Solidarities Forever

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by Dave Roediger

In the article below, Dave Roediger discusses his contribution to The Big Red Songbook (Green, Archie; Roediger, David; Rosemont, Franklin; and Salerno, Salvatore, eds. The Big Red Songbook Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2007). That contribution was in part inspired by the title of AUD's thirtieth anniversary conference, held in 2000.

Three years ago Sal Salerno, Archie Green, Franklin Rosemont, and I scrambled to send The Big Red Songbook, a giant compilation of Industrial Workers of the World songs (Charles H. Kerr Company) to press. In putting final touches on my small introductory contribution to the book, I recalled the title of the 2000 AUD Thirtieth Anniversary conference, "When the Workers' Inspiration Through the Union's Blood Shall Run." The title played, of course, on a line from Ralph Chaplin's classic 1915 labor anthem "Solidarity Forever." That line ran, "When the union's inspiration through the workers blood shall run."

Together, the two variations of the line highlights just the point I wanted to make about the songs we collected. Their open-ended, part-of-changing-world and part-of-changing-the-world spirit made them available for new uses with new lines in new struggles. Indeed when Matt Noyes told me, regarding the AUD's recasting of the lyric, "It's funny, the line seems so natural to me that I have trouble remembering which is which," I had the epigraphs for my introduction to the song-book.

As it happened, the great IWW singer and storyteller Utah Phillips was working on his afterward to Big Red Songbook as I worked on my piece, with his writing also being an example of just-in-time production. We did not read each other's articles and near the end of his came: "Even in 'Solidarity Forever,' given our times, many of us sing 'When the workers' inspiration through the union's blood shall run,' instead of the other way around." Thus the same line did double duty early and late in the book.

Much that has happened in the three years since Phillips and I wrote those small contributions makes me glad for their common emphasis on the changing sames of "Solidarity Forever." Utah Phillips died in May, 2008. Archie Green, the pathbreaking labor folklorist and activist, and Franklin Rosemont, the marvelous surrealist revolutionary artist and writer, died within a year of Phillips. Their passings deserve, and will get, close and loving attention from many of us who want to mourn and to organize, but in this short piece I want to think about how various versions of "Solidarity Forever" help us think about them and about how ideas, lyrics and champions of labor reach across generations.

Much of labor music, as Utah hardly ever failed to observe, begins with old tunes that workers knew. Often enough these were patriotic -- "Solidarity Forever" took its melody from "Battle Hymn of the Republic"-or were religious. The lyrics, Phillips wryly added, underwent changes so that they made sense.

Beginning by appropriating somebody else's song, or rather by realizing that songs are everybody's, labor musicians tended to see their own work as unfrozen by either convention or copyright. "Because these songs are ours," Phillips wrote, "we can change and bend them to suit our needs." "Solidarity Forever" provides perhaps the best examples. Some changes were fine-tunings, as when the remarkable Southern Tenant Farmers Union poet and song-writer John Handcox changed Chaplin's "greater than their hoarded gold" to "greater than their horrid gold." In time, the original version's line "Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand-fold," came to have "atoms" stand in for armies Chaplin put agricultural and industrial workers at his song's center but when Yale's clerical and industrial workers struck in 1984 and 1985, their lyrics included:

It is we who push the papers, put the paychecks in the mail;
It is we who type the letters, mind the office without fail.

They further added:
We work with agar-agar, pour chemicals in vats
But until we get a contract, we won't feed your stupid rats.

More recently, campaigns for union democracy within the Service Employees International Union have made "Solidarity Forever" theirs:

It is we who built our union; won the power that they trade;
Stood together while they plotted to divide us and invade.
Now we stand outside our union halls, our will has been betrayed;
But our union makes us strong.

Utah Phillips, Franklin Rosemont and Archie Green will be remembered for many things, not the least of which was a deep ability of each to reach across generations and to learn new things. The rebel songs they cherished provided one model for doing so. Solidarities forever.