Customer Reviews

The Big Red Songbook: 250-Plus IWW Songs

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The last time I checked, songs consist of two things - lyrics and melody. Anyone considering buying this book should know, then, that it contains NO MELODIES. "The Big Red Lyric Book" would be a better title. It's a fine book for anyone who wants a history of the songs of the IWW - it has a wealth of essays, illustrations and historical biographies. If you want to use it to actually learn some Wobbly songs, though, it's not going to serve. I was disappointed when I first flipped through the book - I wanted a songbook, not a historical survey.

I was expecting sheet music and was quite disappointed to flip it open and see lyrics only. Some of the songs say, "To the tune of [...]," but not all. A couple of ways to cope with this:

* Since most of these songs' tunes are from the beginning of the 20th century, in many cases the copyrights have expired. For instance, "Union Maid" is to the tune of "Red Wing," and there are copies of the sheet music to "Red Wing" available in JPGs online.

* You can find maybe forty recordings out of these 250 songs at [] That website is like the ethnomusicology version of iTunes. If all else fails, you can hear how the tune goes by downloading the tracks for $0.99 apiece.

Fear not, fellow union brothers and sisters; you can still find ways to sing these songs.

One inexplicable thing I'd like to mention is they only number their songs up through song #190 or so, but when you look in the index in the back to find the songs, they are listed by song number and go well into the 270s. I can't tell why they didn't feel comfortable doing an index by page number; it would have made it so much easier to find everything.

These days when organized labor is typecast as another big and corrupt special-interest group, it's useful to remember back to the days when there were no retirement or unemployment benefits, no health plans, no Social Security, no workplace safety regulations -- and when it took grass-roots efforts by ragged and democratic organizations like these to establish the basic rights and protections we now take for granted, in the face of persecutions, beatings, burnings, shootings and lynchings by hired goons, vigilantes and even the US armed forces. A lot of this history has only recently appeared in US textbooks at the college level, never mind in the secondary schools.

This collection feels rich and detailed: a number of essays, scraps of memoir, and illustrations augment the headnotes which illustrate each song. Some of the lyrics are over the top in their worshipful attitude toward an idealized Soviet Union and a simplistic reading of Marxist ideology. But remember that in the teens, 20s and 30s the Communist Party was the only organized political movement that took more than token interest in labor issues. And as Pete Seeger has said, "A good song is a triumph of oversimplification." These songs were the engine of that struggle, and medicine for all its hurts, and proof that Woody Guthrie was right when he claimed that music can change the world.

A wonderful collection of IWW songs, spanning six decades, with very informative essays and rich illustrations. Must reading for all labor/radical songs and labor history enthusiasts. These are not songs by Utah Phillips, but are drawn from numerous songwriters which were published in various editions of the IWW songbook. And a great price to boot.

As the owner of a number of Little Red Songbooks from the IWW, I was somewhat skeptical about the value of this book until I opened it. There was a wonderful review of the original Songbook Committee's efforts by Richard Brazier, one of the three men on that committee. While I had often heard about the Little Red Band, I had never seen a picture of the group until I opened the Big Red Songbook. Along the same line, there seem to be almost no images of JH Walsh, the man who dreamed up the idea of the Little Red Songbook, but there is one in the Big Red Songbook (holding his baritone in the Little Red Band). In short, this is a must purchase for anyone interested in the IWW and its historical place as the master of song parody.