Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Workers Music League was formed in 1931 [1] as an extension of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians that was mentioned in the post for 7 July 2019. Norman Cazden remembered a group of classical composers formed a subgroup, the Composer’s Collective of New York, because many of the members of the larger organization lacked the "musical expertise" required to "talk on technical matters." [2]
The Collective’s initial interest was piqued by Hanns Eisler. Like them, the Austrian composer had been influenced by Arnold Schönberg. Unlike them, he had made successful forays into popular political theater with Bertold Brecht [3] using "rhythms and extended harmonies such as ‘blue notes’" [4] in Communist East Berlin during the Weimar period. Their "Solidarity Song" [5] was so popular in 1932, the year the Collective was organized, [6] that it was sung at sports events. [7]
While the Communist Party was promoting proletarian music created by professional musicians, unaffiliated organizers in the South were using Protestant camp meeting traditions to engage members. Harry Leland Mitchell organized the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union (SFTU) as a mixed-race movement in 1934. [8] Joshua Youngblood wrote:
"From the union’s beginning, both white and black leaders worked tirelessly on its behalf. Ministers and preachers of both races overwhelmingly dominated the leadership of the STFU." [9]
Union leaders discovered the only buildings owned by African Americans were churches. [10] By 1935, SFTU organizers were instructed to emulate prayer meetings. Speakers could then move seamlessly from labor to theology if they suspected the approach of white vigilantes. [11]
"J. W. Washington of Earl, Arkansas, described a meeting his local had with the union lawyer in January 1936. The meeting opened with prayer and the singing of a spiritual: ‘We had just begun to get in the [middle] of a big time. We first sung two verses of I Shall Not be Moved that song I do believe sprang from our lips with the voice of god [sic].’ The meeting was then interrupted as the union members were attacked and the song took on a greater meaning." [12]
Lee Hays remembered in the late 1930s at "meetings way out in the back woods or in the heart of the dismal cotton country," Claude Williams "would sing a song like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’—prepared to break into the old hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [13]
Williams was raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church by sharecroppers in northwestern Tennessee. [14] The denomination was a direct descendant of the 1801 Cane Ridge Revival. [15] It was formed in 1810 by churches that were expelled by the Presbyterian Church for promoting Arminianism over Calvinism and for elevating religious experiences by their ministers over seminary educations. [16] Congregations also offended the Scots body by singing hymns, as well as psalms. [17]
His first pastorate after leaving Vanderbilt in 1930 was Paris, Arkansas. Williams expanded the church’s outreach by creating a recreation center for adolescents, [18] and supported the Logan County coal miners in their strike against local operators. [19] Two who joined him at this time were Hays and Zilphia Johnson. [20] Hays’ father was a Methodist minister assigned to Logan County where he died in 1927. [21] Johnson’s father’s maternal grandfather had been part of the original migration of Cumberland Presbyterians to Arkansas from Kentucky in the 1820s. [22]
The Paris church removed Williams, who then was sent to Fort Smith in 1935. [23] Zilphia went to the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee. [24] Soon after her arrival, she married its director. Myles Horton was a Cumberland Presbyterian [25] whose parents were sharecroppers and factory workers in the western Tennessee River valley. [26]
At Highlander, Zilphia trained students to be song leaders, [27] and showed them how to modify existing songs to fit particular circumstances. [28] Each year she published a collection of labor songs from the school. [29] She didn’t include tunes. Chelsea Hodge suggested that eliminated barriers for people who couldn’t read music. [30] Equally important, it drew upon familiar psalm and early hymn singing traditions that used a few melodies with many texts. [31]
In 1938, Zilphia began editing Labor Songs for the Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [32] To obtain material, she asked union locals in all parts of the country to send her songs, along with explanations for how they were used. [33] Her concern was not what workers ought to sing, but what had been proven to work.
Zilphia didn’t just teach; like others at Highlander, she worked directly with union organization drives and strikes. In 1936, she worked with textile workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. [34] She later told farm union leaders in Montana that she organized a parade of unity on Washington’s Birthday. They began
"marching two by two, with the children and the band. They marched past the mill and 400 machine gun bullets were fired into the midst of the group. A woman was shot in the leg on the right and in the ankle on the left, on the left of me. And I looked around and the police were all disappeared…well, in about five minutes, a few of us stood up at the mill gates and sang, "We shall not be moved, just a like a tree that’s planted by the water." And in ten minutes, [the workers] began to come out again from behind the barns and garages and the little stores that were around in this small town, and they stood there, and they were not moved and sang, and that’s what won their organization. [35]
End Notes
1. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
2. Norman Cazden. June 1976. Quoted by David Dunaway. "Unsung Songs of Protest: the Composers’ Collective of New York." New York Folklore 5:1–20:1979. 1–2. Requoted by Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." Masters thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 3.
3. Margaret R. Jackson. "Workers, Unite!: The Political Songs of Hanns Eisler, 1926-1932." PhD Diss. Florida State University School of Music, Fall 2003. 8.
4. Jackson. 27.
5. Bertold Brecht and Hanns Eisler. "Solidaritätslied." For the film Kuhle Wampe. Prometheus Film, 14 May 1932.
6. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. No page numbers in online edition. The Collective was the result of a seminar led by Cowell, Jacob Schaefer, and Leo Charles to pursue "the specific goal of creating an American version of the successful proletarian music by European composers and writers such as Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Bertoldt Brecht."
7. Wikipedia. "Solidaritätslied."
8. Joshua C. Youngblood. "Realistic Religion and Radical Prophets: The STFU, the Social Gospel, and the American Left in the 1930s." Masters thesis. The Florida State University, Spring 2004. 5. A number of more thorough histories exist of the union. I am using this one for its treatment of religion and Claude Williams.
9. Youngblood. 3.
10. Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless. "Of the Least and the Most: The African American Rural Church." In African American Life in the Rural South, 1900 – 1950. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 61. Cited by Youngblood. 24.
11. Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. "New Methods of Organization for the S.T.F.U." 1935. Union papers in University of North Carolina Library. Cited by Youngblood. 25.
12. J. W. Washington. Letter to Harry Leland Mitchell. 19 January 1936. STFU Papers. Quoted by Youngblood. 32.
13. Lee Hays. "The Singing Preacher." People’s Songs Bulletin, February and March 1948. 11, 13, 44. Reprinted in Hays. "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!" 67–70. Edited by Robert S. Koppelman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 70.
14. William H. Pruden III. "Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 9 April 2018.
15. Cane Ridge was mentioned briefly in the post for 2 November 2017.
16. Wikipedia. "Cumberland Presbyterian Church."
17. B. W. McDonnold. History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Nashville: Board of Publication of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1899. 41.
18. Doris Willens. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 27.
19. Pruden.
20. I am using Zilphia’s first name throughout to avoid confusion. She often is identified as the daughter of the mine owner. In fact, her father was a mine prospector [36] who moved the family between Idaho and Arkansas several times during her childhood. Chelsea Hodge said when they returned the last time, her father "owned a small interest in a coal mine." [37]
21. Willens. 3. Hays was 13-years-old. They were living in Booneville about 16 miles from Paris.
22. Wikipedia, "Zilphia Horton," named her parents. Her parents’ entries on Find a Grave did not mention their children, probably because they were buried elsewhere. The Grave data placed them in the right part of Arkansas at the right time.
Charles Robin Rauch. "Robert Guy Johnson" [Zilphia’s father] Find a Grave website. 26 May 2011
Bea Smith Daniel. "Ida May Cox Johnson" [Zilphia’s father’s mother/her grandmother]. Find a Grave website. 8 October 2008.
Bea Smith Daniel. "Rev Anderson Buchanan Cox" [Zilphia’s father’s mother’s father/her great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 30 September 2008. Updated by Bill Hunt.
Bill Hunt. "Coleman Cox" [Cox’s father/Zilphia’s great-great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 25 October 2010. Cox was converted at a revival that preceded Cane Ridge.
23. Pruden.
24. The Highland Folk School was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.
25. Franklin and Betty J. Parker. "Myles Horton (1905-90), Educator and Social Activist of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee; With Addendum." Highlander website. 20 January 2013.
26. Bill Ayers and Therese Quinn. "Myles Horton (1905–1990)." Education Encyclopedia website.
27. Hays said he learned to be a song leader from Zilphia at Highlander. [38]
28. Chelsea Hodge. "‘A Song Workers Everywhere Sing:’ Zilphia Horton and the Creation of Labor’s Musical Canon." Master’s thesis. University of Arkansas. May 2014. 38.
29. Hodge. 25.
30. Hodge. 27.
31. Psalm singing was mentioned briefly in the post for 23 August 2017.
32. Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939.
33. Hodge. 25–26.
34. Zilphia Horton. Letter to Myles Horton. 1936. Myles Horton Papers in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. Cited by Hodge 34–35.
35. Zilphia Horton. Speech to Montana Farmers’ Union School, 1952. Zilphia Horton Folk Music Collection in Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. Quoted by Hodge. 51.
36. Hodge. 9.
37. Hodge. 7.
38. Lee Hays. People’s Songs, January 1947. 11. Cited by Hodge. 31–32. Willens repeated the story, with the added detail the incident occurred at a miner’s meeting. [39]
39. Willens. 94–95.
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