Revisiting IWW's `The Banner Of Labor" protest folk and labor song lyrics.

Until around 5 years ago, most sports fans in the United States never questioned why "The Star Spangled Banner," rather than a labor song like "Solidarity Forever," was played or sung inside a stadium before a football or baseball game begins. And in 2020, after more people pointed out that the lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner" were written by someone who had owned some slaves in early 19th-century, Francis Scott Key, some more people in the USA began to question whether it still made sense in 21st-century for "The Star Spangled Banner" to continue to be the U.S. national anthem.

According to the 2007 book, titled The Big Red Songbook, which Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont and Salvatore Salerno edited, it was only in 1931 that "Congress elevated `The Star Spangled Banner' to become the national anthem of the United States; and "The Star Spangled Banner"'s lyrics are sung to the tune of "To Anacreon In Heaven" (whose collectively-written tune has been attributed to a Brit composer named John Stafford Smith). And the same book also noted that in the early 20th-century an "unnamed author" wrote the following lyrics to "The Banner Of Labor" protest folk and labor song, that can be sung to the same "To Anacreon In Heaven" tune to which "The Star Spangled Banner" national anthem lyrics of the USA is sung:

"Oh say, can you hear, coming near and more near
The call now resounding: `Come all ye who labor?'
The Industrial Band, throughout all the land
Bids toilers remember, each toiler's his neighbor.
Come, workers, unite! `tis Humanity's fight;
We call, you come forth in your manhood and might.

Chorus
And the Banner of Labor will surely soon wave
O'er the land that is free, from the master and slave.

The blood and the lives of children and wives
Are ground into dollars for parasites' pleasure;
The children now slave, till they sink in their grave
That robbers may fatten and add to their treasure.
Will you idly sit by, unheeding their cry?
Arise! Be ye men, see, the battle draws nigh. (chorus)

Long, long has the spoil of labor and toil
Been wrung from the workers by parasite classes;
While Poverty, gaunt, Desolation and Want
Have Dwelt in the hovels of earth's toiling masses.
Through bloodshed and tears, our day star appears,
Industrial Union, the wage slave now cheers. (chorus)