John Paul O'Connor

(This article appeared in the 2013 summer issue of the New Franklin Register)

My main interest in music since I was a teenager was American traditional music. Over the years that passion has extended to traditional music everywhere. For me, there is nothing more exciting in this age of lost traditions than to hear the remnants of it in unexpected places at unexpected moments. I recently returned from six weeks in Europe and my first sampling of traditional music on my journey was not from an unexpected place. It came from a fado club in the Alfama district of Lisbon. My sister, who now calls Lisbon her home, treated me to dinner at this club as an early birthday present. Fado originated in the early eighteen hundreds in the neighborhood where sat down to eat. The name of the music translates to “fate” in English. It’s a haunting song tradition, often composed in a minor key and supported by two or more traditional stringed instruments. My first exposure to fado was at Town Hall in New York, a concert by an artist named Misia and I have been a devotee to the music ever since. I don’t speak a lick of Portuguese, but anyone who has listened to a fado singer doesn’t need to know the translation of the lyric to hear the tragedy and drama in the music. Fado is the art of the singer and each one is thought of as a singular champion of the form, almost as if it were a competition. On this night, there were three singers, taking the stage one at a time. Two of the singers had waited on us earlier in the evening. In the states, you often find musicians and artists working as waiters, but not on the same night in the place where they just served your dinner. Something fado about about that, I would say. Life is a struggle. And that’s where art comes from.

Two weeks later I was in Barcelona for a few days. On my last morning there, I took one more walk around the labyrinth of the medieval Gothic Quarter. As I was about to head back to my hotel to do some final packing, I heard the sound of some sort of band wafting from around the corner of the narrow street on which I was walking. It had a familiarity, yet was distinctive in a way I had never heard. A couple of hundred feet later I found myself at a square where Barcelonians where dancing in several circles of a dozen or more, accompanied by musicians in two rows, brass in back and reed players in front, and one stand up bass. This, I came to find out, was cobla, an eleven piece ensemble (always just eleven) playing to the Catalan tradition of the Sardana, the dance I was witnessing. The dance is not all that technical and anyone, Catalan or otherwise, is invited to join in. But what really grabbed me was this music. It was joyful and slightly regal, invoking the festivity of a peasant fair. The reed instruments were of a particular variety I had never seen nor heard. Four double reed instruments known as shawms and five brass instruments, more familiar looking, and a bass. But the most enchanting and fascinating of the instruments was the flabiol, a short, small whistle, or flute, if you prefer, which, in its tiny fashion, leads the band. The flabiolist also holds a tiny drum in the hand that is not holding the flute, setting the tempo for the rest of the much larger instruments. Each dance starts with the flabiol playing solo a few bars (to announce the dance) and tapping on the drum with a small wand to set the tempo of the piece the band is about to play, and of course the pace at which the dancers will prance. By this sound and spectacle I was completely, to use the technical term, blown away! I found my face strained with a huge uncontrollable smile and I became completely entranced by the flabiolist, who happened to be a small slender and young woman whose skills were remarkable. It became immediately clear to me that the technique of the instrument could not have been easy to master. On some of the pieces, I swore I heard both eighth notes and sixty-fourth notes coming from her flabiol simultaneously, much like skilled harmonica players produce chords at the same time they play the melody. Barcelona is a remarkable city, but if you miss the cobla while you are there, you have not fully experienced the city.

In Naples two weeks later, I sat eating one of the city’s fabulous pizzas at an outdoor seating area, when an accordion player approached the tables busking for change. He was playing the melody of the Italian folksong, Bella Ciao, and after a short while the staff of the restaurant shooed him away. In Italy, the tune seems ubiquitous and maybe to some Italians, worn, but I love the tune and am especially attached to it because of the song’s origin, an Italian textile strike in the mid-nineteenth century. I heard other accordionists playing the song, as well. The tune rolled around in my head the entire time I was in Italy. It’s perfect for the accordion, an instrument, I am not ashamed to say, I quite like as much for its huge variety of music styles around the globe than anything else. The song was revised in the first half of the twentieth century with new lyrics which express the passion of an Italian partisan fighting against fascism. Perhaps, the accordion player was shooed away because of politics. After all, the newly elected prime minister is a member of the political party that is descendant from the party Mussolini ruled during the time of the Nazis. A few years ago Tom Waits recorded an English version of the Bella Ciao with the marvelous Mark Ribot playing a penetrating guitar part. Waits, as is his wont, sang it in such a fashion to make you believe he wrote the song. Google it. If it doesn’t send chills up your spine, I know who you voted for in the last election.

The older I get, the more I can’t stop myself from crying when I see an emotional scene while watching a movie. It doesn’t matter what the film is, if there is something in the drama crafted to manipulate the emotions, I fall for it every time. I seem to have no control over it. Last night I tuned into the Criterion Channel and watched Sidney Lumet’s heart-tug, Running on Empty with River Phoenix, Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti. For christsakes, I cried all the way through the movie. This is the great tear-jerker for my generation, or at least a certain part of my generation. The world has, in the past several years, come to view the boomers as the villains of our domestic political epoch, the selfish generation that took all they could get and left nothing for the generations to follow. Some of us boomers have it all wrong in our heads. We thought that we, the anti-war, anti-racist, anti-sexist movement builders were the embodiment of our generation. Of course, looking back, we were completely wrong about that, now realizing we were a tiny minority that fell between the cracks and ended up the odd gray weird old ladies and dudes who show up and stand at the perimeters of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations wondering what happened to the anti-war movement, SDS and the Black Panthers. In the movie, the 60s radical couple on the lam for blowing up a university building many years ago that contained a lab that developed napalm bombs are trying to live their ideals and raise two boys who are unwilling fugitives in a loving nuclear family. It’s a tragedy, of course. The couple knows they didn’t stop the war and realized a long time ago that the revolution spilled out like sand through their fingers without ever getting started. Watching the scenes in the film, it’s impossible for someone like me to not think of the background, the horrible frustration we felt over not being to stop the war crimes our government committed in Vietnam. But worse, we also know that those crimes have continued through every government since then, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans and continue to this day. While the nation is rightfully up in arms about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are silent about our own country’s crimes that are happening at the very moment that I type these words. When I foolishly break down during scenes made of tricks of cinema and drama; a kiss, a touch, a word of unexpected kindness, the emotion on the surface is supported by something deeper behind it. Watching Running On Empty brought small, not quite suppressed sobs for our failures to affect the kind of change that might have prevented the new cold war that is now descending on us, the streets empty of protesters against our own wars of sanctions and arms sales that result in the painful death of children in places like Afghanistan and Yemen. In the final scene of the movie, as the Hirsch and Lahti characters pull out of parking lot, leaving their eldest son to find his own way, it felt as if they were leaving us tired old lefty boomers behind as well. And yeah, I cried silently as I got up to do the dishes, wondering if we could ever stop a war. Time passes. We’re now 70ish or 80ish, most of the Weathermen out of jail or dead, the rest of us collecting social security, and the title of the movie, released in 1988, now takes on a new meaning. I suppose that’s where the real sobs come from, even though tomorrow morning I’ll get up and it will be a new day and a new petition will arrive in my email inbox.

In March of this year I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The next day, I left New York and drove back to my home in Delaware County. On that day, the museum closed due to the Covid 19 pandemic. That day began the long suspended world we now live in. Artists, musicians, theater artists, dancers have since then made attempts to practice their art in ways that we call “virtual”, using all the various platforms of the internet that allow us to sit in our rooms and watch an approximation of what used to be (and with some luck, will be again) the real world of space and reaction, audience and touch and visual and audio sensuality that has been our world up until the year of 2020.

A few weeks ago, the Met announced it was opening its doors again under strict pandemic guidelines to assure that the museum is not too crowded and that viewers take precautions not to catch or spread the little invisible pests that cause havoc on our respiratory systems. Having been one of zillions who find the virtual world of art, acting, music, etc. extremely unsatisfactory and depressing, I decided to make the trip to New York last week to visit the Met (as well as one of my favorite galleries, St. Etienne). I thought it would be a nice visual experience to see the assemblage of Jacob Lawrence paintings of the American experience. In person.

On my wanderings through the American wing to get to the Lawrence exhibit I feasted on the many twentieth century paintings that grace those walls. Paintings that make you stand in wonder at this magnificent art form and those whose gigantic talents move us through a meditation of visual stillness. Paintings have always seemed to me be the closest art to poetry. Good poetry can be read and re-read, always revealing something new each time. The same happens with a painting. But I don’t think you can experience this discovery and rediscovery without seeing the painting directly, having in front of you with its texture and real world dimension. In the middle of the pandemic, standing in front of these paintings, I was aware of how what a human privilege it is to see works that are tremendously moving and filled with the context of the epochs they came from.

I have never especially been a big admirer of Edward Hopper, but there I was, entranced by his painting of a restaurant with a waitress preparing a fruit counter (can’t remember the title), and acutely aware of its’ painterliness. The word “painterly” I learned from the painters who have been personal friends of mine, and for me the term goes to the dimension that is added to the two-dimensions we think of when we consider paintings. Paintings are, if one observes there painterliness, anything but two-dimensional. And this is why it is impossible to understand and experience a painting without being in front of the actual work.

The sensuality of my visit to the museum that day was unlike any other time viewing paintings of the stature seen at the Met. Our world is a world that cannot be reproduced by the “virtual”, in my opinion. And that world, I think, is in danger of slipping away. The pandemic has shown how important it is. Perhaps that is the silver lining of the pandemic; the appreciation of what is real and sensual.

As we get closer to the November election and the possibility of another Trump term, reality has been focused into full relief. Not only is it clear that a second Trump term will be far worse than the first, but it is certainly arguable that Trump, in the past few months, has gone further into a reckless and dangerous mode of insanity. Even Fox News has noticed. There have been some significant alarms coming from that network warning of Trump’s oversteps. As one who is not planning on casting my ballot for Biden because I live in a “safe” state, I have shifted my opinion that those leftists, Bernie Bros and other anti-establishment types living in toss-up states should hold their noses and vote Biden. Before you berate me for being a hypocrite, I would like to remind you that I cast protest votes in both Obama elections against the centrist posing as progressive, but I earned the right to do so by going to Pennsylvania to work for the Democrats to get out the vote. I may do the same thing this year.

But the most recent compelling argument for voting for Biden is the fact that there will be many more left leaning and socialist people joining congress in 2021. These congresspeople will be far more influential in their roles in congress than their numbers. We have already scene how 4 or 5 House Representatives have changed the discussion in Washington, as well as the electorate as a whole. AOC is popular, not only among Democratic Socialists, but with liberals who don’t consider themselves socialists. The majority of Democrat voters, may say they’re moderate, but they support most of Sanders’ agenda. And the Sanders effect on the country has continued to grow because of AOC and the Squad. The Squad is about to more than double their numbers. The fact is that as much as Biden would like to remain stubbornly opposed to progressive platforms, the left moving congress, aided by what I think will be a continued protest movement that began as a Black Lives Matter protest, will go a long way toward toppling the neo-liberal consensus in the Democratic Party. It can at least be said that this is a possibility. (With a second Trump term it is not.) The BLM demonstrations are far more than an expression of outrage toward police conduct and abuse of Black citizens. We know from reporting that this youth led movement also stands for just about everything that Bernie Sanders campaigned for. And they are pissed as hell that the Democrats ignored them and betrayed them in the primaries.The movement is, as far as I can observe, more anti Biden than it is anti Trump. It is not likely to cease with a Biden win.

Here’s the thing: The movement and the new progressives in Congress are going to get nowhere under a second Trump administration. If Trump is elected, the most we can hope for is a continued civil war between Trump’s increasingly fascist supporters and the rest of America, with the left continuing to be disenfranchised and voices like Rachel Maddow being the dominant feature of media. MSNBC will continue to take up space and distract from the real maladies that affect our republic and continue their hopelessly zany Russia scapegoating. With a Biden presidency, the opposition becomes the voice against neo-liberalism and Biden’s transparent ignoring of the will of the people. Everything over the past 5 years has led to a place where we’re going to still be in the streets once Biden takes office. The left opposition to the Democratic establishment has gained strength during Bernie II and has led to a wave of leftist candidates winning national and local offices. The states of New York and Rhode Island will be completely altered terrains in 2021, moving those legislatures to the left and influencing more popular sentiment toward socialist ideas.

In early 2020 I was of the opinion that if a Biden won the Democratic nomination it was game over. I no longer believe that because the wider arena of politics has changed in a very dramatic way. I agree with Noam Chomsky. Bernie did not lose. Richie Neal, the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, a Democrat entrenched by the establishment of his party and powerful wealthy supporters faced a challenger, a 31 year old progressive gay man, who came within 20 points of beating the incumbent! We have seen powerful centrist Democrats fall at the hands of self-declared socialists. The times, they are a ‘changing. All of this wind power will be up against a great stone wall with a Trump second term. With Biden, it will only be a forest. And in this era of climate catastrophe, we know what is happening to forests when faced with prevailing winds and a raging fire. Forgive the analogy, but you get my drift. If you live in Wisconsin, Arizona, Texas, etc. hold your nose and support the Squad.

April 10, 2020

Nothing like someone dying to bring focus to their work. John Prine died last Tuesday as a result of the coronavirus. The news came later on the same day that Bernie Sanders announced the end of his campaign for president. I wondered if Prine was hopeful of a Sanders presidency. I’m guessing that if his personal politics were as genuine as his songs were, he was likely a Bernie bro, at least in his heart.

As expected, everybody and their dog posted messages all over social media, facebook being the one I am familiar with. RIPs were flying around like swarms of sparrows. He was widely admired and deservedly so. A very clever songwriter with deep wit and humanity who seemed to be free of bullshit and exuded genuineness. I remember being turned on to him by Virginia Roberts back when she was Gini Rothwell. Gini was always ahead of the curve much more than I was. She got me into the New Lost City Ramblers and the Greenbriar Boys. I was skeptical of John Prine at first, thinking he was just another trend, but I gave him a listen. The first album I heard was his second, Diamonds in the Rough, the all acoustic one with Everybody Needs Somebody and the Late John Garfield Blues, maybe one of his best songs.

I had just come back to Iowa after a year living in Portland, Maine, where I had my first regular gig singing weekly at a place called Cremo’s. Those years, when I was still in my twenties, seemed long and eventful. Several months later I was visiting my sister, Pat, in a suburban community west of Chicago and she told me that her back fence neighbor was the sister of John Prine’s wife and that he was coming over to visit one afternoon. This was in my early songwriting days when I had only a few good songs under my belt and several pretty bad ones that I didn’t always recognize as messes. (Prine has had some messes, too, but he didn’t record them until after he had reached legend status, when it didn’t matter to anyone.) But my good ones gave me the sense, incorrectly as it turned out, that maybe I could make it as a songwriter, given the right breaks. At the moment I thought that meeting John Prine might lead me in that direction.

I can hardly remember a word he said when he walked into my sister’s living room. I know he didn’t say much, he was soft spoken, and I remember we both awkwardly tried to make small talk, him cracking an occasional small joke, giving me the impression of someone who was too clever to keep it under wraps. I said something about my songwriting, prompted by my sister. I had written maybe 30 songs at the time and I somehow must have mentioned this to Prine because he told me it was more than he had written. Instantly I regretted putting a count on my compositions because I knew most of them were duds, at least compared to the magnificence of his songs. Prine made some vague promise that he would pass my songs onto his road agent if I sent them to him. Later, I have the memory of me standing in his sister-in-law’s driveway next to his road manager, him leaning on the hood of a car, like a character in one of his songs. Physically, Prine was a chameleon. You could meet him for an hour and walk away not remembering what he looked like. At least that is what it seemed to me, a person who always remembers a face.

John Prine’s best work, which is often the case with artists, was on his first album. Seminal songs like Hello In There, Sam Stone and Donald and Lydia, songs so powerful you wondered how anyone could have written them. And this was a guy in his twenties. As far as I am concerned, though he made good music until the end, he never got close to having as consistently a fine collection as that first one. The further he went on with his career, the more it was hit and miss, with some very good “hits” that exploited clever lyrics, catchy tunes and inspired rhymes. There was a lot of collaborative work. I don’t know how that works and I am sure it is not fair of me, but it always disappointed me to see a co-songwriter credited to a song of his I liked. (My own prejudice. I can’t imagine writing a song with someone else. To me it would be like being in the confessional with my mother.) The only song later on that really echoed the kind of powerful message and craftsmanship of his first album was the song, Unwed Fathers, who he co-wrote with Bobby Braddock. There were, of course, some very strong and unusually good songs in other respects, songs like Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis and Mexican Home, just enviable works of art that were immersed in layers of meaning and mystery. But a lot of his songs tended toward what appeared to be the simple task (a genius in itself) of stringing inspired rhymes together in litany of cliches. Like “fish and whistle, whistle and fish/eat everything that they put in your dish” or “you’ll be waiting for a phone call at the wrong end of a broom/that town will make you crazy, crazy as a loon”. It worked like a charm but it wasn’t that serious stuff like Angel From Montgomery, that slammed you over the head with the wooden plank of working class life. It was the kind of work that tended to please those who go for the clever stuff, the surface pleasures.

But underneath even the later songs were the many levels that a poet knows how to simmer and brew. No one since Johnny Cash was able to capture the careless pursuit of happiness in the side streets of working class dreams. A lyric like, “with a pack of Camel cigarettes in the sleeve of my T-shirt/heading out to Hollywood just to have my feelings hurt” is an example of how you pack in seven pages of a novel into a few words. The only other songwriter who knows how to do that is the under-recognized rival to Prine, Michael Hurley.

Being at home all the time during the pandemic and looking for distractions, I sat down the day after John Prine died and recorded on my Iphone – didn’t really know I could do this – the first song of his that popped into my head, which was Far From Me, that unbelievably mournful song about a woman losing interest in the speaker in the song, falling out of love and him knowing it long before she tells him. That haunting and powerful chorus: “The sky is black and still now/On the hill where the angels sing/Aint’ it funny how an old broken bottle/Looks just like a diamond ring.” He was, in his essence, a songwriter for the ordinary working class person who never gets a break, the fuck-up, the failure with a little light that somehow keeps burning, the drunk stumbling on his doorstep late, the lover with a big careless heart. And it all rhymed so wonderfully.

I’m on a train heading for NYC from Vermont. A while ago when we pulled into the station at Hartford, CT a thought suddenly occurred to me. I looked at my iPhone map. Sure enough. This is the same train line that passed my childhood home in Kensington, CT. I mean literally right past it. Across the street was a row of houses and the train went right by those back yards. When I was 6 or 7 the sound of that train heading for New York Town would lull me to sleep. I remember it as well as I remember my mother’s embrace. it had such an impression on me I wrote a song about that train called the 9:14 some 35 years ago. A few minutes past Hartford is the Berlin depot and shortly thereafter I’m looking at a row of back yards, and passing in a flash is the 200 year old house I once lived in, a ghost of my past.I wondered: Was there a child now in that house mesmerized by the sound of this train I was riding in?

Philip Levine died last Valentine’s Day. He was 87, so we won’t call it an untimely death. But still, the news stung me. I was never willing to admit that I had a favorite poet for some reason. But I’ll be unabashed and just say that Phil was. And by a long shot for a few reasons, not all of which have to do with the skill of his writing. Being the working class crusader that I have been for so long, Phil’s work became obviously meaningful to me, the moment it fell into my lap in the 1990s. That was when I was looking, really looking, at poetry for the first time. I’d flirted with the enterprise of poetry since I was a teenager, but read very few of its’ practitioners and my attempts at writing poems were extremely naïve. Then, not long after I moved from Seattle to Western Massachusetts in a last ditch effort to save my folksinging career, I put the dipstick deep into the oil pan of poetry. I took some classes and started writing and learning the craft of free style verse.

In my younger days I had bumped into a few poets that had grabbed me. Carl Sandburg and his microscope of working class Chicago moved me when I was a teen and Kenneth Patchen got under my skin in my twenties. I don’t know how I came across Patchen, but I warmed to his tropes against the status quo and his affinity to the revolutionary voices and movements of his time. And his writing style seemed rebellious and revolutionary. He wasn’t a Beat, but he had something in him that had the same music as the Beats. But I didn’t go beyond that. I didn’t read Ginsburg or Ferlinghetti, for instance. I was too busy with my musical heroes, Woody Guthrie, Jack Elliott, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ian Tyson, to have more than one poet at a time. By the time I had moved to Seattle and had settled into the cultural imprint in the northwest, I discovered Richard Hugo’s poems and the work of Tess Gallagher, poetry that wasn’t particularly political but pulled at my poetic sensibilities. I was writing straight up ballads about working people, laced with agitprop messages. But the little poetry that I was reading moved me in ways that songs didn’t.

When I got to Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1989, my musical career was in steep decline (not that it had ever hit any great heights) and I think I must have subconsciously been looking for a way to soften the blow of the great crash that was about to happen as far as my music and my disillusionment of the terrain I had been trying to navigate. I turned to poetry. First I took a night class at the University of Massachusetts and then I became part of the non-academic workshop scene in the Pioneer Valley north of Amherst and Northampton. I began reading a lot of poets; Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Anna Akhmatova, Rainer Rilke and then closer to home and time, Galway Kinnell, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Ai, Stanley Kunitz, May Swenson, to name a few. When I came across Philip Levine’s poetry, a convergence of a sort took place in the creative workshop of my soul. I walked into a world that this great poet built out of factory filings and mystical alchemy.

You will be hard pressed to find the word, “union” in any of Phil’s work. (I’ll call him Phil because he spoke of himself in the familiar and made good use of the familiar in both his art and in his teaching.) So, why is someone who devotes his life to the labor movement drawn to a poet who writes about the Detroit working class without ever mentioning anything about the UAW? Phil’s poetry may not be concerned with the union struggle, although he is peripherally concerned with working class revolution, as evidenced in his poems that use the background of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. But his main concern is with the connections among working class Americans and how they reach for a sort of communism of the soul on the factory floor and in the bars and parking lots that are peripheral to the industrial web. Consider the woman in the poem Leviticus, who is making her way home from the swing shift at 2 AM: “Even before you washed up and changed your shirt/ Maryk invited you for a drink. You sat in the back,/ Maryk and his black pal Williams in the front/ as the bottle of Seven Crown passed slowly/ from hand to hand, even slow circuits/ until it was empty and Maryk opened/ the driver’s side door and placed the dead soldier/ carefully bottom-side down on the tarmac…”

Which poets are adept enough to put a woman in a car with two uneducated working class men and give her the dignity she deserves without sounding preachy or polemical? The scene of almost ritualistic communion comes off as natural as the night sky that Phil brings into the poem toward its end, the stars “Those tiny diamonds, though almost undone,/having been watching over your house and your kids”. Or to put into the poetic cast the fathers of fourth grade children in Among Children? Their backs “have thickened/how their small hands soiled by pig iron,/leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like/to sit down among them and read slowly/ from The Book of Job until the windows/pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea/of industrial scum, her gowns streaming/with light her foolish words transformed/ into song…”

I wouldn’t know what Phil’s politics were. I never had the chance to talk to him and he kept his remarks to poetics anytime I heard him speak about poetics. Once when meeting with the poet Mark Doty, he asked me if I’d ever had an opportunity to have a beer with Philip Levine, as if this were the proper way to meet with Phil. This was in Johnson, Vermont when I was attending my first writer’s residency. Mark was the visiting poet and all residents had an hour with the master poet. Mark saw some Levine in my poems. He also mentioned others, but he asked if I had read Philip Levine and I told him, jokingly, that I wanted to BE Philip Levine. But had I had a chance to have a beer with him, I might have been disappointed to find out what Phil’s politics were. Or maybe not. It’s not clear. Some poets and writers find it necessary to stand a certain distance from letting on what their politics are outright and Phil might have been one of them. I suspect he was an anarchist, as were some of his heroes of the Spanish Revolution, which was chiefly an anarchist revolution.

It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. Politics are politics and poetry is poetry. The words that are strung together in the lines of poetry float above politics and I don’t mean to say that they are not political. I still believe what I believed decades ago, that all art is political. What rises up is the intensified language that goes beyond analytical essays or sloganeering, though poetry is probably much closer to sloganeering, as sloganeering is a sort of poetry. Think: Bread and Roses. Now there is a slogan that is powerful and enduring, but not as powerful as, say, lines from Phil’s They Feed They Lion: “Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,/Out of black bean and wet slate bread,/Out of acids of rage, the candor of tar,/Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,/ They Lion grow.” I’m told that the poem came from the aftermath of the Detroit riots of the late 60s. I’ve only heard that reference once, so I’m not sure, but the suggestion did bring the poem out in more relief to me when I first heard it. Previously I had been happy to have the language of the poem wash over me without knowing the context, though the anger and the injustice are apparent in the poem, as is the setting of industrial toil and frustration. I once heard Galway Kinnell read the poem (it must have been the occasion of Phil’s 80^th birthday and a number of poets read). Galway was as good a reader as Phil was, but Galway gave a power to the poem that Phil’s self-effacing way of reading couldn’t have got. It was a tremendous moment.

I’m thankful to have heard Galway read that poem while both poets were still alive. And I am grateful to have heard Phil read a few times. He read two or three poems one summer day in Bryant Park along with some twenty of the nation’s best known poets as a part of the New Yorker Festival. In the middle of one of the poems, the crashing thunder of a passing semi-trailer with failing mufflers on 42^nd street drowned out a line and Phil stopped and looked toward the truck and said, “That fucking shit” in a plain unapologetic complaint that could only have been voiced by someone who has made his poetry out of the railing against the industrial machine. And then he went back to his reading.

I’m thankful to have shared a moment on a subway in Manhattan with Phil sitting across the aisle from me and a work colleague. Recognizing him on the subway was for me equal to someone else’s experience of seeing, oh, Paul McCartney. I had to share the experience with my colleague, Lucille. I began to explain. Then, as so often happens in New York on the subway, a passenger made some noisy public display (the specifics of which I can’t remember) that makes everybody turn their attention briefly to the present eccentricity. When the moment was over, Phil’s and my eyes met. I took the opportunity to make verbal contact. I said, “I’m trying to explain to my friend here who you are.” He smiled, “Any luck?” One moment having the briefest encounter with a man whose art I admired as much as anyone’s was something unforgettable. Forget Paul McCartney or even Bob Dylan. This was Phil Levine riding the same subway car I was riding. With a poet, it’s possible. The poet is never celebrity to the masses in this country.

I’ve heard and read about how Phil was a great teacher and those that studied with him at Fresno came away from the experience a different person. Working class students were inspired by his subject, his approach and his way of turning on some to the world of poetry that perhaps no one else could have. Someone referred to him ironically as the “father of Chicano poetry” because of how many Mexican American students became poets under his spell. I would have liked to have been in the classroom. But classrooms and I don’t get along very well. That’s the way it’s always been for me. Phil’s books of poems have been my classroom (as were the books of so many others from his decade.) I’m lucky to have been able to find a voice that in my head is Levinesque, but that no poets I’ve worked with have found out without me telling them. That’s the trick. Mimicking until you no longer sound like the music you’ve stolen from. Like anyone trying to find a voice, I’ve stolen from many. But Phil’s the guy whose writing gets closest to being the teacher I never had. I’m often found counting my regrets and one of them has been not to have found and studied poetry when I was younger. Reading Phil Levine’s work has made up for a good deal of that regret.

(Others whom I miss of that great decade are Galway Kinnell, Hayden Carruth, Adrianne Rich, Jack Gilbert and Mark Strand. The likes of which we will never hear again. Read them. Your soul will be there better for it.)

If you look up Solidarity Forever on Wikipedia, you will learn that the famous labor song, perhaps the most famous of labor songs anywhere in the world other than the Internationale, was written a hundred years ago by Ralph Chaplin, a writer, artist and union activist. Chaplin was a Wobbly; in other words, a member of the radical union of the early twentieth century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). His song has been sung for a hundred years everywhere that union people gather for the cause of the working class, whether it be a union meeting or a strike (or an anti-war rally) and is often the song that is sung to close a union function or labor rally. It’s the We Shall Overcome of the labor movement.

At the last AFM Convention in the summer of 2013, shortly after the delegates had spent more than an hour showing their support for the locked out Minnesota Orchestra members by pledging thousands of dollars to the Minneapolis/St. Paul local union, a handful of delegates were recognized by President Hair. In the middle of the convention floor, they led their sister and brother delegates in singing Solidarity, many raising their arms and linking hands together. It’s an irresistible fall-back song because of its extremely accessible chorus, which is sung simply by repeating the words, “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Joe Hill may have been the most famous of the Wobbly songwriters, but Ralph Chaplin’s song had more endurance than anything Joe Hill wrote. If you ask union activists who Joe Hill is, they will surely recognize the name, but it’s Ralph Chaplin’s song they know.

Chaplin said he began writing the song in 1914 during a miner’s strike and finished the song in 1915. According to some historians, the first time the song was sung broadly was during the great lumber workers’ strike of 1917. The strike started in the lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest and spread through Idaho, Montana, Washington and Oregon. It was fitting that the song caught on here, since the IWW provided leadership and finances for the strike. The lumber workers were striking mostly for better working conditions and the eight hour day and, though the workers were intimidated and their leaders were jailed, they persevered and won most of their demands.

(The strike is captured in an uncredited song written at the time called Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks, whose chorus pronounced: “Such a bunch of devils, that’s what the papers say/ They’ve gone on strike for shorter hours and some increase in pay/ They’ve left the camps, those lazy tramps/They all marched out as one/ They say they’ll win the strike or put the bosses on the bum.)

Chaplin was known for his utopian language in the songs he wrote. Solidarity Forever captured this spirit in its lyrics, along with the IWW’s program for a no-compromise strategy to win power for the workers. Consider the lyrics to this verse: “All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone/ We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone/ It is ours not slave in, but to master and to own/ For the union makes us strong.” Out of the six verses of the song, this verse is not usually sung. Most singers include no more than four verses when performing the song. But one of the most frequently sung verses is the last (but not the least radical) and iterates Chaplin’s and the Wobblies’ revolutionary vision: “In our hands is placed the power greater than their horded gold/ greater than the might of armies multiplied a thousand fold/ We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old/ For the union makes us strong”.

The song has had an interesting journey, being sung throughout the organizing of the CIO, the movement that brought many blue collar workers into middle class. The Almanac Singers, which included singers like Bess Lomax Hawes, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, recorded Solidarity on the 1955 re-issue of their seminal album called Talkin’ Union. Joe Glazer, known as Labor’s Troubadour, put the song on as many as half a dozen albums. There have been surprising recorded renditions as well. In 1970 Leonard Cohen sang the song at a rally against the Viet Nam war, giving it a slow rolling amble that is characteristic of Cohen’s music . And more recently, Emcee Lynx recorded a hip-hop version of the song, using all six verses.

The universal characteristic of songs like Solidarity Forever is their lyrical glimpse into the times of turmoil in which they were written. Most labor songs have been written by the participants of the movements, many having lived their entire lives in poverty. These were not professional musicians by any means. Many of the Wobblies were amateur poets and opinion makers, using the labor and left press of the era to proselytize their message about class conflict. For each song written, one can find the struggle that went side by side.

As an example, a hobo and day worker, T-Bone Slim, was one of the Wobblies’ most prolific poets. He wrote the irreverent song The Popular Wobbly during the widely publicized “free speech fights” of the nineteen-teens. The Wobblies took to the soapbox as a sort of street corner lecture circuit, particularly in the Pacific Northwest; in cities like Spokane, Seattle and Portland. The movement gained its widest notoriety when scores of activists were jailed for their public speech, most notably in Spokane, where over a hundred free speech participants were arrested, attracting unionists, anarchists and socialists from around the country to make speeches as civil disobedience. T-Bone Slim’s song was sung to the tune of They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me: “Oh, the jailer went wild over me/ And he locked me up and threw away the key/ Oh it seems to be rage/ They keep me in a cage/ They went wild, simply wild, over me.”

The tradition of the Wobbly parodies and social commentaries was handed down through the mass movements of the twentieth century. Civil rights activists in the South during the sixties sang a version of The Popular Wobbly in the jails of Mississippi and Alabama. Maurice Sugar, who became active in the labor movement as a socialist at the height of the IWW movement wrote his Soup Song to the tune of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. It could easily be mistaken as a song by Joe Hill or T-Bone Slim: “I’m spending my nights in a flop house/ I’m spending my days on the street/ I’m looking for work but can’t find none/ I wish I had something to eat/ Soo-oup, soo-oup, they gave me a bowl of soup.” But Sugar’s most effective activism was during the CIO movement, as one of the first labor attorneys working for the United Auto Workers. He wrote a song that became immensely popular about the sit-down strikes that spread through the auto industry in the Great Depression: “When the boss won’t talk, don’t take a walk/ Sit down, sit down/ When the boss sees that, he’ll want a little chat/ Sit down, sit down.”

Woody Guthrie’s and Pete Seeger’s occupation with union songs quite likely was spurred by their association with Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland and Sarah Ogan Gunning, a singing family from the coal fields of eastern Kentucky. During the rise of the National Miners Union and the United Mineworkers of America, they wrote scores of songs using melodies that were popular with Appalachian Mountain people. Jackson wrote I Am A Union Woman with lyrics as strong as anything in literature: “The bosses ride their big white horses while we tramp through the mud/ Their banner is the dollar sign and ours is dipped in blood.” Another CIO era poet was John Hancox, an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union. Hancox wrote the ever-present picket line song, ” Roll the Union On”, another song recorded on the 1955 Talking Union re-issue.

These examples of songs that have come from the struggles of the labor movement in the United States are but a few of an immense body. Labor activists have continued to write songs about labor struggles throughout the twentieth century and into the current era of the unions’ fight for their right to exist. But interestingly, musicians of today, when coming to the aid of working class struggles, whether it be in Wisconsin or on Wall Street or in the recording studio, rely heavily on the library of songs that came from the workers movements of the early twentieth century. For many decades to come, I’ll wager, we’ll continue to sing songs like Solidarity Forever and Roll the Union for their eloquence and simplicity. Because as long as musicians sing for justice, they will continue rediscover the great lyrics, music and poetry handed down through the years, as in the prophetic yearning of James Oppenheim poem, Bread and Roses: “As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day/ A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray/ Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses/ For the people hear us singing Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

“Take a trip with me in 1913 to Calumet Michigan and the copper country…” are the opening lines of one of the most haunting, powerful and depressing songs in the Woody Guthrie catalogue. I learned the song from a recording by Jack Elliot, who is still to this day the best interpreter of Woody Guthrie songs. The ballad is the telling of a real event in Michigan history when on Christmas Eve in 1913 miners and their families gathered in Italian Hall for a holiday party. As Guthrie’s ballad tells it, “copper boss thugs” yelled “fire!” from outside the hall and in the ensuing moments the crowd rushed for the door at the bottom of a set of stairs where the thugs outside held the door shut, causing some 73 people, mostly children, to smother to death.

What is remarkable about this song and the story is that no one really knows exactly what happened on that tragic night outside of the fact that the deaths did occur and someone did yell “fire”. For decades a version of the facts that contradicted Guthrie’s lyric had it that the doors at the bottom of the stairs opened inward, preventing the victims from fleeing from the building. This is what the local press reported. But the local press, according to Steve Lehto’s 2006 book, Death’s Door: The Truth Behind Michigan’s Largest Mass Murder, was controlled by the mine owners. Lehto’s investigation while writing the book showed that the doors opened outward (supported by photos), contrary to myth so prevalent that a state historical marker declared it fact.

If it’s true that the establishment press denied the culpability of the “copper boss thugs”, what is undeniable is the power of Woody Guthrie’s song and how it brought the miner’s version of the story to forefront of popular culture. Thousands of Americans (not to mention Woody Guthrie fans from around the globe) know no other history of this event than the one Guthrie tells. So the copper industry, with all their wealth, in the end lost the propaganda battle to a song that has been handed down to us through the singing of a few folk musicians. Steve Lehto’s book goes a long way to back up Woody Guthrie’s version of the event, though he is careful to point out the inaccuracies in the Guthrie song.

This year is also the centennial of an event that led to one of the most infamous union tragedies of the twentieth century. Miners went out on strike in late 1913 in Colorado for recognition of their union and basic wage demands. Spurred by the murder of a union organizer by a guard working for the detective company known as Baldwin-Felts, the strike grew violent and the governor sent in troops to suppress the miners. The violence culminated in what is known as the Ludlow Massacre, when the state militia strafed the miners’ tent colony and set it on fire. “Eleven children and two women were smothered in the flames,” according to Philip Taft’s The AFL in the Time of Gompers. Again, many know the history of this tragedy from a Woody Guthrie song, The Ludlow Massacre, which numerous singers have recorded, bringing the tale to thousands.

The ballads that Woody Guthrie sings are ballads in the traditional sense of the word, where a story is told in verses and makes fable out of true events in history. Woody Guthrie was a master of this art form. Both ballads take their time leading to the tragic turns in each piece, slowly setting the scene and pulling the listener into the story and creating an emotional bond between the listener and the subjects of the ballad. By the end of each of these ballads the listener can’t help be saddened and enraged.

The intelligentsia of Greenwich Village in the year of 1913 may have used some of the same approaches when they hosted a pageant to tell the story of the silk weavers who were on strike against the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey that year. The great pageant was put on in Madison Square Garden. At this point in history, there was a convergence of movements that contributed to a strong solidarity effort between the strikers and artists and intellectuals in New York. The feminist and suffrage movement was in full swing and people like Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn got involved. In addition, the art movement, which was in the throes of change, more often than not was seen in concert with the political revolutionary movements of the time, including the plight of labor and the activity of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who were brought in to lead the strike. The eight-hour day movement was in full swing and the Paterson strikers made a shorter work day one of their demands. The strike was inspiring for the use of songs and humor from each ethnic group of workers involved.

The strike ended badly but the pageant was a huge success. John Reed, who wrote “Ten Days That Shook the World”, organized the pageant with the backing of Mabel Dodge, a well known patron of the arts at the time. John Sloan, the founder of the Ashcan art movement, painted a 90 foot backdrop depicting the mills of Paterson and strikers were brought in to help dramatize the story. The sold out extravaganza ended with thousands of workers singing the Internationale.

Today, the Botto House in Haledon, NJ, where IWW leaders staged massive rallies for the strikers, is the home of the American Labor Museum. A permanent exhibit of the strike features photos and artifacts from this important chapter of labor history. I recommend a visit. It’s just across the Hudson River. Standing in front of the photos in the exhibit inside this house where Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addressed the throngs from the balcony gives one the sense of the greatness of this chapter in labor history.