You know times must be tough when an album of pre World War 2 working class American songs sounds topical. ‘Working- Class Heroes’ finds folk singers Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore revisiting 20 songs mainly culled from ‘Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People’, a book compiled by Alan Lomax with notes on the songs from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, which was published in the sixties. It’s a reminder that times were certainly tough back then and also that the American working class were much more radical with communism and anarchy popular while strikes were often broken with savage violence by the forces of capitalism. Continue reading “Mat Callahan & Yvonne Moore “Working-Class Heroes: A History Of Struggle and Song” (Free Dirt Records, 2019)”
Tag: Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger’s political sailboat heads for DC
God it’s a great feeling in the era of presidential toddlers to have people like Pete Seeger still with us. Billboard reports: “Five decades after the late folk music icon Pete Seeger sailed to the nation’s capital to call for passage of federal Clean Water Act, his Hudson River sloop Clearwater has again cast off for Washington, D.C. to challenge President Trump’s rollback of environmental protections. Musicians and activists gathered June 17 during Clearwater’s Great Hudson River Revival, a two-day folk-rock festival on the river’s edge in New York’s Westchester County, and loaded the sloop with a “cargo of concern” — petitions, municipal resolutions, and testimonials from individuals, citizen groups and elected officials. Continue reading “Pete Seeger’s political sailboat heads for DC”