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Dick Weissman, Talking' 'Bout a Revolution:
Music and Social Change in America
(New York: Backbeat Books, 2010).

Some recent correspondence on songwriting and activism has drawn comments from a number of musicians and friends, including author and banjo picker Dick Weissman, who has a new book out on "music and social change," Portland mandolinist Lincoln Crockett, my brother Banjo Frank Thedford, and Cumberland playwright Richard Maslow. For more on Dick Weissman, see www.dickweissman.com and "Dick Weissman: A Long Memory for Musicians" in our June 2010 issue. For more on Lincoln Crockett, who will resume touring again this fall, see www.lincolncrockett.com and "Lincoln Crockett Q&A: Mando Cat's Gone After His Smile" in our February 2010 issue. Banjo Frank is at www.banjofrank.com. Our readers are invited to join in on this discussion as well.

"Our Prof wrote the textbook"

[VR] You come from Philadelphia, home of fierce Frank Rizzo, who dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound rather than spring for social services in the 'hood. I worked as an ESL English teacher in Philly during the winter-spring of '89-'90, teaching waves of immigrants from Moldova for six hours a day. I remember police cars whose broken bumpers the city couldn't afford to repair, and charity volunteers who would appear on the transit platform at the end of the Main Line, guiding the weary folk who rode the train all night from the outbound train to the inbound train before the transit cops caught them sleeping. Welcome to the cradle of liberty...

[Dick Weissman] Frank Rizzo. There was a time, years ago, when he was the commander of the downtown precinct. The Gilded Cage was the folkie coffeehouse around Rittenhouse Square. Rizzo used to try to bust people for playing chess, and so forth. Mostly he was upset about inter-racial couples. At the time, Philly had elected Richardson Dilworth, its first democrat mayor in many, many years. His daughter used to hang out at the coffeehouse. The owners were praying that Rizzo's cops busted her. It never did happen.

[VR] I liked your Frank Rizzo story. The "Urban folk revival" gains meaning as a frame for our strand of American culture through just such participant anecdotes, I think. Your recollections are also my favorite passages in your new textbook Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution, for which I thank you.

[Dick Weissman] The Revolution book was written for anyone interested in the subject, with enough info for it to be used in a college class. It developed out of a class I taught at the University of Colorado/Denver called Social & Political Implications of American Music, but this book goes a lot farther. That class didn't deal with rock, and only minimally with the music of hate, and the Gulf Wars hadn't occurred when the class started!

[VR] I'm curious about your experience teaching. How did it feel to be discussing music that you'd enjoyed, and presenting it as cultural history?

[Dick Weissman] It went way beyond what I enjoyed. I mean I don't enjoy Nazi music, or a lot of things we listened to in class. It really wasn't about what I liked, but what the music meant in terms of the particular era, or the particular group. I'm teaching that class right now, online, for the first time, at the same (Colorado) school.

[VR] No, I wouldn't have pegged you as a big fan of Nazi music. Actually, I was remembering a team-taught seminar on War and Militarism that I organized in 1980, during the Iranian hostage crisis, while a grad student at Indiana. One of the segments of that class had us reviewing accounts of the Vietnam war era in recent college textbooks. It was one of the weirder experiences in my life to try to explain how textbook accounts of the '60s didn't quite square with my own lived experience.

Karen Silkwood leaves her children in Texas

[VR] Did you actually meet Karen Silkwood?

[Dick Weissman] I didn't know Karen Silkwood. I did drive down to Oklahoma to look at the Kerr McGee plant, and I did do quite a bit of reading.

During the 1990s I wrote a number of songs for the Oil, Coke, Chemical & Atomic Union Workers. These songs dealt with contemporary and historical struggles that the union waged...

-- Dick Weissman, Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution, p. 220.

[VR] Your song "Dancing In My Dreams" (on your album Four Directions), about Karen Silkwood leaving her children behind when she moved from Texas to Oklahoma, also has a gentle complexity that I admire:

I love you now and I won't forget.
Think of me when your daddy lets you.
I'll be back in time, you'll be dancing in my dreams.

You're a long-time union man, but you wrote a song that shows us a Karen Silkwood who wasn't entirely comfortable with the choices she'd made. It seems an interesting response to an intriguing assignment. That wasn't the sort of job you'd get off CraigsList, but from people who trust you. So how did "Dancing in My Dreams" fit in with this assignment? It seems to convey a more personal vision of Karen than one strictly "dealing with her struggle."

[Dick Weissman] Silkwood's original choices were entirely non-political, but feminist. Giving up the children to get away from an abusive husband who was screwing her best friend, and making a life for herself. The precise intention was not to create the stereotypical "hero(ine)." The Silkwood movie stereotyped Karen as that sex-oriented wild child, and the union's goal was to present her as a human being who left her children behind, for the reasons I've explained.

Lori Berenson and her son Salvador

[VR] I imagined Lori Berenson having doubts as well. I think our heroes and heroines are more interesting and accessible with their flaws and doubts left in, not air-brushed away. So do you, apparently.

[Dick Weissman] I was kind of intrigued at your verse at NW Folklife about joining the revolution.

[VR] That's from the first verse of my song "The Girl at the Window," which imagines a young female recruit from the Peruvian mountains making Emma Goldman's complaint that she'd rather be dancing than occupying the Japanese Ambassador's residence:

But join the revolution and they teach you it's a trick.
They want us drunk and dancing, so they can come and pick
the pretty ones to lie with and the rest to wash their clothes.
You come back when you're used up and there's no one left to know.

[Dick Weissman] I thought your song was too long to be as effective as you might have wanted it to be. There are a lot of interesting elements. I think Jim Page likes direct message songs, and I don't see this one as that way.

[VR] That might well be true. Like any songwriter with his ego invested in a longer ballad, I'm inclined to point to the long songs on "Blonde on Blonde" in self-defense. Come to think of it, those weren't exactly "direct message songs" either.

The passage that Jim Page remarked on at our NW Folklife panel "A Conversation About Songwriting" was from the third verse:

The Tupac Amaru would come to make plans:
"Let's kidnap the diplomats and take back our lands."

Jim insisted that "They did what needed to be done!"

[Dick Weissman] Yeah, I just think that life is more complicated than a lot of the protest songs might imply. Why would Lori want to have a baby in prison?

[VR] Lori's husband is a Peruvian civil liberties lawyer who led her defense team. She was turning forty, and wanted to have a child with him while she still could. Personally, it was a calculated risk. Perhaps they would release her early to raise her child outside. Or they might keep her imprisoned for her full term, and after she was no longer nursing her infant son, she'd have to give him up to be raised outside by her parents. Also, having the childbirth in the prison infirmary further injured her back. (Her spine had deteriorated in prison.)

As things worked out, they recently paroled her, thank God. She is constrained to remain in Peru for the next five years, the remainder of her sentence. Her loyal and eloquent parents are now with her in Lima, helping her and young Salvador through their transition from captivity.

Propaganda songs versus writing from lived experience

[Dick Weissman] I guess what really bothered me in the 60's was knowing that many of these heavy protesters would end up on Wall Street, or something similar.

[VR] Jerry Rubin, for instance. My brother Frank had a similarly salty reaction to Jim's comment: "You should have answered 'I don't do propaganda!'" Oh well, I'm not that averse to propaganda. And Jim has written songs of great tenderness and subtle insight, such as "Bobby Cortez" about a high school friend damaged by Vietnam, and "I'd Rather Be Dancing" (on his album Head Full of Pictures), written from Rachel Corrie's letters home:

And I'd rather be dancing,
dancing to Pat Benatar.
Oh but somebody has to do something about it
and here we are.

[Banjo Frank] Actually my suggestion about a possible answer to Jim Page is part of a longer imagined exchange. Your line is: 'Listen, I don't do propaganda.' His line is: 'No buddy, you sure as hell don't.' This plays on the fact that the pejorative sense of 'propaganda' is 'oversimplified political hack-writing' whereas the functional sense is more like 'clear powerful works designed to enhearten believers and win over the uncommitted in a great ongoing struggle.'

[Dick Weissman] There are a variety of problems with propaganda songs. One is that when they are written externally, like Civil Rights songs written by white liberals, they are much less effective then when SNCC workers in a cell improvise on a gospel tune. The songs of textile workers and miners were organic, they were singing cultures, with real roots. When Pete Seeger sings these songs at Carnegie Hall, much as I like Pete Seeger, the meaning isn't the same, and neither is the audience. None of them have ever worked in a mine or in a textile mill.

[VR] Some activist songwriters do take the time to get close to their subjects. Woody Guthrie lived through the dust bowl to write his ballads about Okies and migrant workers. (He also appreciated a good story, true or not -- "1913 Massacre" was written from Mother Bloor's vivid but sometimes self-aggrandizing and ghost-written autobiography.) Jim Page wrote his song "I'd Rather Be Dancing" from Rachel Corrie's letters, and you drove to Oklahoma to find out more about Karen Silkwood. You'd also have to say that Hazel Dickens was pretty close to the miners whose evil bosses she castigated in "The Yablonski Murders."

[Richard Maslow] Is ambivalence permitted in propaganda? Does your "propaganda" taste hanker for Tom Paxton's "The Bravest?" Or Robert Cray's "Twenty?" So many examples.

[VR] Or Tom Waits' "The Day After Tomorrow."

[Richard Maslow] Is Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd" propaganda? What about Bob Dylan's "Hattie Carroll" or "Hollis Brown" or "Blowing in the the Wind" or "The Times They are A-Changing"? The latter two have the short theme song quality that Dick mentions, but also contradict the "only write from your own experience" advice.

And when do you polish the latest version of "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles"? Or what is that country western song, a wonder to hear, Toby Keith's "Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)."

[VR] I recently played "Hollis Brown" at an open mic, and the host expressed surprise that it was a Dylan song. "Never heard of it." But I'm also getting slower and slower in my dotage: Frank had to explain to me the meaning of the "F.Y.T.K." t-shirt that Natalie Maines wore on stage after Toby Keith responded critically to her comment about the Dixie Chicks being ashamed that W. was from Texas.

Say what's true, or enact the situation

[Dick Weissman] Before John Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath, he wrote another novel called In Dubious Battle. It's a much more honest book, although it's considerably less literary. At the end of the book, the communist organizer is killed. Without missing a beat, another red steps up and delivers a speech based on the killing of his fallen comrade. No time for tears, no time for reflection. Just another arrow for the quiver. That scene has stayed with me for many years.

[Banjo Frank] I remember reading In Dubious Battle. I thought it was a really cool book. I was in the Cuyahoga County Jail at the time waiting to get sent back to the Navy, and for some reason the book was lying around. So I read it. This was in 1967. 1967 was an interesting year.

I would note the distinction between writing a song about something where all you're consciously trying to do is say what you yourself feel and think about it, and one where you're most of all deliberately trying to affect what others think and feel about it. Of course a song that's about one's own thoughts and feelings on something if well done can in fact affect the thoughts and feelings of others. It should, if well done. But the difference in approach is still significant.

[VR] I'd also distinguish songs that try to say what's true, for example who is being oppressed by whom, from songs that enact situations, to bring events to life. Woody Guthrie was a master of the latter, in songs like "1913 Massacre" and "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You." (I love the detail that the preacher "folded his specs.")

[Dick Weissman] Interesting that you would mention Woody. In the "Ludlow Massacre" he created a happy ending. Unfortunately, in fact the strike broke the union.

[Banjo Frank] On the subject of political songs, there's whether the person who comes up with the song (or the new verse to an old song) is speaking about and from his own life, or is an outsider. We seem to be assuming a sincere and sympathetic outsider, but it can be someone just trying to write in a certain genre. For example, in the early 60's there was a market for folk-group style freedom songs. So a lot of folk-group style freedom songs got written.

So there's the question of where someone is coming from--degree of involvement, degree of sincerity. And there's the question of effectiveness. Now I'll grant that a new verse that comes out spontaneously at a picket line or a demonstration and is remembered and repeated at the next picket line and the next is effective. It's from reality and it functions in reality. But for an outsider's song, and here's my actual question, does sincerity have anything to do with effectiveness? I'm thinking just as a pro defense attorney can conduct a very skilled defense of a client he knows is guilty, and a pro ad writer can put together a slogan and campaign that sells the product even if he knows the product is crap, so a skilled pro songwriter can craft an effective political song without really buying into the cause.

Or can someone who really feels it always tell when someone doesn't really feel it? That could be argued. But it's obvious from experience that mere sincerity is no guarantee of a good song or an effective song. We've all heard really sincere songs that were very difficult to listen to. Haven't we?

[Happy Traum] I don't feel that there is much difference between your work now and your earlier work. I can see a continuity of ideas, although they're not politically as black and white as they once were. "Masters of War" was a pretty black and white song. It wasn't too equivocal. You took a stand.

[Bob Dylan] That was an easy thing to do. There were thousands and thousands of people just wanting that song, so I wrote it up. What I'm doing now isn't more difficult, but I no longer have the capacity to feed this force which is needing all these songs.

-- from "Interview with John Cohen and Happy Traum, Sing Out!, October/November 1968," reprinted in Jonathan Cott, Ed., Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (New York: Wenner Books, 2006), p. 137.

The campus radicals got firehosed, when they'd rather go dancing

[Richard Maslow] The civil rights movement was based on hope. How can someone not get addicted to the adrenaline high during a struggle for justice?

[VR] Former participants do seem to miss that rush. Compare Michael Herr in Dispatches on correspondents missing war, even though they also hated it. No rush like it.

[Lincoln Crockett] Something like this has been on my mind lately: my early influences - almost all non-folk music - were all politically and socially radical. But I'm not hearing the same eye-popping radicalism anymore. Is it cuz I'm maturing and I have my head thoroughly wrapped around the basic problems, e.g., race, economics, etc? Or is it cuz the next 'wave' will be some new level of radical?

Is it possible that to be effective now, to make a modern or future world for our great-grandkids we'll express the heart of the previous way in a new way, eg: "what you resist, persists"? Is there a practical place for a radical perspective that embraces, dunno the words - healing, radical oneness, non-dualistic 'them'-ing and personal and political rejection of 'enemies' - and still has a worldly impact? I am a healer as well, and to watch a person recover a part of their soul is to know that they cannot spread suffering and injustice into the world to the same degree anymore.

...Visited the Americana Song Accademy at the Sister's Folk Festival yet? (http://www.sistersfolkfestival.org) That is the revolution, fomenting in the hearts of the people. And it persists in folk music fans and festivals in general everywhere. Gives me hope! Keep up the revolution.

[VR] In the fall of 1967, as a college freshman, I found myself on the lawn of the campus Art Museum for several hours, staring down at the crowd of students who had surrounded a Navy recruiter's car on the street. I held a hand-lettered sign that said "Stay the fist, open the mind," so I was probably seen as a reactionary, but actually I was all for impeding military recruitment. The Navy wanted officers for Vietnam, of course.

After several hours, the kids gave the recruiter a bucket to pee in. In frustration, he gunned the engine and ran over the hand of a conservatory pianist. The students were eventually fire-hosed off the car by a law-enforcement phalanx gathered from the surrounding county. Later that afternoon, some of us did an improv about wind-up robot cops in modern dance class. Later, I got into a conversation back in the dorms with a black, female pre-med student, who said "I need a scholarship to go to med school, and if soldiers are injured, they are still patients who need a doctor." None of the arguments were easy.

A decade and a half later, I would get booted out of grad school early by the good folks at Indiana, a M.A. in Folklore barely in hand. My teaching assistantship was canceled in mid-year because I'd refused to check a box on a Reagan-era financial aid form acknowledging my draft status. What right did they have to enquire about my draft status? Which was in perfect order, by the way. (I had registered, survived the draft lottery, and was by then 34.) I felt as though I was finally making up for not being on the Navy recruiter's car that day back in '67. So, no career. My grown kids, their own tuition due, aren't impressed.

I haven't yet told that story as a song. But in the songs that I have written, mixed feelings often come up. Like most of us, my own experiences over the years tend to serve as the frame through which I understand, or at least imagine, the experiences of others. When I talk to my grown kids about standing up for principles, memories of conflicted struggles from past decades remain my reference points.

from Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory

The old man puckered up his face and sprayed a tree with tobacco juice, and said, "Girls. You girls. Go in the house and get your music box, and set there on the bed and play with the baby, so's he won't fall off."

One of the sisters tuned a string or two, then chorded a little. People walked from all over the camp and gathered, and the kid, mama, and dad, and all of the visitors, kept as still as daylight while the girls sang:

Takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
I'm worried nowwww
But I won't be worried long.

I heard these two girls from a-ways away where I was leaning back up against an old watering trough. I could hear their words just as plain as day, floating all around in the trees and down across the low places. I hung my guitar up on a stub of a limb, went down and stretched myself out on some dry grass, and listened to the girls for a long time.

...Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I felt, rest like I rested. And when I say two thousand, take a look down off across these three little hills. You'll see a hat or two bobbing up above the brush. Somebody is going, somebody is coming, somebody is kneeling down drinking from the spring of water trickling out of the west hill. Five men are shaving before the same crooked hunk of old looking-glass, using tin cans for their water. A woman right up close to you wrings out a tough work shirt, saves the water for four more. You skim your eye out around the south hill, and not less than a hundred women are doing the same thing, washing, wringing, hanging out shirts, taking them down dry to iron. Not a one of them is talking above a whisper, and the one that is whispering almost feels guilty because she knows that ninety-nine out of every hundred are tired, weary, have felt sad, joked and laughed to keep from crying. But these two little girls are telling about all of that trouble, and everybody knows it's helping.

-- Woody Guthrie, Bound For Glory, Chapter XV.

Hank Davis can be heard finger-picking songs and reading poems at local venues in Seattle.