SPACER
SPACER
A Musical Tribute for Si Kahn: Cultural Activist, Organizer, Educator
SPACER
[Song: “John Henry.”]
That was Pete Seeger, Si Kahn, and Jane Sapp singing “John Henry,” from their 1986 albumCarry It On.
Si Kahn just celebrated his 74th birthday on April 23rd. So today, on Wasn’t That A Time: Stories & Songs That Moved The Nation on WERA-LP Arlington, VA 96.7 FM, we are going to continue the festivities with a special musical tribute. I’m Susie Erenrich — your host for the hour.
For listeners not familiar with Si, here’s a bit of backstory from his home page. Si Kahn has worked for 50 years (at the time of the broadcast) as a professional civil rights, labor, and community organizer and musician. He began his organizing career in 1965 in Arkansas with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, more popularly known as SNCC, the student wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
During the War on Poverty, he served first as a VISTA Volunteer and later as Deputy Director of an eight-county community action agency in rural Georgia, where he also coached the first racially integrated Little League team in that part of the state.
In the 1970s, he worked with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) during the Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky and was an Area Director of the J.P. Stevens Campaign for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). These historic labor struggles are portrayed in the movies Harlan County U.S.A. and Norma Rae.
In 1980, Si founded Grassroots Leadership, a national, Southern-based progressive organization committed to community, civil rights, and labor organizing. He served as its Executive Director for 30 years, stepping down on May Day 2010.
Si is one of three co-founders of Musicians United to Protect Bristol Bay. Since 2010, he has been actively involved as a passionate volunteer in the international campaign to stop the proposed Pebble Mine and to protect permanently the people, jobs, communities, Indigenous languages, cultures, traditions, and wild sockeye salmon of Alaska’s Bristol Bay, one of the great remaining wild places in the world.
We are going to continue our musical journey with two tunes from Carry It On, “I Am a Union Woman,” and, “Which Side Are You On?” performed by Si Kahn and Jane Sapp. That will be followed by John McCutcheon’s rendition of the Si Kahn tune, “Wild Rose of the Mountain,” from Water From Another Time.
[Songs: “I Am a Union Woman,” “Which Side Are You On?” and “Wild Rose From the Mountain.”]
If I had my life to live
I'd surely live it over
Only walk in brand new shoes
Just lay down in clover
Only work on Christmas Day
All the rest go sporting
Spend my days down at the creek
Every night go courting
Honey from the honeycomb
Water from the fountain
Sugar from the sugar cane
And my wild rose of the mountain
When I think of home sweet home
It makes my eyes grown misty
Poppa singing gospel songs
Momma sipping whiskey
Whiskey from a white oak barrel
Sure does make good liquor
Makes the nights seem twice as bright
Days go by much quicker
If I had a new made quilt
I'd fill it up with feathers
Take my Rosie by the hand
Lay down there together
Oh the days that we were young
Thoughts that keep returning
Drive the winter night away
Just like a log fire burning
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
You are listening to Wasn’t That A Time on 96.7 FM. Today we are honoring Si Kahn. Si turned 74 on April 23rd. Si is an accomplished lyricist. His songs have been translated into at least half a dozen languages, including French, Welsh, Hebrew, Swedish, Drents (a Dutch dialect), and Plattdeutsch (“Low German”). Many of his tunes have become part of the oral tradition and are sung in folk clubs and living rooms, at demonstrations, and on picket lines around the world.
We are going to listen to a few of Si’s compositions performed by others. First, Magpie’s rendition of, “Spinning Mills of Home,” from Working My Life Away. That will be followed by “Aragon Mill,” performed by Side by Side from Friends With You.
[Song: “Spinning Mills of Home”]
Early Monday morning
I keep thinking that I'm late to work
Why didn't someone wake me
Guess the mills are down again
Three years I've been trying to raise
My kids on card room wages
Guess it's time to hit the road and try
My luck up North again
All along the river
Railroad tracks turned red and rusty
Cotton fields all dry and dusty
You can taste it in your mouth
Now you've heard people say
How they've got one foot in the grave
Well, I got one in Indiana
And the other in the South
On the highway heading South
On the highway heading North
Just back and forth
Sometimes I feel like a rolling stone
From the rolling mills of Gary
To the rolling hills
And spinning mills of home
I wish that they would write it down
The way someone who knows their work
Can have their labor bought and sold
Like cotton by the pound
It's just too hard to choose between
A job at home for lousy pay
And making real good money
In some Northern factory town
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
[Song: “Aragon Mill.”]
At the east end of town
At the foot of the hill
Stands a chimney so tall
That says Aragon Mill
But there's no smoke at all
Coming out of the stack
For the mill has pulled out
And it ain't coming back
And the only tune I hear
Is the sound of the wind
As it blows through the town
Weave and spin, weave and spin
Now I'm too old to change
Too young to die
And there's no place to go
For my old man and I
There's no children at all
In the narrow empty streets
Now the looms have all gone
It's so quiet I can't sleep
And the only tune I hear
Is the sound of the wind
As it blows through the town
Weave and spin, weave and spin
Now the mill has shut down
It’s the only life I know
Tell me where will I go
Tell me where will I go
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
In the liner notes to The Forgotten: Recovered Treasures From the Pen of Si Kahn, Joe Jencks recounts the story behind his new album. He wrote, “In 2012, Si Kahn approached me with more than seventy songs that he had written over a period of nearly thirty-five years, but which had not made it onto any of his own recordings. He asked if I would consider listening, to see if any of them resonated with me.
In 2016 the project came to fruition. Joe says that the album’s title celebrates the intent to remember people and stories that have been Forgotten. In these songs, we remember those who toiled for a better future. We learn from countless lives spent creating a world worth living in and a future worth fighting for.
We are going to listen to two tracks from The Forgotten, “Morning Star,” followed by “The Old Labor Hall.”
[Song: “Morning Star.”]
Tell me where are you going
Tell me where have you been
I’ve been ’round the mountain
And I’ve come back again
Morning star oh morning star
I ain’t going to Harlan
I ain’t going again
For there’s no more Black Diamond
And there’s no more L&N
Morning star oh morning star
If you see someone coming
Don’t you ask where they’ve been
For they’ve worn down the mountain
And they’ve torn down the wind
Morning star oh morning star
If you see someone going
Don’t you ask what they saw
For there’s no more deep mining
On the Cumberland Plateau*
Morning star oh morning star
*Pronounced locally as ‘plataw’
Tell me, where are you going
Tell me, where have you been
I’ve been ’round the mountain
And I’ve come back again
Morning star oh morning star
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
[Song: “The Old Labor Hall.”]
They stand outside the doorway as the long shadows fall
A line of ghostly figures at the Old Labor Hall
Mother Jones has just arrived in pillbox hat and shawl
From the Battle of Blair Mountain to the Old Labor Hall
Big Bill Haywood stoops to enter, he’s nearly six feet tall
Bringing children from Lawrence to the Old Labor Hall
He nods to Emma Goldman, so fiery, yet so small
She’s arguing with Eugene Debs at the Old Labor Hall
We still tell their stories
We still share their pride
’Cross a century of struggle
We’re still on their side
They view the ancient photographs that line the worn wood walls
They are back in 1900 at the Old Labor Hall
An Italian woman cocks her head as if trying to recall
Some old song from Palermo at the Old Labor Hall
A Scots stonecutter proudly holds his chisel and his maul
His Highland brogue still echoes through the Old Labor Hall
He sculpts the Barre granite the finest stone of all
For some rich man’s mausoleum at the Old Labor Hall
With socialists and anarchists sometimes it’s quite a brawl
It isn’t always peaceful at the Old Labor Hall
But on the roll of honor the brightest names of all
Are the immigrants whose strong hands built the Old Labor Hall
So today we gather, grateful to recall
The gentle man who fought to save the Old Labor Hall
Who with such grace and humor, such feeling for us all
Infused his steadfast passion through the Old Labor Hall
We will tell his story
We will share his pride
Today and in the future
Chet Briggs is on our side
We will tell their stories
We will share their pride
’Cross a century of struggle
We’re still on their side
They’re still on our side
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
We are going to pause for some program identification. We will continue with our Si Kahn Tribute when we return.
[Pause]
You are listening to Wasn’t That A Time: Stories & Songs That Moved The Nation on 96.7 FM. Today we are honoring the musical and organizing achievements of cultural activist Si Kahn. I’m Susie Erenrich, your host for the rest of the hour.
We are going to kick off the second half of the show with a few tunes from Si’s most recent musical theatre work, Mother Jones in Heaven, starring Vivian Nesbitt and John Dillon. The production honors the memory of the legendary Irish immigrant and social justice agitator termed “the most dangerous woman in America” by a U.S. district attorney in 1902.
[Song: “Stitch and Sew.”]
Morning has broken like ice on the lake
Out on the sidewalk the children are passing
Far from their tenements, hungry and cold
Warm in this window I stitch and sew
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Fingers that ache and heart that is bleeding
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Watching the children, I stitch and sew
Wind from the lake rises angry with snow
Out in the street where the jobless are standing
Shaking and shivering, bitter and old
Safe in this mansion I stitch and sew
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Driving the needle through layers of velvet
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Eyes on the distance, I stitch and sew
Back in the drawing room laughter rings out
There where the lords and the ladies are preening
Satins and silks worked in patterns so fine
No word escapes me, I stitch and sew
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Pulling the cloth ‘til the needles are breaking
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Listening and learning, I stitch and sew
Far in the mountains where blood marks the coal
Down in the shaft a fire is growing
Closer and closer it comes to my life
Waiting for justice, I stitch and sew
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
Pulling the thread ‘til the silk is on fire
Stitch and sew, stitch and sew
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
[Song: “Mother Jones Farewell.”]
I have been a radical
For fifty years and more
Stood against the rich and greedy
For the workers and the poor
From Canada to Mexico
I traveled everywhere
Wherever trouble called me
I was there
Like stitches in a crazy quilt
That women piece and sew
Wherever there was suffering
I was bound to go
With angry words for cowardice
Comfort for despair
Whenever help was needed
I was there
I was there in the depressions
When times were at their worst
But we had them where we wanted
Like a dam about to burst
With fire in our bellies
Revolution in the air
For a moment we saw clearly
I was there
There were times I saw the issues
In quite a different light
And old friends turned against me
But I never left the fight
When stones were in my passway
And the road was far from clear
Whether I chose right or wrongly
I was there
On a day when hope goes hungry
And your dreams seem bound to fall
You may see me at the mill
Or just outside the union hall
When the clouds are empty promises
The sky a dark despair
Like an eagle from the mountain
I’ll be there
And you, my brave young comrades
When the future sounds the call
Will you be there for the battle
Will you answer, one and all
When the roll is called up yonder
When the roll’s called anywhere
Will you stand and answer proudly
We’re still here
Can you stand and answer proudly
I was there
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
You are listening to Wasn’t That A Time on 96.7 FM.
I first met Si Kahn in 1992. I was in the process of creating and developing a major project on the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. I asked Si to participate. Of course, he said, “Yes.” We’ve been friends ever since.
Here’s the introduction to the piece he submitted then for the anthology. His article is titled, “I Have Seen Freedom.”
I missed Mississippi Summer. How it happened, I’m still not sure. Looking back at that period in my life, it certainly seems that everything had been moving me in that direction, southward toward the Civil Rights Movement. After all, I had been involved, at least peripherally, since high school days in Bethesda, Maryland, when members of our class had picketed the Woolworth’s on Wisconsin Avenue and, across the street, the Baronet Theater, which in 1961, was still segregating its audience, no more than fifteen miles from where the United States Supreme Court sat in solemn judgment. The next spring, I had ridden a bus from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Maryland, where Race Street running down the center of the town divided Black from White, to march and picket with Gloria Richardson and the Freedom Movement in that city.
But then I dropped out of college for a year, trying (I now understand) to figure out who I was and where my life was going. By the time I returned to school, it was already early 1964, and I felt disconnected from much of my previous life. Now a year behind, I felt the pressure to graduate, if not with my class, at least not too far behind it. So, while others went to Mississippi, I went to summer school. I watched the news on TV, I listened, I was inspired, I worried, I was sick at heart — but I wasn’t there.
That’s the story. But I wonder: Is this story true? Or was it just that I didn’t have the courage, the vision, the commitment that others had?
Did I really want to go, but just talked myself out of it, because I was scared, because other things seemed more important to me at the time? Was it, for reasons I’ll never know, simply not the right time — in the same way that, a year later, in the summer of 1965, it was very much the right time for me finally to head south, to Forrest City, Arkansas, to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to a life of Southern organizing from which I’ve never gone back.
So maybe, though “a dollar short and a day late,” I got there after all. My Mississippi Summer happened a year later, in the summer of 1965, when I was finally ready to go. And it wasn’t in Mississippi after all, but across the Mississippi River in Forrest City, Arkansas.
The crowds, the cameras, were gone, but the heart of the Movement — the African American citizens of the South, who had inspired us and me by risking everything on the highway to freedom, were still there, willing to tolerate and teach yet one more northern kid who was trying to find his own road. Better a year late than never.
We are going to listen to a few tracks that embody Si’s deep commitment to the various civil rights campaigns he participated in — “Mississippi Summer,” performed by Si Kahn from Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, followed by “Why Are the Guns Still Firing,” performed by Joe Jencks from his newly released album, The Forgotten: Recovered Treasures From the Pen of Si Kahn.
[Song: “Mississippi Summer.”]
My hands are as cracked as an August field
That’s burned in the sun for a hundred years
With furrows so deep you can hide yourself
But I ain’t choppin’ cotton no more this year
I’ll just sit on the porch with my eagle eye
And watch for a change of wind
The rows are as straight as a shotgun barrel
And long as a bullet can spin
You know how hot it gets
In Mississippi
You know how dry it gets
In the summer sun
The dust clouds swirl
All down the Delta
I just hope that I don’t die
‘Fore the harvest comes
Black clouds gathering on the edge of town
But no rain’s gonna fall on us
Hoes rise and fall in a distant field
Earth takes a beating for all of us
Thought I heard the Angel of Death overhead
But it’s only the crop duster’s plane
Hoes rise and fall like the beating of wings
Lord send us freedom and rain
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
[Song: “Why Are the Guns Still Firing.”]
Along the battery in Charleston, South Carolina
The ancient silent cannon point to sea
In 1851 they fired on Fort Sumter
The dead and wounded still cry out to you and me
Why are the guns still firing
Why are the innocent laid low
Why is this war still raging
That should have ended long ago
That war was fought in part to put an end to slavery
The nation’s shame we never should forget
One hundred fifty years ago the gunners finally rested
But shameless violence enslaves us yet
Now nine new souls are added to the millions
Who’ve lost their lives in this uncivil war
And it remains unto us the living
To spike the guns of hate forever more
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]
Before I play one last song, I want to thank you for tuning in to Wasn’t That A Time: Stories & Songs That Moved The Nation on WERA-LP Arlington, VA 96.7 FM. The fabulous Rusty Roberts is the on-air engineer and the amazing technical guru for this show.
I’m Susie Erenrich signing out with Magpie’s renditions of Si Kahn and Charlotte Brody’s song for labor organizer Joe Hill, “Paper Heart,” from When We Stand Together.
[Song: “Paper Heart.”]
There’s a long long line of people
Trying to keep from crying
There’s always’s someone dying
But today’s just not the same
There’s a man shot dead in Utah
With a paper heart pinned on him
Framed up without pardon
I guess you know his name
You say you saw him out last night
But I hear him every day
In the voices of the people
In the songs they sing and play
His name was Josef Hillstrom
This country is his coffin
But the songs of the working people
Are his marking stone
If heaven is one big union
I know that’s where I’ll find him
Playing cards with Bib Bill Haywood
Telling jokes with Mother Jones
Casey Jones and long-haired preachers
Mister Block and Scissor Bill
Send to hell a-flying
By songs no one can kill
[Reprinted with permission. © Joe Hill Music LLC (ASCAP). All rights reserved.]