Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States (review)

In the spirit of the late Archie Green (to whom the book is dedicated), Ronald Cohen's Work and Sing traces the history of the study of music by, for, and about working people in the United States. In compact form, Cohen's book traces efforts by folklorists, musicologists, and radical cultural workers to collect and preserve the lyrics and melodies that emerged from the lives of cowboys, sailors, lumberjacks, and hobos. Individual chapters attend to African American work songs, ballads, and blues, to trade union anthems and hymns, and to musicals and folk music performances and practices. Although attentive to the uses and effects of singing as a way to make work seem less tedious, to promote solidarity on the job, and to voice broad social and political aspirations, Work and Sing is primarily an account of a long and unevenly successful struggle by sympathetic intellectuals to build a recognizable archive of working people's music through songbook collections, recordings, and the activities of popular social movements.

In historical work, the archive looms large. History is not really the past, but rather a representation of it. Traditional archives foreground the voices of the wealthy and all but excise from the historical record the opinions, experiences, and aspirations of working people. Yet working people and their allies have been very adept in creating alternative archives, often in unexpected places. Cohen's careful research unearths a treasure trove in sheet music, song books, magazines, and recordings. Part of the history of American life and labor resides in the Library of Congress recording Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks, in back issues of the folk-music journal Sing Out!, and in the song book Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People edited by Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. Cohen shows that these archives emerged from determined individual and group struggles, from lifelong dedication to social movements by committed cultural workers and collectors, as well as from social movement "halfway houses" like the Highlander Folk School or Commonwealth College, and Popular Front groups including People's Songs. The striking visual images in Work and Sing of songbook covers, posters, and sheet-music illustrations constitute an archive in themselves that resonates with the ideas and aspirations that shaped the labor struggles of the past. This book reminds us that conservatories controlled by conservative gatekeepers and works of popular culture guided primarily by commercial imperatives do not encompass the entire history of music making in the United States, despite their privileged places in official archives.

One of the many strengths of Cohen's book is his careful delineation of the intentionality behind the creation of the archive of working people's music. Folklorists were not invited by dominant cultural institutions to collect the songs of working people; they invited themselves and convinced the institutions to come along for the ride. Initially shaped by misguided Manichean oppositions between tradition and modernity, some collectors eventually came to see a more useful political purpose in their archival work. Cohen quotes Alan Lomax explaining the impetus behind Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People as stemming from the belief that "Most of these songs would probably have disappeared if they had not been collected or recorded at that time. . . . In a sense we treasured these songs, because to us they were symbols of the fighting, democratic spirit of a whole sector of the population that is too often viewed as faceless, voiceless, supine and afraid" (101).

The archive assembled in Work and Sing tells a great deal about how history happens and why music matters. In a country where the perspectives of working people (past and present) are virtually invisible in popular culture and political discourse, where there has been no official labor party and trade unions are dominated by bureaucracies friendly to the imperatives of capital, workers and their...