John McCutcheon – Joe Hill’s Last Will

JOHN McCUTCHEON

Joe Hill’s Last Will

Appalsongs

folkmusic.com

Joe Hill (1879-1915) is a legendary figure in the history of folk music and the labor movement. A Swedish immigrant (born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund), he immigrated to the United States in 1902 and learned to speak English as a migrant laborer. Sometime around 1910, Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Wobblies, a union that believes in industrial unionization, “One Big Union,” as opposed to trade unionism, and began to write songs for them – often set to tunes borrowed from popular songs of the day. In some ways, Woody Guthrie followed in Hill’s footsteps a generation later.

In 1914, Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City, Utah for a murder he did not commit, and was tried and convicted. He was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915 at the age of 36.

Like many of my generation, I initially learned about Joe Hill from the song written about him in the 1930s by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson via recordings by Paul Robeson and recordings and performances in the ‘60s by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Much of what I know about Joe Hill, though, came from another great Wobblie songwriter, my late friend Bruce “Utah” Phillips, who I heard sing many of Joe Hill’s songs, and tell many stories about him, over a period of many years.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Hill’s execution and John McCutcheon marks the occasion with Joe Hill’s Last Will, an inspired and inspiring collection of Joe Hill songs – a couple of which I’m hearing for the first time on this CD, others which I know from recordings by such artists as Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, and Hazel Dickens.

One of the astounding things that hits home about these songs is the so very brief period in which they were created. The earliest is from 1911 and the latest from 1915 – just a four year period. But, although these songs date from a century and more ago and are essentially topical songs, most – particularly with John’s infectious and creative arrangements – seem relevant to the (economic) times we’re living in now.

While the entire album is entirely praiseworthy, some of the finest moments include “It’s a Long Way to the Soup Line,” a song Hill wrote in prison in 1915 to the tune of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”; “The Preacher & the Slave,” a parody of “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” that Hill used to mock the Salvation Army (the “Starvation Army”) and their brass bands that were used back in the day to disrupt IWW rallies; and the rousing finale, “There is Power in the Union,” on which John is joined by a bunch of fellow workers from the American Federation of Musicians, Local 1000 (the folksingers' local), and the Seattle Labor Chorus.

Certainly the most moving song is the title track, “Joe Hill’s Last Will,” whose words Hill wrote the day before his execution and which were smuggled out of the prison by a guard.

My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kind don't need to fuss and moan –
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

My body? Ah, If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to all of you.

Joe Hill

“Joe Hill’s Last Will” has been set to music several times over the years – I have a bluegrass version on the collaborative 1976 album by Country Cooking and the Fiction Brothers – but John’s lovely version is to a melody of his own. (I’ve also heard it performed as recitation by both Utah Phillips and the late Tex König.)

I’ll also note that a couple of the songs, “Overalls & Snuff,” and “Where the Fraser River Flows,” are of special Canadian interest as they were written for the strike against the Canadian National Railroad in 1912.

An essential recording and an excellent companion to John's Woody Guthrie tribute, This Land: Woody Guthrie's America.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Kathy Mattea – Calling Me Home

KATHY MATTEA

Calling Me Home

Sugar Hill

mattea.com

In a career dating back to the 1980s, Kathy Mattea had a bunch of country hits. In 2008, though, she shucked all commercial pretence and released Coal, a thematic folk and bluegrass album of songs about the lives of Appalachian coal miners. It was her finest work ever. Whether singing about lost ways of life or of lost lives, she found the emotional essence of each song and brought it, sometimes powerfully, sometimes beautifully, to the fore.

Although only a few of the songs on Calling Me Home explicitly deal with coal miners, the album, both thematically and musically, does continue in the vein of Coal and at least equals, if not surpasses, the predecessor’s achievement.

The deep Appalachian roots of the album are signaled from the beginning of the first song, Michael and Janet Dowling’s “A Far Cry,” when the first sound heard is the fiddle and the second is the mandolin. The song itself, memorably recorded years ago by Del McCoury, is a powerful song of regret from the perspective of someone who forsook their life in the Appalachians, and the love they had there.

As noted, several songs deal directly with coal mining issues. Jean Ritchie’s quietly powerful “West Virginia Mine Disaster,” sung from the perspective of a woman whose husband was one of many men lost in the latest mining disaster and who fears a similar fate could await her sons. “Black Waters,” also written by Jean, and equally quietly powerful, is a lament for the environmental devastation the coal industry has wreaked in states like Kentucky, where Jean comes from, and West Virginia, where Kathy comes from. In Larry Cordle’s “Hello, My Name is Coal,” the narrator is coal itself contrasting its virtues and its sins.

Most of the other songs are drawn from writers who are either from the Appalachians like the late Hazel Dickens, or who have immersed themselves in the traditional culture and/or music. Among the most compelling are Si Kahn’s “Gone, Gonna Rise Again,” in which a beloved and wise grandfather is recalled; and Alice Gerrard’s “Calling Me Home,” sung a cappella with chilling harmonies by Tim Eriksen, in which a dying man says his farewells.

The mostly-acoustic arrangements featuring such musicians and harmony singers as Bryan Sutton, Stuart Duncan, Tim O’Brien, Emmylou Harris, Aoife O’Donovan, Mollie O’Brien and Alison Krauss serve the songs perfectly.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Hazel Dickens 1935-2011

Like virtually all in the folk music world, I was deeply saddened to learn that Hazel Dickens, the great Appalachian singer and songwriter, and pioneering woman of bluegrass, had passed away early today in a Washington, D.C. hospital where she was being treated for pneumonia.

Hazel’s importance cannot be underestimated. At a time when most of the artists coming into the folk music world were revivalists, she was a tradition-bearer, born and raised in “the green rolling hills of West Virginia,” who brought generations of authenticity to the songs she sang, and the songs she wrote, and the music she played.

In the mid-1960s, Hazel formed a duo with Alice Gerrard that fronted bluegrass bands as bandleaders and lead singers – which was very rare for the day. They recorded two LPs of bluegrass for Folkways in the ‘60s that were among the first bluegrass albums to feature women as leaders. When Smithsonian Folkways reissued the LPs on a single CD, they rightfully named it Pioneering Women of Bluegrass.

I first encountered Hazel and Alice in the early- or mid-‘70s at a folk festival – I think it was Mariposa – around the time that Rounder put out their masterpiece album, Hazel and Alice. That album of traditional and neo-traditional old-time Appalachian music, is one of the most important and influential folk music recordings of the past half-century.

Hazel went on to record another fine album with Alice, several solo albums, and several collaborations with other artists all of which I played enthusiastically over the years on the radio show.

I didn’t know Hazel very well, but enjoyed hearing her perform and chatting with her when our paths crossed at folk festivals over the years.

Art Menius, who knew Hazel much better than I did, said this in an e-mail this afternoon:

“The greatest takeaway for me with Hazel is her courage on all matters except flying and revealing her age. The courage to leave home in the hills for the industrial harshness of Baltimore a half century ago. The courage to play bass in the hostile male world of bluegrass. The courage to partner with Alice Gerrard and record bluegrass albums with male sidemen. The courage to write bluegrass songs that raised issues a lot of people would rather not discuss. The courage to be honest and confrontational. The courage to speak truth to power in her art and to keep alive the tradition of hillbilly radical singers like Sarah Ogun Gunning and Aunt Molly Jackson while working in a genre that had little model or precedent for that save for odds and ends like Vern & Ray's ‘To Hell With the People, To Hell With the Land.’ Hazel combined two of my passions -- hillbilly music and political art.”

“Well I paid the price for the leavin'
And this life I have is not one I thought I'd find.
Just let me live, love, let my cry, but when I go just let me die
Among the friends who'll remember when I'm gone.”
-Hazel Dickens, “West Virginia, My Home”

--Mike Regenstreif

BTW, the line in quotation marks, “the green rolling hills of West Virginia,” is the title of, and a lyric from, a song written by Bruce (Utah) Phillips. Some of what's in that song accurately parallels Hazel's real life. The song's definitive version, with an added final verse, was on the Hazel and Alice album. --MR