Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Communist influence on the commercial folk revival in the United States was largely a figment of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ (FBI) imagination. [1] Scholars like Richard Reuss [2] and Serge Denisoff [3] dedicated much of their graduate school lives to trying to document the links, and couldn’t.
None of the important performers were party organizers bent on the overthrow of the government. Few even argued party philosophy. Most were bothered by disparities of income and the condition of the working and poor classes, or by the rise of fascism in Europe. They drifted into the party’s orbit when those interests coincided, and left when they diverged. [4]
The FBI probably thought anyone who questioned the status quo was more dangerous than a true revolutionary. It seemed particularly concerned with those who challenged social hierarchies in the South, and hounded those it could.
The Soviet model was authoritarian with individuals taking direction from their leaders, and changing their views as necessary. The early folk-song revival movement was largely the uncoordinated actions of individuals. It resembled Brownian motion rather than iron filings tracking a magnet.
The artists who inspired the Composer’s Collective, mentioned in the posts for 4 August 2019 and 11 August 2019, were Marxists before they were Communists. [5] Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party of America sponsored the Southern Farmer’s Tenant Union (SFTU). [6] It was organized in 1934 as a direct response to the displacement of farm workers by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act that paid farmers to keep their land fallow. Southern landowners evicted their tenants and sharecroppers, and appropriated the money intended to compensate them. [7]
Josef Stalin changed direction in August 1935 at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, and declared the end of parallel unions. In their place, he proposed joining other liberal groups in a Popular Front against fascism, especially in Spain. [8] Many discovered this was a subterfuge: the party’s goal still was to establish hegemony by destroying its rivals. [9]
The party targeted the SFTU. Its president recognized the danger, [10] but men like Claude Williams believed in the possibilities of the Poplar Front. [11] The union was effectively destroyed when Williams failed to take control in 1938. [12] He had gained publicity for the cause when he and a white woman were attacked by white vigilantes the previous year. Sis Cunningham remembered it "provided a perfect opening for all sorts of racketeering outfits to jump in and raise money for poor sharecroppers. (The sharecroppers, of course, never saw the first dime.)" [13]
The Highlander Folk School, also mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019, had been established in 1932 with support from Reinhold Niebuhr. [14] The Party left it alone, because it already had taken over another school that trained labor organizers in Mena, Arkansas. Williams became head of Commonwealth College in 1937. [15] Party intrigues became so intense he left for Detroit in 1940 to support Presbyterian efforts to reach Southern Blacks and whites streaming into the area to work in factories. [16]
Lee Hays, mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019, [17] had followed Zilphia Horton to the Highlander Folk School in 1935, then returned to Arkansas when Williams took over Cumberland College. Hays went north to Philadelphia in 1940 where he stayed with Walter Lowenfels, [18] and began submitting articles to The New Republic. [19]
Extended droughts in western Oklahoma precipitated another agricultural crisis in 1935. Farmers lost their land, and began moving to California. [20] Their cause gained more reputable publicity than the African-American one when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. [21] John Ford’s film followed the next year. [22]
In March 1940, Will Greer staged a benefit for Okies in New York City. The headline performers included Burl Ives, Josh White, and Richard Dyer-Bennett. It was Pete Seeger’s first concert. He was scheduled after the stars, when many in the audience already had left. He was followed by a still unknown singer Greer knew in California, Woody Guthrie. [23]
Alan Lomax brought Guthrie and Seeger together to compile a book of labor songs. When Lomax found no publisher, [24] Guthrie decided to return to Oklahoma and asked Seeger to accompany him. [25]
While Seeger and Guthrie were away, Hays moved to New York to room with Millard Lampell. [26] Lampbell had just graduated from West Virginia University, where he’d played football for a year and visited the mining hometown of his roommate. He had had a couple articles published by The New Republic, and had written to Hays about one his in the same periodical. [27]
Since Hays was considering publishing a collection of labor songs, [28] Pete Hawes introduced Seeger to them in November. [29] Seeger remembered:
"He liked the sound of my banjo accompanying him, and I really admired his way with an audience. I was relatively shy and inexperienced in many, many ways. So we took bookings together." [30]
Others began dropping by and a communal house evolved for mostly college-aged individuals interested in singing political songs. By February 1941 they were calling themselves the Almanac Singers. [31] Among those who came and left were Lomax’s younger sister Bess, [32] and Sis Cunningham and her husband. They had had to leave Oklahoma for the same reason Molly Jackson had had to leave Kentucky: labor organizers were threatened with physical violence. [33]
In the summer, Seeger, Hays, Hawes, and Lampell planned a tour for the umbrella union group, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Just before they started, Hitler invaded Russian in June 1941, and Hawes developed pneumonia. Guthrie happened to return, [34] and replaced him in the group. [35]
Events continued to overtake the group. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Seeger was drafted, [36] and became a suspicious character after he married a Japanese-American. [37] Some family friends pulled strings, [38] and he spent the rest of the war at a hospital recovery site in the Mariana Islands. [39]
Hays was rejected by the military because he had tuberculosis. He spent the war working for a YMCA group assisting prisoners of war. [40] Guthrie avoided active service by joining the Merchant Marine. [41]
Lomax spent much of the war with the Office for War Information, [42] before being drafted in 1944. [43] He spent some time with Armed Forces Radio, [44] before being transferred to the entertainment division. [45]
Lampell had left the Almanac Singers when their CIO tour reached California. [46] The son of Jewish immigrants in Patterson, New Jersey, was the only one to enlist in 1943, and the only one to see combat as a machine gunner in the Army Air Corps. [47]
After the war, Seeger and others put together a cooperative clearing house to book jobs for politically liberal musicians. [48] Lomax helped with the promotion. [49] Then, Seeger removed Hays from the board in 1946, and replaced him, with one of the men he met in the army. [50] Irwin Silber showed up in 1947. [51] Just as Walter Reuther was expelling Communists from the United Auto Workers union and the CIO, [52] a committed party man [53] took over its publication company. [54]
The costs for publishing the People’s Songs Bulletin were greater than its revenues, and the publication fell into debt. [55] Seeger was chagrined to discover unions preferred the highly polished Dyer-Bennett to his folk-inflected style. [56]
Then to generate some income in 1948, Lomax helped them get hired by Henry Wallace’s campaign for president, [57] even though both the UAW and the CIO supported his opponent, Harry Truman. [58] Whatever union audience they still had disappeared.
One last attempt was made to raise money for People’s Songs with a Thanksgiving concert. Hays was working with Fred Hellerman, who he’d met in 1946, [59] to put together some music to accompany folk dancing. [60] They were joined by Seeger and a woman Hellerman knew from Wo-Chi-Ca in 1944. [61]
All the cultural and political streams that fed the commercial folk-music revival in the United States came together. Ronnie Gilbert understood how to prepare and rehearse a program from Wo-Chi-Ca. [62] Sometime between 1935 and 1937, when Hays was at Highlander, he’d been trained by the New Theater League. [63] Hellerman had worked in Yiddish-language theaters when he was young. [64]
More important, three had traditions of singing harmony, the two in camps, and Hays in his father’s Methodist meetings in Arkansas. [65] They knew how to use timbraic harmony and improvise parallel seconds. Seeger had no such background: he’d had some instruction at Old Avon Farms, but the prep school sang in unison in chapels. [66] He only knew how to sing a counter-melody.
The Weavers’ initial repertoire was general, rather than political. By then, Seeger no doubt was influenced by his stepmother. Her American Folks Songs for Children had just been published by Doubleday. [67] Instead of trying to copy Lomax’s folk-music styles to reach labor groups, they used American folk songs to reach whatever audience would listen. [68]
The group was surprised by its reception. Seeger’s wife, the former Toshi Ohta, got The Weavers an audition at the Village Vanguard. [70] They began during December 1949, [71] when the owner probably had few expectations for large crowds. Then, Lomax took Carl Sandburg to a show. The poet’s comments to the press brought more people, [72] including a representative from Decca Records that Lomax had worked with in the past. [73]
End Notes
1. Harvey Matusow identified Communists, including members of The Weavers, to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. He later admitted he had fabricated most of the evidence and was convicted of perjury. [74]
2. Richard A. Reuss. American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957. With JoAnne C. Reuss. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2000.
3. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
4. Reuss. Chapter 10, "The Folk Music Legacy of the American Communist Movement."
5. Bertold Brecht didn’t become interested in Marxism, until 1925, after he had been a playwright for years. [75] His collaborator, Hanns Eisler, was raised in Vienna where his brother and sister were both members of the German Communist Party. [76]
6. Marci Bynum Robertson. "Harry Leland Mitchell (1906–1989)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 18 March 2014. The SFTU was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019. Norman Thomas was originally a Presbyterian minister. [77]
7. Wikipedia. "Agricultural Adjustment Act."
8. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
9. George Orwell described this behavior in Homage to Catalonia. His memoir of the Spanish Civil War was published in England in 1943 by Penguin.
10. The union head was Harry Leland Mitchell.
11. Williams began as conventional Cumberland Presbyterian minister but was radicalized by reading Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Modern Use of the Bible [78] in 1927. [79] He then enrolled in Vanderbilt’s School of Religion where he was exposed to the ideas of Reinhold Neibuhr. [80] When he was in Fort Smith in 1935 he tried to organized the unemployed. He was beaten and jailed, then tried for heresy by the church. It was while he was in jail, he became disillusioned with gradual methods, and became more committed to the ideas of the Communist Party. [81]
12. 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.
13. Agnes Cunningham and Gordon Friesen. Red Dust and Broadsides. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 158.
14. Anthony P. Dunbar. Against the Grain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982. 43.
15. Wikipedia. "Commonwealth College (Arkansas)."
16. Youngblood. 124.
17. Hays also was mentioned in post for 3 October 2017.
18. Doris Willens. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 63. Lowenfels worked for the Party’s Daily Worker in Philadelphia. [82]
19. Willens. 65.
20. Wikipedia. "Dust Bowl". The first of three droughts occurred in 1934. Cunningham and Guthrie were from areas outside the drought’s epicenter.
21. John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: The Viking Press, 14 April 1939.
22. The Grapes of Wrath. 20th Century Fox. 24 January 1940.
23. David King Dunaway. How Can I Keep from Singing? New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition. 67. Greer had a role in the Broadway production of Tobacco Road, [83] and thought he could find job for Guthrie. [84] An earlier concert appearance by Guthrie was mentioned in the post for 11 August 2019.
24. John Szwed. Alan Lomax. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010. 161–162. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People finally was published in 1967 by Oak Publications.
25. Dunaway. 69.
26. Willens. 65.
27. Dennis Gildea. "Millard Limpall: From Football to Blacklist." 29–46 in Defending the American Way of Life. Edited by Toby C. Rider and Kevin B. Witherspoon. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018. 33–34.
28. Dunaway. 80.
29. Dunaway, 80, and Willens, 66.
30. Willens. 66.
31. Dunaway. 82.
32. Dunaway. 87. She was a student at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia.
33. Wikipedia. "Sis Cunningham." Molly Jackson was mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019.
34. Willens. 69.
35. Dunaway. 94.
36. Dunaway. 118.
37. Dunaway. 121–122.
38. Dunaway. 122.
39. Dunaway. 124.
40. Willens. 76. The organization was War Prisoners Aid.
41. Wikipedia. "Woody Guthrie."
42. Szwed. 196. He left the Library of Congress for OWI in October 1942.
43. Szwed. 205–206.
44. Szwed. 209.
45. Szwed. 211. The entertainment group was Special Services Training.
46. Dunaway, 95; and Willens, 70.
47. Gildea. 37.
48. Dunaway, 95; Reuss, 186; and Willens, 70. Richard Reuss provided the most detailed, and therefore the clearest, chronology of events in the 1940s. The booking agency was People’s Artists.
49. Reuss. 187. Alan Lomax organized concerts for them [85] and created an honorary group of sponsors. [86]
50. Willens. 89–90.
51. Dunaway, 139, and Reuss, 191.
52. Wikipedia. "Walter Reuther."
53. Reuss. 206.
54. The publication arm was People’s Songs. Silber replaced the People’s Songs Bulletin with Sing Out! in May 1950. [87]
55. Dunaway, 149; and Reuss, 204–205.
56. Dunaway, 163; and Reuss, 235.
57. Reuss, 198–202; and Szwed, 235–236.
58. Wikipedia. "1948 United States Presidential Election."
59. Willens. 97. Hays and Hellerman met in 1946. After Seeger isolated Hays, "Lee had suggested they might work up some material and take bookings together."
60. Dunaway, 160; and Willens, 106.
61. William Ruhlmann. "Fred Hellerman." All Music website. The International Workers Order children’s summer camp was discussed in the post for 14 July 2019.
62. June Levine and Gene Gordon made clear the camp had both a strong performance arts programs and group singing traditions like those found in other children’s camps. [88]
63. Willens. 38. The New Theater League was a Popular Front organization that was established in 1935. Chris Vials said it "moved away from the agitprop guerilla theater of the early 1930s and toward professional, polished work." [89] The agitprop was inspired by Brecht.
64. Caleb Hellerman. Quoted by Associated Press. "Fred Hellerman, Member of Weavers Folk Group, Dies at 89." 3 September 2016. Caleb was Fred’s son. I have not seen anyone follow up on this information on the internet. His later work as a record producer for people like Joan Baez suggests he had a talent, even then, for putting together a sound that appealed to an audience.
65. Wikipedia. "Lee Hays." Hays’ father was mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019.
66. Dunaway. 42.
67. Ruth Crawford Seeger. American Folk Songs for Children. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1948.
68. Seeger later told Dunaway: "As the labor movement kicked out the radicals, I settled for ‘Let’s get American singing’; maybe the basic democratic philosophy in these songs will filter out subliminally to the American people." [90]
69. Dunaway. 163–164.
70. Dunaway. 165.
71. Willens. 116.
72. Dunaway, 165; Szwed, 238; and Willens, 122. The relationships between Sandburg, Lomax, and Ruth Seeger were discussed in the post for 11 August 2019.
73. Willens, 124; and Szwed, 128–129. The Decca representative, Gordon Jenkins, was born in suburban Saint Louis. He "responded to the rural flavor of Lee’s stories almost as much as he did to the Weavers’ music." [91]
74. John Simkin. "Harvey Matusow." Spartacus Educational website. September 1997. Last updated August 2014.
75. Wikipedia. "Bertolt Brecht."
76. Wikipedia. "Hanns Eisler."
77. Wikipedia. "Norman Thomas."
78. Harry Emerson Fosdick. Modern Use of the Bible. London: Student Christian Movement. 1926.
79. Wikipedia. "Claude C. Williams."
80. Youngblood. 19.
81. Youngblood. 44.
82. Wikipedia. "Walter Lowenfels."
83. Szwed. 160 .
84. Szwed. 157.
85. Szwed. 225–226.
86. Szwed. 235.
87. Reuss. 229.
88. June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002.
89. Chris Vials. Realism for the Masses. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 51.
90. Dunaway. 175.
91. Willens. 124.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Seegers and Lomaxes
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The folk music revival in the United States provided opportunities for generations of Seegers and Lomaxes. Charles Louis Seeger went to México soon after Porfirio Díaz opened the country to foreign investors. [1] He began as a journalist, then became a partner in an import-export business that sold machinery to sugar plantations. [2]
Charles Louis was not happy when his sons did not enter business. [3] To him the arts were the avocations of men successful in other areas. [4] The older boy, Charles, studied music at Harvard, then went to Germany to pursue composition and conducting. [5] The younger, Alan, majored in English at Harvard, lived in Greenwich Village, and migrated to Paris in 1912. [6]
Charles returned home unemployed, hindered, he said, by a hearing impediment that prevented him from detecting high pitches. He was hired by the University of California in Berkeley where he began focusing on music history. [7] His most important student was the modernist composer, [8] Henry Cowell. [9]
World War I ended his second career. Alan had joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914, and been killed in 1916. [10] His collection of war poetry was being reissued in 1919, [11] as Charles was announcing he was a pacifist. He took his pregnant wife and two sons back to his father’s home in New York. [12]
John Lomax, as was mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019, lost his first career when he was removed from the University of Texas in 1917 by James Ferguson as part of the governor’s purge of political rivals. [13] Some friends found him a position selling bonds in Chicago. While there, he became friends with Carl Sandburg, mentioned in the post for 5 May 2019. [14] After the governor was impeached, Lomax returned to the university to work with alumni relations. [15]
Charles’ wife, Constance Edson, was a concert violinist who found self-inflicted penury hard to accept. [16] She finally found employment for the two of them in 1921 at the Institute of Musical Art through Walter Damrosh. The school’s director was a close family friend. [17]
The marriage was rocky, and the boys were sent to boarding schools. The youngest, Pete, was four the first time he was dispatched. [18]
In 1925, John left the University of Texas, this time over the politics of football, and again sold bonds, this time in Texas. [19]
While Charles was teaching music history in a conservatory, Cowell was touring as the leading modern composer in the United States. [20] He met Ruth Crawford when he was in Chicago. [21] She also was introduced to Sandburg, who included the modernist composer in his family’s music evenings and had her transcribe some songs for The American Songbag. [22]
In 1927, Constance told Charles she had a private bank account, and he walked out with the children. [23] The memories Pete chose to share with his biographer are fragmentary. He recalled refusing his mother’s request to take music lessons, but did remember someone gave him a ukulele that he played constantly. He also said his mother gave him a collection of sea chanteys that he used with the uke [24] at the Spring Hill boarding school [25] in Litchfield, Connecticut. [26]
Cowell later urged Charles to take Ruth as a student. [27] After a year she went to Europe, [28] but returned when her fellowship wasn’t renewed. [29] Charles and Ruth became lovers, and Constance finally accepted a divorce. [30] The Institute had merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, but the chairman of the board for the two schools refused to let Charles teach his new theories of musicology. [31] Damrosch cut his hours, then terminated his contract. [32]
John lost his bank job in the early 1930s. [33] Steady employment didn’t exist in the Depression, so he converted his salesman’s skills from bonds to promoting himself. He suggested his publisher sponsor a new collection of American Ballads and Folk Songs. [34]
His oldest son, John Junior, also lost a banking job, but found employment with Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He contacted the Library of Congress to get support for his father’s project. It was an honorary position that paid a token dollar a year, but provided John with the status needed to get cooperation from local officials. [35]
Charles began teaching at the New School for Social Research. Cowell had urged Charles to join the Communist Party’s Pierre Degeyter Club in 1931. [36] A group of modernist composers within the group formed the Composer’s Collective of New York in 1932. [37] Pete’s first contact with the party occurred that year when Charles and Ruth took him to a Collective meeting featuring Aaron Copeland. [38]
During the summer of 1933, Sandburg was advising John Lomax on how to get bookings on the lecture circuit. In return, John’s son, Alan, was helping Sandburg find work in the South. [39] Before American Ballads and Folk Songs was published in 1934, Macmillan asked Charles and Cowell to review it. Charles remembered they found the transcriptions "god-awful," but were enthusiastic about the lyrics. [40]
Charles’ fourth career didn’t last long. New School should have been ideal: it was founded by men like himself who had lost their academic appointments for opposing the entry of the United States into World War I. [41] All he intimated in 1935 was "American universities do not yet recognize musicology as a respectable subject." [42]
A friend from the New School had gone to work as a painter for Franklin Roosevelt’s Work’s Progress Administration (WPA). He helped Charles get hired by the Resettlement Administration’s culture section in 1936. [43] The same year, John began working for the Federal Writers’ Project within the WPA. [44]
Soon after, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, [45] and Charles began moving from job to job in the bureaucracy. [46] In 1937, he became the deputy music director of the Federal Music Project. [47] The same year, John asked the vice-president, a politician from Texas, to help his son, Alan, get a job with the Library of Congress. [48]
Sometime in this period, John and his children, Alan and Bess, began work on a second volume of American Ballads. To avoid the criticisms leveled against the first volume, John asked Charles to do the transcriptions. He claimed he was too busy, but recommended Ruth do the work. [49]
In 1939, with infighting in Washington, the Federal Music Project budget was cut, and the agency absorbed by the WPA. [50] Charles moved to a State Department committee on Latin American relations. From there, he joined the Pan American Union in 1941. [51]
Alan Lomax was in New York City, working part time for the Library of Congress while taking graduate courses in anthropology. [52] He asked companies, like Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor, for copies of records by folk or folklike musicians. [53] He got so many contributions, he hired Bess and Pete to help him sort through them. [54]
In the fall, CBS radio asked him to contribute to their School of the Air. This gave him an opportunity to provide paying jobs for people who had helped him, [55] including the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Molly Jackson, and Pete. [56] In each program, he asked listeners to send him copies of folk songs. As mentioned in the post for 30 January 2019, he gave the most interesting to his father to pursue.
In 1940, while still working for the Library of Congress, Alan performed at a New York concert for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. It was the first time he heard Woody Guthrie. [57] They both appeared a month later at a concert for John Steinbeck’s committee to aid farm workers. [58]
Such efforts were noblesse oblige by middle class whites who had no more job security than tenant farmers. Charles was a bureaucrat serving at the whims of politicians. John was constantly looking for opportunities "on the low-rent outskirts of academia." [59]
Their years of financial and familial security passed when their sons were young children. Alan still hadn’t held a full time job outside the government. Pete dropped out of college and failed to find work in journalism. He had yet to overcome his inherited view that music was for fun [60] and his rejection of practicing, to make music a profession. [61]
End Notes:
First names are used to make it easier to distinguish between members of the Seeger and Lomax families.
1. Ann M. Pescatello. Charles Seeger. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 10–11.
2. Pescatello. 8.
3. "Alan Seeger." Poetry Foundation website.
4. Pescatello. 8.
5. Wikipedia. "Charles Seeger."
6. Poetry Foundation.
7. Mark Swed. "Behind Pete Seeger, A Formative Father and Mother." Los Angeles Times website. 6 February 2014.
8. Wikipedia. "Henry Cowell."
9. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. No page numbers in online edition.
10. Poetry Foundation.
11. According to WorldCat, Alan Seeger’s Poems was published in London in 1916, in New York in 1917, and in Paris in 1918. A second printing was issued in London in 1919 and in New York 1920. The English publisher was Constable, the U. S. was C. Scribner’s sons, and the French was Payot.
12. David King Dunaway. How Can I Keep from Singing? New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition. 25–28.
13. Wikipedia. "James E. Ferguson."
14. John Szwed. Alan Lomax. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010. 13.
15. John Szwed. 14.
16. Dunaway. 26–27. Each Seeger has edited the past. I have not been able to find any information about Constance de Clyver Edson that did not come from a male Seeger.
17. Pescatello. 86.
18. Dunaway. 32.
19. John Szwed. 16.
20. Wikipedia, Cowell.
21. Pescatello. 102.
22. Pescatello. 102-103. The American Songbag was discussed in the post for 5 May 2019.
23. Pescatello. 85.
24. Dunaway. 33.
25. Dunaway. 35.
26. "Spring Hill School Collection, 1926-1939." Litchfield Historical Society website.
27. Pescatello. 104.
28. Pescatello. 107.
29. Pescatello. 108.
30. Pescatello. 108. Charles Seeger later said the divorce occurred in 1927, [62] which made his relationship with Ruth conform with bourgeois morality.
31. Pescatello. 94. The Institute of Musical Art merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, and John Erskine was chairman of the board that oversaw both. [63]
32. Pescatello. 109.
33. John Szwed. 23.
34. John Szwed. 31. American Ballads and Folk Songs was discussed in the post for 12 May 2019.
35. John Szwed. 32.
36. Sachs.
37. Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." MA thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 1. The Collective was mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019.
38. Dunaway. 36.
39. John Szwed. 61.
40. Charles Seeger. Dictated to Penny Seeger Cohen, 22 April 1977. Cited by Pescatello. 135.
41. "Our History." New School website.
42. Charles Seeger. "Preface to All Linguistic Treatment of Music." Music Vanguard 1:17–31:1935. Quoted by Pescatello. 129. Earlier she noted a man active in the New York Musicological Society said it could not become a national organization "unless Charles Seeger (who must have ruffled a few feathers) agreed to step down from the leadership." [64]
43. Pescatello. 236. The friend was Charles Pollack, a student of Thomas Hart Benton. Charles had attended Benton’s weekly gatherings of musicians at the New School. [65]
44. John Szwed. 107. John Lomax’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project was mentioned in post for 23 January 2019.
45. Wikipedia. "Resettlement Administration." It later became part of the Farm Security Administration.
46. Pescatello. 150.
47. Pescatello. 154.
48. John Szwed. 104. Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president was John Nance Garner. He represented south Texas in United States House of Representatives from 1903 to 1933 when John Lomax was at the University of Texas. [66]
49. Pescatello. 162. Also, John Szwed. 109.
50. Wikipedia. "Federal Music Project."
51. Pescatello. 173.
52. John Szwed. 140.
53. John Szwed. 142.
54. John Szwed. 144.
55. John Szwed. 154. Alan said, "The whole thing was ridiculous so I took this job only on the basis that I could have guests on the program and could pay them." [67]
56. John Szwed. 156. Jackson was mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019.
57. John Szwed. 157.
58. John Szwed. 160.
59. John Szwed. 77.
60. Dunaway. 63.
61. Dunaway. 61.
62. Wikipedia, Charles Seeger.
63. Wikipedia. "Juilliard School."
64. Pescatello. 121. She was quoting Harold Spivacke, but gave no source. He later was head of the Library of Congress Music Division, and Alan’s supervisor.
65. Pescatello. 133.
66. Wikipedia. "John Nance Garner."
67. No source given.
The folk music revival in the United States provided opportunities for generations of Seegers and Lomaxes. Charles Louis Seeger went to México soon after Porfirio Díaz opened the country to foreign investors. [1] He began as a journalist, then became a partner in an import-export business that sold machinery to sugar plantations. [2]
Charles Louis was not happy when his sons did not enter business. [3] To him the arts were the avocations of men successful in other areas. [4] The older boy, Charles, studied music at Harvard, then went to Germany to pursue composition and conducting. [5] The younger, Alan, majored in English at Harvard, lived in Greenwich Village, and migrated to Paris in 1912. [6]
Charles returned home unemployed, hindered, he said, by a hearing impediment that prevented him from detecting high pitches. He was hired by the University of California in Berkeley where he began focusing on music history. [7] His most important student was the modernist composer, [8] Henry Cowell. [9]
World War I ended his second career. Alan had joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914, and been killed in 1916. [10] His collection of war poetry was being reissued in 1919, [11] as Charles was announcing he was a pacifist. He took his pregnant wife and two sons back to his father’s home in New York. [12]
John Lomax, as was mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019, lost his first career when he was removed from the University of Texas in 1917 by James Ferguson as part of the governor’s purge of political rivals. [13] Some friends found him a position selling bonds in Chicago. While there, he became friends with Carl Sandburg, mentioned in the post for 5 May 2019. [14] After the governor was impeached, Lomax returned to the university to work with alumni relations. [15]
Charles’ wife, Constance Edson, was a concert violinist who found self-inflicted penury hard to accept. [16] She finally found employment for the two of them in 1921 at the Institute of Musical Art through Walter Damrosh. The school’s director was a close family friend. [17]
The marriage was rocky, and the boys were sent to boarding schools. The youngest, Pete, was four the first time he was dispatched. [18]
In 1925, John left the University of Texas, this time over the politics of football, and again sold bonds, this time in Texas. [19]
While Charles was teaching music history in a conservatory, Cowell was touring as the leading modern composer in the United States. [20] He met Ruth Crawford when he was in Chicago. [21] She also was introduced to Sandburg, who included the modernist composer in his family’s music evenings and had her transcribe some songs for The American Songbag. [22]
In 1927, Constance told Charles she had a private bank account, and he walked out with the children. [23] The memories Pete chose to share with his biographer are fragmentary. He recalled refusing his mother’s request to take music lessons, but did remember someone gave him a ukulele that he played constantly. He also said his mother gave him a collection of sea chanteys that he used with the uke [24] at the Spring Hill boarding school [25] in Litchfield, Connecticut. [26]
Cowell later urged Charles to take Ruth as a student. [27] After a year she went to Europe, [28] but returned when her fellowship wasn’t renewed. [29] Charles and Ruth became lovers, and Constance finally accepted a divorce. [30] The Institute had merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, but the chairman of the board for the two schools refused to let Charles teach his new theories of musicology. [31] Damrosch cut his hours, then terminated his contract. [32]
John lost his bank job in the early 1930s. [33] Steady employment didn’t exist in the Depression, so he converted his salesman’s skills from bonds to promoting himself. He suggested his publisher sponsor a new collection of American Ballads and Folk Songs. [34]
His oldest son, John Junior, also lost a banking job, but found employment with Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He contacted the Library of Congress to get support for his father’s project. It was an honorary position that paid a token dollar a year, but provided John with the status needed to get cooperation from local officials. [35]
Charles began teaching at the New School for Social Research. Cowell had urged Charles to join the Communist Party’s Pierre Degeyter Club in 1931. [36] A group of modernist composers within the group formed the Composer’s Collective of New York in 1932. [37] Pete’s first contact with the party occurred that year when Charles and Ruth took him to a Collective meeting featuring Aaron Copeland. [38]
During the summer of 1933, Sandburg was advising John Lomax on how to get bookings on the lecture circuit. In return, John’s son, Alan, was helping Sandburg find work in the South. [39] Before American Ballads and Folk Songs was published in 1934, Macmillan asked Charles and Cowell to review it. Charles remembered they found the transcriptions "god-awful," but were enthusiastic about the lyrics. [40]
Charles’ fourth career didn’t last long. New School should have been ideal: it was founded by men like himself who had lost their academic appointments for opposing the entry of the United States into World War I. [41] All he intimated in 1935 was "American universities do not yet recognize musicology as a respectable subject." [42]
A friend from the New School had gone to work as a painter for Franklin Roosevelt’s Work’s Progress Administration (WPA). He helped Charles get hired by the Resettlement Administration’s culture section in 1936. [43] The same year, John began working for the Federal Writers’ Project within the WPA. [44]
Soon after, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, [45] and Charles began moving from job to job in the bureaucracy. [46] In 1937, he became the deputy music director of the Federal Music Project. [47] The same year, John asked the vice-president, a politician from Texas, to help his son, Alan, get a job with the Library of Congress. [48]
Sometime in this period, John and his children, Alan and Bess, began work on a second volume of American Ballads. To avoid the criticisms leveled against the first volume, John asked Charles to do the transcriptions. He claimed he was too busy, but recommended Ruth do the work. [49]
In 1939, with infighting in Washington, the Federal Music Project budget was cut, and the agency absorbed by the WPA. [50] Charles moved to a State Department committee on Latin American relations. From there, he joined the Pan American Union in 1941. [51]
Alan Lomax was in New York City, working part time for the Library of Congress while taking graduate courses in anthropology. [52] He asked companies, like Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor, for copies of records by folk or folklike musicians. [53] He got so many contributions, he hired Bess and Pete to help him sort through them. [54]
In the fall, CBS radio asked him to contribute to their School of the Air. This gave him an opportunity to provide paying jobs for people who had helped him, [55] including the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Molly Jackson, and Pete. [56] In each program, he asked listeners to send him copies of folk songs. As mentioned in the post for 30 January 2019, he gave the most interesting to his father to pursue.
In 1940, while still working for the Library of Congress, Alan performed at a New York concert for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. It was the first time he heard Woody Guthrie. [57] They both appeared a month later at a concert for John Steinbeck’s committee to aid farm workers. [58]
Such efforts were noblesse oblige by middle class whites who had no more job security than tenant farmers. Charles was a bureaucrat serving at the whims of politicians. John was constantly looking for opportunities "on the low-rent outskirts of academia." [59]
Their years of financial and familial security passed when their sons were young children. Alan still hadn’t held a full time job outside the government. Pete dropped out of college and failed to find work in journalism. He had yet to overcome his inherited view that music was for fun [60] and his rejection of practicing, to make music a profession. [61]
End Notes:
First names are used to make it easier to distinguish between members of the Seeger and Lomax families.
1. Ann M. Pescatello. Charles Seeger. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 10–11.
2. Pescatello. 8.
3. "Alan Seeger." Poetry Foundation website.
4. Pescatello. 8.
5. Wikipedia. "Charles Seeger."
6. Poetry Foundation.
7. Mark Swed. "Behind Pete Seeger, A Formative Father and Mother." Los Angeles Times website. 6 February 2014.
8. Wikipedia. "Henry Cowell."
9. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. No page numbers in online edition.
10. Poetry Foundation.
11. According to WorldCat, Alan Seeger’s Poems was published in London in 1916, in New York in 1917, and in Paris in 1918. A second printing was issued in London in 1919 and in New York 1920. The English publisher was Constable, the U. S. was C. Scribner’s sons, and the French was Payot.
12. David King Dunaway. How Can I Keep from Singing? New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition. 25–28.
13. Wikipedia. "James E. Ferguson."
14. John Szwed. Alan Lomax. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010. 13.
15. John Szwed. 14.
16. Dunaway. 26–27. Each Seeger has edited the past. I have not been able to find any information about Constance de Clyver Edson that did not come from a male Seeger.
17. Pescatello. 86.
18. Dunaway. 32.
19. John Szwed. 16.
20. Wikipedia, Cowell.
21. Pescatello. 102.
22. Pescatello. 102-103. The American Songbag was discussed in the post for 5 May 2019.
23. Pescatello. 85.
24. Dunaway. 33.
25. Dunaway. 35.
26. "Spring Hill School Collection, 1926-1939." Litchfield Historical Society website.
27. Pescatello. 104.
28. Pescatello. 107.
29. Pescatello. 108.
30. Pescatello. 108. Charles Seeger later said the divorce occurred in 1927, [62] which made his relationship with Ruth conform with bourgeois morality.
31. Pescatello. 94. The Institute of Musical Art merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, and John Erskine was chairman of the board that oversaw both. [63]
32. Pescatello. 109.
33. John Szwed. 23.
34. John Szwed. 31. American Ballads and Folk Songs was discussed in the post for 12 May 2019.
35. John Szwed. 32.
36. Sachs.
37. Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." MA thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 1. The Collective was mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019.
38. Dunaway. 36.
39. John Szwed. 61.
40. Charles Seeger. Dictated to Penny Seeger Cohen, 22 April 1977. Cited by Pescatello. 135.
41. "Our History." New School website.
42. Charles Seeger. "Preface to All Linguistic Treatment of Music." Music Vanguard 1:17–31:1935. Quoted by Pescatello. 129. Earlier she noted a man active in the New York Musicological Society said it could not become a national organization "unless Charles Seeger (who must have ruffled a few feathers) agreed to step down from the leadership." [64]
43. Pescatello. 236. The friend was Charles Pollack, a student of Thomas Hart Benton. Charles had attended Benton’s weekly gatherings of musicians at the New School. [65]
44. John Szwed. 107. John Lomax’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project was mentioned in post for 23 January 2019.
45. Wikipedia. "Resettlement Administration." It later became part of the Farm Security Administration.
46. Pescatello. 150.
47. Pescatello. 154.
48. John Szwed. 104. Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president was John Nance Garner. He represented south Texas in United States House of Representatives from 1903 to 1933 when John Lomax was at the University of Texas. [66]
49. Pescatello. 162. Also, John Szwed. 109.
50. Wikipedia. "Federal Music Project."
51. Pescatello. 173.
52. John Szwed. 140.
53. John Szwed. 142.
54. John Szwed. 144.
55. John Szwed. 154. Alan said, "The whole thing was ridiculous so I took this job only on the basis that I could have guests on the program and could pay them." [67]
56. John Szwed. 156. Jackson was mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019.
57. John Szwed. 157.
58. John Szwed. 160.
59. John Szwed. 77.
60. Dunaway. 63.
61. Dunaway. 61.
62. Wikipedia, Charles Seeger.
63. Wikipedia. "Juilliard School."
64. Pescatello. 121. She was quoting Harold Spivacke, but gave no source. He later was head of the Library of Congress Music Division, and Alan’s supervisor.
65. Pescatello. 133.
66. Wikipedia. "John Nance Garner."
67. No source given.
Sunday, August 4, 2019
We Shall Not Be Moved
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The similarities between the uses of "We Shall Not Be Moved" in the 1936 Chattanooga, Tennessee, textile workers, discussed in the post for 28 July 2019, and the 1937 Flint, Michigan, automotive workers sit-down strike, discussed in the post for 21 July 2019, are obvious. Both used it as a performance piece to dramatize unity in the face of deadly force.
The link was what today would be called consultants, organizers who moved from strike to strike as advisors. One group used by Walter Reuther against General Motors was the Brookwood Labor College. Both he and his brother Roy had been trained there, [1] and Roy was on the faculty in 1936. [2] Zilphia Horton was working at the Highlander Folk School when she went to Chattanooga. [3]
She believed "sharecroppers in Arkansas" [4] in the Southern Farm Tenants Union were the first to use "We Shall Not Be Moved." However, Helen Grosvenor Norton watched "a mixed group of white and Negro miners and their wives" sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" during a 1931 strike in the Kanawha Coal Fields of southern West Virginia. As they stood on the steps of a "dilapidated Negro schoolhouse," they were watched by "a group of state ‘po-lice’ and mine guards, their guns conspicuously displayed." [5]
Norton and Tom Tippet were in West Virginia for Brookwood. [6] He told Archie Green he always went into local stores to purchase records, which he used to work with local organizers. [7] One of them, and more likely he, probably was responsible for the song moving into the labor movement. She married one of the Brookwood instructors in 1932, and became Helen Norton Starr. [8] Tippet was director of Brookwood’s extension activities until 1933. [9]
The event described by Norton was very like the later occurrences, but that’s not necessarily what was happening. She thought the steps were a stage, but David Corbin made clear miners lived on company property, and any building in the area was controlled by the operators. They had locked the churches in an earlier conflict, and the school likewise may have been made inaccessible. [10] It also may have been unsafe to go into a building where they could be ambushed.
Corbin said that after the failed strike of 1921, the Logan County Coal Operators’ Association had invited Billy Sunday [11] to hold a month-long revival in Charleston in 1922. [12] The state capital was in Kanawha County. Sunday lumped strikers with all other sinners in his exhortations. [13]
Miners turned away from company-controlled churches, and listened to other miners who were called by God to preach. They led prayers before men entered the pits, and often offered thanks when they came up. The "mine pit often became the pulpit" [14] unobserved by company spies. Men were free to read the Bible and one miner remembered "there’s a sermon in those songs, so we sang them all the time." [15]
One unintended consequence of inviting Sunday to Charleston was the introduction of new gospel songs, because wherever Sunday went, Homer Rodeheaver was there as his song leader. Rodeheaver had opened his own publishing house in 1910, [16] and, no doubt, always carried a store of his songbooks to sell.
"I Shall Not Be Moved" was copyrighted in 1908 by Alfred Ackley, [17] a year after his brother joined the Sunday organization as a pianist. [18] Rodeheaver, began including it in songbooks sold at revivals held by William Biederwolf. [19] In 1910, Rodeheaver went to work for Sunday [20] and included it in a new songbook. [21]
Rodeheaver was still promoting "I Shall Not" when he published a 1920 songbook that sold for thirty cents. [22] He had a new book in 1922 that did not include it, [23] and he may not have sung it during the Charleston revival. But, if he continued to sell Victory Songs, which he likely did, it would have been a safe purchase for miners. "I Shall Not" appeared on page 28. From there, it could have moved into the repertoire of some in Kanawha County.
The song may have moved from southern West Virginia to the Southern Farm Tenants Union (SFTU) through labor organizers, or through the gossip network that connected union leaders. [24] The labor use also could have been an independent invention in Arkansas that Horton observed when she lived there. [25]
Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer did not provide a source for the Norton quotation, but it sounds like it was from a later interview, rather than a contemporaneous account. The group in southern West Virginia may or may not have been singing "we shall not," but by the time Norton was interviewed, that was the accepted form. The letter from an SFTU member quoted in the post for 28 July 2019 was written in 1936, and used "I."
The song entered tradition in the South, and was undergoing changes from oral transmission in the 1920s. Ackley’s version followed the verse-chorus form with the two-line first verse beginning "As a tree beside the water." The AABA chorus repeated "I Shall Not Be Moved" three times, with "anchored to the Rock of Ages" as the B line.
Edward Boatner included "I Shall Not Be Moved" in the collection of spirituals he amassed for the National Baptist Convention in 1927. [26] His version used an AAB form. The A lines used a statement-refrain format with the statement changing with each iteration and "I shall not be moved" repeated. The B line, which appeared in every verse, used "like a tree planted by the water" as the statement.
It’s not known if Ackley, who joined his brother with Sunday before entering seminary to become a Presbyterian minister in 1914, [27] created the song or reworked something he heard in a revival meeting. [28] Boatner could have been closer to the original, or his version could have resulted from the digestion of the complicated Ackley form. He may have created this variant, which he copyrighted in 1925.
Joe and Emma Taggart recorded a version that was between the two the year before the African-American Baptist version was available. [29] "I Shall Not Be Removed" followed Boatner’s AAB form, but repeated the "I shall not be moved" after every variant as a burden.
Two versions collected by Julian Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in the fall of that year, 1926, followed the Taggarts’ pattern. Minnie Lee sang "I shall not be blue," [30] while Bryan D. Banks used "I Shall Not be Moved." [31] None of the three shared any verses with each other or with Boatner, but all used Boatner’s "planted by the water" phrase.
Joe Taggart was a blind African-American musician from Abbeville, South Carolina, who worked in Atlanta before moving to Chicago in 1921. [32] Banks was from a white family that had been in Pamlico County for generations, [33] and may have been a Free Will Baptist. Lee also was a white Free Will Baptist. [35]
Once "I Shall Not" moved into active tradition among both whites and African Americans in the South, it became an especially useful song for unions that included members from both groups. By 1939, Boatner’s version was the most common. It was adapted by Zilphia as a "Union Hymn" in a collection she edited for Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [36]
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Brookwood Labor College."
2. James TenEyck. The Life and Times of Walter Reuther. New York: Page Publishing, 2016. Roy was a student in 1933, the year Tucker Smith became the director. Under the previous director, A. J. Muste, it had grown closer to Marxism, and Smith was charged with returning the Quaker-founded school to its original purpose. [37]
3. Horton was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.
4. 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. 49.
5. Helen Norton Starr. Quoted by Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Freedom. New York: Dover Publications, 1983. 39. Reprint of edition published in 1960 by Roosevelt University’s Labor Education Division in Chicago.
6. Archie Green. Only a Miner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 254–256.
7. Tom Tippet. Letter to Archie Green. 6 February 1958. Quoted by Green. 254.
8. Richard Lewis. Biography of Marc Starr in Dictionary of Labour Biography. London: The Macmillan Press, 1993. 9:279.
9. Wikipedia, Brookwood.
10. David Alan Corbin. "We Shall Not Be Moved." 146–175 in Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1981. The chapter was not about the song, but about religious life in the coal fields of southern West Virginia. The comment on churches shuttered during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike was on page 151.
11. Corbin. 151.
12. Jerry Waters. "Billy Sunday." My WV Home website.
13. Corbin. 151.
14. Corbin. 158. One miner-preacher mentioned by Corbin was Walter Seacrist, who served as vice president of the West Virginia Mine Workers Union. Green said Tippet taught Seacrist a song about Mother Jones, which he localized. [38]
15. Corbin. 149.
16. Wikipedia. "Homer Rodeheaver."
17. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Copyrighted by A. H. and B. D. Ackley, Hilburn, New York, 1908. [39]
18. Wikipedia. "B. D. Ackley."
19. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Songs for the King’s Business. Edited by Franklin Edson Belden. Chicago: B. E. Belden, 1909. 67. Robert Waltz and David G. Engle listed a collection [40] published by Rodeheaver and William Edward Bierderwolf in 1906. However, it was not in the copy I own. [41] The book went through several editions, and was in the 1910 revision [42] I obtained. It was undated, but was probably from 1910. The word "revised" appeared on the cover," but not on the title page.
20. Wikipedia, Rodeheaver.
21. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Great Revival Hymns for the Church, Sunday School and Evangelistic Services. Edited by Homer Alvan Rodeheaver and Bentley DeForrest Ackley. Chicago: Rodeheaver, 1910. 58.
22. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Victory Songs. Edited by Homer A. Rodeheaver. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1920. 28.
23. Homer A. Rodeheaver. Rodeheaver’s Gospel Songs. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1922.
24. The SFTU shared one trait with the Frank Kenney’s West Virginia Mine Workers Union that might have made the one group contact leaders of the other. Unlike Harlan County, Kentucky, and Gastonia, North Carolina, West Virginia had a mixed labor force. When railroads and New York entrepreneurs began exploiting coal in the state, the population was so sparse, agents were sent to recruit immigrants from the mines in Pennsylvania and African Americans from Virginia, North and South Carolina. [43] In 1908, just before John D. Rockefeller facilitated the creation of Consolidated Coal, [44] 73.5% of Kanawha County’s miners were native-born whites, but were only 55% in Raleigh County and 47.1% in Fayette County. [45] The percentages no doubt changed when World War I shut down immigration from Europe.
The likelihood men from one union joined the other are slight. Corbin noted that, while miners moved from job to job, most stayed in the area because they preferred mining to the drudgery of industrial jobs. As one African American told him, "in the mines, the supervisors, they don’t bother you none." [46]
25. Horton’s life in Arkansas was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.
26. "I Shall Not Be Moved." 9 in Spirituals Triumphant Old and New. Edited by Edward Boatner. Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board, National Baptist Convention, 1927. Copyrighted by Boatner, who arranged it.
27. "Alfred Henry Ackley." Hymn Time website.
28. This revision of a tradition that then was recreated in tradition was described with "At the Cross" in the post for 22 November 2018. David Spener’s study of "We Shall Not Be Moved" did not provide any early history. [47]
29. Joe and Emma Taggart. "I Shall Not Be Removed." Vocalion 1062. 1926. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 5 November 2014.
30. Minnie Lee. "I Shall Not Be Blue." The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:639.
31. B. D. Banks. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Brown 3:639–640.
32. Wikipedia. "Blind Joe Taggart."
33. Notes on Julian Boyd’s students may be found in the posts for 6 February 2019, 24 November 2019, and 1 December 2019.
34. Mittie Banks was married to Bryan Banks, and was survived by one son in 1967, B. D. Banks, Junior. She was buried by the Rock of Zion Free Will Baptist Church. [47]
35. Information on Minnie Lee appeared in the post for 8 December 2019.
36. Anonymous. "We Shall Not Be Moved." Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939. 32. Tune was identified as "I Shall Not Be Moved."
37. Wikipedia, Brookwood.
38. Green. 255.
39. Library of Congress. Copyright Office. Musical Compositions. Part 3, Numbers 36-39. September 1908. 817.
40. "I Shall Not Be Moved." The Traditional Ballad Index. California State University-Fresno website. Version 4.5.
41. William Edward Biederwolf. Hymns for His Praise No 2. Assisted by Homer Rodeheaver. Chicago: McCrea-Taylor, 1906.
42. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Songs for his Praise No. 2 Revised. Edited by William Edward Biederwolf, assisted by Homer Rodeheaver. Chicago: The Glad Tidings Publishing Company. 188.
43. W. Jett Lauck. Immigrants in Industries. Part 1. Bituminous Coal Mining. United States. 61st Congress Joint Immigration Commission report. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911. 6:23.
44. Ronald L. Lewis. "Coal Industry." The West Virginia Encyclopedia website. Last updated 8 January 2019.
45. Lauck. 7:156
46. Corbin. 41.
47. David Spener. We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016.
48. Victor T. Jones, Jr. "Sunday’s Obituary: Mittie Banks." Genealogy Jones and the Lost Crusade website.
The similarities between the uses of "We Shall Not Be Moved" in the 1936 Chattanooga, Tennessee, textile workers, discussed in the post for 28 July 2019, and the 1937 Flint, Michigan, automotive workers sit-down strike, discussed in the post for 21 July 2019, are obvious. Both used it as a performance piece to dramatize unity in the face of deadly force.
The link was what today would be called consultants, organizers who moved from strike to strike as advisors. One group used by Walter Reuther against General Motors was the Brookwood Labor College. Both he and his brother Roy had been trained there, [1] and Roy was on the faculty in 1936. [2] Zilphia Horton was working at the Highlander Folk School when she went to Chattanooga. [3]
She believed "sharecroppers in Arkansas" [4] in the Southern Farm Tenants Union were the first to use "We Shall Not Be Moved." However, Helen Grosvenor Norton watched "a mixed group of white and Negro miners and their wives" sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" during a 1931 strike in the Kanawha Coal Fields of southern West Virginia. As they stood on the steps of a "dilapidated Negro schoolhouse," they were watched by "a group of state ‘po-lice’ and mine guards, their guns conspicuously displayed." [5]
Norton and Tom Tippet were in West Virginia for Brookwood. [6] He told Archie Green he always went into local stores to purchase records, which he used to work with local organizers. [7] One of them, and more likely he, probably was responsible for the song moving into the labor movement. She married one of the Brookwood instructors in 1932, and became Helen Norton Starr. [8] Tippet was director of Brookwood’s extension activities until 1933. [9]
The event described by Norton was very like the later occurrences, but that’s not necessarily what was happening. She thought the steps were a stage, but David Corbin made clear miners lived on company property, and any building in the area was controlled by the operators. They had locked the churches in an earlier conflict, and the school likewise may have been made inaccessible. [10] It also may have been unsafe to go into a building where they could be ambushed.
Corbin said that after the failed strike of 1921, the Logan County Coal Operators’ Association had invited Billy Sunday [11] to hold a month-long revival in Charleston in 1922. [12] The state capital was in Kanawha County. Sunday lumped strikers with all other sinners in his exhortations. [13]
Miners turned away from company-controlled churches, and listened to other miners who were called by God to preach. They led prayers before men entered the pits, and often offered thanks when they came up. The "mine pit often became the pulpit" [14] unobserved by company spies. Men were free to read the Bible and one miner remembered "there’s a sermon in those songs, so we sang them all the time." [15]
One unintended consequence of inviting Sunday to Charleston was the introduction of new gospel songs, because wherever Sunday went, Homer Rodeheaver was there as his song leader. Rodeheaver had opened his own publishing house in 1910, [16] and, no doubt, always carried a store of his songbooks to sell.
"I Shall Not Be Moved" was copyrighted in 1908 by Alfred Ackley, [17] a year after his brother joined the Sunday organization as a pianist. [18] Rodeheaver, began including it in songbooks sold at revivals held by William Biederwolf. [19] In 1910, Rodeheaver went to work for Sunday [20] and included it in a new songbook. [21]
Rodeheaver was still promoting "I Shall Not" when he published a 1920 songbook that sold for thirty cents. [22] He had a new book in 1922 that did not include it, [23] and he may not have sung it during the Charleston revival. But, if he continued to sell Victory Songs, which he likely did, it would have been a safe purchase for miners. "I Shall Not" appeared on page 28. From there, it could have moved into the repertoire of some in Kanawha County.
The song may have moved from southern West Virginia to the Southern Farm Tenants Union (SFTU) through labor organizers, or through the gossip network that connected union leaders. [24] The labor use also could have been an independent invention in Arkansas that Horton observed when she lived there. [25]
Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer did not provide a source for the Norton quotation, but it sounds like it was from a later interview, rather than a contemporaneous account. The group in southern West Virginia may or may not have been singing "we shall not," but by the time Norton was interviewed, that was the accepted form. The letter from an SFTU member quoted in the post for 28 July 2019 was written in 1936, and used "I."
The song entered tradition in the South, and was undergoing changes from oral transmission in the 1920s. Ackley’s version followed the verse-chorus form with the two-line first verse beginning "As a tree beside the water." The AABA chorus repeated "I Shall Not Be Moved" three times, with "anchored to the Rock of Ages" as the B line.
Edward Boatner included "I Shall Not Be Moved" in the collection of spirituals he amassed for the National Baptist Convention in 1927. [26] His version used an AAB form. The A lines used a statement-refrain format with the statement changing with each iteration and "I shall not be moved" repeated. The B line, which appeared in every verse, used "like a tree planted by the water" as the statement.
It’s not known if Ackley, who joined his brother with Sunday before entering seminary to become a Presbyterian minister in 1914, [27] created the song or reworked something he heard in a revival meeting. [28] Boatner could have been closer to the original, or his version could have resulted from the digestion of the complicated Ackley form. He may have created this variant, which he copyrighted in 1925.
Joe and Emma Taggart recorded a version that was between the two the year before the African-American Baptist version was available. [29] "I Shall Not Be Removed" followed Boatner’s AAB form, but repeated the "I shall not be moved" after every variant as a burden.
Two versions collected by Julian Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in the fall of that year, 1926, followed the Taggarts’ pattern. Minnie Lee sang "I shall not be blue," [30] while Bryan D. Banks used "I Shall Not be Moved." [31] None of the three shared any verses with each other or with Boatner, but all used Boatner’s "planted by the water" phrase.
Joe Taggart was a blind African-American musician from Abbeville, South Carolina, who worked in Atlanta before moving to Chicago in 1921. [32] Banks was from a white family that had been in Pamlico County for generations, [33] and may have been a Free Will Baptist. Lee also was a white Free Will Baptist. [35]
Once "I Shall Not" moved into active tradition among both whites and African Americans in the South, it became an especially useful song for unions that included members from both groups. By 1939, Boatner’s version was the most common. It was adapted by Zilphia as a "Union Hymn" in a collection she edited for Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [36]
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Brookwood Labor College."
2. James TenEyck. The Life and Times of Walter Reuther. New York: Page Publishing, 2016. Roy was a student in 1933, the year Tucker Smith became the director. Under the previous director, A. J. Muste, it had grown closer to Marxism, and Smith was charged with returning the Quaker-founded school to its original purpose. [37]
3. Horton was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.
4. 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. 49.
5. Helen Norton Starr. Quoted by Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Freedom. New York: Dover Publications, 1983. 39. Reprint of edition published in 1960 by Roosevelt University’s Labor Education Division in Chicago.
6. Archie Green. Only a Miner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 254–256.
7. Tom Tippet. Letter to Archie Green. 6 February 1958. Quoted by Green. 254.
8. Richard Lewis. Biography of Marc Starr in Dictionary of Labour Biography. London: The Macmillan Press, 1993. 9:279.
9. Wikipedia, Brookwood.
10. David Alan Corbin. "We Shall Not Be Moved." 146–175 in Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1981. The chapter was not about the song, but about religious life in the coal fields of southern West Virginia. The comment on churches shuttered during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike was on page 151.
11. Corbin. 151.
12. Jerry Waters. "Billy Sunday." My WV Home website.
13. Corbin. 151.
14. Corbin. 158. One miner-preacher mentioned by Corbin was Walter Seacrist, who served as vice president of the West Virginia Mine Workers Union. Green said Tippet taught Seacrist a song about Mother Jones, which he localized. [38]
15. Corbin. 149.
16. Wikipedia. "Homer Rodeheaver."
17. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Copyrighted by A. H. and B. D. Ackley, Hilburn, New York, 1908. [39]
18. Wikipedia. "B. D. Ackley."
19. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Songs for the King’s Business. Edited by Franklin Edson Belden. Chicago: B. E. Belden, 1909. 67. Robert Waltz and David G. Engle listed a collection [40] published by Rodeheaver and William Edward Bierderwolf in 1906. However, it was not in the copy I own. [41] The book went through several editions, and was in the 1910 revision [42] I obtained. It was undated, but was probably from 1910. The word "revised" appeared on the cover," but not on the title page.
20. Wikipedia, Rodeheaver.
21. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Great Revival Hymns for the Church, Sunday School and Evangelistic Services. Edited by Homer Alvan Rodeheaver and Bentley DeForrest Ackley. Chicago: Rodeheaver, 1910. 58.
22. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Victory Songs. Edited by Homer A. Rodeheaver. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1920. 28.
23. Homer A. Rodeheaver. Rodeheaver’s Gospel Songs. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1922.
24. The SFTU shared one trait with the Frank Kenney’s West Virginia Mine Workers Union that might have made the one group contact leaders of the other. Unlike Harlan County, Kentucky, and Gastonia, North Carolina, West Virginia had a mixed labor force. When railroads and New York entrepreneurs began exploiting coal in the state, the population was so sparse, agents were sent to recruit immigrants from the mines in Pennsylvania and African Americans from Virginia, North and South Carolina. [43] In 1908, just before John D. Rockefeller facilitated the creation of Consolidated Coal, [44] 73.5% of Kanawha County’s miners were native-born whites, but were only 55% in Raleigh County and 47.1% in Fayette County. [45] The percentages no doubt changed when World War I shut down immigration from Europe.
The likelihood men from one union joined the other are slight. Corbin noted that, while miners moved from job to job, most stayed in the area because they preferred mining to the drudgery of industrial jobs. As one African American told him, "in the mines, the supervisors, they don’t bother you none." [46]
25. Horton’s life in Arkansas was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.
26. "I Shall Not Be Moved." 9 in Spirituals Triumphant Old and New. Edited by Edward Boatner. Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board, National Baptist Convention, 1927. Copyrighted by Boatner, who arranged it.
27. "Alfred Henry Ackley." Hymn Time website.
28. This revision of a tradition that then was recreated in tradition was described with "At the Cross" in the post for 22 November 2018. David Spener’s study of "We Shall Not Be Moved" did not provide any early history. [47]
29. Joe and Emma Taggart. "I Shall Not Be Removed." Vocalion 1062. 1926. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 5 November 2014.
30. Minnie Lee. "I Shall Not Be Blue." The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:639.
31. B. D. Banks. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Brown 3:639–640.
32. Wikipedia. "Blind Joe Taggart."
33. Notes on Julian Boyd’s students may be found in the posts for 6 February 2019, 24 November 2019, and 1 December 2019.
34. Mittie Banks was married to Bryan Banks, and was survived by one son in 1967, B. D. Banks, Junior. She was buried by the Rock of Zion Free Will Baptist Church. [47]
35. Information on Minnie Lee appeared in the post for 8 December 2019.
36. Anonymous. "We Shall Not Be Moved." Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939. 32. Tune was identified as "I Shall Not Be Moved."
37. Wikipedia, Brookwood.
38. Green. 255.
39. Library of Congress. Copyright Office. Musical Compositions. Part 3, Numbers 36-39. September 1908. 817.
40. "I Shall Not Be Moved." The Traditional Ballad Index. California State University-Fresno website. Version 4.5.
41. William Edward Biederwolf. Hymns for His Praise No 2. Assisted by Homer Rodeheaver. Chicago: McCrea-Taylor, 1906.
42. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Songs for his Praise No. 2 Revised. Edited by William Edward Biederwolf, assisted by Homer Rodeheaver. Chicago: The Glad Tidings Publishing Company. 188.
43. W. Jett Lauck. Immigrants in Industries. Part 1. Bituminous Coal Mining. United States. 61st Congress Joint Immigration Commission report. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911. 6:23.
44. Ronald L. Lewis. "Coal Industry." The West Virginia Encyclopedia website. Last updated 8 January 2019.
45. Lauck. 7:156
46. Corbin. 41.
47. David Spener. We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016.
48. Victor T. Jones, Jr. "Sunday’s Obituary: Mittie Banks." Genealogy Jones and the Lost Crusade website.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Folk Revival - 1930s Labor Songs
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.
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.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
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."
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."
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Folk Revival - Indigenous Communists
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.
Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]
Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.
In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]
The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]
The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]
Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]
A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.
Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]
Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]
The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]
In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]
More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]
Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]
The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]
Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]
In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]
The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]
Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:
"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]
She added:
"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]
Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]
End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.
1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."
4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]
5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.
6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]
8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."
9. Kaufman. 104.
10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.
11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.
16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.
17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."
18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.
21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.
26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.
27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.
31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.
32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.
33. Denisoff. 42.
34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.
35. Denisoff. 44.
36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.
37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.
39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]
40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]
41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.
Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]
Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.
In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]
The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]
The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]
Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]
A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.
Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]
Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]
The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]
In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]
More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]
Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]
The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]
Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]
In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]
The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]
Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:
"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]
She added:
"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]
Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]
End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.
1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."
4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]
5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.
6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]
8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."
9. Kaufman. 104.
10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.
11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.
16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.
17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."
18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.
21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.
26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.
27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.
31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.
32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.
33. Denisoff. 42.
34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.
35. Denisoff. 44.
36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.
37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.
39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]
40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]
41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Folk Revival - Soviet Union
Topic: Folk Music Revival
Peter the Great was the first Russian monarch to recognize his empire needed a distinct identity. [1] Marina Ritzarev said, when historians researched the origins of Rus’ leaders, they discovered the early princes were Varangians, and suppressed the facts. In place of Vikings, the people, especially those in the vicinity of Moscow, were accorded the status of progenitors. [2]
These were the folk whose music was used by Mikhail Glinka [3] a few years after Nicholas I implemented his policy of Official Nationality. [4] Collections, like one made by Nikolai Lvov in 1790, [5] were intended to emphasize "kindred, rather than alien characteristics." [6] The music reflected the aesthetics of an audience no more than one generation removed from rural villages. [7]
The nature of the urban population began to change with the introduction of textile manufacturing. Old Believers, who had been banished in 1667 during the reign of Alexis I, [8] were operating cotton, silk, and woolen mills in Moscow in 1832. [9] The Bremen-born Ludwig Knoop opened his first mill in Moscow in 1840. His operations expanded after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on the export of tools used by textile factories in 1842. [10]
Rural society changed when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. They still were forced to stay on the land and operate through commune leaders, but they no longer were subject to arbitrary demands by estate owners who took the profits from their initiatives [11] to finance lifestyles that proved the nobles’ loyalty to the tsar by imitating his court. [12]
Even before 1861, Mily Balakirev was changing the definition of national music from that of the peasants to that which made Russia different from Prussia, England, and France. [13] In 1862, the disciple of Glinka went to the Caucasus to collection folk music. [14] One work song from his home province of Nizhny Novgorod became famous in 1902 when it was recorded by Feodor Chaliapin [15] as the "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." [16]
The interest in music from remote areas of the Empire increased in 1884 when the Russian Geographic Society organized a Folk Song Commission. It sent its first collecting expedition to the Archangel area in 1886. [17] Balakirev was on the organization’s board. [18]
Just a few years before, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, and his son Alexander III condoned anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland and Ukraine. [19] He demanded everyone speak Russian and convert to the Russian Orthodox church. [20] Anyone who was a little bit liberal became suspect.
Evgenia Lineva and her husband fled to London in 1890, then resettled in New York. The student of Glinka organized Ukrainian and Russian immigrants in a choir that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in peasant costumes. They were accompanied by an orchestra and featured male dancers. [21]
Alexander III died in 1894, and his son, Nicholas II, allowed the Linevas to return in 1896. [22] She spent some time with the Musico-Ethnographic Commission that had been organized at the University of Moscow in 1901. [23] Chaliapin took Mitrofan Pyatnitsky to a meeting, and the latter began collecting in his home province of Voronezh. He eventually brought singers from the village to perform for the commission. [24]
World War I ended folk song collecting. Members of Pyatnitsky’s group were drafted, and, after the Revolution, disagreed with one another and dispersed. He formed a new choir with people who had moved to Moscow from "remote villages." [25] This coincided with the formation of "thousands of choruses" by workers’ clubs who sang political words to "old popular tunes and folk songs." [26]
In 1928, Josef Stalin implemented his First Five-Year Plan to industrialize the country. To free individuals to work in factories, he appropriated farm land, destroyed the largest landowners, and settled the rest on collective farms. [27]
The same year, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was formed to weed out "the anti-proletarian and the counter-revolutionary elements" in contemporary music. [28] In 1930, the All-Russian Choir Conference "voted to liquidate peasant choruses, deeming them ‘alien, harmful, corrupting to the class consciousness of participants and listeners.’" [29] Peasant music programming on radio stopped in 1929, and traditional music was banned in 1930. [30]
Pyatnitsky had died in 1927 and bequeathed his choir to his nephew. [31] The choir survived the general purge because it was too popular. Still, the choir modified its repertoire to fit Soviet requirements after a member of the Proletarian Musicians association [32] joined the group in 1931. [33]
At the end of five years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished the existing artistic organizations, and replaced them with creative unions. [34] The new musicians’ group was dominated by conservatory-trained men who decreed any professional musician must be able to read music notation and be familiar with the classics. [35]
Two years later, in 1934, Maxim Gorky exhorted attendees of the First Congress of Soviet Writers to use folklore motifs to create socialist realism. [36] Choirs again were encouraged, [37] and amateurs were expected "involve themselves in the creation of art, thus demonstrating that each individual was fully self-actualized and active in the work of building the ideal society." [38] Textual content was controlled by bringing the best singers and writers to Moscow for indoctrination. [39]
The Pyatnitsky peasant chorus became the Pyatnitsky Russian Folk or Popular Choir in 1936. [40] Singers were trained to read music, and the improvisational element that Pyatnitsky had encouraged was restricted to a few soloists. [41] An orchestra and dance troop was added in 1938. [42] In seeking to reach the mass audience defined by the Communist Party, it recapitulated Lineova’s evolution in the Unites States in 1893.
End Notes
1. Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014. 3. This article was based on "The Conflict between Nationalistic and Pluralistic Traditions in Russian Musical Narratives." International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Haifa University. August 1998.
2. Ritzarev. 4.
3. Glinka was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
4. Peter the Great was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
5. Ivan Pratsch. Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. Saint Petersburg: 1790. Prach was the arranger. Lvov’s name was added on later editions.
6. Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 16.
7. Richard Taruskin. "N. A. Lvov and the Folk." 3-24 in Defining Russia Musically. 20. Lvov and Pratsch collected "their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity — and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances."
8. Wikipedia. "Old Believers."
9. Danila Raskov and Vadim Kufenko. "The Role of Old Believers’ Enterprises: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century Moscow Textile Industry." 7 May 2014. Carl von Ossietzky Universtät, Evangelisches Studienwerk website. 14.
10. Wikipedia. "Ludwig Knoop."
11. Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire." 27 January 2017. Moscow’s New Economic School website.
12. Markevich. 19. For instance, Balakirev’s first exposure to music came from performances staged by Alexander Ulybyshev, a local noble who maintained a private orchestra. [43]
13. Composers like Rimsky-Korsikov and Borodin pursued Balakirev’s ideas in their own ways. Balakirev later advised Tchaikovsky. [44]
14. Wikipedia. "Mily Balakirev."
15. Chaliapin was an operatic basso.
16. Wikipedia. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." Nizhny Novgorod was not in the Caucasus.
17. Barbara Krader. "Folk Music Archive of the Moscow Conservatory, With a Brief History of Russian Field Recording." Indiana University website. 13. Based on I. K. Sviridova. Kabinet narodnoi muzyki. Moscow: Izd-vo Muzyka, 1966.
18. Krader. 13. This was the more conservative Balakirev who returned to public life after a period of isolation and depression [45] that began after Russia was defeated lost in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire."
20. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
21. Norman E. Saul. The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 44–45.
22. Saul. 46.
23. Krader. 14.
24. Elena Prokofieva. "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky - Peasant Choirmaster." The Third Age website. John Freedman brought this to my attention in "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky Bust and Monument, Voronezh." Russian Landmarks website. 25 June 2015.
25. Prokofieva.
26. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
27. Wikipedia. "First Five-year Plan."
28. "RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Ideological Platform." 1929. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). 1052–1055. Reprinted on Michigan State University, Soviet History website. Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov was more hostile to modern forms of music like jazz and compositions by Shostakovich.
29. Susannah Lockwood Smith. "Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927-45." Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1997. 66. Cited by Pauline Fairclough. Classics for the Masses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. No page numbers in on-line edition.
30. Smith. 129.
31. Prokofieva. The nephew was Pyotr Mikhailovich Kazmin.
32. Wikipedia. "Vladimir Grigoryevich Zakharov." It said 1932.
33. Wikipedia. "Pyatnitsky Choir." It said 1931, as did Marina Frolova-Walker. Stalin’s Music Prize. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 184.
34. Kiril Tomoff. Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 13. It was the Decree on the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations. [47]
35. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2012. 116.
36. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" 21 September 2000. Semantic Scholar website. 3–4. Gorky’s speech is better than any of its precis. It’s available on the Marxist.org website. Its source was Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. 25–69.
37. Olson. 3.
38. Smith. 160. Cited by Olson. 11.
39. Stites. 72.
40. Smith. 127–128. Cited by Olson. 14. The Russian word was "narodnyi."
41. Smith. 123. Cited by Olson. 14–15. he did not rehearse his peasant chorus. Instead he told them to "sing it, as you sing on your bench and in a round dance." [48]
42. Frolova-Walker. 184.
43. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
44. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
45. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
46. Wikipedia. "Franco-Prussian War."
47. Wikipedia. "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians."
48. Prokofieva.
Peter the Great was the first Russian monarch to recognize his empire needed a distinct identity. [1] Marina Ritzarev said, when historians researched the origins of Rus’ leaders, they discovered the early princes were Varangians, and suppressed the facts. In place of Vikings, the people, especially those in the vicinity of Moscow, were accorded the status of progenitors. [2]
These were the folk whose music was used by Mikhail Glinka [3] a few years after Nicholas I implemented his policy of Official Nationality. [4] Collections, like one made by Nikolai Lvov in 1790, [5] were intended to emphasize "kindred, rather than alien characteristics." [6] The music reflected the aesthetics of an audience no more than one generation removed from rural villages. [7]
The nature of the urban population began to change with the introduction of textile manufacturing. Old Believers, who had been banished in 1667 during the reign of Alexis I, [8] were operating cotton, silk, and woolen mills in Moscow in 1832. [9] The Bremen-born Ludwig Knoop opened his first mill in Moscow in 1840. His operations expanded after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on the export of tools used by textile factories in 1842. [10]
Rural society changed when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. They still were forced to stay on the land and operate through commune leaders, but they no longer were subject to arbitrary demands by estate owners who took the profits from their initiatives [11] to finance lifestyles that proved the nobles’ loyalty to the tsar by imitating his court. [12]
Even before 1861, Mily Balakirev was changing the definition of national music from that of the peasants to that which made Russia different from Prussia, England, and France. [13] In 1862, the disciple of Glinka went to the Caucasus to collection folk music. [14] One work song from his home province of Nizhny Novgorod became famous in 1902 when it was recorded by Feodor Chaliapin [15] as the "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." [16]
The interest in music from remote areas of the Empire increased in 1884 when the Russian Geographic Society organized a Folk Song Commission. It sent its first collecting expedition to the Archangel area in 1886. [17] Balakirev was on the organization’s board. [18]
Just a few years before, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, and his son Alexander III condoned anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland and Ukraine. [19] He demanded everyone speak Russian and convert to the Russian Orthodox church. [20] Anyone who was a little bit liberal became suspect.
Evgenia Lineva and her husband fled to London in 1890, then resettled in New York. The student of Glinka organized Ukrainian and Russian immigrants in a choir that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in peasant costumes. They were accompanied by an orchestra and featured male dancers. [21]
Alexander III died in 1894, and his son, Nicholas II, allowed the Linevas to return in 1896. [22] She spent some time with the Musico-Ethnographic Commission that had been organized at the University of Moscow in 1901. [23] Chaliapin took Mitrofan Pyatnitsky to a meeting, and the latter began collecting in his home province of Voronezh. He eventually brought singers from the village to perform for the commission. [24]
World War I ended folk song collecting. Members of Pyatnitsky’s group were drafted, and, after the Revolution, disagreed with one another and dispersed. He formed a new choir with people who had moved to Moscow from "remote villages." [25] This coincided with the formation of "thousands of choruses" by workers’ clubs who sang political words to "old popular tunes and folk songs." [26]
In 1928, Josef Stalin implemented his First Five-Year Plan to industrialize the country. To free individuals to work in factories, he appropriated farm land, destroyed the largest landowners, and settled the rest on collective farms. [27]
The same year, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was formed to weed out "the anti-proletarian and the counter-revolutionary elements" in contemporary music. [28] In 1930, the All-Russian Choir Conference "voted to liquidate peasant choruses, deeming them ‘alien, harmful, corrupting to the class consciousness of participants and listeners.’" [29] Peasant music programming on radio stopped in 1929, and traditional music was banned in 1930. [30]
Pyatnitsky had died in 1927 and bequeathed his choir to his nephew. [31] The choir survived the general purge because it was too popular. Still, the choir modified its repertoire to fit Soviet requirements after a member of the Proletarian Musicians association [32] joined the group in 1931. [33]
At the end of five years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished the existing artistic organizations, and replaced them with creative unions. [34] The new musicians’ group was dominated by conservatory-trained men who decreed any professional musician must be able to read music notation and be familiar with the classics. [35]
Two years later, in 1934, Maxim Gorky exhorted attendees of the First Congress of Soviet Writers to use folklore motifs to create socialist realism. [36] Choirs again were encouraged, [37] and amateurs were expected "involve themselves in the creation of art, thus demonstrating that each individual was fully self-actualized and active in the work of building the ideal society." [38] Textual content was controlled by bringing the best singers and writers to Moscow for indoctrination. [39]
The Pyatnitsky peasant chorus became the Pyatnitsky Russian Folk or Popular Choir in 1936. [40] Singers were trained to read music, and the improvisational element that Pyatnitsky had encouraged was restricted to a few soloists. [41] An orchestra and dance troop was added in 1938. [42] In seeking to reach the mass audience defined by the Communist Party, it recapitulated Lineova’s evolution in the Unites States in 1893.
End Notes
1. Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014. 3. This article was based on "The Conflict between Nationalistic and Pluralistic Traditions in Russian Musical Narratives." International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Haifa University. August 1998.
2. Ritzarev. 4.
3. Glinka was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
4. Peter the Great was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
5. Ivan Pratsch. Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. Saint Petersburg: 1790. Prach was the arranger. Lvov’s name was added on later editions.
6. Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 16.
7. Richard Taruskin. "N. A. Lvov and the Folk." 3-24 in Defining Russia Musically. 20. Lvov and Pratsch collected "their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity — and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances."
8. Wikipedia. "Old Believers."
9. Danila Raskov and Vadim Kufenko. "The Role of Old Believers’ Enterprises: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century Moscow Textile Industry." 7 May 2014. Carl von Ossietzky Universtät, Evangelisches Studienwerk website. 14.
10. Wikipedia. "Ludwig Knoop."
11. Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire." 27 January 2017. Moscow’s New Economic School website.
12. Markevich. 19. For instance, Balakirev’s first exposure to music came from performances staged by Alexander Ulybyshev, a local noble who maintained a private orchestra. [43]
13. Composers like Rimsky-Korsikov and Borodin pursued Balakirev’s ideas in their own ways. Balakirev later advised Tchaikovsky. [44]
14. Wikipedia. "Mily Balakirev."
15. Chaliapin was an operatic basso.
16. Wikipedia. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." Nizhny Novgorod was not in the Caucasus.
17. Barbara Krader. "Folk Music Archive of the Moscow Conservatory, With a Brief History of Russian Field Recording." Indiana University website. 13. Based on I. K. Sviridova. Kabinet narodnoi muzyki. Moscow: Izd-vo Muzyka, 1966.
18. Krader. 13. This was the more conservative Balakirev who returned to public life after a period of isolation and depression [45] that began after Russia was defeated lost in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire."
20. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
21. Norman E. Saul. The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 44–45.
22. Saul. 46.
23. Krader. 14.
24. Elena Prokofieva. "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky - Peasant Choirmaster." The Third Age website. John Freedman brought this to my attention in "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky Bust and Monument, Voronezh." Russian Landmarks website. 25 June 2015.
25. Prokofieva.
26. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
27. Wikipedia. "First Five-year Plan."
28. "RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Ideological Platform." 1929. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). 1052–1055. Reprinted on Michigan State University, Soviet History website. Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov was more hostile to modern forms of music like jazz and compositions by Shostakovich.
29. Susannah Lockwood Smith. "Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927-45." Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1997. 66. Cited by Pauline Fairclough. Classics for the Masses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. No page numbers in on-line edition.
30. Smith. 129.
31. Prokofieva. The nephew was Pyotr Mikhailovich Kazmin.
32. Wikipedia. "Vladimir Grigoryevich Zakharov." It said 1932.
33. Wikipedia. "Pyatnitsky Choir." It said 1931, as did Marina Frolova-Walker. Stalin’s Music Prize. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 184.
34. Kiril Tomoff. Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 13. It was the Decree on the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations. [47]
35. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2012. 116.
36. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" 21 September 2000. Semantic Scholar website. 3–4. Gorky’s speech is better than any of its precis. It’s available on the Marxist.org website. Its source was Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. 25–69.
37. Olson. 3.
38. Smith. 160. Cited by Olson. 11.
39. Stites. 72.
40. Smith. 127–128. Cited by Olson. 14. The Russian word was "narodnyi."
41. Smith. 123. Cited by Olson. 14–15. he did not rehearse his peasant chorus. Instead he told them to "sing it, as you sing on your bench and in a round dance." [48]
42. Frolova-Walker. 184.
43. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
44. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
45. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
46. Wikipedia. "Franco-Prussian War."
47. Wikipedia. "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians."
48. Prokofieva.
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