John Neuhaus was a strapping San Francisco machinist who joined the Industrial Workers of the World – the radical unionists called the Wobblies – in San Francisco in 1930. A passionate man who wore lumberjack shirts and had no use for doctors, lawyers and other bourgeoisie, Neuhaus became an ardent folklorist, researching and collecting the potent and piquant songs that Wobblies of many creeds and colors sang around copper mines and hobo campfires, on picket lines and in jail.
Shortly before he died of cancer in 1958 at age 54, Neuhaus gave his friend and fellow folklorist Archie Green a tin tea box containing all but one of the 29 little red Wobbly songbooks published between 1909 and 1956 (seven more have appeared since, the last in 1995) and a World War II ammunition box filled with original sheet music and other material he’d amassed with the goal of publishing a complete Wobbly songbook. Green implicitly understood the job would fall to him.
“I felt morally responsible to do something with his collection,” says Green, one of the editors of “The Big Red Songbook,” an engaging new anthology (Charles Kerr, $24) that’s been in the works for nearly half a century.
It features the lyrics to 250 or so Wobbly songs, rich with references to job sharks, shovel stiffs, capitalist tools and plutocratic parasites. Wobbly wordsmiths such as the fabled Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Haywire Mac and Richard Brazier set their fighting words to popular tunes of the day, gospel hymns, old ballads and patriotic anthems. Green and his co-editors place the songs in the context of the tumultuous times in which they were written and sung.
“I put it off as long as I could,” laughs Green, who turns 90 this month. “Eventually, you run out of time, and I knew that if I didn’t finish it, nobody would.”
A longtime San Francisco shipwright, union leader and labor historian who’s a retired University of Texas folklore professor, Green grew up in Los Angeles in a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants active in the Jewish socialist group called the Workmen’s Circle.
He soaked up live cowboy music and jazz with his friend Norman Granz, the late, great record producer. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a philosophy degree, he began working on the San Francisco waterfront in 1940, returning to the shipwright’s trade after serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. At 22, he was elected secretary of his local union, which, unlike the Wobblies, never sang songs at meetings.
A handful of Wobbly numbers have become classics, still sung by labor groups and folk singers. They include Hill’s sardonic “The Preacher and the Slave” (sometimes known by its famous phrase “Pie in the Sky”), set to the 1868 gospel hymn “Sweet Bye and Bye”; John Brill’s “Dump the Bosses off Your Back,” wed to the hymn “Take It to the Lord in Prayer”; “Solidarity Forever!,” which Ralph Chaplin set to the Civil War tune “John Brown’s Body”; and Slim’s “Mysteries of the Hobo Life,” sung to the melody of “The Girl I Left Behind,” a ballad and fife tune popular in colonial America.
The songs stressed the solidarity and power of the working class, Green says, “it wasn’t about the state, or the Communist Party or the worship of Stalin, this murderer who killed more people than Hitler and became a demigod of the left. The Wobblies said no, no one is our leader.”
The Wobblies rejected the communist line and there was a long-standing enmity between them and the other radical American groups. The Wobblies, whose influence waned in the 1920s, would have nothing to do with probably the best-known song about one of their own, “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” popularized by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.
The song, which immortalized the Wobbly poet executed by a Salt Lake City firing squad in 1915 after he was convicted of murder, was written at a communist camp in New York in 1936 by Earl Robinson and Alfred Hayes.
“The Wobblies wouldn’t sing that song because they were conscious of what they called Stalinist methods,” Green says. For similar reasons, they wouldn’t embrace Woody Guthrie’s famed “Union Maid,” which was not included in the little red songbook until the 34th edition in 1973.
The labor movement is in a weakened state at the moment. But Green, whose two sons belong to the electricians’ union, looks ahead. He thinks “The Big Red Songbook” will prove useful not only to those interested in labor history and lore, but to future workers. “The very fact that working people were able to compose and sing and celebrate their past,” he says, “will be encouraging when we form new coalitions, if we do.”
E-mail Jesse Hamlin at jhamlin@sfchronicle.com.
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