very young Bob Dylan at about 21 years old, road blowing in the wind. Now it did fairly well, but it was much more successful in the hands of Peter, Paul and Mary. We just lost Peter Yarrow about a week ago.
Peter, Paul and Mary, who were managed by the same managers Bob Dylan, Alan, Alan Grossman, they, their version of it peaked at #2 on the Billboard Top 100.
Let's hear a little bit of Bobby's version.
[“Blowin’ In the Wind” by Bob Dylan, from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, excerpt]
00:31:26 Joe Kendrick
You can interpret that song in so many ways. You'll probably notice that it does have some root in Biblical scripture, as that's just another example of how scripture and spirituals have worked their way into songs of the Civil rights movement especially. It inspired — it's been covered so many times. It was influential on Sam Cooke. He not only covered the song, but it helped, it spurred him to write another famous song in his catalog. “Change is going to come”.
Later on, we're going to talk about the group Public Enemy, a rap group. They covered “blowing in the wind” as well. Stevie Wonder eventually made it into a top ten hit of his own in 1966. As recently as 2022, Bob Dylan sold a newly recorded version on an analog format called the Ionic original disc for $1.78 million. So quite an enduring song. Bob Dylan said about it himself when it came out, “There ain't that too much to say about the song, except the answer is blowing in the wind. Ain't in notebook or movie or TV show or discussion group. It's in the wind and it's blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is, but oh, I won't believe that. I still say it's in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper, it's got to come down some. But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down. So not too many people get to see and know, and then it flies away.”
Was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994. Was number 14 on Rolling Stone's top 500 greatest songs of all time, and it did not make any charts when it came out. As a single, but just countless, countless versions of that song have lived on.”
[“Blowin’ In the Wind” by Tangled Up In Bluegrass, from A Tribute To Bob Dylan, continuing as bed]
That’s where we will leave it for now with this reworking of a portion of my brief survey of music that made an impact through, for and about social movements in the 20th century. As we hear one of the many covers of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”, this one an instrumental by the tribute band Tangled Up In Bluegrass, I am reminded that, as enduring an anthem as this is, it is a bit like the exception that proves the rule. So many of the greatest hits of the civil rights movement came from artists who were big stars already before they dipped into these themes. But not Bob! He went at it the other way around.
Thanks for listening, and you can find out more about my presentation to Queens University and their upcoming 3-day retreat, where I will have time to dive into this subject much deeper, in our show notes.
This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available at osirispod.com. You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio at bluegrassplanetradio.com. Thanks to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs. A big thanks to everyone at Queens University for asking me to speak at their Senior Scholars program, and thanks as well to Daniel Coston, photographer, writer and now record producer, who came to the event and shared the photos he took. You can hear Daniel on this podcast in the recent episode on David Childers, as well as in one of our early episodes on the band Time Sawyer. Thank you to Armando Bellmas, who still has a hand in radio at WNCW many years after his full time stint as music director -- Armando took me to lunch afterwards. He has also appeared in this series, on the episode “The Mystery of ‘Chest Fever’ by The Band”.
I am Joe Kendrick, saying so long for now, from Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it.
correction - it is Ahmet Ertegun. But a question - I have never heard of people walking out during Billie Holiday's singing of Strange Fruit. Can you document? Thanks.