Rural Free Delivery

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”
– Rob (John Cusack), High Fidelity

There are times — even during good times — when you just need a little melancholy in your music. Not sentimentality, but just a touch of blue. When those times come, here are some of the songs (or, more precisely, the lyrics to those songs) that I turn to:

“Banks Are Made of Marble”

I’ve traveled ’round this country
from shore to shining shore
It really made me wonder
the things I heard and saw

I saw the weary farmer
plowing sod and loam
l heard the auction hammer
just a-knocking down his home

But the banks are made of marble
with a guard at every door
and the vaults are stuffed with silver
that the farmer sweated for

I’ve seen the weary miner
scrubbing coal dust from his back
I heard his children cryin’
“Got no coal to heat the shack”

But the banks are made of marble
with a guard at every door
and the vaults are stuffed with silver
that the miner sweated for

I’ve seen my brothers working
throughout this mighty land
l prayed we’d get together
and together make a stand

Then we might own those banks of marble
with a guard at every door
and we might share those vaults of silver
that we have sweated for

Originally by Les Rice. The most famous versions are by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, but Iris Dement does a lovely take on it.

“No Expectations”

Take me to the station
And put me on a train
I’ve got no expectations
To pass through here again

Once I was a rich man and
Now I am so poor
But never in my sweet short life
Have I felt like this before

You heart is like a diamond
You throw your pearls at swine
And as I watch you leaving me
You pack my peace of mind

Our love was like the water
That splashes on a stone
Our love is like our music
Its here, and then its gone

So take me to the airport
And put me on a plane
I got no expectations
To pass through here again

– Jagger/Richards, The Rolling Stones. While I could pick nearly anything from Beggar’s Banquet, after I heard this played behind the harrowing footage of Katrina refugees turned away on the bridges out of New Orleans five years ago, it has come to have a special meaning for me.

“O Worship the King”

“Broken Bicycles”

Broken Bicycles, old busted chains/With busted handlebars out in the rain/Somebody must have an orphanage for/These things that nobody wants anymore/September’s reminding July/It’s time to be saying goodbye/Summer is gone, but our love will remain/Like old broken bicycles out in the rain.

The things that you’ve given me will always stay/They’re broken, but I’ll never throw them away.

Tom Waits, “Broken Bicycles” (must I like Maura O’Connell’s version from A Real Life Story better).

Melancholy, but lovely.

See? I feel better already.

The intersection between African American sacred music and the labor movement in this country is one of the areas I’m exploring as I research Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement. Spirituals quickly found their way into the brave labor actions of the first part of the 20th century, during a time when the wholesale slaughter of workers and activists was sanctioned by Big Business and Big Government alike.

One of the heroes of the labor movement was Ralph Chaplin, a brilliant labor activist, writer, and artist. It is Chaplin who pens the lyrics for the famed union anthem ”Solidarity Forever,” for instance.

It is in the pages of Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology* — where I found numerous examples of old spirituals transformed into stirring labor songs  — that I encountered this lovely, heart-breaking poem by Chaplin, written while unjustly imprisoned, following the officially sanctioned murder of yet another labor activist:

Mourn Not the Dead

Morn not the dead that in the cool earth lie/Dust unto dust/The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die/As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell/Too strong to strive/Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell/Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng/The cowed and the meek/Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong/And dare not speak!

* Industrial Workers of the World (or the “Wobblies”), “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”

W.C. Handy, the so-called “Father of the Blues,” once said on a radio broadcast that he was always inspired by the spirituals and that the spirituals did more for the slave’s emacipation than all of the guns of the Civil War.

I’ve spent the past few years examining the influence of the spirituals, Freedom Songs, gospel songs, R&B songs, and the hymns of Isaac Watts on the Civil Rights Movement. And people like Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga) have echoed Handy’s words as they relate to another fight, 100 years later.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that the spirituals were used by African Americans in the labor movements of the 1920s and ’30s as well, when the Federal government used American soldiers to slaughter strikers and corporations controlled entire blocs of states, not just their representatives.

This research path has taken me to “New Masses,” “The Labor Defender” and other feisty newspapers and magazines from that era. And in an article on the lynchings in the U.S. in 1933, there is an account of what black Share Croppers Delegation at the Farmers Second National Conference sang that year, to the tune of the spiritual, “We Shall Not Be Moved:”

“We fight against the terror/We shall not be moved/We fight against terror/We shall not be moved/Just like at tree that’s planted by water/We shall not be moved.”

Which brings me to my favorite James Taylor song, “Millworker,” written for a musical version of Studs Terkel’s “Working” project. Few songs move me as powerfully as this:

Now my grandfather was a sailor
He blew in off the water
My father was a farmer
And I, his only daughter
Took up with a no good mill-working man
From Massachusetts
Who dies from too much whiskey
And leaves me these three faces to feed

Millwork ain’t easy
Millwork ain’t hard
Millwork it ain’t nothing
But an awful boring job
I’m waiting for a daydream
To take me through the morning
And put me in my coffee break
Where I can have a sandwich
And remember

Then its me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
For the rest of the afternoon
And the rest of my life

Now my mind begins to wander
To the days back on the farm
I can see my father smiling at me
Swinging on his arm
I can hear my granddads stories
Of the storms out on lake eerie
Where vessels and cargos and fortunes
And sailors lives were lost

Yes, but its my life has been wasted
And I have been the fool
To let this manufacturer
Use my body for a tool
I can ride home in the evening
Staring at my hands
Swearing by my sorrow that a young girl
Ought to stand a better chance

So may I work the mills just as long as I am able
And never meet the man whose name is on the label

It be me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
And the rest of the afternoon
Gone for the rest of my life