NRR Project: The Almanac Singers, 'Talking Union and Other Union Songs,' 1941/1955

 

NRR Project: ‘Talking Union’

Performed by the Almanac Singers, and Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers

May, 1941; revised and expanded 1955

33 min, 41 sec.

From December 1940 to March 1943 the Almanac Singers existed. Despite their brief life as a group, their influence was profound. They sparked the folk movement and the protest-song movement in American music simultaneously. A collection of left-leaning artists, portrayed as suspicious Communists by the press and  government, they sang out songs of social activism, anti-war, anti-racism, and pro-union.

First I must point you to Cesare Civetta’s excellent essay on it at the National Recording Registry. Wikipedia is also quite helpful.

They were radicals, philosophically and musically. They utilized traditional American instruments and folk tunes to create a secular hymnal that the dispossessed and their allies could sing, stirring feeling and rousing the conscience. The idea of pouring sociological content into song was not new; listen to Gene Autry’s 1931 recording of “The Death of Mother Jones.” But the Almanacs put it on the map.

The original group consisted of Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Peter Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. Talking Union was their second album, after Songs for John Doe. Doe, released in May 1941, was anti-war; Talking Union was recorded the same month. Doe was quickly shelved after June 22, the date on which Hitler invaded Russia and the group became pro-interventionist. 

On Talking Union is heard Seeger, Hays, Lampell, John White, Sam Gray, Carol White, and Bess Lomax Hawes. The six songs are all pro-union – “All I Want,” “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” “Talking Union,” “Union Maid,” “Union Train,” and “Which Side Are You On.” All catchy, memorable, moving. This was a new kind of American song, or rather the rebirth of an older kind, of ballads and singalongs. Their earnestness, their energy, would be transmitted to a future generation of singer/songwriters who would ignite the social protest movements of the coming decades.

The Almanacs recorded three more albums, then sputtered to a halt. Seeger and Hays would go on to form part of the Weavers quartet in 1948, another group that was watched by the FBI. (The Weavers would end up blacklisted.) Liberal sentiments were despised; to adhere to them was as good as to be a card-carrying Communist, anathema to the American way.

In 1955, Folkways reissued the album, padding it with seven more songs from “Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers,” an ensemble that included a young Mary Travers, later of Peter, Paul, and Mary. They perform “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Roll the Union On,” “Casey Jones,” “Miner’s Lifeguard,” “Solidarity Forever,” “You’ve Got to Go Down and Join the Union,” and “Hold the Fort.”

This stuff is dynamite. Plaintive like “All I Want (I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister),” ardent like “Solidarity Forever” (to the tune of the Battle Hym of the Republic); defiant like “Which Side Are You On?”

World War II and the Red Scare slowed its progress, but the American folk music revival would explode in the 1950s, spawning a multitude of artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins, not to mention Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Kingston Trio, the New Christy Minstrels, and many other outfits.

But this was the real thing – songs they sang at labor rallies. “Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m stickin’ to the union/’Til the day I die.” These were committed activists who paid the penalty for speaking their minds. They were the first folkie heroes.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Memphis Minnie with Me and My Chauffeur Blues (1941).