"Which Side Are You On?" | |
---|---|
Song | |
Written | 1931 |
Songwriter(s) | Florence Reece |
"Which Side Are You On?" is a song written in 1931 by activist Florence Reece, who was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky.
In 1931, the miners and the mine owners in southeastern Kentucky were locked in a bitter and violent struggle called the Harlan County War. In an attempt to intimidate the family of union leader Sam Reece, Sheriff J. H. Blair and his men, hired by the mining company, illegally entered their home in search of Reece. Reece had been warned and escaped but his wife, Florence, and their children were terrorized. That night, after the men had gone, Florence wrote the lyrics to "Which Side Are You On?" on a calendar that hung in their kitchen. She took the melody from a traditional Baptist hymn, "Lay the Lily Low", or the traditional ballad "Jack Munro". [1]
Reece supported a second wave of miner strikes in 1973, as recounted in the documentary Harlan County USA . She and others performed "Which Side Are You On?" a number of times throughout. Reece recorded the song later in life, and it can be heard on the album Coal Mining Women.
Pete Seeger, collecting labor union songs, learned "Which Side Are You On" in 1940. The following year, it was recorded by the Almanac Singers in a version that gained a wide audience. More recently, Billy Bragg, Deacon Blue, Dropkick Murphys, Rebel Diaz, Natalie Merchant, Ani DiFranco, Tom Morello, Panopticon, and S.G. Goodman each recorded their own interpretations of the song.
The song is referred to by Bob Dylan in the song "Desolation Row". It was also the inspiration for the title of Alessandro Portelli's 2011 book on Harlan County's coal mining community. [2]
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter and composer who was one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land".
Harlan County is a county located in southeastern Kentucky. As of the 2020 census, the population was 26,831. Its county seat is Harlan. It is classified as a moist county—one in which alcohol sales are prohibited, but containing a "wet" city—in this case Cumberland, where package alcohol sales are allowed. In the city of Harlan, restaurants seating 100+ may serve alcoholic beverages.
Peter Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.
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"This Land Is Your Land" is a song by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. It is one of the United States' most famous folk songs. Its lyrics were written in 1940 in critical response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". Its melody is based on a Carter Family tune called "When the World's on Fire". When Guthrie was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing "God Bless America" on the radio in the late 1930s, he sarcastically called his song "God Blessed America for Me" before renaming it "This Land Is Your Land".
Harlan County, USA is a 1976 American documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike", a 1973 effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.
Mermaid Avenue is a 1998 album of previously unheard lyrics written by American folk singer Woody Guthrie, put to music written and performed by British singer Billy Bragg and the American band Wilco. The project was the first of several such projects organized by Guthrie's daughter, Nora Guthrie, original director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and archives. Mermaid Avenue was released on the Elektra Records label on June 23, 1998. A second volume of recordings, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, followed in 2000 and both were collected in a box set alongside volume three in 2012 as Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions. The projects are named after the song "Mermaid's Avenue", written by Guthrie. This was also the name of the street in Coney Island, New York, on which Guthrie lived. According to American Songwriter Magazine, "The Mermaid Avenue project is essential for showing that Woody Guthrie could illuminate what was going on inside of him as well as he could detail the plight of his fellow man". It was voted number 939 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000).
The Harlan County War, or Bloody Harlan, was a series of coal industry skirmishes, executions, bombings and strikes that took place in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the 1930s. The incidents involved coal miners and union organizers on one side and coal firms and law enforcement officials on the other. The Harlan County coal miners campaigned and fought to organize their workplaces and better their wages and working conditions. It was a nearly decade-long conflict, lasting from 1931 to 1939. Before its conclusion, an unknown number of miners, deputies and bosses would be killed, state and federal troops would occupy the county more than half a dozen times, two acclaimed folk singers would emerge, union membership would oscillate wildly and workers in the nation's most anti-labor coal county would ultimately be represented by a union.
Brewing Up with Billy Bragg is the second album by Billy Bragg, released in 1984.
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Man in the Sand is a 1999 documentary that functions as both a biography of American folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie and a chronicle of the creation of the Billy Bragg & Wilco Mermaid Avenue albums, which feature songs consisting of previously-unheard Woody Guthrie lyrics set to newly-created music.
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Florence Reece was an American social activist, poet, and folksong writer. She is best known for the song "Which Side Are You On?" which she originally wrote at the age of twelve while her father was out on strike with other coal miners, according to The Penguin Book of American Folk Song by Alan Lomax.
The Woody Guthrie Foundation, founded in 1972, is a non-profit organization which formerly served as administrator and caretaker of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The Foundation was originally based in Brooklyn, New York and directed by Woody Guthrie's daughter Nora Guthrie.
Alessandro Portelli is an Italian scholar of American literature and culture, oral historian, writer for the daily newspaper il manifesto, and musicologist. He is a professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In the United States he is best known for his oral history work, which has compared workers' accounts of industrial conflicts in Harlan County, Kentucky, and Terni, Italy. In 2014–15, he was a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, co-teaching a course on Bruce Springsteen's America.
The 2019 Harlan County coal miners' protest was a labor protest held by dozens of coal miners in Cumberland, Kentucky. The causes of the protest stemmed from the 2019 bankruptcy of Blackjewel Coal, a coal mining company that operated a mine in the county. Following the company's bankruptcy, former coal miners did not receive payment for several weeks of work, leading to many miners protesting by blocking a coal train on tracks in the county. The protest lasted from July 29 to September 26, with litigation continuing in bankruptcy courts.
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