Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC , Nat Hentoff Workers and Songsters Many state affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union throw annual Bill-of-Rights dinners. Folks come from all around, and the price is...
...Rosalie also tells of a singing club in Austin named Emmajoe's—for Emma Goldman and Joe Hill...
...In a performance that might even have pleased Nielsen (he is a half-century dead), Herbert Von Karajan conducts the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon 2532 029...
...Joe is not what you'd call the Pavarotti of the collective bargaining committee...
...Penn tells of a school for workers he attended...
...This has not prevented such brassy prophets as Karlheinz Stockhausen from decreeing, as he did a couple of decades ago, that Beethoven is dead...
...M He was the son of a house painter, and one of his first ways of making music was using the branches of a fallen tree...
...That news might make Larry Penn feel a bit better...
...A slender, mocking, extraordinarily energetic young woman with the voice of someone who'd been smoking for half a century, and a beat that could have kicked through walls if it wanted to...
...Her name was Anita O'Day...
...Of the tales he sang that January night in Milwaukee, the ones of the Wobblies most set me longing for a nearby picket line...
...Anita records for the future—if not for Stockhausen—on Emily Records (P.O...
...But once he came to the Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen when he was eighteen, this "primitive" began to produce a body of music that is the most distinguished and distinctive in Denmark's history...
...Nielsen's Fourth Symphony ("The Inextinguishable"), like the songs of the Wobblies, just keeps on reverberating...
...They organized workers that other unions wouldn't touch— blacks, Asian Americans, Mexicans, hobo harvesters, women, and "timber beasts" (lumber workers), among others...
...Also inextinguishable, it seems, is Rosalie Sorrels, the Traveling Lady, who originally hailed from Adams County, Idaho...
...The free-speech campaigns in support of the Wobblies, who faced local ordinances banning their freedom of expression, make up one of the most glorious episodes in First Amendment history...
...The song was written by Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet, editor, and agitator, and a dividend on the Glazer album is a speech Chaplin delivered to a Woodworkers' convention in 1960 when he was seventy-three...
...I first heard her in a small, noisy Chicago bar thirty years ago...
...Music is life, and like life inextinguishable...
...She was becoming famous then, got a lot more famous, was put in prison, had other problems, but came out of it...
...And like the Chasidim in another line of work, the Wobblies put great emphasis on music as a way to organize...
...Her sense of time is like an annuity, no matter what happens to her voice...
...But now, what a delight is Miscellaneous Abstract Record No...
...Only the stuffed shirts and the big shots made history...
...New to me, but permanent now, is "You've Got to Sleep Alone," written by Jimmy Gilmore of Austin, Texas...
...But, Chaplin told them, it wasn't that way...
...Folks come from all around, and the price is low enough so that just about anybody can afford to attend...
...Rosalie has always chosen her material beyond category, but this time the range and illuminations are unusually varied— songs associated with Mississippi John Hurt and Montana Slim, a bar song from a public house in Delaware, a powerful calling in of memories of Ireland, and a tune that would delight Joe Glazer and Larry Penn: Aunt Molly Jackson's "I Am a Union Woman...
...She may not know who Joe Hill was, but she's got the idea: Keep on keeping on...
...Some fifty people were there and a movie about Joe Hill was about to be shown...
...The real history boasts events like those free-speech fights that the Wobblies carried on...
...Joe Glazer has recorded a whole album of Songs of the Wobblies (Collector Records 1927, 1604 Arbor View Road, Silver Spring, MD 20902...
...Speakers too, but it was the singing that gave the evening a particular glow—most of it by Joe Glazer, who must have on file more underpaid workers' songs than the Library of Congress...
...In his symphonies particularly, Carl Nielsen spoke with a strength that is both rugged and lyrical, and a musical intelligence that is incapable of being complacent...
...True believers in the Constitution who have taken special risks for liberty during the year are honored, and there are speakers to rouse the troops for next year's wars because, as Roger Baldwin used to say, no civil liberties battle ever stays won...
...It's got "Pie in the Sky," "Joe Hill," "The Rebel Girl," and, of course, "Solidarity Forever," which has been sung in the cold by a lot of strikers who never heard of the Wobblies...
...Music like: "Would you have freedom from wage slavery?/Then join the grand industrial band/Would you from misery and hunger be freed?/Then come do your share like a man/There is power, there is power, in the band of working men/When they stand hand in hand...
...This album, however, recalls those jammed jails with Wobblies singing so loud "you could hear it a mile away...
...She didn't stay long with the melody, riding over it, under it, ahead of it, scatting (making sounds without words) like a roller-coaster, and altogether having a ball, as they used to say...
...Beethoven, of course, was another believer that music is inextinguishable...
...Performed by the Beaux Arts Trio—Menahem Pressler, piano...
...Yet, here in a new recording (Philips 6514 184) is a set of Beethoven piano trios quite alive—"The Gassenhauer" and "The Ghost...
...The City is in San Francisco, and the tunes range from Tommy Dorsey's old theme "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" to "Tea for Two" (more Lewis Carroll's than the Caesar/Youmans version...
...All along the line, dedicated men have gone down slugging rather than endure industrial serfdom...
...But I doubt if any school teaches about them...
...If you look in the histories of the states, labor didn't make history...
...Isidore Cohen, violin...
...for information about this and his other albums, write to the same address...
...For thirty-five years, Joe has shown up at picket lines, union conventions, schools, and just about anywhere else he's been asked...
...Joe Glazer still hears them, and so does a Milwaukee truck driver, Larry Penn, whom Joe has recorded on his label (Workin' for a Livin', Collector Records 1931...
...that is, his music has decayed into museum pieces...
...The Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905 and smashed by the Government during World War I, advocated the abolition of capitalism, and along with that, the end of hunger and want...
...That grainy, ain't-hardly-anywhere-I-ain't-been voice is now laid back again, watching and waiting to make its key points with the knowing use of space...
...But his gruff affection for the lore of rebellious wage serfs and his undiminished rage at their bosses are more satisfying than any politician's bel canto...
...Still slender and mocking, full of moxie and fun, she's better now at playing with the melody and scatting than ever...
...These are labor songs from the inside...
...1 (Green Linnet SIF 1042, Green Linnet Records, Inc., 70 Turner Hill Road, New Haven, CT 06840...
...Bernard Greenhouse, cello—these subtle, often mysterious, and proudly melodic conversations (harmonies definitely out of style) reveal new connections between present listeners and that allegedly dead man...
...Last January, the Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union held its celebration of the Bill of Rights, and unlike most of the others I get to, this one had music...
...Box 123, North Haven, CT 06473), and her newest is Anita O'Day Live at the City (Emily ER 42181...
...Nielsen said the Fourth Symphony is about "the elementary will to live...
...Only three people had ever heard of Joe Hill," Penn remembers, "which I thought was phenomenal, to say the least...
...One more of the inextinguishables...
...The last few albums I heard by her seemed mannered, as if she were putting in too many italics...
...Chaplin told the rank and file to remember who got them where they are: "You wouldn't have had the eight-hour-day if five men hadn't been hanged in the Cook County Jail in 1886...
...Not, for instance, those fast Nashville turns about the romance of the road, but one guy's body-and-soul rhythms of a quarter-century on the road, starting at 5:30 every morning...
...He died a year later...
...Riding boxcars from all over the country," Chaplin recalled, "singing all the way," Wobblies would converge on a place like Spokane and just speak on the streets, organizing until they were carted away and "the jails were filled to overflowing...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
