Folk Music Revival - Unions

Topic: Folk Music Revival
Josef Stalin ordered followers to abandon working through existing United States labor unions in 1928, after his agents were expelled from the American Federation of Labor in 1924 and the United Mine Workers in 1926. He told them, instead, to form rival unions. [1]

In 1929, the party’s National Textile Workers’ Union sent Fred Beal to Charlotte, North Carolina, where workers were protesting longer hours for less pay. [2] The brutality of mill owners in Gastonia drew national attention after men opened fire on a truck load of protestors on September 14. Margaret Larkin began publicizing the murdered Ella May in November as a genuine folk singer who used topical songs to rouse workers. [3]

This was the period when Stalin had forbidden the use of folk music. Larkin was not a Communist, but had been involved with textile-union activities in Passaic, New Jersey. [4] Her knowledge of folk music went back to her childhood in Las Vegas, New Mexico. [5] The railroad town had both Spanish-speakers, whose families had been in the area for hundreds of years, and ranchers, who had relocated from Texas.

Larkin already was singing folk songs to a guitar accompaniment when she was a student at the University of Kansas in the early 1920s. [6] While many wanted to see the cowboy as the prototype of the singing laborer, she did not believe the songs she published in 1931 in Singing Cowboy [7] were work songs. Instead, she noticed only some men sang around Las Vegas, and it seemed to be a matter of personal preference. [8]

Most of the research on Wiggins has focused on the circumstances of her death, rather than her early life. Larkin implied her parents were mountaineers in the tradition of those met by Cecil Sharp. [9] She described them as "hill people" who raised yams, cabbages, beans, corn, apples, and hogs. [10]

Mary Frederickson said she was born near Bryson City, North Carolina. [11] More recently, Elizabeth Olmstead said May was born in Sevierville, Tennessee in 1900. [12] Both towns were county seats in the Smokey Mountains, so May could have been born in a rural area, but raised in a town where she learned to read and write. [13]

If both statements were partly true, her father may have left a North Carolina mountain farm to work on building the railroad that was completed in Sevierville in 1910. [14] Larkin said her father went to a logging camp in 1910, when the family lacked the money to buy clothing. [15]

No one has mentioned anyone in May’s family who was a traditional singer. [16] It seems likely she gained her skills as a performer during her adolescence spent in logging camps. One man, who knew her then, told Larkin: "she had a fine, ringing voice, and nobody else could sing ‘Little Mary Fagan,’ ‘Lord Lovel’ and ‘Sweet William’ with such plaintive sweetness as she." [17]

The image of the folk-song-singing union activist was formed by the time Theodore Dreiser headed a commission investigating violence in Harlan County coal fields. [18] His group sent Molly Jackson on a tour in 1931 to publicize problems in Kentucky. [19] While she wasn’t known to have been active in the strike, she had been a midwife who dealt with the consequences of poverty. [20]

Archie Green noticed the first verses of her "Poor Miner’s Farewell" were traditional, and the rest were polemical. [21] He hypothesized she had created the first from lines and images already familiar to her, and added the other verses after she had gone to New York City for Dreiser. [22]

The perception of the folk-singing union was circumscribed by the view, discussed in the post for 12 May 2019, that the only true folk lived in the rural south, either in the Appalachian mountains or as African-American sharecroppers. Serge Denisoff noted the songs written by Maurice Sugar for the United Auto Workers sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, in 1937 were dismissed because he was a lawyer. [23]

Songs sung during strikes or labor organizing campaigns were the performed or public parts of existing traditions shared by the workers. The narrow perception of the folk blinded labor organizers and journalists to the fact less-isolated groups of people had shared repertoires they could use to produce ephemeral songs for specific occasions.

The Flint strike made this difference between public and private traditions clear because those on strike were hidden in buildings, while the individuals seen by journalists were often the wives of strikers who were publicizing union activity by their presence.

Perhaps the most important exterior event occurred on 1 February 1937 when the women staged a shadow challenge to an unoccupied plant to divert the attention of GM’s security forces while men took control of a separate, more important building. [24] Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, who had been at Gastonia, [25] said the women stood in front of the gate, holding hands, and sang "We Shall Not Be Moved." [26]

Later, the women said, while they had seen many songs on sheets provided by union organizers, [27] but the only ones they sang much were Sugar’s "Soup Song," "Solidarity Forever," and "Hold the Fort." [28] The last was a gospel song written in 1870 by Philip Paul Bliss that was inspired by an incident in the Civil War. [29]

Inside the factory buildings, the UAW supervised workers to make sure no damage was done to company property that would justify the governor sending in the National Guard. [30] Sugar remembered:

"singing was part of the organized recreation of the workers, and they frequently improvised bands [. . .] lots of hillbilly stuff . . . and lots of parodies." [31]

Part of the Flint tradition may have gone back to the community singing movement of World War I. George Oscar Brown remembered he was contracted to develop a music association to support the war effort. He said he began with public meetings that tended to attract women. After a few Sunday sessions, they brought their families. [32]

Brown then was let into General Motors plants during the noon breaks [33] He recalled:

"In some of our shops there will be 600 or 800 men gathered together, in others 200 or 300. In Buick No. 11, [34] where there are 2,500 men working under one roof, on one floor approximately 1,200 take part in the ‘sing.’ It is not possible to get to each shop very often, there are so many places to go, and it is not possible to give noon-hour every day." [35]

The University of Michigan music professor added:

"They would welcome us every day if they could have us. Whereas, other public speakers and evangelists are rather frowned upon both by the men and the employers, we have absolute entree to every factory in the city. It is a great inspiration to stand with a great group of these working men and see how eager they are to sing." [36]

The ethnic backgrounds of the singers seems to have been mixed. Germans were less inclined to settle in the Flint area in the 1850s than in other parts of the country, since it had little good farm land. [37] Brown emphasized the difficulties he encountered teaching songs to people during World War I who did not speak English. [38] However, JoEllen Vinyard said most of Flint’s factory workers after World War I were "Michigan-born white Protestant Americans or moved from Ohio, Indiana, and neighboring states." [39]

Photographs reproduced by Timothy Lynch, showed this variety of cultures. The musical instruments in one included a fiddle, an accordion, and an harmonica. [40] Another showed one accordion and one harmonica. [41] These instruments would have been found in lumber camps, on Great Lakes freighters, and other isolated places with all-male workforces. Sugar was part of this world: his Jewish parents had fled Russian-controlled Lithuania for the lumber county in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. [42]

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration to bring some stability to industrial competition. It included provisions for recognizing unions. [43] In 1934, Louis Adamac said the automotive companies responded by recruiting labor from Kentucky and other parts of the South they believed would be less interested in union activities. [44]

Lynch’s photographs showed the auto companies miscalculated: Southerners would unionize when times were bad. There also were four guitars and one banjo in the first photograph; the second showed two guitars and one man clogging. These instruments and the dance most likely were brought from the South. All the men in the pictures were white.

End Notes:
1. Wikipedia. "Wikipedia Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
2. R. Veto. "Beal, Fred Erwin." NC Pedia website. 1979.

3. Margaret Larkin. "The Story of Ella May." New Masses 5:1–2: November 1929. She usually is called Ella Mae Wiggins. Wiggins was her married name, but she had reverted to May by the time she was in Gastonia.

4. Wikipedia. "Margaret Larkin." She married a Communist in 1937, years after she wrote about Wiggins.

5. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. 12.

6. Myra Hull. "Cowboy Ballads." Kansas Historical Quarterly 8:35– 60:1939. 60, note 5.
7. Margaret Larkin. Singing Cowboy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.

8. Scott B. Spencer. "Margaret Larkin." 60–61 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 60.

9. Cecil Sharp was discussed in the posts for 6 February 2019, 7 April 2019, and 12 May 2019.

10. Larkin, Ella May. 1. Her parents were James Emanual Mays and Lucretia Catherine Maples.

11. Mary E. Frederickson. "Wiggins, Ella May." NC Pedia website. 1996.
12. Elizabeth Olmstead. "Ella May Wiggins." Find a Grave website. 11 October 2006.
13. Larkin, Ella May. 1.
14. Wikipedia. "Sevierville, Tennessee."

15. Larkin, Ella May. 1. Kristina Horton, May’s great-granddaughter suggested, instead, when the railroad arrived so did commercial lumbering that made it impossible for small farmers to sell timber for the cash needed to supplement their subsistence agriculture. [45]

16. Horton said May’s father, James May, was Dutch. [46] Frederickson indicated May’s mother, Elizabeth, was Cherokee. [47]

17. Larkin, Ella May. 1. "Lord Lovel" was Child 75. "Sweet William" was Child 74. "Little Mary Phagan" was written about a 1913 murder in Georgia, and recorded in 1925. [48]

18. "Theodore Dreiser." University of Pennsylvania, Rare Book and Manuscript Library website.

19. Wikipedia. "Aunt Molly Jackson."

20. "Aunt Molly Jackson." University of Virginia website. Its source was her stepbrother, Jim Garland. Welcome the Traveler Home. Edited by Julia S. Ardery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

21. Archie Green. Only a Miner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 31. Jackson first learned old ballads from her great-grandmother. [49]

22. Green. 33.
23. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 50–51.

24. Timothy P. Lynch. "‘Sit down! Sit down!’: Songs of the General Motors Strike, 1936-1937." Michigan Historical Review 22:1–47:Fall 1996. 41–42.

25. Vorse wrote a novel about May and Gastonia called Strike! New York: Horace Liveright, 1930.

26. Mary Heaton Vorse. Labor’s New Millions. New York: Modern Age Books, 1938. 77. Quoted by Lynch, 41–42.

27. Outside organizers brought the Rebel Song Book published in 1935 by the Rand School Press. [50] The New York publisher supported socialism, including Fabians and Norman Thomas. [51]

28. Lynch. 38. His source was the papers of Henry Kraus in the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.

29. Dwight Lyman Moody. The Gospel Awakening. Edited by L. T. Remlap. Chicago: F. H. Revell, 1883. 35. Both Bliss and the Civil War commander, Daniel Webster Whittle, appeared at Moody’s revivals. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer provide more details on how the song was adapted for secular uses. [52]

30. Wikipedia. "Flint Sit-Down Strike."
31. Maurice Sugar. Letter to Denisoff, 10 December 1965. Quoted by Denisoff. 51.

32. George Oscar Brown. "Community Music in Flint, Michigan." School Music 19:32–44:May 1918. 34, 36.

33. Brown. 38.

34. The sit-down strike was in a different plant, one managed by the Fisher Body division and known as Fisher Plant #1. [53]

35. Brown. 38.
36. Brown. 38.

37. Allison Rosbury. "The Origins of Genesee County Part 2: Early Settlement Patterns." My City Mag website. 1 December 2015.

38. Brown. 34.

39. JoEllen Vinyard. Right in Michigan’s Grassroots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 33.

40. Lynch. 4.
41. Lynch. 24.

42. Wikipedia. "Maurice Sugar." Its source was Christopher H. Johnson. Maurice Sugar. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.

43. Wikipedia. "National Recovery Administration."
44. Louis Adamic. "The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit." The Nation 140:177:13 February 1934.

45. Kristina Horton. Martyr of Loray Mill. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2015. Her source was Jo Lynn Haessly. "Mill Mother’s Laments: Ella May, Working Woman’s Militancy, and the 1929 Gaston County Strikes." MA thesis. University of North Carolina, 1987.

46. Horton. 30. Most of Horton’s information on May’s early life was drawn from Larkin. Dutch may have been Deutsch (German).

47. Frederickson.

48. "Mary Phagan." The Traditional Ballad Index. California State University-Fresno website. Version 4.5. The first record issued was by Rosa Lee Carson. Two other 1925 recordings, one by Vernon Dalhart and one by Charlie Oaks, were released in 1927.

49. Wikipedia, Jackson.
50. Lynch. 37.
51. Wikipedia. "Rand School of Social Science."

52. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Freedom. New York: Dover Publications, 1983. 37. Reprint of edition published in 1960 by Roosevelt University’s Labor Education Division in Chicago.

53. Wikipedia. "Flint Sit-Down Strike."