>> Will Thomas Rowan: Hello, and
welcome to Homegrown at Home.
We're Windborne.
This is Jeremy, Lynn, Lauren,
and I'm Will, and we're excited
to be singing for you today.
We're going to start with
what's probably the greatest hit
of American labor song,
Which Side Are You On,
written by Florence Reece, and
she wrote it during what's known
as the Harlan County Coal Wars.
Her husband was a union
organizer and activist,
and he was being hunted by the
Sheriff J.H. Blair who came
to her house late at night
just to look for him,
and Florence was so mad after
he left, (they didn't find him,
luckily), that she took
the calendar off the wall
and she wrote the verses
for this song on the back
of it right then and there.
This is Which Side Are You On.
[ Singing ]
>> Jeremy Carter-Gordon:
Thank you.
So that was a song off of
our past album called Song
on the Times, and it's
represents what's become a real
theme for Windborne, which is
singing songs from the past,
and in particular from past
movements for people's rights
from the past 400 years
and singing them for some
of the struggles that we face in
today's world, and we're going
to follow that up
with a piece by one
of the most prolific composers
of American labor song,
a man by the name of Joe Hill,
and Joe actually
came from Sweden.
He came over as an immigrant and
made his way over to Portland,
Oregon in 1910 and he met up
there and joined fairly quickly
with the Industrial Workers
of the World, the IWW,
popularly known as the Wobblies,
and the Wobblies were
a prominent labor union
of the time, and they had the
opponents that you might expect
from a prominent labor
movement of the time,
these factory bosses
and lords of industry
who really didn't want
their workers organizing
for better wages, better
working conditions, all of that.
They also had some opponents
that you might not expect,
and one of these was
The Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army was
opposed to the IWW,
and this wasn't even just
a theoretical opposition.
No, they would actually
send their marching bands
out to the rallies where
the IWW was having speeches
and they would march with
the big trombone and the tuba
and the big bass drum and they'd
march up and down the street
and try and drown
out the speakers
so they couldn't
recruit any more workers
and they couldn't
spread the message,
and this is kind of strange.
You might be wondering
why they were doing this,
and it was actually
because they thought
that The Salvation Army
was spending too much time
organizing people to
make life on Earth better
and not enough time
thinking about the salvation
of their eternal souls, so when
the speakers would out there
and talk about the power
of collective action
and coming together
The Salvation --
So as you can see, that
could get kind of annoying,
and Joe got a little bit sick
of that and he decided that,
you know, I'm a songwriter
and he decided
that the next time The
Salvation Army was going
to come along marching
and playing one
of these old hymn tunes, that
the workers would be prepared,
and so The Salvation Army
came marching down the street
and suddenly all of the
workers burst into song,
singing right along with the
big trombone and all of that,
but with new lyrics
that were making fun
of The Salvation Army, and this
is a trick he pulled a number
of times.
This is probably
his most well-known.
It started off as a hymn
called In the Sweet By-and-By,
which if you don't
know it, is sort of --
you can imagine what it says,
you know, keep your head down
and don't make a fuss and work
hard and you'll be rewarded
in the afterlife, and Joe said
no, that's not good enough
and by the time he was done with
it, said you will eat by-and-by
in that glorious
land above the sky.
Work and pray.
Live on hay.
You'll get pie in
the sky when you die.
That's a lie.
And that's the chorus of the
song so if you're listening
at home and you can't help
joining in, please do sing along
with us and this is The Preacher
and the Slave, or
Pie in the Sky.
[ Singing ]
>> Lynn Mahoney Rowan: Gracias.
Can I pass you this?
>> Lauren Breunig:
Always a fun one.
>> Lynn Mahoney Rowan:
Yes, so next we're going
to sing a song whose
origins are not too far away
from where we are
currently recording from.
We're recording from
Concord, Massachusetts.
This is at Jeremy's mom's house.
Thank you, Liza, for the use of
this space, and this song comes
from a strike that happened
in Lawrence, Massachusetts
in the early 1990s and this was
a strike in textile industry
that later came to be known
as the Bread and Roses Strike,
and it was called that
largely because of a speech
that was given as part of that
strike by this union activist
and organizer named
Rose Schneiderman,
and part of what she
said is what the woman
that labors wants is the right
to live, not simply exist,
the right to life as the rich
woman has the right to life,
and the sun, and music, and art.
The worker must have bread
but she must have roses too.
And so then after
this amazing speech,
and after the strike was over,
later a man named James
Oppenheim wrote a poem including
some of those sentiments, which
was then later put to music.
The more popular version that
people often know is one written
by Mimi Farina but the
earliest version of the melody
that we could find
is by Martha Coleman,
and so that's what we
based our arrangement
of Bread and Roses on.
[ Singing ]
>> Will Thomas Rowan:
We are going
to do a piece that's a little
bit of an interesting story
because the text and the
melody are each available
in The Library of Congress
and the Folklife Center,
but in different manners.
The text comes from -- it's
the oldest text that we sing.
It comes from Gerrard
Winstanley, who was the leader
of the Diggers movement
in the 1600s
in the U.K. The Diggers were
a group of radical Protestants
who decided that they were
going to claim common land
and cultivate it for the good
at all, interpreting the Bible
to be calling for
social equality,
to level the social classes.
They were also known
as the True Levelers,
and he wrote this great text,
and then at some
point along the way,
it joined up with this
song family that's known
as the Captain Kidd song family.
The Ballad of Captain Kidd
was written, published in 1701
and it along the way gained
a bunch of different texts.
In the sacred harp, it has
What Wonderous Love is This.
Wonderous Love, it also
joined up with Sam Hall,
a bunch of other texts,
and this is one of them,
so it's a piece called The
Diggers Song from kind of 1640s
and maybe sometime in the 1700s.
[ Singing ]
>> Lauren Breunig: Thank you.
We're going to continue
on with a piece
that you won't find anywhere
in The Library of Congress
or American Folklife Center
archive, but we are singing it
at the special request
of the librarians.
This is a piece that was
inspired or sort of based
on a piece called
Four Pence A Day,
which came from the north
part of England and came
out of the lead mining industry
there, and it talks about --
the original text talks
about the really dismal working
conditions and starvation wages
that those workers were paid,
and we sort of looked at that,
at that text and have
rewritten the lyrics
to a subject that's a little
closer to home for us,
and the melody that we're using
is a piece by another group
or a melody by another group
called Cross of the Hands
and this is a song that is one
of our current favorites
dedicated to the librarians.
Thank you all for having us.
[ Singing ]
>> Jeremy Carter-Gordon:
It's good advice.
>> Lauren Breunig: On that note,
we do invite you to find us
on all of the social
media platforms.
We are @windbornesingers on
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
We are on Spotify,
and you can find us,
our website at
windbornesingers.com.
We're also on Patreon at
patreon.com/windborne.
We'd love to have you be
part of our community there.
We do have one more
piece for you.
We'd love to -- we want to say
a big thank you to The Library
of Congress and American
Folklife Center for having us
at this Homegrown at
Home concert series,
and this last piece is
the one that really sort
of brought us together
with the archive.
We arranged it as part of
the archive challenge concert
at the Folk Alliance
International Conference back
in 2020 where The Library of
Congress invited artists to look
through the archive,
find a song,
and sort of give it new
life in their own style,
and we found this piece called
The Song of Hard Times sung
by Lily Steele, originally
from Kentucky and it's a song
that the original text was this
really biting social critique
of people in a community all
trying to cheat each other,
and it was that we felt, like
many of the songs that we sing,
still feels very relevant today,
but we wanted to sort of zoom
out a little bit as it were,
so we've added several verses
to the original text to
sort of trace the lines
of power up the ladder.
So thank you once
again, for having us.
This is the Song of Hard Times.
[ Music ]
[ Singing ]
>> Lynn Mahoney Rowan:
Thanks for watching.
>> Jeremy Carter-Gordon:
Thank you so much.
>> Lauren Breunig:
Thank you all so much.
>> Will Thomas Rowan: Thank you.
>> Lauren Breunig:
We'll see you later.