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Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People

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I first starting using this book when I thought I was going to be a folklorist, about 30 years ago. I've been through 2 hardback copies and will probably have to buy the new paperback version. The most striking thing about Hard Hitting Songs..., is that it strips away all the glamor of the Folk Scare days to reveal the essence of these songs and the people who wrote and sang them. The stark black and white photography accompanying the songs is as evocative as the music. The simple presentation of the melody lines with chord symbols boils each song down to its essentials. A few lines of background on each song place it in historical, political and cultural context. And, many of them are pure politics.

These are the real songs of the people. True, some of them were written by professionals. Some are mere parodies of popular songs of the day. But all of them rise out of the lives of those who often had to make their own music if they were to have any at all.

The only dispiriting thing about this collection is that too many of the songs remain meaningful to too many modern Americans. On the other hand, it reminds us that even in this New Guilded Age, we have an economic history of which we should be mindful.

Pete Seeger used this book as his lecture notes when he appeared in 1971 at Cornell University's Willard Straight Hall for a lecture on "The Role of Music in the Labor Movement." It was more of a concert, really, but as always, he delivered the goods by bringing the text and music of the book to life.

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This book is, among other things, a "lost writing" of Woody Guthrie's. Woody wrote not one but two "Forewords" and multi-paragraph introductions for nearly all the songs included, and for each of the several subject headings. Alan Lomax gathered together the songs, with help and guidance from his collaborators; Pete Seeger transcribed their melodies & simple guitar tablature ("G," "C7," etc.), and anyone with an elementary musical education can learn to sing and strum these songs from the text. Oh, and Woody wrote a lot of the songs, too - "Union Maid," "66 Highway Blues," and many others.

These are all topical songs - "protest" songs, labor-organizing songs, contemporary ballads - and many are guaranteed to rile Establishment partisans even today - for instance, "I Hate The Capitalist System" by Sara Ogan Gunning. There are songs by Kokomo Arnold, Big Bill Broonzy, Joe Hill, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Washboard Sam, Sonny Boy Williamson the First... and there are new Afterwords by Lomax and Seeger, plus great Depression-era photographs on every other page. This is an entertaining and valuable text, whether you plan to sing out or just read it in solitude.

The hardcover edition of HARD HITTING SONGS FOR HARD-HIT PEOPLE, Oak Publications, 1967, originally sold for $12.50 USD, according to the printed price on the thoroughly protected dust cover of my copy. My copy, well-worn, but in fairly good condition, had been discarded by the Shelby Park Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library, apparently resold for $3.00 USD (the price pencilled in on the flyleaf), and ultimately resold to me for $108.00 USD through yet another used book seller located via amazon.com. It still bears the Dewey Decimal catalogue number on the cellophane-ized dust cover and, as testament to the shortsightedness of some rare, [possibly] right-leaning public librarian somewhere in Kentucky, bears three rubber-stamped "DISCARD" instructions, one on the title page and two over the pocket on the final page.

My love affair with this book began about five years after its initial publication when, as an undergraduate student, I stumbled across it in the music library of a smallish state teachers college located in the bituminous coal fields of western Pennsylvania. For an aspiring ethnomusicologist (not a career path I'd travel for very long), it was love at first sight -- err -- sound. With the permission of Professor Irwin Marcus, now retired, I even performed several favorites from the book during one of his history classes.

Unfortunately, having left the book behind after college graduation (and having later found guitar chords and lyrics for many of the entries in other sources, even before the dot.com explosion and construction of the Internet "information highway") I did not have occasion to reference it again until hearing a re-recording of Woody Guthrie's "Don't Kill My Baby And My Son," a plaintive ballad describing the triple lynching of an Afro-American woman, her infant, and her adolescent son at the hands of the 'good' citizens of Okemah, Oklahoma. (According to Guthrie, his father had served as "undersheriff" in Okemah for a year of two, a span that coincided with the events the song describes and at which time the young Woody would have been "about eight or nine years old.") I instantly recalled where I'd first seen and heard the words and music and decided, nearly forty years to the day from the moment I'd first laid eyes on it, to try to get my hands on the book.

Compiled by pioneering ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax, my edition includes a Foreword by John Steinbeck, an Introduction by Woody Guthrie, an autobiographical essay "About Woody" (also by Guthrie), and musical transcriptions by Pete Seeger. As if fearing the flavor and subject matter of the more than 160 songs allegedly "of the Depression and the Labor Movement of the 1930's" might not prove sufficiently evocative, publisher Irwin Silber also sprinkled the pages with dozens of haunting, period photographs by Jake Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Aurthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and "others." Woody Guthrie also wrote a personal introduction to each and every song in the collection, which includes many of his own compositions, as well. Despite its being the result of an obviously collaborative effort, Guthrie's ubiquitous personal 'imprint' would seem to make this very much his book.

Section V, "SOME FROM THE OLD WOBBLIES," contains six songs from the IWW's LITTLE RED SONGBOOK, a.k.a. SONGS OF THE WORKERS, ON THE ROAD, IN THE [hobo] JUNGLES, AND IN THE SHOPS -- SONGS TO FAN THE FLAMES OF DISCONTENT. As that collection was first published c. 1909, consider these a "bonus feature" belonging, chronologically and ideologically, to neither The Great Depression nor the Labor Movement of the 1930s. Contributions from the latter appear in Section X, "DETROIT SETS DOWN," and Section XII, "ONE BIG UNION" [not to be confused with the earlier Canadian movement of the same name].

The pleasures of the treasures in this tome go well beyond what might be expected from a typical single reading. Along with Woody Guthrie's folksy offering of a kind of "people's history," the book offers many hours of enjoyment for anyone who can read and sing the songs, whether alone or with friends and comrades. If only the rating system permitted, I'd give it TEN STARS -- Five for the words, five for the music!