Revisiting UK Protest Folk Songwriter/Miner Tommy Armstrong

UK Miner/Protest Folk Songwriter Tommy Armstrong

As John McDonnell noted in the 1979 book, Songs of Struggle and Protest, which he edited:

"The songs of workers composed and sung sometimes in the workplace itself, are...different...They express the feelings of...workers...The mining industry has been particularly noted for its fine songs. Probably the harshness and isolation of the conditions of work, and the danger which fostered the spirit of comradeship among the miners, have contributed to this creativity..."

And in the same book, McDonnell explained why he thought a UK miner named Tommy Armstrong was considered to be a great writer of protest folk songs:

"The greatest songwriter among miners must surely be Tommy Armstrong born in 1848 who started work at the age of nine and spent most of his long working life at Tanfield Lea...He had a real sense of responsibility to the miners...and felt a deep obligation to record the landmarks in their history...He entertained at concerts given to raise money for the victims of pit disasters, for strike funds, for reading rooms and for the miners' union. He is one of the best of all worker poets and A.L. Lloyd has described his work as `characterized by a profound class consciousness and a notable faculty for criticism of society.' Most of Armstrong's strike ballads were made during the 1880's and 1890's..."

http://www.pitmanpoet.org.uk/TommyArmstrong/TommyArmstrong.htm

Hard-Hitting Labor Songs Revisited In Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore's `Working-Class Heroes' CD

If you were inspired by Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore's updated 21st-century musical arrangements for and spirited singing of protest folk songs (that IWW organizer/Irish socialist labor organizer and 1916 Dublin Easter Rising executed leader James Connolly wrote in the early 20th century) in their 2013 Songs of Freedom  cd, you're likely to also be moved and inspired by their latest cd, Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle In Song.

As the liner notes for their 2019 Working-Class Heroes cd (which is being distributed in the USA by both PM Press and Free Dirt Records) observes:

"The most essential music is conceived by real human beings: ordinary, anonymous, often poor-people who stood up and joined together to fight injustice and institutional oppression. This is the story of  Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song, a collection of American working-class, pre-World War II folk songs revived by Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore. Here the duo presents 20 songs written by both folk canon heavyweights and lesser known but equally gifted songwriters...The album is a collection of stories as much as songs--stories of the women and men who (sometimes literally) gave their lives to emancipate the working-class.

"Heroes featured in this collection: Sarah Ogan Gunning, Ralph Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, Ella May Wiggins, Joe Hill, Paul Robeson, John Handcox, Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, and several more anonymous proletarian songwriters, whose names have been long forgotten but their words immortalized."

Most of the labor movement songs written by working-class labor movement organizers and/or working-class songwriters featured on Working-Class Heroes were included in the Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People songbook compilation, of Wobbly and 1930's Depression Era protest folk songs, that Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger put together in the early 1940's--which didn't get published until 1967. But some of these featured songs may not have been heard much by either older 20th-century or younger 21st-century labor movement activists, labor union members and U.S. working-class protest folk music fans--like "Come All You Coal Miners," "Come On Friends And Let's Go Down," "I Hate The Capitalist System," "The Mill Mother's Song" and "The Commonwealth of Toil."

In her spirited and passionate singing of the songs featured on Working-Class Heroes at a June 2019 performance of the duo at Encuentro 5 in Boston, Yvonne Moore showed that she's able to sing labor songs in as moving and intense a way as Hazel Dickens, Barbara Dane, Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Bev Grant were able to sing labor songs in the second half of the 20th-century. And, at the same event, Mat Callaghan was able to explain the historical context of the labor songs in the 21st-century that the duo sang as well as Pete Seeger did in the 20th-century; and  also to sing a great, entertaining version of Woody Guthrie's "Mama Don't `Low No Bush-Wahs Hangin' Around," that most Woody Guthrie fans in USA probably have never heard performed before.

Yvonne Moore and Mat Callahan

The duo has also edited an accompanying 96-page songbook for their new cd (that PM Press is also distributing), titled Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song: A Songbook. And as the blurb for this 2019 songbook notes: 

"Most of the songs collected here are from the early twentieth century, yet their striking relevance to current affairs invites us to explore the historical conditions that inspired their creation: deep, systemic crisis, advancing fascism, and the threat of world war. In the face of violent terror, these working-class songwriters bravely stood up to fight oppression. Such courage and heroism is immortal, such heroes should be celebrated and their songs can still lift our spirits, if we sing them today..."

http://www.matandyvonne.com/

`We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement' 1963 Introduction: An Excerpt

In 1963, the introduction to the We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement songbook (that was compiled by Guy and Candie Carawan for SNCC and published by Moe Asch's Oak Publications) indicated how non-commercially-motivated Freedom Movement protest folk songs, that working-class people of various racial backgrounds and Movement activist/organizers collectively created in 20th century, differ from most of the commercially-motivated pop songs that get played on corporate media conglomerate radio and television station programs in 21st-century, in the following way:

"Freedom songs today are sung in many kinds of situations: at mass meetings, prayer vigils, demonstrations, before Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins, in paddy wagons and jails, at conferences, work-shops and informal gatherings. They are sung to bolster spirits, to gain new courage and to increase the sense of unity...

"The freedom songs are of many kinds and range through many moods. The important ones are the old, slow-paced spirituals and hymns (some in the minor mode) that sing of hope and determination, and, the rhythmic jubilee spirituals and bright gospel songs that protest boldly and celebrate eventual victory. These are in the majority and usually have new or revised words to old tunes...Finally, there is a small miscellany of songs imported from the north, including a couple of revised union songs and a handful of newly adapted folk songs. These have come from exchange students, freedom riders, folk singers and hit records...The students have been responsible for making up most of the new lyrics and singing new life into the old songs...

"...No other songs have been able to express so closely the feelings of the participants or have been so easily adapted to fit current situations as some of the old spirituals. When sung with anything approximating the old time style and spirit, they are unbeatable..."

Irwin Silber's 1966 Foreward To `Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People' Book: An Excerpt

In 1966 Sing-Out! folk music magazine editor Irwin Silber wrote the following about the Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People book, whose text Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax first put together in the early 1940's, that was finally published in book form by Moe Asch's Oak Publications in 1967:

"...This book is all about--the despair, the struggle, and the dreams of the working people of the United States...as expressed through the songs the people themselves made up and sang.

"There aren't many professional song-writers represented in these pages. Mostly, the writers and composers, where we know their names, are people like Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Ella Mae Wiggins, Sara Ogan, John Handcox. Or blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red. For these and all the anonymous picket-line poets of the time, there was no intellectual problem of `commitment' or whether or not `protest' was `art.' When you sing because your life depends upon it, when you sing out of the very bowels of your being with a scream of anguish or when you sing out with a yell that demands and proclaims and asserts your rights as a man or a woman and as a human being--when you sing this way, where the song is an extension of your own life as it is inter-connected with the lives of others, there is no need to weigh the advisability or artistic worth of songs of protest..."

John Steinbeck's Foreward To Text of `Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People' Book: An Excerpt

`Grapes of Wrath' Author John Steinbeck

In the early 1940's, the novelist who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, also wrote the following about the protest folk songs created by U.S. working-class people and about 20th-century protest folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie; in a Foreward to the early 1940's text of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax's Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People book:

"The songs of the working people have always been their sharpest statement...Working people sing of their hopes and of their troubles...You can learn more about people by listening to their songs than in any other way, for into their songs go all the hopes, and hurts, the angers, fears, the wants and aspirations...

"Woody is just Woody...He is just a voice and a guitar...There is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression..."

Did Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Dylan Sell-Out The Movement In 1965?

In his 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, Elijah Wald described what apparently happened in the world of U.S. folk music, historically, in the summer of 1965--during the same year when the Democratic Johnson Administration ordered U.S. warplanes to bombard North Vietnam on a daily basis and sent over 200,000 U.S. soldiers to wage war in South Vietnam, in violation of international law:

"On the evening of July 25, 1965...Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival...carrying a Fender Stratocaster in place of his...acoustic guitar...The New York Times reported that Dylan `was roundly booed...' Many were dismayed and angry...

"In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past. But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power, abandoning idealism and hope and selling out to the star machine. In this version, the Newport festivals were idealistic, communal gatherings, nurturing the growing counterculture...and the booing pilgrims were not rejecting that future; they were trying to protect it...

"...1965 marked a significant divide...The weekend Dylan walked onstage with his Stratocaster, President Johnson announced he was doubling the military draft and committing the United States to victory in Vietnam.

"...Dylan...spent the rest of the decade making...albums that seemed willfully oblivious to the events...in the headlines...In 1968, pressed by an old friend to explain why he was not more engaged in the Vietnam protests, he responded: `How do you know I'm not...for the War?'...

"In 1965 Dylan was...24 years-old...When he turned from sharp topical lyrics, followers who had hailed him as the voice of a generation lamented...

"...Seeger and Dylan can stand for the two defining...ideals: Seeger for the ideal of democracy, of people working together, helping each other, living and believing and treating each other as...equals...

"...There is some truth in the simplification that Dylan was a cynical careerist..."

Revisiting BBC's 1983 Folk Music Series Episode with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger