1971 `Free John Sinclair' Protest Music Concert Revisited: Parts 1 and 2

 

In late 1971, U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs performed with some other musicians (such as Stevie Wonder and former Beatles group member John Lennon) at a concert in Michigan that demanded the release of then-U.S. political prisoner John Sinclair, a member of the early 1970's White Panther Party

Did NYC DJ Willie Bryant Play Rhythm & Blues Before Alan Freed?

Before Alan Freed arrived from Cleveland in September 1954 to play Rhythm & Blues on NYC's WINS radio six nights a week, a DJ named Willie Bryant had apparently been featuring Rhythm & Blues on his NYC show since the 1940's. As Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed And The Early Years Of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson recalled in 1991:

"At an uptown rally in a Harlem YMCA, angry Blacks characterized Freed as an outsider who imitated Blacks...The loudest...complainer was Willie Bryant, a local rhythm & blues disc jockey...Bryant...in 1946 became the first Black deejay to host a national radio music program. On local radio, Bryant teamed up with Ray Carroll, a white man, and the pair hosted their `After-Hours Session,' broadcast on New York's WHOM from 11:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. After featuring R & B on the air since the 1940s, however, Bryant and Carroll `couldn't get arrested, ' while the minute Freed hit town his WINS program took off. To Willie Bryant, Freed's eclipse of the Black deejay was simply another example of the racial discrimination he had experienced throughout his long career..."

In his 2000 book, The Covert War Against Rock, Alex Constantine also observed:

"...John Elroy McCaw....was...instrumental in bringing Alan Freed to New York...After the war, McCaw bought a New York radio station, WINS at Seven Central Park West...By the early 1950s the station pioneered twenty-five minutes of....popular crooners of the day, followed by five muntes of news...`Top 40,'...owes its very existence to McCaw, Alan Freed's boss, the entrepreneurial brains behind `big beat' radio...at ease in the closed chambers of Washington's national security `elite.'...John E. McCaw died in 1969. He sired four sons, including Craig McCaw, who has been as influential in the molding of media..."

`A Time To Stir' Film Wins 2020 De Antonio Award

Protest Folk Magazine is pleased to announce that the winner of its Emile de Antonio Award for the Best Documentary Feature Film released in 2020 is filmmaker Paul Cronin's A Time To Stir historical documentary, about the student protests on the Upper West Side at Columbia University in April and May of 1968.

The 2020 De Antonio Award-winning documentary film can be viewed for free on Vimeo.

Emile de Antonio

 

Revisiting IWW's `Wage Workers, Come Join The Union' protest folk and labor song Lyrics

As the 2007 book, The Big Red Songbook, which Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont and Salvatore Salerno edited, noted, the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] protest folk and labor song, "Wage Workers, Come Join The Union," was written by an anonymous worker in the early 20th-century.

And the following "Wage Workers, Come Join The Union" lyrics can be sung to the same traditional folk song tune which the melody of "John Brown's Body," "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Solidarity Forever" songs utilize:

"We have seen the reaper toiling in the heat of summer sun,

We have seen his children needy when the harvesting was done.

We have seen a mighty army dying, helpless, one by one,

While their flag went marching on.

(chorus)

Wage workers, come join the union!

Wage workers, come join the union!

Wage workers, come join the union!

Industrial Workers of the World.

O, the army of the wretched, how they swarm the city street--

We have seen them in the midnight, where the Goths and Vandals meet;

We have shuddered in the darkness at the noises of their feet,

But their cause went marching on. (chorus)

But no longer shall the children bend above the whizzing wheel,

We will free the weary women from their bondage under steel;

In the mines and in the forest worn and helpless man shall feel

That his cause is marching on. (chorus)

Then lift your eyes, ye toilers, in the desert hot and drear,

Catch the cool winds from the mountains.

Hark! the river's voice is near;

Soon we'll rest beside the fountain and the dreamland will be here

As we go marching on. (chorus)

 

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)

  

Revisiting IWW's `Walking On The Grass' protest folk and labor song lyrics

As the 2007 book, The Big Red Songbook, which Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont and Salvatore Salerno edited, noted, the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] protest folk and labor song "Walking On The Grass," "represents IWW songs with authors unknown," was "probably composed in response to a Missoula, Montana ordinance prohibiting public assembly" in the early 20th-century and "addressed issues raised in free-speech campaigns waged by Wobblies in the Northwest and California." Following are the lyrics to the "Walking On The Grass" song, which can be sung to the traditional tune of "The Wearing Of The Green" Irish rebel protest folk song:

"In this blessed land of freedom where King Mammon wears the crown
There are many ways illegal now to hold the people down
When the dudes of state militia are slow to come in time
The law upholding Pinkertons are gathered from the slime.
There are wisely framed injunctions that you must not leave your job
And a peaceable assemblage is declared to be a mob.
And Congress passed a measure framed by some consummate ass,
So they are clubbing men and women just for walking on the grass.

"In this year of slow starvation, when a fellow looks for work,
The chances are a cop will grab his collar with a jerk;
He will run him in for vagrancy, he is branded as a tramp,
And all the well-to-do will shout: `It serves him right, the scamp!'
So we let the ruling class maintain the dignity of law.
When the court decides against us we are filled with wholesome awe,
But we cannot stand the outrage without a little sauce
When they're clubbing men and women just for walking on the grass.

"The papers said the union men were all but anarchists,
So the job trust promised work for all who wouldn't enlist;
But the next day when the hungry hoard surrounded city hall,
He hedged and said he didn't promise anything at all.
So the powers that be are acting very queer to say the least
They should go and read their Bible and all about Belshazzar's feast,
And when mene tekel at length shall come to pass
They'll stop clubbing men and women just for walking on the grass." 

Revisiting Irish Rebel Folk Singer-Songwriter Dominic Behan's 1965 `Note To Young Singers'

At the beginning of his book Ireland Sings: An Anthology of Modern and Ancient Irish Songs and Ballads, which Essex Music Limited published in 1965, Irish rebel folk singer-songwriter Dominic Behan included the following "Note To Young Singers:"

"Historically, collectors of folk material, like Sharpe, Herd, Ord, Child etc. have made significant contributions to the preservations of folk-lore. But, to imagine--as some people would have us believe at present--that balladry is in itself worth of study in an abstract art sense, is a foolish and undesirable premise. That everything in relation to folk song must be limited to the purely `Ethnic', with no allowance for the day to day changes which are a feature of any society is tantamount to asking us for our signature on a death warrant for folk-lore. Above all, it is asking us to sing with an academic tongue in cheek, and, before we bawl our heads off, we must find out why. It is enough to prevent young people from making their own songs...

"All this emphasis on `Folk knowledge,' `Ethnic approach' etc. is hindering the young singer. It is educating him/her into the phony accent, the idiomatic restrictive, and the world where song is no longer something to have on one's lip, but a kind of mysticism related only to the professorial and ultra academic. Forget the `Folk pundit'. Open your mouth, and, whatever your voice is like, sing! And to hell with the `Ethnicists'. Folk-song is not the special preserve of the few, but the undeniable heritage of the many."

And in the "Notes On Some Song Makers Of The Past," that he included in the same songbook, Dominic Behan also wrote the following:

"In this collection of traditional and contemporary songs the urban may tend to outweigh the rural tradition somewhat. This is because I have deliberately tended to include only songs from the countryside written earlier than the nineteenth century. Poor, wailing songs, and songs of love, inspired chiefly by Thomas Moore's success as a 19th-century court jester, are not for me. If you put your hands up to Heaven in despair at my occlusion of `Maire my Girl' or `My Mary of the Curling Hair', I can only suggest that there are plenty of recordings of this type of song made by the type of lyrical tenor likely to sing them...

"When Tomas Moore was eighteen years of age he was nearly charged alongside Robert Emmett with sedition in 1798. He wrote two pieces--anonymously--for `The Press', a highly revolutionary paper, and his Mother heard about it. She made Tom promise never again to do the likes. He kept his promise; indeed, he went further, he made a point of dedicating his translation of the `Odes of Anacreon' to the Prince of Wales...

"Before [Lord] Byron died, he entrusted his memoirs to Moore for posthumous publication. That Byron had given them to Moore's care as a friend no more worried Tommie than the sanctity of the songs he took from Ireland's folklore and so bowdlerized. At the behest of Lord Byron's relatives he burned the manuscripts in their presence. Emmett had been hanged drawn and quartered and his headless remains dumped, forty-nine years before Moore died peacefully in 1852..."