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Music to walk the line by A WALZ THROUGH THE SONGS OF AMERICA'S RICH LABOR HISTORY By Jesse Hamlin Special to the Free Press You can't have a strike without the songs. Let's sing one for Joe Hill, bard of the Wobblies. A little Woody Guthrie to rouse the spirits and strengthen our resolve -- perhaps a chorus or two of "Solidarity" to get us in a righteous groove. We could sing praises to Woody's "Union Maid," who "never was afraid of goons ginks and company finks." Why not move them with "Which Side Are You On?," written in 1931 by Florence Reece, the wife of a striking Appalachian coal miner who, according to labor lore, scribbled the words on the back of a calendar after the goons dragged her husband away. She set the lyrics to the haunting melody of an old Scottish ballad, "Jackie Frazier." The classic songs of the American labor movement draw from the deep well of secular and sacred music heard around the country at the turn of the century: pop tunes picked up from vaudeville shows, sheet music and piano rolls, and gospel hymns from both black and white churches. The songs of the Industrial Workers of the World -- the radical unionists called Wobblies who roved the West in the early 1900s -- are rich in the language and lore of the American hobo. The Wobblies took up the vocabulary of the tramps who hopped the rails looking for work, says Archie Green, the esteemed San Francisco folklorist. "They tranferred the lore of the jungles -- the hobos' term for their camps along the railroad tracks or streams," Green says. "Joe Hill's 'Meet Me in the Jungle, Louie,' is sung to the melody of 'Meet Me in St. Louis, Louie,' the hit of the 1904 St. Louis Exposition." Most of the Wobblie songs parody the hits of the day; Hill's version of "Casey Jones" turns the beloved engineer into a scab driving his train into a picket line. He breaks his back and goes to hell. Hill was executed in Salt Lake City in 1915 for allegedly murdering a grocer. Twenty-one years later, two young radicals on the staff of a commie summer camp in the Catskills immortalized him in a song written for a skit: "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night." The lyrics were written by Alfred Hayes and set to music by Earl Robinson, who later had a hit with his patriotic cantata "Ballad for Americans." He also wrote "The House I Live In," recorded by brother Sinatra. Ralph Chaplin's "Solidarity Forever," written during a 1913 coal miners' strike in West Virginia, is a great labor hymn. Chaplin, a writer, printer and cartoonist, "was the kind of guy, " Green says, "who'd be on strike at the Chron right now. He also wrote some great jail poetry. He was jailed, like many Wobblies, for opposing World War I." And let's not forget "Roll the Union On," written in 1935 by John Handcox, a black sharecropper who belonged to the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers union. He grafted his words onto the spiritual "Roll the Chariot On." We already suggested Guthrie's "Union Made" but didn't mention that it is based on the ragtime melody "Red Wing." Green would love to hear us sing "We Shall Overcome." The civil rights anthem is a gospel song sung by striking black tobacco wrokers in Raleigh, N.C., in the early 1930s. "It was moving to hear the Chinese students singing it in Tiananamen Square, " Green said. "These songs still have bite because they tap into an almost subterranean feeling of solidarity, unity and justice. They hit moral chords." The best place to find recordings of these labor classics -- by Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, Joe Glazer and others -- is Down Home Music in El Cerrito. To buy a copy of the Wobblie songbook, first published in Spokane, Wash., in 1909, stop by the Wobblie office in the Grant Building at 7th and Market in San Francisco. Old Wobblies never die, they just keep on warbling. Sing!