How Jim Connell Wrote `The Red Flag' Protest Folk Song Lyrics

Labor Movement Organizer and Songwriter Jim Connell

In a column that first appeared in the British Socialist Party's newspaper, The Call, in 1920, a labor movement organizer and songwriter named Jim Connell recalled how he wrote the lyrics to a classic labor song and protest folk song, "The Red Flag" in 1889, when Connell was 37 years old, by writing the following:

"...The song was first published in the Christmas number of Justice [a UK socialist newspaper] 1889, which was then edited by Harry Quelch, and it immediately became popular. Justice then was published on Thursday, and the following Sunday the song was sung in both Liverpool and Glasgow...I may...try to explain how the song came to be written...

"1889 was the year of the London Dock Strike. It was the biggest thing of its kind that occurred up to that date, and its leaders, H.H. Champion, Tom Mann and John Burns, aroused the whole of England by the work they did and the victory they won. Much occurred, however, before that to elevate me.

"Not many years previously the Irish Land League aroused the democracy of all countries. I am proud to be able to say that I founded the first branch of the Land League which was established in England...I remained its secretary until the League was suppressed...

"About the same time the Russian Nihilists, the parents of the Bolsheviks, won the applause of all lovers of liberty and admirers of heroism. Under the rule of the Czar,...the best men and women of Russia were deported to Siberia at the rate of 20,000 a year. Young lady students were taken from their classrooms and sent to work in horrible mines where their teeth fell out and their hair fell off their heads in a few months. Nobody could possibly fight this hellish rule with more undaunted courage than the Nihilists, women as well as men.

"It was my privilege to know Stepniak...His book Underground Russia, produced a greater effect on me than any `revelation' ever produced on a devotee. I was indeed `raised above myself' by the dauntless courage of Vera Sassulitch and the `endless abnegation' of Sophie Perovskaya. There happened also in 1887, the hanging of the Chicago Anarchists. Their innocence was afterwards admitted by the Governor of the State of Illinois. The widow of one of them, Mrs. Parsons, herself more than half a Red Indian, made a lecturing tour of this country soon afterwards. On one occasion, I heard her tell a large audience that, when she contemplated the service rendered to humanity, she was glad her husband had died as he did. Yes, I heard Mrs. Parsons say that. The reader may now understand how the souls of all true Socialists were elevated, and how I got into the mood which enabled me to write `The Red Flag.'

"...In a train between Charing Cross and New Cross, during a 15-minute journey, the first two stanzas, including the chorus, were completed, and I think I may say the whole of the song mapped out. After I got home, I wrote more, and little remained to be done after that. Next day, I made some slight additions and alterations, and the following day I sent it on to Quelch.

"As far as I remember, I never wrote a song in such a short time before or since...Did I, when I wrote it, think that my song would live? Yes. The last line shows I did. `This song shall be our parting hymn.'

"I hesitated a considerable time over the last line. I asked myself whether I was not assuming too much. I reflected, however, that in writing the song I gave expressions to not only my own best thoughts and feelings, but the very best thoughts and feelings of every genuine socialist I knew, Anarchists, of course included. I decided that the last line should stand."

Jim Connell's "The Red Flag" protest folk song lyrics:

(chorus)

"Then raise the scarlet standard high!
Within its shade we'll live and die!
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We'll keep the red flag flying here!"

(verses)

"The people's flag is deepest red;
It shrouded oft' our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.

"Look round--the Frenchman loves its blaze;
The sturdy German chants its praise;
In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung;
Chicago swells its surging throng!

"It waved above our infant might,
When all ahead seemed dark as night;
It witnessed many a deed and vow;--
We must not change its colour now!

"It well recalls the triumphs past;
It gives the hope of peace at last.
The banner bright, the symbol plain
Of human right and human gain.

"It suits today the weak and base,
Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place,
To cringe before the rich man's frown,
And haul the sacred emblem down.

"With heads uncovered swear we all
To bear it onward till we fall!
Come dungeon dark, or gallows grim
This song shall be our parting hymn!"

How Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Dylan Became `Part Of The Establishment'

As a now-deceased early 1960s Congress of Racial Equality [CORE] activist Suze  Rotolo once recalled:

"Robert Shelton's [Sept. 29, 1961 New York Times] review, without a doubt, made Dylan's career, because that brought the Establishment. He couldn't have gotten the Columbia thing, in a way, without that. That review was unprecedented. Shelton had not given a review like that for anybody...He [Dylan] always said he was going to be very big...What was shocking was seeing him became part of the Establishment--Carnegie Hall, Columbia Records..."

NY Times Folk Music Critic Robert Shelton with Dylan in 1964

According to an Oct. 23, 1961 entry in Izzy Young's Notebook, that includes early 1960s comments made to him by  Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Bob Dylan, which can be found in the 2018 book, Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, which Jeff Burger edited, Dylan also told Izzy Young the following in October 1961:

"Bob Shelton helped by writing an article [Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk Song Stylist,' published Sept. 29, 1961 in the New York Times--ed.]--talked around--someone from Elektra came down but nothing happened. Bob Shelton been like a friend for a long time...The article came out on Thursday night...Showed the article to John Hammond [of Columbia Records]--Come in and see me. I did. And he is recording me..."

And in a March 27, 1965 interview a few years after he became "part of the Establishment," whose text appeared in the Sept. 17, 1965 issue of the Los Angeles Free Press underground newspaper, that also was included in the 2018 Dylan on Dylan book, Dylan told Paul Jay Robins the following:

"...I'm not going to tell them I'm the Great Cause Fighter...Because I'm not, man. Why mislead them. That's all just Madison Avenue, that's just selling. Sure Madison Avenue is selling me..."

So, not surprisingly, on May 5, 1965 antiwar protest folk singer and protest folk songwriter Joan Baez wrote a letter to her now-deceased sister, Mimi Baez Farina, from the Savoy Hotel in London, which appeared in David Hajdu's 2001 book, Positively 4th Street, that stated:

"We're leaving Bobby's entourage...He doesn't speak to me, or anyone, really, unless it's `business,' how many records he's selling, will his record be #1, etc. It's shocked me completely out of my senses and I'm fed up...Joanie."

Also not surprisingly, when most hip young people in the USA were protesting against the U.S. Establishment's decision to escalate its war in Vietnam during the 1960s, Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Dylan apparently attempted to discourage his fans from both listening to protest folk songs or from protesting against the U.S. Establishment's militaristic foreign policy by saying, in an interview with writer Nat Hentoff whose text appeared in the March 1966 issue of Playboy magazine, that's included in the 2018 Dylan on Dylan book, the following:

"Folk music is a word I can't use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people...Songs like `Which Side Are You On?'...they're not folk-music songs, they're political songs. They're already dead...Everybody knows that I'm not a folk singer...`Protest' is not my word. I've never thought of myself as such...Message songs...are a drag. It's only college newspaper editors and single girls under 14 that could possibly have time for them...My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing...

"...I haven't lost any interest in protest since then...I just didn't have any interest in protest to begin with...Sure, you can go around trying to bring up people who are lesser than you, but then don't forget, you're messing around with gravity. I don't fight gravity...People that march with slogans and things tend to take themselves a little too holy...It's pointless to dedicate yourself to the cause; that's really pointless..." 

Hip Capitalist Manager Albert Grossman With Dylan In Early 1960s

How Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Dylan Obtained Melody For "The Ballad of Emmett Till" Protest Folk Song

Over 56 years ago a now-longtime hip capitalist multi-millionaire musician, whose stage name was Bob Dylan, wrote the lyrics to a protest folk song about the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, titled "The Ballad of Emmett Till."

But the melody for "The Ballad of Emmett Till" was apparently created not by Dylan, but by an early 1960s African-American protest folk songwriter and protest folk singer named Len Chandler.

In a February 1, 1962 entry contained in Izzy Young's Notebook that appeared in the Chicago Review Press's 2018 book that Jeff Burger edited, titled Dylan On Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, the then-nearly 21 year-old Dylan is quoted as saying the following:

"Wrote a song the other night Ballad of Emmett Till. After I wrote it someone said another song was written but not like it. I wrote it for CORE--I'm playing it February 23 [1962]. I think it's the best thing I've written. Only song I play with a capo. Stole the melody from Len Chandler--a song he wrote about a Colorado bus driver...Getting some money from Columbia. I'm supposed to be making all kinds of money, I seem...I'm sort of disconnecting myself from the folk music scene..."

And in the text of a March 1962 interview with Cynthia Gooding, that the Pacifica Foundation's listener-sponsored WBAI radio station in New York City aired, which also was included in the 2018 Dylan On Dylan book which Jeff Burger edited, the then-nearly 21 year-old Dylan is quoted as saying the following:

"Well, I just wrote songs...You wanna hear one?...Well, let me see. What kind do you wanna hear? I got a new one I wrote...Yeah, I got a new one. This one's called `Emmett Till.' Oh, by the way, I stole the melody from Len Chandler. And he's a funny guy. He's a folksinger guy. He uses a lot of funny chords when he plays and he always wants me to use some of these chords, trying to teach the new chords all the time. Well, he played me this one. He said, `Don't those chords sound nice??' And I said. `They sure do.' So I stole the whole thing...Yeah...Melody's his...Wait till Chandler hears the melody, though..."

Time To Revisit `Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye' Anti-War Protest Folk Song?

Did Smithsonian Folkways Partner With U.S. Capitalism In Distributing Non-Commercially-Motivated Folk Music?

Most people who are into listening to non-commercially-motivated folk music have, historically, been anti-capitalist and been against the denial of a fair share of daily U.S. mass media access to anti-capitalist musicians--like Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick and Matt Jones--by the U.S. capitalism's corporate media gatekeepers. And most people who are into listening to non-commercially-motivated folk music have, historically, been opposed to the commodification of folk music for-profit; and also to the exploitation by the U.S. capitalist system's corporate music industry record distribution companies of the folk music fans to whom they market their commodified folk music.

Yet Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has generally failed to focus much on opposing either the U.S. capitalist system's continued denial of a fair share of U.S. mass media daily access to post-1965 anti-capitalist, non-commercially-motivated, non-professional folk musicians who are working-class. Nor has Smithsonian Folkways demanded that the U.S. capitalism's music distribution system be operated in a non-commercial, non-exploitative way that provides U.S. folk music fans with their cultural right to listen to all folk music recordings for free.

One reason might be because the director emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings apparently saw nothing morally and politically contradictory in partnering with U.S. imperialism's capitalist system in marketing and distributing the non-commercially-motivated folk music that, historically,was generally collectively or individually created by anti-capitalist working-class people or anti-capitalist musicians; who, historically, had generally only received minimal sums of money or royalties from either Folkways or Paredon Records, in exchange for recording the albums whose folk music Smithsonian Folkways marketed.

As Timothy D. Taylor noted in his 2016 book Music and Capitalism, "Anthony Seeger, director emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, told me that that label had no qualms about using the capitalist infrastructure of distribution networks to disseminate its music." The Smithsonian Folkways director emeritus apparently told the Music and Capitalism author in 2012:

"At Folkways I always thought I was taking advantage of the capitalist system to distribute a kind of music that was unpopular, by definition...It seemed to me that capitalism and the market system actually was a really efficient way...for anybody anywhere in the world being able to get what they cared about. It seemed to me in principle you could in fact take advantage, sort of ride on the back of the capitalist system..."

Yet, coincidentally, few recordings of protest folk songs written by non-commercially-motivated anti-capitalist U.S. working-class folk musicians  or by members of the People's Music Network [PMN] that were written after 1980, have been produced or distributed by Smithsonian Folkways during the last three decades when it's been partnering and riding "on the back of the capitalist system."

Anti-War Protest Folk Singer-Songwriter and Activist Joan Baez's 1967 Statement Revisited

`They Drove Woody Guthrie' protest folk song lyrics

(chorus)
If you write too many songs and you side with the poor
And you refuse to be a wage slave
They will say you’re “insane”, they will put you away
Like they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave.

(verses)
He walked around the land and spoke with men and women
And wrote a thousand songs to tell the truth
The media barons, they felt he was too red
And his exclusion drove him to booze. (chorus)

He wrote a big long book which no one would publish
Because it spoke too much of love
He saw that nine-to-five was a big waste of life
But few understood what he said. (chorus)

They said he was “too old” to refuse to settle down
They ordered him to act like other men
But when he refused, they said he had “a disease”
And they locked him in a mental hospital bed. (chorus)

The capitalists got rich from the songs of the communist
Whom they kept hidden away with the insane
They marketed his legend while they took away his pen
Yes, they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave. (chorus)

The "They Drove Woody Guthrie" protest folk song was written in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Woody Guthrie's `Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti' Album Revisited

How Brit Capitalist Epstein Made 1960s Hip Capitalist Beatles Popular In USA

Brit Capitalist Brian Epstein and Hip Capitalist Beatles Band in 1960s

In the early 1960s, most music fans in the USA were more into listening to rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll vinyl records created, played or sung by African-Americans and white songwriters, musicians, bands and singers from the United States than into listening much to rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll vinyl records sung by white British bands. And in the early 1960s, most hip music fans on U.S. campuses were more into listening to U.S. rural and urban folk music and blues vinyl records created, played or sung by African-American blues musicians or white folk musicians than into listening to the vinyl blues or rock'n'roll records of white British bands.

Yet in early 1964 the vinyl records of a British rock'n'roll band of white hip capitalist singer-songwriters and musicians, the Beatles, began to be purchased by large numbers of music fans in the United States. But in his 1991 book, The Beatle Myth: The British Invasion of American Popular Music 1956-1969, "Doc Rock" Michael Bryan Kelly indicated how a white British capitalist named Brian Epstein was apparently able to eventually create a big music consumer market in the USA for the vinyl records of the Beatles after 1964:  

"If ever management promoted a band into popularity, it was Brian Epstein promoting the Beatles. He moved from bars and strip joints, and forced them literally to clean up their act. He specifically had them cut and wash their hair. He also insisted that they watch their language and smile a lot. Teen idols were always impeccably dressed. Epstein bought for the Beatles matching collarless suits, boots, and other items of dress which were all the rage in Paris at the time.

"After he had the Beatles groomed to his specifications, he literally manufactured their popularity, starting when their first British single failed to make the charts in 1962. Brian bought 10,000 copies himself with his own money, simply to get them on the charts.

"When the Beatles' first appearance at the London Palladium flopped, Brian had a photographer take a tight shot of a small group of girls he had asked to scream. Then he sent copies of the photo to all of the papers with a press release claiming that 5,000 screaming girls had swamped the theater.

"Musically, Epstein teamed the Beatles with arranger George Martin, who put violins on the Beatles' records and, with songs like `Yesterday' and `Michelle,' made them respectable enough to be accepted by parents.

"The Beatles' early British hits failed when they were first released in the States in 1963. To give the Beatles a push, Capitol Records' publicists spent an unprecedented sum of $50,000 [equal to over $400,000 in 2018] to promote Beatles music into popularity it could not attain without such promotion. The Beatles got onto the Ed Sullivan show because Epstein agreed to just one-half the fee normally paid by Sullivan to performers. In short, manager Brian Epstein, arranger George Martin, and promoters at Capitol manufactured a teen idol career for the Beatles, collectively turning them from young misfits into teen idols! Had not Epstein ordered John Lennon to never again sing nude on stage (as he did in Hamburg in the early '60s), wearing nothing but a toilet seat hung around his neck, Ed Sullivan (the Beatles' version of Dick Clark] would never have booked them on his `reely big show!'...Capitol sent, free and unsolicited, cases of free Beatle wigs to record stores and radio stations across the country as part of their promotional campaign for the Beatles..."

Did` Folk Capitalist' Musicians Make Big Money By Ripping Off Non-Commercially-Created Folk Songs in 1950s and 1960s?

Most African-American and white working-class people and rural folks, who either collectively built anti-corporate movements for radical democratic change and economic equality in the USA or collectively created most U.S. folk songs prior to the late 1950s, never made a lot of money from either their Movement work or their writing of non-commercially-motivated folk songs, which generally reflected the anti-capitalist sentiments and concerns of the Movement.

Yet some "folk capitalist" and commercially-oriented musicians in the late 1950s and early 1960s apparently made a lot of money from their involvement in the commodification of folk music by for-profit U.S. corporate music industry vinyl record production and distributions companies, like Capitol Records, etc. In his 2013 book, Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest, Ronald Lankford Jr. recalled what happened, for example, after the Kingston Trio recorded "Tom Dooley;" and their version of a traditional folk song about the hanging of a convicted murderer was aired by some radio station DJs in the USA:

"...`Tom Dooley' started generating thousands of dollars in royalties each week...[Kingston Trio members] Guard, Shane and Reynolds discovered that you could make $30,000 [equal to over $240,000 in 2018] a week from the royalties of one folk song...By December of 1959, the Kingston Trio had 4 albums on the Top Ten chart at the same time, giving the green light to major labels...: Folk music could be obscenely profitable...The commercial record labels...confused the public by promoting pop-folk as the real thing...

"...Popular folk performers made money faster than their accountants could find tax shelters to hide it in...The Kingston Trio...averaged between $8,000 and $12,000 [equal to over $65,000 to over $97,000 in 2018]  per show and another $6,000 [ equal to over $48,000 in 2018] per week in record sales, netting...$1.7 million in 1962 [equal to over $13.8 million in 2018] and accounting for 12 percent of Capitol's annual sales. The Limeliters tagged behind, making...$3,000 to $5,000 [equal to over $24,000 to over $40,000 in 2018] per week, though they tried to make up the income gap by singing...for Ford Motor Company and Folger's Coffee. Peter, Paul and Mary received $30,000 [equal to over $240,000 in 2018] after signing with Warner...By 1961, folk music...was...something you invested in like stocks and bonds...The Limeliters...turned `Things Go Better With Coke' into a...hit, and attempted to convince the public of the rich flavor of L and M cigarettes. The Kingston Trio...donned sailor suits and boarded a whaling yacht to sell 7-Up...Schlitz paid the Journeymen $25,000 [equal to over $206,000 in 2018] for a year's worth of jingles, while American Express...also engaged the group to cut an ad..."

Quotations From Pete Seeger: Folk Music vs. Show Business

In his July/August 1974 Sing Out! magazine column (that's included in the book Pete Seeger: In His Own Words which Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal edited), Pete Seeger criticized the way most music magazines cover the folk music scene for the following reason::

"What's good about folk music is that it is not show business. It should not be show business.

"But the trouble with most `folk music' magazines...is that they tell me what professional performer is singing here, and why that one is better than some other one. And somehow millions of people have gotten the idea that folk music is somebody standing on stage with a guitar in his or her hand. I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with giving such a false impression..."

Quotations From Pete Seeger: On Fame and Celebrity Worship

As the book Pete Seeger: In His Own Words that Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal edited indicates, during the 1970s Pete Seeger wrote the following about the negative effects of fame and celebrity worship on people in modern society:

"...I feel very deeply that the whole feverish search to get close to `fame' is not only foolish but a symptom of something very bad in modern society around the world.

"Modern technology, mass production, has made some people too famous and has left billions of people feeling that they are unimportant, that they are just cogs in a big machine...This is really false. Everybody is important in this world...

"...I urge all autograph collectors to realize that the kind of fame people get in show business and politics is about the phoniest of all. To be in show business is to be in the professional publicity business. People are hired to send out releases to newspapers and to arrange for TV interviews..."

Quotations From Pete Seeger: On The Movement and The Celebrity Star System

In a May/June 1975 Sing Out! magazine column that was included in the Pete Seeger: In His Own Words book that Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal edited, Pete Seeger wrote the following about Movement activists' failure to generally fight against the U.S. corporate entertainment media's celebrity star system:

"You ask me, do I know `some big name performer' who can help your cause. Don't you realize that we all have to fight the star system? In this technological society, we have to oppose the cult of personality...

"...Revolutionists have always had to teach the people that some of the greatest talents in the world have no reputation to speak of; they have just been sitting beside us all the time, and we didn't know about it."

Quotations From Pete Seeger: On The 1960s `Folk Music Revival'

In a letter that he wrote to Don West in the 1960s that was published in a book that Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal edited, Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, Pete Seeger made the following critique of the post-1960s "Folk Music Revival" in the USA and elsewhere:

"...The whole character and definition of the word `folk music' is being warped by the commercial image of the solo professional performer and the publicity surrounding (him or her)--and I think that you are right that magazines such as Sing Out are consciously or unconsciously contributing to this bad state of affairs by continually boosting the names of performers in articles rather than talking about the music and the unknown people who have created it and kept it alive.

"...In our present commercial system the star syndrome is the regular thing and I believe among the biggest victims of it are the so-called stars themselves. I know that I feel a victim of it personally because for 10 years I have tried to persuade Sing Out to play down my name, but it keeps popping up in every issue. I keep sending letters to publishing companies and record companies, but the basic facts of economic life keep running against me and there goes my name up in huge letters. I consented to a normal interview with the Christian Science Monitor and suddenly see a headline, `A Folk Hero Is Born.' What are you going to do about this kind of shit? I can tell you for sure that many times I've thought of quitting the whole music business because of it..."

In a March 25, 1986 letter that was published in the same book, Seeger also wrote the following:

"...In the long run what the human race needs in the way of music is the ability and the confidence to sing a song, whether it is at the fireside, bedside, tableside, workside, sidewalk side, or anywhere side without having to think of it as a `performance.' And none of the `folk revivals' in any country nor any festivals, magazines, recordings that I know of have really attacked the problem and made much headway in solving it...Music seems still to be in hock to the experts, and most of the millions listen..."

And in a December 20, 1986 letter that was also published in Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, Pete also wrote the following:

"What I wanted to do was try and get rank-and-file people singing again, whether parent singing to children or workers singing on the job or friends harmonizing in a car as they drove down the highway. But the prevalence of loudspeakers has defeated me and a lot of others and in the end our `Revival of Folk Music' seemed more like simply starting up another minor branch of the pop music business, especially appealing to middle-class whites..."

`Bloody Minds' protest folk song lyrics from 1967 and 2010

This protest folk song was written in March, 1967, in Furnald Hall dorm at Columbia University to protest the university's institutional membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank. Last verse of lyrics was added in 2010.

lyrics

Come, you Bloody Minds
Look what I done find
I done did research
IDA exists
Laugh between your walls
Sit behind your desks
Watch your missiles fall
IDA exists.

The value-free school
Your mask we see right through
The weapons of the Pentagon
Their brains procured by you.

Godly Grayson Kirk
On the board he knits
Smokes upon his pipe
While his bombers bite
Problems he assigns:
“How to make men die?”
Professors they plan
Death for Viet Nam.

In ’56 to serve Defense
Five schools they did combine
Four years later
Columbia
It joined the bloody minds.

City slums they rot
Homeless live in lots
Atoms to destroy
They’re your little toys
Oh, they pay you well
To create a hell
Did you see the news?
Twelve children they slew.

A division
Its name Jason
In summer they study
They meet, they talk
They plan, they plot
Counter-insurgency.

Lovers they must part
Lamps they now are dark
Knowledge turned to swords
Kirk sits on the board
Schools changed into guns
For the Pentagon
Students now they learn:
How to make kids burn.

You stand in class
You spout your facts
A noble scientist
But then at night
You join the fight
You do secret research.

Wall Street banks collapse
Workers get laid-off
Laser beams command
Bombs on Afghanistan
Drones built by IDA
In Pakistan they slay
Robot war research
Makes professors rich.

In 2010, scientists again
They do space war research
With DARPA funds in secret labs
They threaten all the Earth.

Murder poor peasants
With the tools you sent
Orphan thin children
Help the junta win
Kill them with your mind
Paralyze their spines
Someday you will die
And in slime you’ll lie.

`Columbia' protest folk song lyrics from 1966

The historical protest folk song, "Columbia," was written in the Furnald Hall dormitory on Columbia University's campus in late 1966 to protest the Columbia Administration's complicity with the U.S. war machine during the Vietnam War Era.
(lyrics)
Oh, educate Columbia Pursue the truth Columbia Exalt the mind Columbia Research and find Columbia And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool." Invite the spies Columbia The C.I.A. Columbia Give them a room Columbia To recruit spooks Columbia And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool." Help the Navy Columbia R.O.T.C. Columbia Teach a course for Columbia "The Art of War" Columbia And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool." Secret research Columbia You'd best not snitch Columbia At campus labs Maybe some bombs? For electronic war Design lasers And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool."

Quotations From Pete Seeger: On The `Star System'

Pete Seeger in 1978 (photo: Brian McMillen

In an October 30, 1969 letter, Pete Seeger wrote the following in reference to the U.S. music industry's undemocratic "star system"--and its undemocratic influence on U.S. left-wing and left-liberal activists and organizers and in the world of U.S. folk music:

"...Unfortunately, the average person that calls me is just as much a prisoner of the `Star system' as anybody else, and they always want to get someone with a well-known name who can help fill the hall..."

( from Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, selected and edited by Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal and published in 2012 by Paradigm Publishers)

Gordon Friesen's `The Strange Death of Phil Ochs' `Broadside' Magazine Article of 1976 Revisited

         

(In the October-December 1976 issue of the now-defunct Broadside: the topical song magazine,” a founder and longtime editor of that non-profit folk music publication who died in 1996, Gordon Friesen, provided U.S. music fans with the following interesting alternative take on the 1960s topical and anti-war protest folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs’s strange death to that presented in the 2011 documentary film about Phil Ochs, There But For Fortune, which was later broadcast in January 2012 on the PBS series, American Masters)

"It is indicative of the depth of the brainwashing to which the American people have been systematically subjected that too many of them accept Phil Ochs’ death as a not too uncommon breakdown of a personality. But the accumulated facts raise more than a suspicion that a plot existed leading to his deliberate destruction. Let us look at some of these facts which would impel the reactionary, fascist-type U.S. imperialists to reach the decision that Phil Ochs must die.

"The brainwashing of the people by the U.S. ruling class has created a tendency by artists, especially dissident songwriters, to underestimate the ferocious measures the ruling class will employ to destroy them. We know that the Wobbly balladeer Joe Hill was framed and executed by a firing squad (Phil knew this and even wrote a song expressing his admiration of Joe Hill). The woman radical songwriters, Fannie Sellins and Ella May Wiggins, were shot to death by police. Aunt Molly Jackson and her fellow songwriting relatives, Jim Garland and Sara Ogden, were forced to flee for their lives from the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal fields.

"A fascist vigilante mob, aided by N.Y. State and local police, tried to murder Paul Robeson at Peekskill. He was finally silenced and driven into exile by the U.S. government. Even Woody Guthrie stated in print he was under surveillance by what he called the F-B-Eyes. Many Pete Seeger concerts were picketed by John Birchers handing out inflammatory leaflets urging at least by implication, violence against him. In 1940 the Oklahoma Red Dust Players were raided and scattered to the winds.

"One can conclude that Phil Ochs was an even greater threat than these to the U.S. imperialists. In his early songs he defended Castro Cuba and the Vietnamese liberation fighters against the imperialistic designs of Washington. His songs became more and more pointed. “White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land”, “Santo Domingo”, “United Fruit” (where he approves of “young men going to the mountains to learn the way of the rifle” instead of slaving at pitiful wages for the American exploiters). But it was “Cops Of The World” with such lines as “here’s a kick in the ass, boys”, and “clean your johns with your flag” because “we’re the cops of the world”, and “Ringing Of Revolution” where he looks forward to the destruction of the last vestiges of the desperate decaying ruling class by the exploited masses, which really stuck like a bone in the throat of the U.S. imperialists.

"A special threat was the wide circulation of Phil’s songs abroad. Books containing materials about him and his work were published in Spain, France, and other countries. The Spanish book reprinted “Cops Of The World” for its example of an Ochs song and the author likened Phil’s guitar to a machine gun. The first edition sold out so quickly, mainly to students, that the Franco regime did not have time to suppress it, as it did any further reprintings. Individuals and groups sang his songs in Japan, Scandinavia, Holland, W. Germany and many other countries.

"It was naïve on Phil’s part to think when he undertook several jaunts in the early seventies to foreign nations that he would be treated like an ordinary tourist. He was met at two South American airports by police who arrested him, jailed him overnight and deported him the next day. From recent revelations it becomes obvious that the local authorities were acting under orders from the C.I.A. He was welcomed only in Chile where he sang together with Victor Jara, the popular Chilean peoples’ singer (Jara was destroyed in a bestial fashion when the C.I.A.-Ford-Kissinger sponsored Chilean fascists overthrew Allende in 1973. The police smashed Victor’s hands with their rifle butts, gave him his guitar and taunted “Now play and sing.” Then they murdered him).

"When Phil tried to visit his ancestral Scotland the London police intercepted him and put him on a plane back to the United States. He got off at Dublin. Here communications between the C.I.A. and the Irish authorities seemed to have lagged, for Phil was allowed to stay all of two days in Dublin before being deported to New York.

"On an African trip he was set upon by three thugs who paid special attention to crushing his voice box. Again the participation of the C.I.A. seemed unmistakably obvious. He came home barely able to croak and could never again sing like in the old days.

"Meantime the activities and programs of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were slowly coming to light through hearings in Washington and books by former agents who could no longer endure the inhumanity of these secret organizations—their assassination plots, poison dart-guns, drugs to induce incoherency, burglaries, arming foreign fascists to overthrow their democratic governments, the use of informants and disrupters, spreading of lies, clawing through personal mail, bugging telephones, planting listening devices in citizens’ cars. And so far this seems only the tip of the iceberg.

"The F.B.I. even had an elaborate program designed to induce dissidents to commit suicide. They confessed they had tried it on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this instance they failed. But who knows in which cases they have succeeded. In 1965 another Broadside songwriter “committed suicide.” He was Peter La Farge, adopted son of Oliver La Farge, first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature—the book was “Laughing Boy,” a sympathetic treatment of the Navajo Indians. The F.B.I. took an interest in Peter and began hounding him when he organized FAIR (Federation for American Indian Rights). Several months before he died, the F.B.I. raided his New York apartment at midnight. They scattered and tore up his papers; they put handcuffs on him and dragged him to Bellevue in his pajamas. They put pressure on Bellevue to declare him insane, but Bellevue could find nothing wrong and turned him loose.

"When Phil came back to New York last summer [in 1975] he was still full of plans. He was arranging to go to a place in New Jersey for a six-weeks “drying out” period under supervision by medical experts. Then he planned to set up what he called Barricade House, where he would issue a newspaper, record protest singers and make films. He already had the building picked out in SoHo.

"People ask us what motivation would the F.B.I.-C.I.A. have in wanting to see Phil dead when he could no longer sing or write. We answer that this was their motivation: Phil still had tremendous organizing ability, as witness his organizing the Chilean benefit. Barricade House would have been a great threat to the ruling class. We can visualize the F.B.I. doing one of their infamous psychological profiles on Phil Ochs. They asked the computer, what is his greatest weakness? The computer spat back: ALCOHOL! The next step of the F.B.I. is to assign agents to exploit this weakness in their intended victim; I would be very suspicious of the “friends” who attached themselves to Phil and kept plying him with alcoholic drinks.

"I am afraid we didn’t take to seriously Phil’s daily insistence that the C.I.A. and F.B.I., and later with the collaboration of Mafia hit men, were out to murder him. He sought a place to hide and tried to hire a bodyguard; he carried an iron bar, a big scissors and other means with which to defend his life.

"Where did these threats come from? What really happened? Perhaps some commission five or ten years from now will bring out the true details of how Phil Ochs met his strange death. We should finally learn how the great song-poem “Crucifixion” became a personal prophesy of the fate of its author. 

--Gordon Friesen (Broadside, 10-12/76/issue 133)

Broadside magazine co-editors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen

`American Folk Songs of Protest' Author John Greenway's Late 1940s Visits To Woody Guthrie Revisited

In his 1953 book, American Folk Songs of Protest, John Greenway recalled his late 1940s visits to U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie:

"When I first visited Guthrie in 1946 he was living in a crowded apartment in Coney Island with his wife and 4-year-old daughter, Cathy Ann...

"I asked if he agreed with a more famous contemporary who said that folk songs were gaining popularity because city people were bored with screen glamour and soap operas...

"He did not: `The unions started the boom,' he insisted. `The workers wanted to sing about their fight, but they couldn't borrow popular tunes because the moneymen who own the big monopoly on music would sock them with copyright laws. They had to go where they should have gone in the first place--to the old songs made by workers years ago...'

"He pushed a two-inch thick book of bound typewriter papers toward me. `Look,' he said, `there's more than 300 songs I've written, most of them to the old tunes. You won't hear the night club-orgasm girls singing these songs.'...

"Since that meeting Guthrie has been exceptionally prolific in song writing, and probably his stack of compositions now is three or four times as thick...His songs are likely to be...versified paraphrases of newspaper accounts of injustices perpetrated on individuals or groups...The inspiration and feeling of protest are still there in sufficient quantity...Of an estimated thousand songs in his manuscript collection, I found...about 140 whose basic theme was one of protest...

"...Like the IWW, which never copyrighted their songbooks, Guthrie...seems content to let them [his songs] fall into the public domain...

"...Guthrie never uses the tune of a popular song for his compositions."

Peggy Seeger: A 1996 Interview--Conclusion

Since the 1950s, Peggy Seeger has been performing before audiences in the United States and Britain. During this period she has recorded over 14 solo albums and many joint albums. After living in England between 1959 and 1994, Seeger moved back to the USA and lived in Asheville, North Carolina until early 2006. Following is the conclusion of a 1996 interview with Seeger.

As far as the festivals you’ve been performing at in the Nineties. Is there any difference between the audiences and the performers, compared to the Eighties? In what people are singing about? What response you get?
Peggy Seeger: I’m not much of an authority on what’s happening in America. I really haven’t been here long enough. Ewan MacColl and I didn’t do festivals. Because we didn’t like the “stop-start,” “stop-start” thing that goes on in festivals. I compare it to greyhound racing. You know, the gun goes and you have 5 minutes to do your bit and that’s it. Generally, I prefer concerts. I’ve been doing festivals because I think it’s an important discipline to have. And, probably apart from anything else, it gives me a chance to hear other performers, which I love to do.

I am very impressed at what’s going on at a lot of the festivals. There’s a lot of young people. Quite a lot of children. And it’s an audience with a very catholic taste. They seem to be able to take almost anything that you give them.

Have they heard of you? The U.S. media doesn’t seem to give you much airtime?
Seeger: No. The U.S. media has not given me much airtime. I hope to remedy that. I don’t know that I’m popular stuff. My songs have a lot of words. And some of them take a lot of thinking about. I think I’m probably not “sensational” enough. I’m not “smooth” enough. I don’t know. There’s something that I’m “not enough of.”

What about public television? I know whenever they’ve needed to raise funds, they invite a lot of the folksingers from the Sixties who allegedly are excluded from the commercial stations because they have “no commercial appeal?”
Seeger: I don’t know that I’m excluded. When I do sing on television and radio I seem to get a lot of appreciation. There’s a lot of us out there, you know. There’s a lot of people vying for these spots. I’ve been on “Prairie Home Companion.” I’ve been on “Mountain Stage.”

I was out of the country for so long. And also my name was tied to someone else’s, as part of a duo. And people get used to saying “Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger.” And when Ewan MacColl dies—I actually met people who said they didn’t know I was still alive. You know, I’m only 61 [in 1996].

So, it’s a very fickle audience. But there are a lot of people who have followed the stuff that I have done over the last 30 years. And I get quite a lot of nice pats on the back when I go to festivals and concerts. And I’m very happy getting concerts, as I have been doing. I’m getting a reasonable amount of work. And I’m learning also that I can teach. Which is something that I wasn’t aware of until Ewan MacColl died. Since then I’ve been teaching songwriting and been talking about the position of women in Anglo-American folksongs. And been giving seminars on ballad-singing and on what makes folks songs so powerful, and all these kinds of things.

Is that why you’re living in North Carolina [in 1996]?
Seeger: Oh, I just picked that out of a hat. Because I wanted a place that was in the South, that was in the mountains, that had good music and warm weather. And that wasn’t too near the rest of my family. Because I just wanted to see what would happen if I landed in a place by myself, without any connections.

If people want to get your cassettes or CDs, where would they go about getting them?
Seeger: My web page is open now—you might find it of interest. The best place…just go into a record store.

One of my records I like best is really hard to get. And you can really, I suppose, only get that from me. Which is one called Almost Commercially Viable. I made that with my friend Irene, when we were “No Spring Chickens.” Made it in England and never managed to get it sold to anybody over here yet. Mind you, I haven’t pushed hard. That’s one that I really like. Probably Internet, Worldwide Web.

In terms of the future. What’s your sense? What’s going to be happening in the United States and in England?
Seeger: England I can’t say very much about. Because I haven’t really been in contact with what’s been happening in England since ’89. I took a couple of years out to write a couple of books and I hardly sang at all in England.

What books?
Seeger: I finished a book of my own songs—140 of them. And a book of Ewan MacColl’s songs—200 of those.

Some readers might not have heard much of Ewan MacColl for some of the reasons you indicated, like blacklisting. From an artistic point of view, what is going to be his place in history?
Seeger: Well, in England he is regarded as one of the architects of the British Folk Revival. There was Alan Lomax, Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd: who were largely responsible for starting the English revival as we know it. And he was one of the main singers and theorists, teachers, and critics in that. He was a superb unaccompanied singer. And he was a person who opened up the English and Scottish repertoire of songs. I would say he probably has recorded about 100 albums. And many of them were songs that he just literally revived out of books. Because if they died, nobody knew them anymore.

He was a theorist of the revival, in that he worked out ways by which singers who were, say, brought up in different musical traditions, could approach singing of folk songs without ruining them. He also kind of kept the British Revival’s nose to the grindstone, as far as understanding the relationship between folk song and the working-class.

So he was like a Woody Guthrie, right, for Britain?
Seeger: Kind of.

But what are the differences?
Seeger: He came from the same kind of background as Woody Guthrie did: a working-class man. He was also uneducated, like Woody Guthrie. I would say he was probably a more skilled songwriter than Woody Guthrie. Ewan didn’t write—now this is my personal opinion: I don’t think he wrote any bad songs. And I think Woody Guthrie did. And I think Woody Guthrie wrote some absolutely superb ones. But he also wrote some stinkers. And if Ewan wrote stinkers, he kept them quiet. He was lucky enough to keep them quiet.

Ewan was also in theatre, which Woody wasn’t. He was responsible with his first wife, Joan Littlewood, for forming Britain’s best recognized revolutionary theatre: Theatre Workshop—which in the late 1940s and right through the Fifties was regarded as a pacesetter for activist theatre. He left that to stir-up the folk revival, which he did. And made a lot of enemies.

If you were in England and were in the folk revival and spoke of Ewan MacColl, anybody would have heard of him. He also is known for writing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” And for writing a number of songs which many people in the folk revival over here think are folk songs. Like “Dirty Old Town.”

Is there an autobiography or biography of him [as of 1996]?
Seeger: There’s an autobiography of him. But it was published in England and then taken out of publication. I’m trying to get it done again. It was never released here. And I’m trying to get it released over here. I will get it done. It’s called Journeyman. And I think it’s a wonderful book. An excellent book.

He wrote plays. And then the two books that I’ve done are kind of historical surveys, telling what was happening at the time when the song was written, making comments about the songs. With discographies and prefaces. Oh, you know, the whole thing. They’re huge books.

Getting back to your own performances. What do you hope to achieve when you perform before a live audience?
Seeger: Oh, I want to entertain them and make them think. I firmly believe that I have a great deal to learn from any audience that I sing for. And the folk revival generally gets an awful lot of really thinking people to it. I would like to, if possible, move them on from where they are and to draw on their experience to move me on. I’m very much invigorated by most of the people that I meet at the concerts that I give.

I suppose you might say I probably appeal more to their thinking faculties then I do to their emotional ones. But I try to make a good combination.

Technically, you’re considered quite skillful compared to most musicians. How did you get so good?
Seeger: Well, I’m not as good as I used to be. Because I have arthritis in my left wrist, which is hampering me rather a lot.