Heaven above, and ours Hell right here after Dorian Lynskey, History of protest songs, 33 revolutions per minute 2010
”Oh, I ain’t a Communist necessarily, but I’ve been in the red all my life.”
” Work and pray, live on hay/ You’ll get pie in the sky when you die” The Preacher and The Slave, 1911
The Red Song Book 1932The Socialist Rebel Song Book 1934Negro Songs of Protest 1936
Political message put into the arena of entertainment, books I can imagine in my hand, small, worn out with yellowish smelly pages, the ongoing rebellion, ongoing inspiration of coal miners, their wives, copper miners, their wives, textile workers, their husbands, inspired by Woody Guthrie, This Land Is your Land, 1944. ”I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world..that make you take pride in yourself and your work” Woody Guthrie’s mission statement which he read on the radio 1944 in his weekly show on New York’s WNEW.
This is a kind of Poem, this is a kind of scribbles, I end up seeing the same thing, a pattern, but I cannot put my finger on it
Failed to quicken the pulse, Ella May Wiggins who was shot dead during the Gastonia textile strike 1929, hero of the left. Message belonged to whoever stuck a flag on it. And increasingly the flag was red. Leftist intellectuals were in love, most of all, with the idea of a common man. Sometimes he drank, he fought, even shot his woman down. There was nothing ennobling about it. Music of rumors, dreams, ghost stories and whispers in the night.
Dust can’t kill me, beneath the cover of bad grammar, misspellings, Okie vernacular, which would come in handy in darker times.
It had not rained in four years bitter but exhilarating like biting into a lemon. To know about Confucius, did he know more about hypocrisy than he did about nature of American society.
Something fishy for robbing her off her lightness mixed with serrated glass day and night
it was when she discovered heroin in 1940s, and commenced slow dying, scourging hypocrisy
from sea to ocean from sea to shining sea aw-shucks, ionization of a affectionately common man.
Full of bad luck and violent ends. Violent beginnings, startling start, I took these words from this book I found added them here next to my words. I gave words back to you. You do what you can with them.
What has happened before, what happens now to a worker? Is he/she called a worker anymore, the proletarian, or is it employee, staff, laborer. We have short history of couple of industrial revolutions during which many other kinds of revolutions have taken place. Couple of which have been Feminist. Suffrage movement, sexual revolution, inventions of contraception, women’s right to study, abortion, divorce, go to work and have a career. Women’s rights to their bodies are still under questioning, which makes me wonder why. Why female body is the main object of terror and a possession of man? We are still fighting for human rights to happen on many levels. But all in all, women’s rights have taken big steps forwards globally during couple of decades, lots is still to be done. It astonishes me how heavy the battle is.