Showing posts with label bloody harlan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bloody harlan. Show all posts

Friday, September 23, 2016

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Merle Travis' "Dark As A Dungeon"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Johnny Csh performing Merle Travis' "Dark As A Dungeon."

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

ORIGINAL MERLE TRAVIS LYRICS, transcribed from Capitol 48001:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's as dark as a dungeon way down in the mine...

SPOKEN:

I never will forget one time when I was on a little visit down home in Ebenezer, Kentucky. I was a-talkin' to an old man that had known me ever since the day I was born, and an old friend of the family. He says, "Son, you don't know how lucky you are to have a nice job like you've got and don't have to dig out a livin' from under these old hills and hollers like me and your pappy used to." When I asked him why he never had left and tried some other kind of work, he says, "Nawsir, you just won't do that. If ever you get this old coal dust in your blood, you're just gonna be a plain old coal miner as long as you live." He went on to say, "It's a habit [CHUCKLE] sorta like chewin' tobaccer."

Come and listen you fellows, so young and so fine,
And seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mines.
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul,
'Till the stream of your blood is as black as the coal.
CHORUS:
It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,
Where danger is double and pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.
It's a-many a man I have seen in my day,
Who lived just to labor his whole life away.
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine,
A man will have lust for the lure of the mines.

I hope when I'm gone and the ages shall roll,
My body will blacken and turn into coal.
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And pity the miner a-diggin' my bones.

ADDITIONAL STANZA RARELY PERFORMED BY MERLE TRAVIS:

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,
Is the same to the miner who labors away.
Where the demons of death often come by surprise,
One fall of the slate and you're buried alive.

Tuesday, September 08, 2015

***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Storms Are On The Ocean- For Prescott Breslin

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of June Carter Cash performing Storms Are On The Ocean one of Prescott Breslin’s favorite boyhood tunes.

Wildwood Flower, June Carter Cash, produced by John Carter Cash, Dualtone Music, 2003

Scene:
Brought to mind by the song Storms Are On The Ocean performed by June Carter Cash on her Wildwood Flower album.


Prescott Breslin was beside himself on that snowy December day just before the Christmas of 1953. He had just heard, no more than heard, he had been told directly by Mr. John MacAdams, the owner’s son, that the James MacAdams & Son Textile Mill was closing its Maine operations in Olde Saco and moving to Lansing, North Carolina right across the border from his old boyhood hometown down in Harlan, Harlan, Kentucky, bloody Harlan of labor legend, song, and story right after the first of the new year. And the reason that the usually steady Prescott was beside himself at hearing that news was that he knew that Lansing back country, knew that the matter of a state border meant little down there as far as backwater ways went, knew it deep in his bones, and knew that come hell or high-water that he could not go back, not to that kind of defeat.

Prescott (not Pres, Scottie, or any such nickname, by the way, just dignified Prescott, one of his few vanities), left the mill at the closing of his shift, went across the street to Millie’s Diner, sat at the stooled-counter for singles, ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of Millie’s homemade pumpkin pie, and put a nickel in the counter jukebox, selecting the Carter Family’s Storms Are On The Ocean that Millie had ordered the jukebox man to insert just for Prescott and the other country boys (and occasionally girls), mainly boys, or rather men who worked the mills in town and sometimes needed a reminder of home, or something with their coffee and pie.

Hearing the sounds of southern home brought a semi-tear to Prescott's eye until he realized that he was in public, was at hang-out Millie’s where he had friends, and that Millie, thirty-something, but motherly-kind Millie was looking directly at him and he held it back with might and main. In a flash he thought, tear turning to grim smirk, how he had told his second son, Kendrick, just last year when he asked about the Marine Corps uniform hanging in a back closet in the two by four apartment that they still rented from the Olde Saco Housing Authority and naively asked him why he went to war. He had answered that he preferred, much preferred, taking his chances in some forsaken battlefield that finish his young life out in the hard-bitten coal mines of eastern Kentucky. And then, as the last words of Storms echoed in the half-empty diner, he thought, thought hard against the day that he could not turn back, never.

And just then came creeping in that one second of self-doubt, that flash of why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing boys, with Delores. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter jukebox, and played the flip side of Storms, Anchored In Love. Yes, times will be tough since the MacAdams Mill was one of the few mills still around as they all headed south for cheaper labor, didn’t he know all about that from the mine struggles, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.
*********
Carter Family - The Storms Are On The Ocean lyrics

I'm going away to leave you love
I'm going away for a while
But I'll return to see you sometime
If I go ten thousand miles

The storms are on the ocean
The heavens may cease to be
This world may lose it's motion love
If I prove false to thee

Oh who will dress your pretty little feet
And who will glove your hand
Oh who will kiss your rosy red cheeks
When I'm in a foreign land

Papa will dress my pretty little feet
And Mama will glove my hand
You may kiss my rosy red cheeks
When you return again

Have you seen those mournful doves
Flying from pine to pine
A-mournin' for their own true love
Just like I mourn for mine

I'll never go back on the ocean love
I'll never go back on the sea
I'll never go back on my blue-eyed girl
'Til she goes back on me

Monday, March 12, 2012

Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Class Struggle is….”hot running water and a big old bathtub”- "Harlan County, U.S.A."- A Review

DVD Review

Harlan County, U.S.A., starring the workers of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the women of the Brookside (Kentucky) Women’s Club, directed by Barbara Kopple, 1976

This excellent documentary, directed by Barbara Kopple, focuses on the long, somewhat isolated strike in 1973 by the new United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) local of Brookside, Kentucky coal miners fighting for a union contract against the Eastover Mining Company (a subsidiary of the massive Duke Power Company, the modern equivalent of the old villainous Peabody Mining Company well known in labor circles and in coal country songs). That long strike, the ups and downs of the battles for recognition, the changing tactics on both sides over time, the frustrations of the strikers and their wives and other supporters, and the lessons to be learned for labor militants today are what make this such a compelling and rewarding documentary to view.

That “hot running water and a big old bathtub” caption in the title may need some explaining in post-industrial America, although perhaps not by as many people as one would think. One of the virtues of this documentary is that the participants in the strike and their wives and loved ones get plenty of air time. Thus, we get to hear and see, up close and personal, them express their views, their frustrations during the strike and their hopes for a successful strike and a new contract that will provide enhanced safety standards (notoriously poor throughout the inherently dangerous history of coal mining underground and a central goal of coal miner unions up to the present day), produce more benefits and place the Eastern Kentucky miners on a equal footing with other UMWA miners.

The most poignant expression, as noted above, of that hope was provided by a poor miner’s wife living in a ramshackle old cabin (company-provided, I believe, which is not unusual in coal country) without hot running water or a proper bathtub to her daughter while the daughter was being bathed in a washtub. That, my friends, is what the class struggle meant down at the base then, and, I daresay, now. We politically-oriented labor militants may express that proposition a little more theoretically concise and analytically profuse but I dare anyone who fights for a more just society to say they can express the sense of the struggle down at the base better than that.

And what of the lessons to be learned by today’s labor militants, including today’s coal miners who have lost a great deal of the spirit of their militant history in the last almost forty years since the events depicted in this film occurred. Well, as always, the question posed by the sub-theme that drives the spirit of the struggle in this documentary and as eloquently expressed by the writer of the song in the 1930s when there was also a huge wave of class struggle in the coal fields, Florence Reece - “Which Side Are You On?” After a few minutes of viewing here one should be very clear about that point. Further that, “picket lines mean don’t cross”, a chronic problem during the strike with scabs being sent into the mines by the company daily- a question that repeatedly comes up these days when labor disputes come up as well. And another lesson, not surprisingly, do not trust bourgeois politicians, judges, cop, the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy or anyone else that gets in your way. That is for starters.


Moreover, a strike committee has to be tactically supple, as the heroic work of the Brookside Women’s Club demonstrated when the miners were enjoined from keeping effective picket lines to keep the scabs out. And… well I could go on and on but the best bet is to actually watch this film, and re-watch it because there is plenty to pick up on there. And plenty to make you glad, glad as hell, that you are a labor militant. A retrospective hats off to the 1973 Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners, a place very close to this reviewer’s heart.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Out In The Be-bop 1950s Night- A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- For Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of June Carter Cash performing Will The Circle Be Unbroken to set the mood for this piece.

Keep On The Sunny Side: June Carter Cash-Her Life In Song, June Carter Cash and others, Two CD Set, Sony Records, 1999

Scene: Brought to mind by the song Will The Circle Be Unbroken performed by June Carter Cash on the compilation, Keep On The Sunny Side: June Carter Cash-Her Life In Song.

“Jesus, it’s been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill keeps screaming at us (and also to not trespass under penalty of arrest, christ,) and I still haven’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I don’t even have a high school diploma to do anything but some logging work up North when they need extra crews,” Prescott Breslin half-muttered to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between the two, and by many previous parties on those self-same stools, took place, of course, at Millie’s Diner right across the street from the closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.

Just then Prescott (no Pres, or PB, or any such thing, not if you don’t want an argument on one of his few vanities) fell silent, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as he thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that came creeping through his brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, first told him the plant was shutting down and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from his eastern Kentucky roots. Then it was just a second of self-doubt but now the thoughts started ringing incessantly in his brain.

Why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that he had worked in his youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, boys with Delores. Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.

The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and playedWill The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that his late, long-gone mother sang to him on her knee when he was just a tow-headed young boy. That got him to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when eight kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girls stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.

Then he thought about the Saturday night barn dances where he cut quite a figure with the girls when he was in his teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. He was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Uncle Eddie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And he heard, just like now on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances. As Millie asked him for the third time, “More coffee” he came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, he said no to himself with that same kind of December resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again he let out his breathe and said to himself one more time- Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.

Just then through the door Jack Amber yelled, “Hey, Prescott, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months work clearing some land up North for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, he was going too.

Friday, November 04, 2011

Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Storms Are On The Ocean- For Prescott Breslin

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of June Carter Cash performing Storms Are On The Ocean one of Prescott Breslin’s favorite boyhood tunes.

Wildwood Flower, June Carter Cash, produced by John Carter Cash, Dualtone Music, 2003

Scene:
Brought to mind by the song Storms Are On The Ocean performed by June Carter Cash on her Wildwood Flower album.

Prescott Breslin was beside himself on that snowy December day just before the Christmas of 1953. He had just heard, no more than heard, he had been told directly by Mr. John MacAdams, the owner’s son, that the James MacAdams & Son Textile Mill was closing its Maine operations in Olde Saco and moving to Lansing, North Carolina right across the border from his old boyhood hometown down in Harlan, Harlan, Kentucky, bloody Harlan of labor legend, song, and story right after the first of the new year. And the reason that the usually steady Prescott was beside himself at hearing that news was that he knew that Lansing back country, knew that the matter of a state border meant little down there as far as backwater ways went, knew it deep in his bones, and knew that come hell or high-water that he could not go back, not to that kind of defeat.

Prescott (not Pres, Scottie, or any such nickname, by the way, just dignified Prescott, one of his few vanities), left the mill at the closing of his shift, went across the street to Millie’s Diner, sat at the stooled-counter for singles, ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of Millie’s homemade pumpkin pie, and put a nickel in the counter jukebox, selecting the Carter Family’s Storms Are On The Ocean that Millie had ordered the jukebox man to insert just for Prescott and the other country boys (and occasionally girls), mainly boys, or rather men who worked the mills in town and sometimes needed a reminder of home, or something with their coffee and pie.

Hearing the sounds of southern home brought a semi-tear to Prescott's eye until he realized that he was in public, was at hang-out Millie’s where he had friends, and that Millie, thirty-something, but motherly-kind Millie was looking directly at him and he held it back with might and main. In a flash he thought, tear turning to grim smirk, how he had told his second son, Kendrick, just last year when he asked about the Marine Corps uniform hanging in a back closet in the two by four apartment that they still rented from the Olde Saco Housing Authority and naively asked him why he went to war. He had answered that he preferred, much preferred, taking his chances in some forsaken battlefield that finish his young life out in the hard-bitten coal mines of eastern Kentucky. And then, as the last words of Storms echoed in the half-empty diner, he thought, thought hard against the day that he could not turn back, never.

And just then came creeping in that one second of self-doubt, that flash of why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing boys, with Delores. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter jukebox, and played the flip side of Storms, Anchored In Love. Yes, times will be tough since the MacAdams Mill was one of the few mills still around as they all headed south for cheaper labor, didn’t he know all about that from the mine struggles, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Our Mother, The Mountain- The Music Of Jean Ritchie"

Our Mother, The Mountain- The Traditional Mountain Music Of Jean Ritchie

CD REVIEW

Mountain Hearth And Home, Jean Ritchie, Rhino Handmade, 2004

The last time that the name of traditional mountain folk singer Jean Ritchie was mentioned in this space was as part of the lineup in Rosalie Sorrel’s last concert at Harvard University that spawned a CD, The Last Go-Round. At that concert she, as usual, she performed, accompanied by her sweet dulcimer, the mountain music particularly the music that she learned in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and that she has been associated with going back at least to the early 1960’s. Here, in the CD under review, Mountain Hearth and Home, we get a wide range of those traditional mountain songs from those parts that provide something for every palate.

The songs, simple songs of the mountains that befit a simple folk with simple lyrics, chords and instrumentation representing what was at hand, many of which have their genesis back in the hills of Scotland and Ireland, never fail to evoke a primordial response in this listener. The songs speak of the longings created by those isolated spaces; and, occasionally of those almost eternal thoughts of love, love thwarted, love gone wrong or love disappearing without a trace. Or songs of the hard life of the mountains whether it is the hard scrabble to make a life from the rocky farmland that will not give forth without great struggle or of the mines, the coal mines that in an earlier time (and that are making a comeback now out west) represented a key energy source for a growing industrial society. Many a tale here centers on the trails and tribulations of the weary, worked-out mines and miners. Add in some country lullabies, some religiously-oriented songs representing the fundamental Protestant ethic that drove these people and some Saturday dancing and drinking songs and you have a pretty good feel for the range of experience out there in the hills, hollows and ravines of Eastern Kentucky.

Several time over the past year or so I have mentioned, as part of my remembrances of my youth and of my political and familial background, that my father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner in the hills of Hazard, Kentucky (a town mentioned in a couple of the songs here) in the heart of Appalachia. I have also mentioned that he was a child of the Great Depression and of World War II. He often joked that in a choice between digging the coal and taking his chances in war he much preferred the latter. Thus, it was no accident that when war came he volunteered for the Marines and, as fate would have it, despite a hard, hard life after the war, he never looked back to the mines or the hills. Still this music flowed in his veins, and, I guess, flows in mine.

My Boy Willie

Traditional

Notes: This song has the exact same tunes as the song "The Butcher Boy" and is of a similar theme.

It was early, early in the spring
my boy Willie went to serve the king
And all that vexed him and grieved his mind
was the leaving of his dear girl behind.

Oh father dear build me a boat
that on the ocean I might float
And hail the ships as they pass by
for to inquire of my sailor boy.

She had not sailed long in the deep
when a fine ship's crew she chanced to meet
And of the captain she inquired to
"Does my boy Willie sail on board with you?"

"What sort of a lad is your Willie fair?
What sort of clothes does your Willie wear?"
"He wears a coat of royal blue,
and you'll surely know him for his heart is true".

"If that's your Willie he is not here.
Your Willie's drowned as you did fear.
'Twas at yonder green island as we passed by,
it was there we lost a fine sailor boy".

Go dig my grave long wide and deep,
put a marble stone at my head and feet.
And in the middle, a turtle dove.
So the whole world knows that I died of love.

"The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore"

When I was a curly headed baby
My daddy sat me down on his knee
He said, "son, go to school and get your letters,
Don't you be a dusty coal miner, boy, like me."

[Chorus:]
I was born and raised at the mouth of hazard hollow
The coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door
But now they stand in a rusty row all empty
Because the l & n don't stop here anymore

I used to think my daddy was a black man
With script enough to buy the company store
But now he goes to town with empty pockets
And his face is white as a February snow

[Chorus]

I never thought I'd learn to love the coal dust
I never thought I'd pray to hear that whistle roar
Oh, god, I wish the grass would turn to money
And those green backs would fill my pockets once more

[Chorus]

Last night I dreamed I went down to the office
To get my pay like a had done before
But them ol' kudzu vines were coverin' the door
And there were leaves and grass growin' right up through the floor

[Chorus]


Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies

Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They're like a star on a summer morning
They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story
And they'll make you think that they love you well
And away they'll go and court some other
And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks were black as ink
I'd write a letter to my false true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

I wish I was a little sparrow
And I had wings to fly so high
I'd fly to the arms of my false true lover
And when he'd ask, I would deny

Oh love is handsome, love is charming
And love is pretty while it's new
But love grows cold as love grows older
And fades away like morning dew

"BLACK IS THE COLOUR"

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I love my love and well she knows
I love the ground whereon she goes
But some times I whish the day will come
That she and I will be as one

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I walk to the Clyde for to mourn and weep
But satisfied I never can sleep
I'll write her a letter, just a few short lines
And suffer death ten thousand times

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

Blue Diamond Mines

I remember the ways in the bygone days
when we was all in our prime
When us and John L. we give the old man hell
down in the Blue Diamond Mine

Well the whistle would blow 'for the rooster crow
full two hours before daylight
When a man done his best and earned his good rest
at seven dollars a night

In the mines in the mines
in the Blue Diamond Mines
I worked my life away
In the mines in the mines
In the Blue Diamond Mines
I fall on my knees and pray.

You old black gold you've taken my lung
your dust has darkened my home
And now I am old and you've turned your back
where else can an old miner go


Well it's Algomer Block and Big Leather Woods
now its Blue Diamond too
The bits are all closed get another job
what else can an old miner do?


Now the union is dead and they shake their heads
well mining has had it's day
But they're stripping off my mountain top
and they pay me eight dollars a day


Now you might get a little poke of welfare meal
get a little poke of welfare flour
But I tell you right now your won't qualify
'till you work for a quarter an hour.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

*Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Bloody Harlan" In Song

Click on title to link to my entry for "Bloody Harlan In Song".

This commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Kathy Mattea's"Black Lung"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Kathy Mattea performing about the classic coal country health issue that never goes away, "Black Lung".

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

I can add nothing here to the song, except that the struggle portrayed in the accompanying film review on this date, "Harlan County, U.S.A.", brings that safety issue home in a very big way.


Black Lung Lyrics

Sign a petition under working condition
Union is in bed with the coal operators
Carry our freedom, looking for something
To get your family a better life for every single day

Some things keep me going
Well I got no one to blame
Five o'clock is comin'
Do you feel the same?
When a lonely whistle
Calls out your name?

All the men look the same
When they come out the mine
No prejudice for the mighty black lung
Rank and file workers, rank and file minds
Take off the gloves and sock it to 'em

Some things keep me going
Well I got no one to blame
Five o'clock is comin'
Do you feel the same?
When a lonely whistle
Calls out your name?

Hey unbeliever (Hey)
Black lung fever (Hey)
Transmit receiver (Hey)
Stand up deceiver (Hey)
Well I don't like it either (Hey)
No predjucide for the Black lung fever(no)

Some things keep me going
Well I got no one to blame
Five o'clock is comin'
Do you feel the same?
When a lonely whistle
Calls out your name

Thursday, November 11, 2010

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Women Fight for UMWA in Harlan County-Brookside Organized After 13-Month Strike

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry reviewing the documentary, Harlan County, USA that gives addition information about the strike below.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution,Spring 1976, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

************
Women Fight for UMWA in Harlan County-Brookside Organized After 13-Month Strike

HARLAN, November 8—After thirteen months on strike the miners of Brookside, Kentucky, scored a victory when Duke Power Company and its subsidiary, East-over Mining Company, agreed to accept the national contract of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) on August 29. A long and tough class battle has been fought to bring the UMWA back to Harlan County, and the job is only begun. One thing everyone involved agrees on, including Norman Yarborough, president of Eastover, is that the women of Brookside were key to the miners' victory.


Union-busting is a tradition in this southeast corner of Kentucky. Harlan County earned the byname it carries to this day-"Bloody Harlan"-in the organizing battles of 1931-32 during which three thousand men were blacklisted in the area. On 5 May 1931 the Battle of Evarts took place in which an undetermined number of men, including three deputies, died. As a result 34 miners were charged with murder, and 100 more were arrested on charges of "criminal syndicalism."

Among the numerous pensioners who reside in Evarts, just a few miles up from Brookside on High¬way 38, and the other mining villages in the hollows along the Cumberland River, many vividly remember these battles and are more than willing to recount the events in dramatic and articulate detail. They remem¬ber well because then, perhaps even more than now, the issue was one of survival.

The headaches of Norman Yarborough and Carl Horn, president of Duke Power Company, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, began at the end of June 1973 when miners at Eastover's Brookside and Bailey's Creek mines voted to recognize the UMWA as their bargaining representative by a vote of. 113-55. For three years, since Duke Power had bought the mines, they had involuntarily been represented by the company-created Southern Labor Union (SLU), whose "sweetheart" contract had expired. The entire purpose of this "union" is to prevent unionization of the mines in the area* Workers were fired according to company whim under the SLU contract.

Safety conditions were abominable. In 1971 the Brookside mine had a disabling injury rate three times the national average; in 1972 its rate was twice the national average. Welfare and retirement benefits, as important to the miners and their families as wages, were virtually non-existent.

The Brookside women all tell the same story of doctors, clinics and hospitals rejecting the SLU med¬ical card as a scrap of paper from which they would never collect their fees. On occasion, when the medi¬cal cards were accepted, the women who had used them found themselves pursued by collection agencies.

Even now in Harlan the campaign waged by the com¬panies against the UMWA retains crusade proportions. Every few minutes the local radio station broadcasts spot announcements sponsored by the company front, "KIN, Inc." (Keep Informed Neighbor), denouncing the UMWA as an enemy of working people. In response to KIN, Inc.'s broadcasts and newspaper ads the presi¬dent of the local Boosters Club has offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who can produce three miners on SLU pension. A safe bet.

Duke Power Refuses to Negotiate

In provocative defiance of the workers' vote Duke Power refused to sign the standard national UMWA
contract which has covered UMWA's mines since 1971 when it was negotiated by Tony Boyle. Limited as the benefits provided by this agreement were, it was too much for Duke Power, the largest electric power com¬pany in the Southeast and third largest coal consumer in the country with assets of $2.5 billion and posted 1973 profits of $90 million.

During negotiations the company insisted that any contract it signed had to contain a no-strike provision. Furthermore it demanded deletion of the fundamental contract clause that all mining and coal preparation was to be performed by UMWA miners. Promotion was to be based on "ability" as opposed to seniority and a 50 cents per ton royalty to the-welfare and re¬tirement fund, as opposed to 75 cents^ then provided by UMWA contract, was more than enough for miners, in the company's opinion.

Duke Power refused to budge, and at the end of July the Brookside miners struck. Judge Byrd Hogg of Letcher County, a former coal operator, issued an injunction limiting the number of picketers at any mine entrance to three. Brookside women speak bitterly of the experiences of their husbands on picket duty. Scabs had a heyday crossing the picket line, cursing and spitting on the picketed and waving their paychecks in their faces, finally,.as one woman put it, "After  working in that mine for so little, watching some scab come in to take his job when he fought for something better was more than I could take."


One day the Brookside women decided to gofrom a demonstration in Harlan to the scene of the action where they could be most effective. From then on they manned picket lines at Brookside. They organized themselves into the Brookside Women's Club to act primarily as a strike support committee. Though such activities by women are not unprecedented, this is probably the first time women have undertaken such initiative in the mining industry.

There is little press coverage of the Brookside strike that fails to mention the Brookside Women's Club. The effectiveness of the efforts of the women on the picket line earned them a well-deserved repu¬tation for courage and militancy. Brookside was shut down by their numbers, "persuasiveness" and untiring perseverence. They threw themselves in front of the cars of the scabs to stop them. They beat them with one-inch tree branches. At least one state trooper numbers among their casualties. The stories of their encounters with scabs, operators and the companies' "law enforcers" and thugs have become part of the folklore of the region.

Norman Yarborough's name has become a dirty word in the Harlan County mining community and be¬yond over the course of 13 long months. Duke Power understandably came to represent more than a giant absentee monopoly-capitalist corporation—an imper¬sonal force somehow coldly and imperiously determin' ing the course and quality of their lives from distant urban offices. The policies of Duke Power and East-over Mining were determined and implemented by human beings whose greed, dishonesty and contempt for working people could be observed firsthand, most directly in the person of Norman Yarborough. One of the women who spent a night in the Harlan jail where "Yardbird" had strikers sent described how she stayed up all night rather than sleep among the cockroaches, which she "hates almost as much as Norman Yarborough."

The Eastover president entered his office each day under heavy guard. To occupy the time on the picket line the women plotted various means of "getting their hands on him to knock some sense into his head." At one point they taunted him to come outside in order to discuss the possibility of their employment at the Brookside mine as soon as the UMWA contract was signed. As Yarborough cautiously peeked around the door of his office, each in turn made her pitch as to her qualifications and abilities—her physical strength, experience and knowledge of machinery and mining methods. Needless to say he was far from enticed by their modest proposal. He was later horrified to dis¬cover that the women "forever milling around and acting crazy put there," were not totally usurious in their ambition: with the end of the strike several fa¬miliar female faces appeared in his office to request employment applications. According to reports, though he appeared relieved to discover their business, a certain exasperation was apparent in his expression.

The Duke Power Company has notoriously discrim¬inatory employment practices, victimizing blacks as well as women, and has lost several law suits in this regard. The coal industry has hired women as under¬ground miners since December 1973, when the first two went to work in Jenkins, Kentucky. Since then sev¬eral dozen have been hired in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The reaction to women in the mines, as well as to women on the picket lines has been mixed. The argument that "the mines are too dangerous for wormen" tends to be put forward infrequently and sometimes sheepishly, given the obvious fact that danger doesn't discriminate. More commonly, opposition to women in the mines comes from miners' wives concerned to "prevent hanky panky in the mines."


Increasing integration of women in the industrial work force tends to allay such fears. The real inter¬ests of women and all workers are promoted by such integration. Not only are women thus able to make a better living, but working outside the home in social production increases social and political conscious¬ness. Women have significantly contributed to labor's struggles historically, having been in the forefront of many class battles. The unity of the labor movement and thus its strength is greatly enhanced by breaking down the divisions created by women's forced exclu¬sion from many areas of productive labor. Equal pay for equal work and equal access to training programs and all job categories are a fundamental democratic right of all workers, regardless of sex or race.

Companies Use Terror Tactics

The women involved in the Brookside strike laugh as they recount their experiences, but they also point out that many events they laugh over now were far from funny at the time. The strike was a grueling experience, won at great expense. It was not simply a matter of long and late hours on the picket line, foul weather or the fatigue of the pace of fund raising efforts, but of fending off attacks of the companies which ranged from harassment, arrest and prosecu¬tion to the most brutal terrorization of strikers and their families by hired gun thugs.


Strike supporters were repeatedly and arbitrarily arrested during the course of the strike. In October 1973 sixteen picketers were arrested following an incident on the picket line on charges of violating the court order limiting the number of picketers. In a stu¬pid attempt at intimidation seven women were arbi¬trarily held for two days in the filthy vermin- and roach-infested Harlan jail. Several had to bring their children with them for lack of child care.

At one point the women were informed that pro¬ceedings were being initiated to put their children in¬to foster homes on the grounds that they were unfit mothers. They replied that "Bloody Harlan" would be an understatement if this threat were executed. Rather than intimidating the miners, this crass maneuver further solidarized them and won them greater sympathy, even among the petty-bourgeois professionals of Har¬lan proper, many of whom have a contemptuous atti¬tude toward the miners.

The other event that most effectively exposed the cynical duplicity of the company and revealed the char¬acter of the SLU was their attempt to bribe two MWA strikers to lead a back-to-work movement. The strik¬ers reported the offer to UMWA officials and played along with the SLU officials in order to entrap them and definitively document the dirty deal. On two occasions Carl Noe and Ron Curtis received partial pay¬ment from SLU officials near the Harlan airport. They •were wired to record the transaction, and a photo¬graphic record was shot by a hidden photographer, proving beyond any reasonable doubt company/SLU collusion. To the dismay of many strikers, the provisions of the settlement negotiated by the UMWA na¬tional leadership to end the strike included the con¬cession that the charges before the NLRB against Duke Power and the SLU would be dropped in return for company amnesty for fired strikers.


The Brookside mine stayed closed for eleven months. Last July the center of activity moved to Duke Power's nearby Highsplint mine. Given the unreliable sympathies of some local police, state troopers were sent in by Governor Wendell Ford to herd scabs through the picket lines. Though the supply of coal to Duke Power was not cut off, the normal three shifts per day were reduced to one. A machine gun was sta¬tioned in the company office, and on at least one occa¬sion the picketers were forced to dive for cover as machine gun .fire flew over their heads for fifteen minutes.

The strategic situation at Highsplint made the mass picketing tactic difficult, and few of the women who had closed down Brookside participated. Between the gun thugs and state troopers, who escorted the scabs into the mine with drawn* guns, strikers picketed under constant extreme physical danger. Several picketers were shot, beaten and arrested. One of them, 66-year-old Minard Turner, returned to the picket line after two days, despite the bullet still lodged in his chest.


The, strikers were enraged over Governor Ford's use of state troopers. Arnold Miller, who doles out support from the union's political action fund (COMPAC) to Democratic ^friends of labor, "suggested that Ford, who ran this fall for U.S. Senator against Marlowe Cook, was behaving in an "unfriendly" manner by strikebreaking. Miller met with Ford and, lo and- behold, the strikebreaking turned put to be all a "misstake"—the result of a "misunderstanding"—and the state troopers were for the moment called off.

But Wendell Ford had, not had a change of heart; the "mistake" was merely that the timing was momen¬tarily inopportune for such blatant strikebreaking. As a capitalist politician he is by definition a strikebreak¬er. Arnold Miller's support to Democratic "friends of labor" puts him in a political alliance with these strikebreakers and their capitalist bosses who control both the Democratic and Republican parties, lock, stock and barrel. Workers need their own political party. The UMWA, like other unions, needs leaders that will fight for the political independence of the working class and build a labor party based on the trade unions to fight for a workers government.

Finally, Highsplint foreman Billy Carroll Bruner shot and killed 23-year-old Lawrence Jones. Even as he lay dying in the hospital four days after he was shot, the strike settlement was being drawn up in spe¬cial negotiating sessions. A combination of factors had made any other course but surrender suicidal for Duke Power. Not least among these was the fact that a number of strikers had taken all the abuse they were going to take. It was to grim and angry miners, prepared to defend their numbers with any force necessary —to answer kind with kind—that the settlement an¬nouncement arrived in the pre-dawn hours.


The women, too, had had enough. Many families had been forced to sleep on the floor for some time in order to avoid bullets fired into their homes by cruising night riders; the home of UMWA local president Mickey Messer was riddled with more than 100 rounds of am¬munition on August 8. Norman Yarborough had framed up picketers in court; the miners' children had been harassed by anti-union elements, and their teachers had ripped UMWA buttons off students wearing them and had penalized them grade-wise.


Several families living in company housing had fought off eviction attempts by Eastover by mobilizing supporters to carry their belongings back in as the company carried them out. Most of the families,forced to live in company housing by a serious housing short¬age in the area, as well as by their financial circum¬stances, lack indoor plumbing, and the water which they fetch from outdoors is infected with fecal bacteria six times the "safe" level. The water tastes bad and makes their children sick.

UMWA Shuts Down the Mines

The decisive step that finally brought the company to terms after 13 months was the national UMWA lead¬ership's mobilization of the entire 120,000 members of the union to shut down its approximately 1200 mines nationally in a five-day "memorial period" beginning August 18. UMWA mines produce about 70 percent of the nation's total.

After a great deal of expense and adverse publicity, including that resulting from the UMWA's participation in campaigns to defeat Duke Power's requested rate increases in North and South Carolina and to under¬mine its capital availability among stockholders, Duke Power settled for terms offered it 13 months before. The UMWA leadership could have won the strike in short order and organized all non-union mines in the process by immediately mobilizing the union's ranks to shut down the entire coal industry in a national strike.


Miller and other national officers made several trips to Harlan during the course of the strike. Hear¬ings were held in March by a panel of "investigators" headed by Willard Wirtz to weigh the relative merits of the two sides in the controversy. Trips to Washing¬ton were organized whereby supporters of the miners could implore their Congressmen to do something about the situation. Not surprisingly, as one enlight¬ened participant put it, "they ran out the back door as we walked in the front."

Much of the UMWA national leadership's rhetoric was devoted to its determination to organize the un¬organized—specifically .to bring the UMWA back to eastern Kentucky. Harlan County was to be the first step in this process. This impressed the miners of Harlan County, as well as did the strike benefits pro¬vided, which seemed fantastic by comparison with UMWA standards under the Boyle regime. The new "democratic," "militant" UMWA leadership has,how¬ever, demonstrated that, though (so far) less venal and perhaps less inclined to resolve internal power strug¬gles by murdering its opposition, its policies will not ultimately protect the miners' interests any better than its predecessors' did.

The reason is simple. The needs of miners, notably safety and job security, can be secured only through class struggle not limited to the confines of capitalism and capitalist "law and order." Just as the CIO's "il¬legal" organizing battles during the 1930's involved immense social struggles, so will organizing the un¬organized today. It cannot be done piecemeal, isolated area by isolated area, but only by united action of the entire labor movement. The fact that even in the wake of the Brookside victory the company/SLU was recent¬ly able to win the Highsplint election illustrates the point. Not only do many miners report that the company/SLU paid for its votes, but management voted in the election. Regardless of whether and when a new election is held, such tactics of the bosses can under¬mine and, and if allowed to continue, defeat an organizing drive.

Arnold Miller Contains the Struggle

Despite his democratic "innovations" like local election of officers as opposed to their appointment by the national office; contract ratification by the mem¬bership; and an end to voting rights for pensioners, Arnold Miller's program is not one of class struggle, but of maintaining capitalism. He was not ushered in¬to power in the UMWA by Nixon's Labor Department in 1972 in order to fight the bosses and capitalism, but to keep the lid on struggle. Though he claims to favor the right to strike over safety and local grievances he has campaigned against the numerous wildcats that have taken place in the last couple of years (more than in any other industry) insisting that Boyle's rotten contract, which authorized the continued endangerment at miners, was more sacrosanct than workers' lives.

A loyal Democrat who has run or office in his home state of West Virginia, Arnold Miller became the can¬didate of the "Miners for Democracy" (MFD) for UMWA president after Jock Yablonski, a former Boyle lieu¬tenant, was murdered on orders from Tony Boyle. He was elected in a Labor Department-administered elec¬tion re-run in 1972. (See "Labor Department Wins Mine Workers' Election," Workers Vanguard No. 17, March 1973.)

The issues which led to the MFD opposition and the events by which Boyle brought about his own downfall were health and safety, the goal of the miners being mine safety legislation and compensation for the chron¬ic occupational disease of miners which claims the lives of 3,000-4,000 per year-black lung disease.

Though many miners have not forgotten the lessons of past experiences with the federal government, its courts and its troops, and therefore know that all are tools of the companies, Arnold Miller—instead of at¬tempting to reform the union from within, to oust the corrupt Boyle machine by mobilizing the rank and file to take the union into their own hands in order to fight for their interests against the companies—sued the union and brought the government into its internal af¬fairs. The UMWA was put into virtual receivership by the Labor Department during its "investigation."

The government's real concern is not to "cleanup" the unions, but to wreck them in order that the capi¬talists it serves are freed to increase their exploita¬tion of the workers. The notion that Nixon or Ford is concerned about democracy and corruption is ludi¬crous. Miners organized to do so are perfectly cap¬able of getting rid of rotten union bureaucrats without any help from the bosses' government, as the history of the UMWA demonstrates. The question is whether their lot will be any better if they do. If one labor faker simply replaces another not much has changed.

Though when compared to Tony Boyle, Miller may look like the epitome of reform, and regardless of personal character or intent, the disservice he has done the trade-union movement in opening wider the door to government intervention in the unions is enormous. The principle of the independence of the trade unions from the state is fundamental, and every attempt to undermine it and establish a precedent to the contrary is a dangerous betrayal.


As we goes to press Miller is in the process of negotiating a new national UMWA contract, the first since he has been in office. The old contract expires November 12 and the miners' "no-contract-no-work" tradition makes at least a short token strike inevitable. The provisions of the settlement of the Brookside strike against Duke Power included the exemption of Brookside from participation in a national miners' strike with expiration of the contract. Though weary from their thirteen months' battle, the mining popula¬tion around Brookside appears disinclined to continue producing coal while fellow workers are on strike. Miller may well find his "compromise" with Duke Power meaningless if even one miner from anywhere decides to picket at Brookside. Crossing picket lines is correctly considered scabbing there.

Decline of the Brookside Women's Club

The Brookside Women's Club, though formally res¬urrected under "new leadership," in fact ceased to ex¬ist as originally constituted some time after Brookside was closed down. The original core of Brookside wom¬en walked out, with the Maoist October League (OL) asserting in the Call that a split had developed between those who felt that the club should concern itself only with Brookside and those who sought to broaden its sphere of political struggle. The facts remain in dis¬pute. When Brookside representatives did seek to in¬volve themselves in the larger labor movement, how¬ever, by addressing the first national conference of the Coalition of 'Labor Union Women (CLUW), they were denied entry on the grounds that they were not union members! And the opportunist OL, which could not risk alienating the labor bureaucrats who comprise the the source of the dignity and respect to which "those who make society's wheels turn" are entitled.


But despite its members' dedication to trade union¬ism and their personal heroism, an organization like the Brookside Women's Club is necessarily limited from the outset. While it was able to organize short-term strike support, without a revolutionary program and the political leadership of a Leninist party it could go no further toward the achievement of the broader social goals necessary for lasting victory.

Such a victory for the miners of "Bloody Harlan" will require a struggle which will begin with the for¬mation of .opposition caucuses in the UMWA to oust the traitorous bureaucrats who control the union and replace them with a class-struggle leadership dedi¬cated to fight for a workers government; it will cul¬minate in the uprising of all sectors of the working class solidly united under the revolutionary leader¬ship of a disciplined vanguard party to smash the rule of capital and begin the construction of a socialist society. Such a struggle cannot succeed without the active intervention of masses of working women and the wives of working men. We have every confidence that this fighting proletariat will include within its ranks women who are veterans of the Harlan County battles.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

*From "The Rag Blog"-Coal Mining : Union-Busting and the Massey Disaster

Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry concerning the Massey mining company and the desperate need to organize the mines, all mines.

Markin comment:

Mourn, then organize, and organize like hell.

Monday, January 04, 2010

*Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Class Struggle is….”hot running water and a big old bathtub”- "Harlan County, U.S.A."- A Review

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Harlan County, U.S.A."

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

Harlan County, U.S.A., starring the workers of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the women of the Brookside (Kentucky) Women’s Club, directed by Barbara Kopple, 1976


This excellent documentary directed by Barbara Kopple focuses on the long, somewhat isolated, strike 1973 by the new United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) local of Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners fighting for a union contract against the Eastover Mining Company (a subsidiary of the massive Duke Power Company, the modern equivalent of the old villainous Peabody Mining Company well known in labor circles and in coal country songs). That long strike, the ups and downs of the battles for recognition, the changing tactics on both sides over time, the frustrations of the strikers and their wives and other supporters and the lessons to be learned for labor militants today are what make this such a compelling and rewarding documentary to view.

That “hot running water and a big old bathtub” caption in the title may need some explaining in post-industrial America, although perhaps not to as many people as one would think. One of the virtues of this documentary is that the participants in the strike and their wives and loved ones get plenty of air time. Thus, we get to hear and see, up close and personal, them express their views, their frustrations during the strike and their hopes for a successful strike and a new contract that will provide enhanced safety standards (notoriously poor throughout the inherently dangerous history of coal mining underground and a central goal of coal miner unions up to the present day), produce more benefits and place the Eastern Kentucky miners on a equal footing with other UMWA miners.

The most poignant expression of that hope was provided by a poor miner’s wife living in a ramshackle old cabin (company-provided, I believe, which is not unusual in coal country) without hot running water or a proper bathtub to her daughter while the daughter was being bathed in a washtub. That, my friends, is what the class struggle meant down at the base then, and, I daresay, now. We politically-oriented labor militants may express that proposition a little more theoretically concise and in an analytically profuse manner but I dare anyone who fights for a more just society to say they can express the sense of the struggle down at the base better than that.

And what of the lessons to be learned by today’s labor militants, including today’s coal miners who have lost a great deal of the spirit of their militant history in the last almost forty years since the events depicted in this film occurred? Well, as always, the question posed by the sub-theme that drives the spirit of the struggle in this documentary and as eloquently expressed by the writer of the song in the 1930s when there was also a huge wave of class struggle in the coal fields, Florence Reece -“Which Side Are You On?”. After a few minutes of viewing here one should be very clear about that point. Further as the strike drags on that, “picket lines mean don’t cross”, a chronic problem during the strike with scabs being sent into the mines by the company daily- a question that repeatedly comes up these days when labor disputes come up as well. And another lesson is, not surprisingly, do not trust bourgeois politicians, judges, cop, the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy or anyone else that gets in your way. Those will do, for starters.

Moreover, as shown here, a strike committee has to be tactically supple, as the heroic work of the Brookside Women’s Club proved when the miners were enjoined from keeping effective picket lines to keep the scabs out. And… well I could go on and on but the best bet is to actually watch this film, and re-watch it because there is plenty to pick up on there. And plenty to make you glad, glad as hell that you are a labor militant. A retrospective hats off to the 1973 Brookside Women's Club and the Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners, a place very close to this reviewer’s heart.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Billy Edd Wheeler's "Coal Tattoo"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Kathy Mattea performing the classic coal country song "Coal Tattoo".


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

I can add nothing here to the song, except that the struggle portrayed in the accompanying film review on this date, "Harlan County, U.S.A.", brings that lesson home in a very big way.

"Coal Tattoo"
Billy Edd Wheeler


Travelin' down that coal town road. Listenin' to my rubber tires whine.
Goodbye to Buckeye and white Sycamore. I'm leavin' you behind.
I've been coal miner all of my life. Layin' down track in the hole.
Gotta back like an ironwood, BENT by the wind. Blood veins blue as the coal.
Blood veins blue as the coal.

Somebody said, "That's a strange tattoo you have on the side of your head."
I said, "That's the blueprint left by the coal. A little more and I'd been dead.
Well, I love the rumble and I love the dark. I love the cool of the slate,
It's GOIN' down the new road, lookin' for a job. JUST travelin' AND LOOKIN' I HATE.
JUST travelin' AND LOOKIN' I HATE.

I stood for the union and walked in the line and fought against the company.
I stood for the U. M. W. of A. Now, who's gonna stand for me?
I've got no house and I got no job, just got a worried soul
And THIS blue tattoo on the side of my head left by the number nine coal.
Left by the number nine coal.

Some day when I'm dead and gone to heaven, the land of my dreams.
I won't have to worry on losin' my job, on bad times and big machines.
I ain't gonna pay my money away on dues or hospital plans.
I'm gonna pick coal where the blue heavens roll and sing with the angel band.
Sing with the angel band.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Jean Ritchie's "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Jean Ritchie performing the classic coal country song "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore".


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

I can add nothing here to the song, except that the struggle portrayed in the accompanying film review on this date, "Harlan County, U.S.A.", brings the tale told here home in a very big way.




The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore
(Jean Ritchie)


When I was a curly headed baby
My daddy sat me down on his knee
He said, "son, go to school and get your letters,
Don't you be a dusty coal miner, boy, like me."

[Chorus:]
I was born and raised at the mouth of hazard hollow
The coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door
But now they stand in a rusty row all empty
Because the l & n don't stop here anymore

I used to think my daddy was a black man
With script enough to buy the company store
But now he goes to town with empty pockets
And his face is white as a February snow

[Chorus]

I never thought I'd learn to love the coal dust
I never thought I'd pray to hear that whistle roar
Oh, god, I wish the grass would turn to money
And those green backs would fill my pockets once more

[Chorus]

Last night I dreamed I went down to the office
To get my pay like a had done before
But them ol' kudzu vines were coverin' the door
And there were leaves and grass growin' right up through the floor

[Chorus]

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Aunt Molly Jackson

Click on the title to link to the "Aunt Molly Jackson" Web site.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

*****

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts
contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?”

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger performing performing the classic coal country song "Which Side Are You On?"


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

I can add nothing here to the song, except that the struggle portrayed in the accompanying film review on this date, "Harlan County, U.S.A.", brings that lesson home in a very big way.


Which Side Are You on?
Florence Reece


(“an American social activist, poet, and folksong writer. Born in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee the daughter and wife of coal miners, she is best known for the song, “Which Side Are You On?“ written in 1931 during a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in which her husband, Sam Reece, was an organizer.”)

Come all of you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

cho: Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner,
And I’m a miner’s son,
And I’ll stick with the union,
Till every battle’s won.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there.
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J.H. Blair.

Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can.
Will you be a lousy scab,
Or will you be a man ?

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Patty Loveless performing the classic coal country song "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive".


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

I can add nothing here to the song, except that the struggle portrayed in the accompanying film review on this date, "Harlan County, U.S.A.", is a better way to proceed.

Darrell Scott- You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive Lyrics


In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky
That's the place where I traced my bloodline
And it's there I read on a hillside gravestone
"You'll never leave Harlan alive"

Oh my grandfather's dad crossed the Cumberland Mountains
Where he took a pretty girl to be his bride
Said "Won't you walk with me out the mouth of this holler
Or we'll never leave Harlan alive"

Where the sun comes up about ten in the mornin'
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you'll fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you're drinkin'
And you spend your life just thinkin' of how to get away

No one ever knew there was coal in them mountains
Till a man from the northeast arrived
Waving hundred dollar bills
Said "I'll pay you for your minerals"
But he never left Harlan alive

Grandma sold out cheap and they moved out west of Pikeville
To a farm where Big Richaldn River winds
And I bet they danced them a jig
And they laughted and sang a new song
"Who said we'd never leave Harlan alive"

But the times got hard and tobacco wasn't selling
And old grandad knew what he'd do to survive
He went and dug for Harlan coal
And sent the money back to grandma
But he never left Harlan alive

Where the sun comes up about ten in the mornin'
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you'll fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you're drinkin'
And you spend your life just thinkin' of how to get away

You'll never leave Harlan alive

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Our Mother, The Mountain- The Music Of Jean Ritchie"

Our Mother, The Mountain- The Traditional Mountain Music Of Jean Ritchie

CD REVIEW

Mountain Hearth And Home, Jean Ritchie, Rhino Handmade, 2004

The last time that the name of traditional mountain folk singer Jean Ritchie was mentioned in this space was as part of the lineup in Rosalie Sorrel’s last concert at Harvard University that spawned a CD, The Last Go-Round. At that concert she, as usual, she performed, accompanied by her sweet dulcimer, the mountain music particularly the music that she learned in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and that she has been associated with going back at least to the early 1960’s. Here, in the CD under review, Mountain Hearth and Home, we get a wide range of those traditional mountain songs from those parts that provide something for every palate.

The songs, simple songs of the mountains that befit a simple folk with simple lyrics, chords and instrumentation representing what was at hand, many of which have their genesis back in the hills of Scotland and Ireland, never fail to evoke a primordial response in this listener. The songs speak of the longings created by those isolated spaces; and, occasionally of those almost eternal thoughts of love, love thwarted, love gone wrong or love disappearing without a trace. Or songs of the hard life of the mountains whether it is the hard scrabble to make a life from the rocky farmland that will not give forth without great struggle or of the mines, the coal mines that in an earlier time (and that are making a comeback now out west) represented a key energy source for a growing industrial society. Many a tale here centers on the trails and tribulations of the weary, worked-out mines and miners. Add in some country lullabies, some religiously-oriented songs representing the fundamental Protestant ethic that drove these people and some Saturday dancing and drinking songs and you have a pretty good feel for the range of experience out there in the hills, hollows and ravines of Eastern Kentucky.

Several time over the past year or so I have mentioned, as part of my remembrances of my youth and of my political and familial background, that my father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner in the hills of Hazard, Kentucky (a town mentioned in a couple of the songs here) in the heart of Appalachia. I have also mentioned that he was a child of the Great Depression and of World War II. He often joked that in a choice between digging the coal and taking his chances in war he much preferred the latter. Thus, it was no accident that when war came he volunteered for the Marines and, as fate would have it, despite a hard, hard life after the war, he never looked back to the mines or the hills. Still this music flowed in his veins, and, I guess, flows in mine.

My Boy Willie

Traditional

Notes: This song has the exact same tunes as the song "The Butcher Boy" and is of a similar theme.

It was early, early in the spring
my boy Willie went to serve the king
And all that vexed him and grieved his mind
was the leaving of his dear girl behind.

Oh father dear build me a boat
that on the ocean I might float
And hail the ships as they pass by
for to inquire of my sailor boy.

She had not sailed long in the deep
when a fine ship's crew she chanced to meet
And of the captain she inquired to
"Does my boy Willie sail on board with you?"

"What sort of a lad is your Willie fair?
What sort of clothes does your Willie wear?"
"He wears a coat of royal blue,
and you'll surely know him for his heart is true".

"If that's your Willie he is not here.
Your Willie's drowned as you did fear.
'Twas at yonder green island as we passed by,
it was there we lost a fine sailor boy".

Go dig my grave long wide and deep,
put a marble stone at my head and feet.
And in the middle, a turtle dove.
So the whole world knows that I died of love.

"The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore"

When I was a curly headed baby
My daddy sat me down on his knee
He said, "son, go to school and get your letters,
Don't you be a dusty coal miner, boy, like me."

[Chorus:]
I was born and raised at the mouth of hazard hollow
The coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door
But now they stand in a rusty row all empty
Because the l & n don't stop here anymore

I used to think my daddy was a black man
With script enough to buy the company store
But now he goes to town with empty pockets
And his face is white as a February snow

[Chorus]

I never thought I'd learn to love the coal dust
I never thought I'd pray to hear that whistle roar
Oh, god, I wish the grass would turn to money
And those green backs would fill my pockets once more

[Chorus]

Last night I dreamed I went down to the office
To get my pay like a had done before
But them ol' kudzu vines were coverin' the door
And there were leaves and grass growin' right up through the floor

[Chorus]


Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies

Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They're like a star on a summer morning
They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story
And they'll make you think that they love you well
And away they'll go and court some other
And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks were black as ink
I'd write a letter to my false true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

I wish I was a little sparrow
And I had wings to fly so high
I'd fly to the arms of my false true lover
And when he'd ask, I would deny

Oh love is handsome, love is charming
And love is pretty while it's new
But love grows cold as love grows older
And fades away like morning dew

"BLACK IS THE COLOUR"

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I love my love and well she knows
I love the ground whereon she goes
But some times I whish the day will come
That she and I will be as one

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I walk to the Clyde for to mourn and weep
But satisfied I never can sleep
I'll write her a letter, just a few short lines
And suffer death ten thousand times

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

Blue Diamond Mines

I remember the ways in the bygone days
when we was all in our prime
When us and John L. we give the old man hell
down in the Blue Diamond Mine

Well the whistle would blow 'for the rooster crow
full two hours before daylight
When a man done his best and earned his good rest
at seven dollars a night

In the mines in the mines
in the Blue Diamond Mines
I worked my life away
In the mines in the mines
In the Blue Diamond Mines
I fall on my knees and pray.

You old black gold you've taken my lung
your dust has darkened my home
And now I am old and you've turned your back
where else can an old miner go


Well it's Algomer Block and Big Leather Woods
now its Blue Diamond too
The bits are all closed get another job
what else can an old miner do?


Now the union is dead and they shake their heads
well mining has had it's day
But they're stripping off my mountain top
and they pay me eight dollars a day


Now you might get a little poke of welfare meal
get a little poke of welfare flour
But I tell you right now your won't qualify
'till you work for a quarter an hour.

*Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-Hard Times In Babylon-Growing Up Working Poor In The 1950s

Click on title to link to my entry Hard Times In Babylon- Growing Up Working Poor In The 1950s