The Southern Textile Song Tradition Reconsidered
by Doug DeNatale and Glenn Hinson
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 28, No. 2/3, Special Double Issue: Labor Song: A Reappraisal (May - Dec., 1991), pp. 103-133
[Great article with a sampling of texts. I have some recordings posted here and in the article:
Listen: Cotton Mill Colic by Dave McCarn (Victor 40274, Recorded 5/19/30.)
Listen: Cotton Mill Colic by J.E. Mainer
Listen: Hard Times in the Mill by Pete Seeger
Listen: Spinning Room Blues by Dorsey Dixon Montgomery Ward 7042, Recorded 6/23/ 36.
Listen: Weave Room Blues by Dorsey Dixon (Bluebird B-6441, Recorded 2/12/36.) (G)
Listen: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues by Pete Seeger]
The Southern Textile Song Tradition Reconsidered
by Doug DeNatale and Glenn Hinson
The development of the textile industry in the southeastern United States exacted more than its share of human costs. From a region of small, interdependent farms where people had long struggled "to raise their bread and meat," the southern Piedmont region became a land of tenant farms, cash crops, and cotton mills. Country people turned to "public work" in the mills hoping to earn a decent living, pay off debts, and perhaps return to farming. Instead, they encountered new hardships.
In villages owned and closely supervised by the mill companies, they worked twelve-hour days in hot, dusty, and noisy mills, for wages as low as ten cents an hour near the turn of this century. Children as young as eight worked full-time to help support their families. More prosperous townspeople despised mill workers as "lint heads" and "factory tacks." The story is well-known, but the achievements of Southern mill workers are less often acknowledged. If Southern mill workers managed to raise their families despite such conditions, it was in large measure a tribute to the strength and support of fellow workers, sustained by elements of traditional culture that they adapted to mill village life.
Workers counted on the continuity of rural norms-for domestic aid in times of sickness, for borrowed goods to cover short pay. Music was an important element of rural culture, and music occupied its own place in the social relations of the mill village. Song had power in addressing the conditions of mill life. Thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated collectors, a generous sample of the textile songs composed by Southern workers is available to us.[1]
At the very least, these songs are invaluable historical documents, for they express a perspective distinct from the institutional sources of Southern labor history. They are eloquent statements from people too often considered inarticulate. Yet the nature of textile songs as historical evidence for the mind of the mill worker is problematic. Unless we have a firm sense of their social context, the messages they convey may seem ambiguous and even contradictory.
Our comments here provide something of the larger context in which textile songs were born and shared. The basis for this discussion is a selection of interviews from the Piedmont Social History Project, a longterm oral history project conducted by the Southern Oral History Program of the University of North Carolina. The major findings of this study have been published in Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987). This study involved over three hundred interviews with textile workers throughout the Carolina Piedmont. As participants in the project, together with fellow folklorists Della Coulter and Allen Tullos, we paid particular attention to the place of music in mill workers' lives. Our exploration of textile songs involved interviews with mill workers who composed songs about the mills, or their closest living relatives; mill workers who did not sing or play music; and mill workers who played and wrote music but did not compose songs about the mills. In the process, we gathered a few previously uncollected songs. More important, we gained a fuller appreciation for the strengths, and serious limitations, of song in addressing the inequities of mill life.
John Greenway's American Folksongs of Protest first treated the body of Southern textile songs as a coherent tradition. According to Greenway, only miners "have produced more songs of social and economic protest than the textile workers." In a chapter devoted to textile songs, and in a subsequent discussion of Ella May Wiggins-the tragic martyr and song maker of the 1929 Gastonia strike-Greenway took the majority of his examples from the southeast. In all, he attributed twenty-two songs to Southern textile workers, "richer in sincerity, quality, genuine folk content, and protest, than those emanating from any other industry" (1953: 16,121-45,248-52; See App. A).
Greenway's emphasis on Southern textile songs as a vehicle for direct protest established the framework for subsequent interpretation. Over two-thirds of the songs in Greenway's collection emerged from particular strikes-in keeping with his belief that "the best songs, as always, are born of conflict." Attacking the tendency of scholars to reject protest songs from the folksong canon on the basis of their controversial, individualistic, or ephemeral nature, Greenway rightly argued for their consideration as individual expressions of a common sentiment. Though folksongs of protest might be "spontaneous outbursts of resentment" aimed at particular wrongs, they emerged from a groundswell of shared feeling. As Greenway depicted the dynamics of social protest among Southern mill workers, unionization drives brought "social enlightenment that might not appear for years without outside stimulation," and the ensuing, often violent, conflicts between mill owner and strikers "inevitably produced songs of protest" (129,7,3,127).
The example of Gastonia, with violent conflict directly proportional to the wealth of songs produced, supported Greenway's analysis of the forces giving rise to strike songs. Such songs were indeed an active collaboration between local songsters, traditional models, and new ideologies. As Archie Green suggests, the charge that strike songs were "imposed on cretinous workers by wiley organizers" is a partisan reduction of a more complex reality (1965a:55).
It is true that outside labor organizers had a crucial influence on the production of such songs. From available evidence, it appears that all of the workers who composed songs voicing direct protest against the mill companies participated in labor drives organized by the United Textile Workers or the National Textile Workers Union, or attended the labor education centers of the Highlander Folk School and the School for Southern Women Workers (see e.g., Adams 1975:72-80; Frederickson 1981:156-59; Horton 1939; Larkin 1929: 383-83; Tippett 1931:250-51). Claims of outside influence were most vehement in regard to the Gastonia strike.
Nonetheless, the impetus to use local song models came from workers themselves. Serge Denisoff notes, 'The Loray strike appears to have been the first significant contact the urban-centered Communists had with folk material as a propaganda form" (1971:19-20). It is apparent from the accounts of the organizers of the Gastonia strike that the use of song was initiated by local female strikers, most notably Ella May Wiggins, and encouraged as an effective tool by the outside organizers (see, e.g., Beal 1937:159; Weisbord 1977:233, 260). As Greenway suggests, songsters such as Ella May Wiggins (or Ella May, as she identified herself) gave mill workers an effective voice for their discontent precisely because they expressed their newly acquired knowledge through locally familiar models for song:
Come all of you good people, and listen while I tell;
The story of Chief Aderholt, the man you all knew well.
It was on one Friday evening, the seventh day of June,
He went down to the union ground and met his fatal doom.
(Ella May, "Chief Aderholt.")
It is for our little children,
That seem to us so dear,
But for us nor them, dear workers,
The bosses do not care.
(Ella May, "The Mill Mother's Lament.")
The bosses will starve you,
They'll tell you more lies,
Than there's crossties on the railroads,
Or stars in the skies.
(Odell Corley, "Up in Old Loray.")[2]
By all accounts, such songs were enthusiastically accepted and used by fellow strikers, for they successfully restated traditional values under the polarized conditions of a strike.
One recent account of the Gastonia strike makes the counterclaim that Ella May was "in fact, anti-Communist; she was a patriotic, loyal and devout American" (Williams and Williams 1983:82). The irony becomes sharper when it is known that the source of this characterization was one of Ella May's children, embittered at being elevated as a symbol of labor while an infant, then abandoned to an orphanage. On the fiftieth anniversary of Ella May's murder, a car scrawled with anti-union sentiments was driven by her children.[3]
The statement from a Gastonia resident unwittingly alludes to the difficult position of the Gastonia songsters, taking sustenance from an outside ideology, but casting it in their own vision of proper relations. A recent thesis by Lynn Haessly effectively traces the cultural context for Ella May's fragmented legacy (1987). Greenway's argument for protest song was a much needed corrective, but his characterization of the Southern textile song tradition was nevertheless limited, if only by the sad yet justified reputation of Southern textiles for being among the least unionized of occupations. It subsumes too many songs under the category Archie Green has called "labor lore," to denote items associated with trade-union movements. Instead, Southern textile songs need to be considered under Green's more general heading of "industrial lore" (1972:9). The collected body of textile songs contains many composed by workers about the everyday life of mill work, with no connection to the labor movement.[4] These songs present a far more ambiguous range of content and style. Consider, for example, the curious mixture of grievance and humorous commentary in Lester Smallwood's "Cotton Mill Girl:"
Combed my hair and it would not curl,
Caught my fellow with another girl.
And it's hard times in this old mill,
Hard times everywhere.
Stooped down one day to get a drink of water,
Around come the boss and he docked me a quarter.
When I marry, I'll marry a weaver,
She won't work and I won't neither.
The belt got hot and the pulley flew off,
And knocked Joe Peterson's derby off.
Chew my tobacco and spit my juice,
I love my honey till it ain't no use.
Contrast this with the ironic cynicism of Wilmer Watts's "Cotton Mill Blues":
Uptown people call us trash,
Say we never have no cash,
That is why the people fret,
Call us the ignorant factory set.
Unlike the strike songs, none of these pieces carries a call to action or suggests a means for changing conditions. From this larger sample, it is clear that Greenway's emphasis on the quality of direct protest in Southern textile songs does not accurately comprehend the tradition as a whole. A consideration of the meaning of textile songs must both embrace and properly relate the entire range of expression in mill workers'
songs.
While we know most of the strike songs through period accounts and the collections of labor centers, many of the non-strike pieces remain because of commercial recordings recovered through the discographic research of Archie Green and others. Like Greenway, Green at first considered Southern textile songs primarily the result of labor drives until he and other researchers had traced the artists who recorded these songs (1961: 5).
Among the recorded textile songs, a few must be considered completely irrelevant to the lives of Southern workers, for they were neither composed by mill workers nor accepted by them. Bob Miller's "Little Cotton Mill Girl" is one example. Miller was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who specialized in composing tear-jerkers for the "hillbilly" market. His song is full of a maudlin sentimentality foreign to any of the songs composed by workers themselves:
My heart is sad and lonely,
I have no friends in the world,
Nobody seems to love me,
I'm only a cotton mill girl.
One of the strike songs quoted by Greenway, 'The Marion Massacre," must also be rejected, together with its accompanying "North Carolina Textile Strike." These were composed and recorded by Frank Welling and John McGhee of West Virginia, a vaudeville entertainer and a lay preacher hoping to cash in on the notoriety of the strike with these event songs. Welling and McGhee's homiletic call for reconciliation sets them apart from the sentiments of the strikers:
Why is it over money, these men from friends must part,
Leaving home and loved ones with a bleeding, broken heart?
But some day they'll meet them on that bright shore so fair,
And live in peace forever, there'll be no sorrow there.
A second group of later recordings stands in more ambiguous relationship to mill workers themselves. Performers affiliated with organized labor such as Pete Seeger, Hedy West, Joe Glazer, and later, Si Kahn, brought strike songs to greater public attention and, in turn, composed new songs inspired by the synthetic model of overt protest couched in traditional forms that arose in Southern strikes. These performers and occasional composers have served as an important conduit to a wider audience and should rightly be considered as mediating figures between mill workers' own forms of community expression and the ideology of organized protest. As such, they stand in curious relationship to mediating figures from the mill worker side, such as Ella May, but fall outside the emphasis of this discussion.
A third group of commercial recordings from the 1930s and 1940s were, in fact, sung or composed by mill workers. Lester Smallwood, who first recorded his version of "Hard Times in the Mill," worked at the New Holland Mills in Gainesville, Georgia. The Lee Brothers Trio (whose members worked in the same mill) recorded another version two years later entitled "Cotton Mill Blues." Dorsey Dixon, who recorded three original mill songs in the 1930s, spent most of his working days at the Little Hanna Pickett mill in East Rockingham, North Carolina. David McCarn, who recorded his "Cotton Mill Colic" shortly after the Gastonia strike, worked near that troubled place in a Belmont, North Carolina, mill.
Wilmer Watts, an independent mechanic in a number of mills around Belmont, recorded his acerbic "Cotton Mill Blues" about the same time. Daddy John Love, who composed and recorded his own "Cotton Mill Blues" in 1936, worked in a mill in Concord, North Carolina. Jimmie Tarlton, who recorded Dorsey Dixon's "Weaver's Life" in 1932, worked in a number of mills during his rambles and met the Dixon brothers while working at the Little Hanna Pickett mill. Lester Pete Bivins, who recorded David McCarn's "Poor Man, Rich Man," was a life-long mill worker from Shelby, North Carolina. Although these artists never participated in any labor drives, and although their songs contrast strongly with the strikegenerated songs, their music was an equally valid expression of mill worker sentiment.[5]
If these recorded songs are set apart from the strike songs by their failure to suggest alternatives to the unequal relations of labor, they are joined to each other through a common approach to the problems of mill life. Though they may present grievances, these are generally couched in ajoking manner. The quality of humor may not be readily apparent to the outsider, who might overlook the conscious irony in lines such as: "Country folks they ought to be killed / For leaving their farms and going to the mill" and take the expressed sentiment more or less literally. These lines from the Lee Brother Trio's version of "Hard Times" can be compared to a couplet from Daddy John Love's "Cotton Mill Blues," in which the irony may be lost without knowledge of the tenant farmer's enforced dependency on the country merchant.
I'm going to the country, going to quit the old cotton mill,
I'm going to the country where they got no grocer bill.
Similarly, when David McCarn sang "I'm gonna starve, everybody will, / 'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill," his exclamation was not a straightforward complaint, but a complicated result of anger transposed through deflecting humor. It was precisely McCarn's skillful blending of the two sentiments that made his "Cotton Mill Colic" one of the most powerful of the mill songs:
Listen: Cotton Mill Colic by Dave McCarn
They run a few days, and then they stand,
Just to keep down the working man.
We can't make it, we never will,
As long as we stay at a lousy mill.
The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting rich,
If I don't starve, I'm a son of a gun.
The song title itself proclaimed McCarn's strategy, for among rural people in North Carolina "to colic" was to make a fuss without taking action. As McCarn himself explained to Archie Green and Ed Kahn:
"Around the town a lot of people say they have the colic when they are griping about something, and they will say let's attack about, let's colic about it and go do something else." McCarn made it clear that his main intention was to portray serious matters in a humorous light. "Things were just about that bad. ... Of course I exaggerated some. It's mostly to be a humorous song, of course, it couldn't be anything else."[6]
According to the testimony of the artists, their families, and friends, an emphasis on humor was paramount in the performance of these songs. Ollie Melton, who lived in the same house with Dorsey Dixon when he composed "Weave Room Blues," remembers that fellow workers in the village took up the song before it was recorded:
'They would sing them as a joke, you know. It was funny to them. And [Dorsey] finally recorded that.... I know it was funny, and we used to all sing it. And it was true, where they told about how much the meat and stuff cost, and how much they made. It was a fact."[7]
Laura Chumbler, whose brother Archer belonged to the Lee Brothers Trio, remembered the version of "Hard Times" sung at the New Holland Mills in the same light: "It was a funny song, you know. It would sound real, you know."[8]
It is not difficult to account for this use of irony in the portrayal of working conditions, but it was also directed toward the mill workers themselves. The manner in which the poverty of the workers could be caricatured in these songs can strike the outsider as particularly odd. When David McCarn sang, he presented a familiar stereotype that the mill worker might well find offensive:
... I've got a wife and fourteen kids,
We all have to sleep on two bedsteads.
Patches on my britches, holes in my hat,
Ain't had a shave since my wife got fat...
McCarn explained to Archie Green and Ed Kahn that the depiction was intended as exaggeration for comic effect. Dorsey Dixon aimed for similar comedy in his "Spinning Room Blues":
Listen: Spinning Room Blues by Dorsey Dixon
I'm a factory worker and I work in the mill,
I have to keep at it cause I live on the hill,
Ain't got no clothes, ain't got no shoes,
I ain't got nothing but the spinning room blues.
If the comic sense is not apparent to the outsider from the text, it was conveyed more strongly in the Dixon Brothers' tone during performance. The most common and apparent stereotype presented in these songs was particularly problematic for mill workers. Daddy John Love sang:
Well I drink my booze and I shoot my dice,
I [swear?] if the mill don't get better,
I'm going to have to divorce my wife.
This image of the dissolute mill worker was not directly challenged in these songs, but defused through humor. According to David McCarn:
Now some people run the mill man down,
But the cotton mill people make the world go round.
They take a little drink, they have a little fun,
Whenever they can manage to rake up the mon.
And Dorsey Dixon achieved a masterful touch of mock pathos in the wellknown stanza from "Weave Room Blues":
Listen: Weave Room Blues by Dorsey Dixon
The harness eyes are breaking with the double coming through,
The Devil's in your alley and he's coming after you.
How our hearts are breaking, let us take a little booze,
For we're going crazy with them weave room blues.
In so doing, Dixon steered carefully between fundamentalist sacrilege and self-mockery. The drinking theme also arises in one of the verses that were omitted from the recorded version of "Spinning Room Blues" because of the three-minute recording time limit:
Listen: Spinning Room Blues
A doffer comes along piecing up ends,
Acting just like he's about out of wind,
Then he starts moving like he's had a drink of booze
But he's never had nothing but the spinning room blues.
(Green 1966b:14)
The acerbic humor of Wilmer Watts's "Cotton Mill Blues" maps an extended period of mill village life. The convoluted history of this piece, which Watts adapted from a turn-of-the-century poem by Greensboro mill worker George Dumas Stutts, is traced fully in a forthcoming study by Archie Green. The original poem, written at a period when the perception of mill workers as a new class in Piedmont society was becoming a contentious issue, is a proclamation of personal worth, redolent with the self-conscious flourishes of a literate sensibility:
Now, while I have a leisure time,
I'll try to write a factory rhyme.
I live in Greensboro, a lively town,
And work in a factory, by name the Crown.
In the original of the stanza from Watts's song cited above, the landscape of Piedmont social relations seen from the perspective of mill workers is burdened with the racial politics of its time:
The darkies call us '"white factory trash."
And say we never have a bit of cash;
But I'll have all colors ne'er forget
We are the "monied factory set."
Stutts published his poem in a commonplace book of verse in 1900. His son, J. S. Stutts, republished the book in 1919. This second printing apparently brought the song to the attention of Watts, who reworked the song as a humorous piece within the self-ironic conventions of his own time (Green forthcoming; Stutts 1900 and 1919).
This tendency toward self-irony could only be fully appreciated by mill workers themselves. Fisher Hendley's 1938 recording of 'Weave Room Blues" points to the underlying issues. A college-educated singer who began as a nightclub performer interpreting "Southern tunes" on his banjo, Hendley had a popular radio program on station WBT in Charlotte. Hendley was careful not to offend because a great portion of his audience lived among the area's mill villages. In the pirated version of Dixon's song that Hendley claimed as his own, he bowdlerized the relevant stanza to become the vapid, "How our hearts are aching, let's take a little snooze." According to a member of his band, Hendley's recording of the song was a conscious attempt to appeal to his mill worker audience.[9]
Yet Hendley's version abounds with the marks of his outsider status. For example, in the succeeding stanza, beginning "Slam outs, break outs, mat ups by the score," Hendley replaces the last two lines with a repetition of the "snooze" lines. This is clearly because he could not make out the technical term in the stanza's original third line-a problem that has plagued every single transcription made of the song. The line should read: "The battery's running empty, strings are hanging to your shoes"- "battery" in this case referring to the ferris-wheel-like apparatus introduced on the Northrop loom that carried a supply of full shuttles. Hendley also attempted a mill song of his own, 'The Weaver's Blues," which reveals his distance from the mill experience:
Tobacco juice and language rare,
In mild confusion mingled there,
Up and down and all about,
Cursing and cutting matups out.
A shuttle flew out with a clicking spat,
And the weaver reached for his coat and hat,
It's no wonder he lost his grit,
He did just what you'd do, he quit,
I've got The Weaver's Blues.
In contrast to Hendley's propitiatory treatment of "Weave Room Blues," Cecil Kinzer of Fries, Virginia pushed his own version in the other direction:
The ends are coming down, and the double's coming through.
The Devil's in the alley, and he's coming after you.
I'm a-fighting for my life, but I think I'm gonna lose.
Done gone crazy with the cotton mill blues.
Come on now, boss, with a little more pay.
You know we're down to three or four days.
Our pockets are empty and we've got no booze.
All gone crazy with the cotton mill blues.
In this regard it was no coincidence that Kinzer, a member of the Grayson County Ramblers, was a long-term employee in the Fries textile mill.[10] The pressures that the record companies placed on rural artists to don the hillbilly mantle might account for some of the self-deprecating humor in the recorded songs. The mill worker is explicitly paired with this image in David McCarn's "Serves 'Em Fine":
Now all you mountaineers just listen to me,
Take off your hats and a-holler "whoopee!"
For I'm going back home in the land of the sky,
Where they all drink moonshine and never do die.
McCarn, it should be noted, was not from the mountains, as is often assumed, but was born and raised in the mill village of McAdenville, North Carolina.[11] Yet it is insufficient to attribute the contrast between these songs and those composed in the labor movement to the effects of the recording industry. Certainly expressions of direct protest were anathema to commercial recordings. But a number of non-strike songs were also collected from oral tradition during the same period, and these share some of the same qualities of deflected anger and ironic humor. In the Southern version of the "Lowell Factory Girl" collected by John Lomax, for instance, the descriptive list of working conditions drawn from the original New England broadside is framed by two new stanzas that invoke the worker's own physical condition in a muted humorous mode:
No more shall I work in the factory
To greasy up my clothes,
No more shall I work in the factory
With splinters in my toes ...
No more shall I wear the old black dress
Greasy all around;
No more shall I wear the old black bonnet
With holes all in the crown.
The several orally collected versions of "Hard Times in the Mill" share the same humor found in the recorded versions, and it was no doubt the sardonic quality of this whole family of songs that made it applicable to mill work:
Listen: Hard Times in the Mill by Pete Seeger
The section hand thinks he's a man,
And he ain't got sense to pay off his hands.
They steal his ring, they steal his knife,
They steal everything but his big fat wife.[12]
The "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," sung to William Wolff in 1939 at the School for Southern Women Workers, is one of the finest examples of anger redirected through humor:
Listen: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues by Pete Seeger
Old man Sargent, sitting at the desk,
The damned old fool won't give us no rest.
He'd take the nickels off a dead man's eyes
To buy a Coca-Cola and an Eskimo Pie ...
When I die, don't bury me at all,
Just hang me up on the spool room wall;
Place a knotter in my hand,
So I can spool in the Promised Land.
When I die, don't bury me deep,
Bury me down on Six Hundred Street;
Place a bobbin in each hand
So I can doff in the Promised Land.
These songs are closer in temperament to the recorded textile songs than to the strike songs. In order to understand the role of humor in these songs, and to relate the commercial recordings to the strike songs, we must acknowledge the troubled and heterogeneous nature of mill village society. A portion of the mill population belonged to the ranks of middle management as overseers and foremen. As a result, the everyday social relations of the mill village were complex, burdened by competing pressures of familial ties and management demands. The foreman responsible for increasing production in the mill might have a dozen ties by blood and marriage to the reluctant workers in his charge. The worker trying to quietly organize a resistance might have a dozen wavering kin to question his or her activities.
We must also recognize that music was part of a larger range of expression employed by Southern mill workers in their everyday lives. An informal code of behavior, developed over time, governed these common cultural practices. Within this code of indirection, covert expressions of personal antagonism were protected by fellow workers, while open protest was considered the prelude to a possibly violent conflict in which the mill worker had the weaker hand. Because of the nature of social relations in the mill village, different forms of expression were unequally appropriate for communicating hostility.[13]
For the most part, the structural inequalities of power had to be accepted as a given by mill workers where no outside intervention made sense. The mill companies' ownership of the villages was a weapon used with telling effect in the event of open protest. When the Dixon brothers' fellow workers at the Little Hanna Pickett mill threatened to strike, for instance, the mill owner moved quickly against the leader to quell his activities:
That was the night after he told us all to fight, and it was getting cold weather, children didn't have no shoes, we didn't have no coal, didn't have nothing to eat. And he got up there that next night, it was short and sweet. He said, "Go back to work. That's what I'm going to do." But they moved his stuff out. He was in our village over there, and they moved his furniture out to a [wooden tent platform that belonged to the Holiness Church].... I passed it one time, and I saw him sitting up there on his furniture.[14]
The tactic was common elsewhere, as a conscious dramatization of the unwritten contract that mill workers were forced to accept when they came to the mills.[15] The mills had less immediate control over the daily expressive activities of the workers, but mill owners certainly could exert pressure when those forms of expression found their way into the commercial media.
A dramatic example occurred during the Danville, Virginia, strike of 1930-31, which coincided with the release of David McCarn's "Cotton Mill Colic." Seeing the commercial possibilities of the song during the strike, Luther B. Clarke, a Danville record store owner who had previously arranged recording sessions for several mill worker musicians, promoted the record through his store and arranged to have it played on a local radio station. Strikers then took up the song as an appropriate expression of their grievances. Tom Tippett described a union meeting where "a small boy, not yet in his teens, sang a solo accompanying himself with a guitar swung from his shoulder. It was called 'Cotton Mill Colic' and accurately portrayed in a comic vein the economics of the textile industry, as well as the tragedy of cotton mill folk.... "(Tippett 1931:250).
In response, H. R. Fitzgerald, the president of Dan River Mills, pressured the local media to suppress the song on the grounds that "it was degrading to cotton mill work." According to one Danville musician, "Harry Fitzgerald ... asked Mr. Clark to quit selling the records or something. I don't know exactly what happened, but they quit playing it anyway, didn't broadcast it no more."[16] Parenthetically, it should be noted that Jim and Jesse McReynold's song, "Cotton Mill Man," though not a mill worker composition, later received similar treatment. According to Neil Rosenberg, the song "appeared to be developing as a hit in 1963, but it lost valuable exposure when radio stations in several Southern mill towns refused to air it because of its protest-type lyrics" (1985: 313).
Within the mill village itself, the ties of kinship and the presence of middle management personnel placed further constraints on the direct expression of protest through song. Mill village string bands often included members of middle management. The members of the Lee Brothers Trio, for example, regularly played with a larger group called Jim King's Brown Mules, which included two foremen. The presence of such supervisory personnel would certainly discourage the voicing of protest through song. Nonetheless, the Brown Mules could, and often did, sing their version of "Hard Times" at gatherings within the mill village.
Listen: Hard Times in the Mill by Pete Seeger
The conscious establishment of a humorous context for mill songs made their performance possible in everyday life and allowed the performers, within limits, to avoid retribution. This was particularly important for individual performers. As an expressive genre with formal boundaries, songs were easily attributed to their creators in the close world of the mill village. But the overt harmlessness of songs considered comic by fellow workers furnished some protection against management reprisals.
According to Archie Green, Dorsey Dixon's "Weave Room Blues" drew a mixed response from his overseers, but no retribution: "One disliked it and one was proud that a poet like Dorsey worked in the plant." In the case of David McCarn, the reaction of the company was stronger, but at least deferred: "McCarn was never actually fired for composing or recording 'Colic,' but after his job ended 'The guys told him that he was barred from the Victory Mill in South Gastonia.' " [17]
Because this group of textile songs was necessarily framed as overtly benign, its ability to actually transform the conditions of mill life was inherently limited. The underlying discontent resonated in the reactions of the mill audience ("it would sound real, you know"), and this fellow feeling helped nourish the seeds of open rebellion. But under the mores of everyday mill life, a direct attack was most feasible when it involved a personal wrong. It was easier to enumerate the wrongs felt at the hands of an overseer than to specify the particular inequities of a company's policy. For this reason, the most pointed comments were reserved for individuals:
Old man Jones taking up cards,
Won't give you half that you take off.
If you lack one yard being two cuts to roll,
He won't give you one but to save your soul.
("Cotton Mill Blues," Lee Brothers Trio)
Old Pat Goble thinks he's a hon,
He puts me in mind of a doodle in the sun.
("Hard Times in the Mill," Lessie Crocker)
Old man Sargent, sitting at the desk,
The damned old fool won't give us no rest.
("Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues") Listen: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues by Pete Seeger
Similarly, the larger injuries of labor relations were placed on a personal horizon:
They'll hunt around and find a little educated man.
He'll stand around with a watch in his hand:
See if you been doing all that you can do.
Now I'm a-going crazy with the cotton mill blues.
("Cotton Mill Blues," Cecil Kinzer)
Saying wait a minute fellow, now tell me where you're going,
Don't you hear the doggone spinning room a-roaring?
Can't fool me cause I'm on the scout,
Get back on the job you ain't a-gonna slip out.
("Spinning Room Blues," Dorsey Dixon)
In either case, the deflating laughter of mill-worker kin helped keep overseers' reactions within the realm of personal antagonisms. Decie Smith of Siler City, North Carolina, exemplifies the constraints upon songwriters and the degree to which they were able to affect social relations in the mill village. A life-long employee of the Hadley-Peoples Manufacturing Company, she began writing poetry and songs at the age of nine and became known in the village for her compositions. In 1957, her mill was sold to a new company, which instituted management practices common in the larger factories. The company erected a fence around the mill and prevented workers from leaving during breaks. In response, the workers invited labor organizers to help them form a union. After a short strike, the company signed a one-year union contract, but it also brought in efficiency experts, or "time-study men" to streamline the production process and "to show the union who was boss."
A year later, the company refused to renew the contract, and the workers began a new strike. After six months, during which the company evicted striking workers and brought in outside labor, the workers finally capitulated. Decie Smith did not join the strike, fearing the possible results. Her mother and sisters had been employees of the Loray Mill in Gastonia during that bloody strike and had told her of the violence they had witnessed. Her fears were not unjustified, as demonstrated by the mill president's actions when the union organizers tried to intercept arriving strikebreakers at the bus station: "Mr. Thomas took a tire tool, and he whopped up that fellow up beside of the head.... He said, 'If any of the rest of you customers want any of it, come and get it.'" [18]
Mrs. Smith's sentiments were largely with fellow workers, though she chose to comply with the new policies. She found the efficiency expert especially obnoxious. She chose to deal with this threat to her autonomy on a personal basis: "I said, 'If I was Popeye I'd throw him clear out of Siler City."' Summoned to the head office to hear a report on her production, Mrs. Smith staged her own protest:
They was all sitting there, two of the union men, Mr. Thomas [the mill president], and Charlie [the time-study man], and Mr. Meyers, the superintendent. Charlie said, "Back in June. ..." I'd hit the table, I'd say, "Gee dee June, this is September!" And Mr. Thomas said, "Decie, let Charlie read his report." I said, "Gee dee Charlie." ... He never did get to read his report how much I'd made back in June.... So when I got up to come on out and go back upstairs to my work,... them union men shook hands with me, they said, "I sure am glad you said that." ... Boy, I laid it on old Charlie. But you know, after that, every time that he'd see me, he'd cut his eye around and give me a smile.[19]
Upon the efficiency expert's departure, Decie Smith used her poetic talents to summarize her feelings in song:
It is so easy to stand and watch,
And say what can be done,
Through eyes that are inexperienced,
Our jobs may look like fun.
When you put it down on paper,
To you it seems quite plain,
But try doing some of the jobs yourself,
You'll find it's not the same.
For each of us God has a book,
We fill a page each day.
Be it good or bad, it won't be erased,
As we go along life's way.
He will not tear any pages out
Of any wrong we do.
So do unto others as you would have
Them do the same to you.
And when your life is over,
And God adds up your score,
Don't let him say, "Dear Charlie,
You should have paid Decie more."
I hope when you've reached the Pearly Gates
St. Peter he won't say,
"For what you done at Hadley-Peoples
You'll have to go the other way.
Mrs. Smith's response stayed within the acceptable boundaries of mill village conduct and it did have material results. Mrs. Smith effectively challenged the efficiency expert's assessment and the reduction of her piece rate. Through this mode of humor, she could even address the actions of the mill president himself:
I made a poem about him.... And I was scared to show it to him, you know. I said, "When he goes through the mill, and his coat don't fit, you better watch out, he's gonna have a fit." ... And my daughter was working in the summertime up there reeling, and they all got a kick out of it, you know, and she said, "Mr. Thomas," said, "Mama made up a poem about you," but said, "she's scared to show it to you, scared you'll fire her." He come walking down my alley, I thought, "Oh oh, what's the matter?"... He said, "How about that poem you wrote about it," said, "bring it over here," said, "I might even agree with you." And so I took it over there, you know, ... and he said his mother said, "Mason, that's just like you." You know, I told all about what he done-he locked all the doors and throwed away the keys, wouldn't let them go out no more, and all such as that. But he really got a kick out of that poem, and I really laid it on him. But it was all true.[20]
Such expression, finally, could not challenge the basic structure of labor relations. On the occasion of her fiftieth anniversary at Hadley- People's in 1970, Mrs. Smith composed a long song that she sang at a dinner in her honor. The composition typified the underlying dilemma. The opening promised to tell all:
They say you will feel better,
If you lay it on the line,
So when I finish up tonight,
I should be feeling fine....
I'm writing a book about Hadley-Peoples,
It should be on the best seller list,
For I want you to know when I get through
There's not a thing I've missed.
And it continued by addressing the inequities of labor relations in general terms:
Some overseers were honest
And their names are in my book,
But some have been as crooked
As a barrel of fish hooks....
If you tell them something's wrong,
Their authority they like to show,
Well I'll tell you one thing-I've forgot more
Than some of them will ever know.
When she listed particular faults, Mrs. Smith carefully placed these in the context of community humor: 'The ones I was calling didn't like what I was talking about, but the others just stamped their feet, you know, and hollered." She tempered her summary by injecting stanzas that deflected the thread of criticism, and she ended with a panegyric to the mill's owner:
Charlie has a high-price car,
Nivens has his plane,
Decie is still walking,
But she gets there just the same.
Martha is in personnel and time keeper too,
And my it is a shame,
Every time a check is wrong,
She always gets the blame.
A lot of people would get to the top,
If they could sit down and slide up I'd say,
But the ones that don't want to work,
They always want the highest pay....
There's been a lot of easyjobs made,
The price they pay is swell,
But seniority didn't get them,
I still have to work like
H-E-L-L-E-L-U-J-A-H
My Fifty's here today,
And I'm hoping it'll be easier,
As I go the rest of the way.
I don't have no pension plan,
Don't get no sick-leave pay,
But Junior will give me ajob and a half,
If I'd run it every day.
But I'm glad I made it,
I'm as happy as can be,
I won't ever be wealthy,
But that don't bother me.
Mr. Dee, he is our Super,
Most of the time he has a smile,
But don't let that fool you,
He is watching all the while.
A new hand said since I'd worked fifty years,
St. Peter should let me through.
Well it hasn't been quite that bad,
Although there's been rough crews.
Now people like to be remembered,
For ever since the world began,
Eve took the prettiest apple,
And gave it to her man.
So I thank you Mr. Baker,
For all the nice things that you do,
Now God may not have you a mill up above,
But at Hadley-Peoples you'll always be loved.
When asked why she had felt the need to soften her satire in this fashion, Mrs. Smith laughed and gave a familiar answer: "I reckon I was scared of my job. I was scared they'd fire me."[21]
The indirect humor grounded in immediate conflict that characterized the non-strike songs may have been one reason for their limited distribution among mill workers. Less than ten of the hundreds of mill workers interviewed during the Piedmont Social History project could recall encountering these songs, and their recognition was limited to "Weave Room Blues" and "Cotton Mill Colic." These two songs appear to have most effectively expressed the general sentiment, for a common response among other workers after hearing one or the other was: "If he was a cotton mill man, I can understand him writing something like that!"[22]
This sparse response does not invalidate the notion of a general textile song tradition, but suggests that the majority of such songs did not go beyond their home communities. We did come across several references, but not the words, to other songs identified with particular communities. In Danville, J. Richard Bigger recalled a song "somebody composed [called] 'The Doffer's Dream' I believe-he went to heaven you know, and, I don't know what all, I've forgot how it went, it was a long way on back."
In Glencoe, Ethel Faucette remembered a song by a fellow worker that reviewed the various jobs in the mill: "He rhymed it up and he made a song, a great long song. Because he started where it went in the breakers at the lap room and went on up. But I can't remember who it was, been so long ago." Anne Montgomery had heard a song about the workers in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Eula Durham of Bynum, North Carolina, remembered hearing songs "about our crazy bunch, you know, and things like that."[23]
From such evidence, it might be best to view the textile song tradition as a submerged body of common sentiment that could be realized in many individual offshoots.
Finally, the major musical contribution of mill workers was not the body of textile songs. Their direct influence in shaping an entire region's music was far more important. As Kinney Rorrer (1982) has discussed, the mill village served as a cradle for the development of new instrumental techniques and as a meeting place for disparate musical styles. In some cases, instructors provided by mill welfare programs introduced new stylistic influences such as classical banjo and new instruments like the mandolin. Such places became hotbeds for the rapid development of new string band styles. A number of rambling mill workers like Charlie Poole orJimmie Tarlton spread these new styles to other mill villages. Mill workers approached ensemble music-making with a seriousness that was impossible in rural society. Homer "Pappy" Sherrill recalls:
They'd have a fiddler's convention. And they'd have it down in a mill village and man, you'd have-you get a little more classy type of bands, because they were closer together to practice. You know what I mean? See, they lived closer together, and they could practice and they were better bands. If you had an old country band, they played once a month, and sat on the porch and played all night long. And have a catfish fry or something like that. Maybe a little corn liquor around once in a while somewhere. But they didn't practice as well much as they did in the mill village, where they was closer together. See? So that made the difference where that you had more players, and they're a little more shiny, polished up in the mill village, you know, cause they were closer together where they could practice."[24]
In this fashion, the new conditions of mill life had a dramatic impact on the shape and social context of Southern music in general. Mill musicians themselves perceived music more often as a means for self-advancement than as a vehicle for mass protest. The development of the fiddlers' convention as a paying contest and the increased popularity of small travelling shows first suggested the possibility of an alternative source of cash to mill musicians. It is no coincidence that Henry Whitter and Fiddlin' John Carson, the very first Southeastern musicians to make commercial recordings, were textile workers. Other mill workers such as G. B. Grayson, Ernest Stoneman, Kelly Harrell, Charlie Poole, J. E. and Wade Mainer, and many others soon followed their example. The number of mill workers who became significant recording artists in the 1920s and 1930s is impressive (see App. B), and indicates the extent to which mill workers attempted to cash in on their musical abilities. The story told of Charlie Poole's departure from the Spray mill captures the sense of optimism many must have felt:
They came early in the morning, before the looms started, to draw their last paychecks. Bringing their instruments into the mill with them, they sat down at the end of one of the rows of looms. As their fellow mill workers gathered around, they played Don't Let Your Deal Go Down. When they finished, Poole spoke up and said, 'Goodbye, boys, we're gone.'" (Rorrer 1982:30)
It is equally significant how few of these musicians chose to compose songs about the mills they were trying to leave. Unfortunately, for some like Charlie Poole, Kelly Harrell, or Dorsey Dixon, the attempt to escape mill work through music ultimately proved unsuccessful. Yet a good number were able to sustain careers as professional musicians for extended periods with the growth of local radio programs. Musicians such as the Mainers, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and Whitey and Hogan began their life-long professional careers on the radio. The comparative advantages of radio work over mill work were obvious, as Roy "Whitey" Grant recalled: "At the Firestone Cotton Mill in Gastonia [formerly the Loray Mill] we had fifteen dollars a week for forty hours at the mill. When Mr. Crutchfield [of WBT] called us up and offered us twenty-five dollars a week, we could hardly speak to each other. We was rich!"' (Coulter 1985:10).
In turn, the broadcasts of such musicians nurtured the dreams of many a textile musician at home. The hope of commercial success also left its mark on textile songs. Many composers, like Dorsey Dixon, recorded their mill songs because the approval of workers in their home villages promised a potential audience among other mill workers. But many, again like Dixon, did not consider these songs the most important part of their repertoire. David McCarn wrote the two follow-up songs to "Cotton Mill Colic" specifically for his later recording sessions, because he assumed the first song to be the reason Ralph Peer called him back: "I knew it sold pretty good or he wouldn't have done it."[25]
The fact that several textile song composers called their pieces "blues" further indicated their professional aspirations. This was less a reference to the conditions of mill work than an advertisement that these songs imitated Jimmie Rodger's phenomenally popular blue yodels. Tommy Scott, whose family worked in the mills, had this connection firmly in mind when he composed his own "Cotton Mill Blues":
Jimmie Rodgers had come along about this same time, and I'm thinking two ways now, I'm thinking about hard labor in the mill, and I'm also thinking about the show business, and I'm watching and listening to Jimmie Rodgers, and he had blues after blues after blues, and yodels. The yodelling thing looked like it was the thing coming in, which it did and it was the thing for quite some time.[26]
The textile song tradition as a whole, then, must be seen as a range of expressive forms that arose from changing social contexts. Mill worker composers were free to express direct protest only when a strike suspended the conditions of everyday life and radically altered the structure of industrial relations. Nonetheless, strike songs were organically connected to the non-strike pieces. Many of the strike songs display small touches of the familiar sardonic humor, particularly in Odell Corley's Gastonia songs, or in the hymn of the Merrimac Mill strikers in Huntsville, Alabama:
Hallelujah, here we rest;
Hallelujah, Mr. Dean;
Uncle Sammy, give us a handout
'Cause we're tired of these beans.
Where the humor of strike songs was largely submerged in direct protest, the quality of protest in the non-strike songs was deflected by their humorous cast.
Ultimately, the hallmark of mill village culture in general became the strategy of deflection. More evanescent forms of expression such as jokes and pranks put this mode of indirection to best use in affecting the fellow workers, for example, to restrict output and actively oppose management interests.[27] Songs were less suited to such purposes, although Decie Smith remembers a striking example from the Siler City mill in which a fellow worker's overbearing behavior was challenged through song. A creeler in the mill relied too heavily on the fellow workers' custom of covering for each other during breaks. When she attempted to brush their antagonism aside with a joke, the ploy was subverted:
She'd come back-and they had a song: "Have I stayed away too long?" And she'd come back a-singing.... She'd see they'd done creeled it, you know.... She'd come back a-singing:
Have I stayed away too long?
Have I stayed away too long?
And Carl would say:
While you was off with your head a-reeling,
We was down here doing your creeling,
Yes, you've stayed away too long.[28]
Decie Smith's example illustrates that textile songs must be seen as but one part of a larger expressive tradition that helped mill workers maintain continuity, address the conditions of their common life, and deflect the high human costs extracted from their labor.
University of South Carolina Center for Folklife and Oral History
University of North Carolina
NOTES
1. In particular, John Edwards, Archie Green, John Greenway, Zilphia Horton, Margaret Larkin, Mike Seeger, and William Wolff should be mentioned.
2. Greenway 1953:12, 135, 248, 251. See Wiley for a discussion of the models for the Gastonia songs.
3. This scene was witnessed by Doug DeNatale and Cliff Kuhn.
4. See Appendix A for a current checklist of Southern textile songs.
5. For further information on these artists, see articles listed in bibliography, and biographical summary of textile worker artists in Appendix B.
6. Interview with David McCarn, Stanley, North Carolina, August 19, 1961, by Archie Green and Ed Kahn (Southern Folklife Collection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina).
7. Interview with Ollie Melton, East Rockingham, North Carolina, December 19, 1979, by Doug DeNatale and Della Coulter.
8. Interview with Laura Chumbler, Gainesville, Georgia, August 19, 1981, by Glenn Hinson.
9. Interview with Joseph D. Miller, Monroe, Georgia, August 18, 1981, by Glenn Hinson.
10. Interview with Lucille Kinzer, Fries, Virginia, August 15, 1981, by Glenn Hinson and Della Coulter. Cecil Kinzer's version of "Weave Room Blues" was collected by Archie Green, and later recorded by Hedy West.
11. See Green 1965b:223, for a discussion of some of the larger cultural currents that might have been at work here.
12. Collected from Lessie Crocker, Columbia, S. C.
13. These observations are drawn largely from the series of interviews conducted by the Southern Oral History Program and incorporated in a number of forthcoming studies. For a discussion of the quality of indirection in mill life and mill worker protest, see DeNatale (1985), especially chapters five, seven, and eight.
14. Interview with Ollie Melton, East Rockingham, North Carolina, December 19, 1979, by Doug DeNatale and Della Coulter.
15. For another example, see Tippett 1931, 202-203, for a description of the unionization attempt in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1930.
16. Interview withJ. Richard Bigger, Danville, Virginia, August 13, 1981, Glenn Hinson and Della Coulter. For a discussion of Clarke's efforts on behalf of Danville musicians, see Rorrer 1982:39-40.
17. Green, Notes, "Babies in the Mill"; Interview with David McCarn, Stanley, North Carolina, August 18, 1963, by Archie Green and Ed Kahn (Southern Folklife Collection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina).
18. Interview with Decie Smith, Siler City, North Carolina, January 21, 1986, by Doug DeNatale.
19. Interview with Decie Smith (above).
20. Interview with Decie Smith (above). Unfortunately, Mrs. Smith was unable to recall any more of the poem, and we have not yet received a copy that she believes to be in her son's possession.
21. Interview with Decie Smith, January 21, 1986 and February 4, 1986.
22. Interview with Bill Ellis, June 23, 1981, by Doug DeNatale.
23. Interviews withJ. Richard Bigger, August, 13,1981, by Glenn Hinson; Anne Montgomery,July 23,1983, and Eula Durham, March 1, 1979, by Doug DeNatale.
24. Interview with Homer "Pappy" Sherrill, October 26,1985, by Glenn Hinson
25. Interview with David McCarn, August 19, 1961, by Archie Green and Ed Kahn (Southern Folklife Collection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina).
26. Interview with Tommy Scott, July 17, 1980, by Glenn Hinson.
27. For an extended discussion of the varieties of active opposition achieved by mill workers through overtly humorous expressive forms, see DeNatale 1990.
28. Interview with Decie Smith, February 4, 1986.
Adams, Frank. 1975. Unearthing Seeds of Fire:The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair.
Ahrens, Pat J. 1970. A History of the Musical Careers of Dewitt "Snuffy" Jenkins, Banjoist, and Homer "Pappy" Sherrill, Fiddler. Columbia, South Carolina: Author.
Beal, Fred. 1937. Proletarian Journey. New York: Hillman-Curl, Inc.
Blackard, Malcolm V. 1969. "Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles."JEMF Quarterly 16:126-40.
Conte, Pat. "Beyond Black Smoke: The Dixon Brothers, Original Recordings," County 6000, Notes.
Coulter, Della. 1985. "The Piedmont Tradition." In Charlotte Country Music Story, 7-11. Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Folklife Programs.
DeNatale, Doug. 1985. "Bynum: The Coming of Mill Village Life to a North Carolina County." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
..... 1986. "Dorsey Dixon." In Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. Vol. 2. Edited by William Powell, 74-75. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
..... 1990. "The Dissembling Line: Industrial Pranks in a North Carolina Textile Mill." In Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife. Edited by Daniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zug III, 254-76. Durham: Duke University Press.
Denisoff, R. Serge. 1971. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
..... 1983. Sing a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Fowke, Edith andJoe Glazer. 1960. Songs of Worka nd Freedom. Chicago: Roosevelt University, Labor Education Division.
Frederickson, Mary E. 1981. "A Place to Speak Our Minds: The Southern School For Women Workers." Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Glazer, Joe. 1988. Textile Voices: Songs from the Mills. New York: Rieve-Pollock Foundation.
Green, Archie. 1961. "Born on Picket Lines, Textile Workers' Songs Are Woven into History." Textile Labor 22:3-5.
..... 1964. "Dorsey Dixon: A Place in the Sun for a Real Textile Troubador." Textile Labor 25/11:4-5.
..... 1965a. "American Labor Lore: Its Meanings and Uses." Industrial Relations 4: 51-68.
..... 1965b. "Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol." Journal of American Folklore 78:204-28.
..... 1966a. "Dorsey Dixon: Minstrel of the Mills." Sing Out 10/3:10-12.
..... 1966b. 'Tipple, Loom & Rail." Folkways FH 5273, notes.
..... 1972. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
--- . n.d. "Babies in the Mill: Nancy Dixon: Dorsey Dixon: Howard Dixon." Testament Records T-3301, notes.
..... Forthcoming. "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme." In Wobblies, Pile Butts, & Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Greenway, John. 1953. American Folksongs of Protest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly. 1987. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Haessly, Lynn. 1987. "'Mill Mother's Lament': Ella May, Working Women's Militancy, and the 1929 Gaston County Strikes." M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Hendley, Fisher. n.d. Fisher Hendley and His Rhythm Aristocrats. (Promotional Songbook.) Charlotte, North Carolina: Author.
Hinson, Glenn. 1981. "Cotton Mill Songs in the Southeastern Piedmont: The Search for a Regional Tradition." Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society, San Antonio, Texas.
Horton, Zilphia. 1939. Labor Songs. Atlanta: T.W.U.A. Southeastern Regional Office.
...... 1964. Registers, Number 6: Zilphia Horton Folk Music Collection. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives.
Larkin, Margaret. 1929. "Ella May's Songs." The Nation 129 (October 9):382-83.
...... 1929. "The Story of Ella May." New Masses 5:3-4.
Lomax, Alan, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. 1967. Hard Hitting Songsfor Hard-Hit People. New York: Oak Publications.
Lomax, John A. 1915. "Some Types of American Folk Song." Journal of American Folklore 28: 1-17.
Nelson, Donald Lee. 1973. "'Walk Right in Belmont:' The Wilmer Watts Story." JEMF Quarterly 9: 91-96.
Paris, Mike. 1973. "The Dixons of South Carolina." Old Time Music 10:13-16.
..... 1969. 'J. E. Mainer-The Crazy Mountaineer." Opry 2:22.
Rhodes, Don. 1979. "Lester Flatt: Talking With a Bluegrass Giant." Pickin'6/1:24- 30.
Rorrer, Kinney. 1968. Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers. Eden, North Carolina: Author.
.... 1982. Rambling Blues: The Life and Songs of Charlie Poole. London: Old Time Music.
.... 1971. "The Bunch of Nuts from Hickory." Old Time Music 2:19.
Rosenberg, Neil V. 1985. Bluegrass:A History.U rbana: University of Illinois Press.
Russell, Tony. 1971. "Kelly Harrell and the Virginia Ramblers." Old Time Music 2:10.
Stutts, G. D. 1900. Picked Up Here and There. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton.
Stutts, J. C. 1919. "Picked Up Here and There" and "Gleanings from the Gullies." Haw River, Alamance County, North Carolina: Author.
Tamburro, Frances. 1974-1975. "A Tale of a Song: 'The Lowell Factory Girl," ' Southern Exposure 2: 42-51.
Tippett, Tom. 1931. When Southern Labor Stirs. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith.
Tribe, Ivan M. 1981. 'John McGhee and Frank Welling: West Virginia's Most-Recorded Old-Time Artists," JEMF Quarterly 17: 57-63.
Tullos, Allen. 1989. Habits of Industry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Weisbord, Vera Buch. 1977. A Radical Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
West, Hedy. 1969. Hedy West Songbook. Erlangen, Germany: Rolf Gekeler.
Whisnant, David E. "'Our Type of Song': A Second Look at the Blue Sky Boys," Presenting the Blue Sky Boys. JEMF 104 (reissue of Capitol ST 2483), Notes.
Wiley, Stephen A. 1982. "Songs of the Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929: Models of and for Southern Working-Class Women's Militancy," North Carolina Folklore Journal 30/2:87-98.
Williams, Robert L. and Elizabeth Wise Williams. 1983. The Thirteenth Juror. Kings Mountain, North Carolina: Herald House Publishers.
Wolfe, Charles. 1977. "Lester Smallwood and His Cotton Mill Song," Old Time Music 25:22-23.
-------------------------------------------
APPENDIX A
A Checklist of Southern Textile Songs
Composer, where known, is given in parentheses; earliest known source is given in brackets. Written sources are cited only where they are the earliest known. Variants are listed indented below earliest known appearance of song. Textile songs cited by Greenway are marked (G).
All Around the Jailhouse (Ella May Wiggins) [Reported by Margaret Larkin.] (G)
Babies in the Mill (Dorsey Dixon) ["Babies in the Mill: Nancy Dixon : Dorsey
Dixon: Howard Dixon." Testament Records T-3301.]
Babies in the Mill [Hedy West, "Love, Hell, and Biscuits for Two Centuries."
Bear Family 15003.]
Ballad of the Blue Bell Jail (Blanch Kinett, Greensboro, NC, 1939) [Zilphia Horton Folk Music Collection, Tennessee State Library.] (G)
The Big Fat Boss and the Workers (Ella May Wiggins) [Reported by Margaret Larkin.] (G)
Chief Aderholt (Ella May Wiggins) [Reported by Margaret Larkin.] (G)
Come On You Scabs If You Want to Hear (Odell Corley) [Reported by Margaret Larkin.] (G)
Cotton Mill Blues (Wilmer Watts, adapted from a poem by George Dumas Stutts) [Paramount 3254, Recorded 10/29/29.]
Cotton Mill Blues [Roy Harper, "I Like Mountain Music," Old Homestead Records OHS-80081.]
Cotton Mill Blues (DaddyJohn Love) [Bluebird B-6491, Recorded 6/20/36.]
Cotton Mill Blues (Tommy Scott) [Glenn Hinson interview, composed 1938.]
Cotton Mill Colic (Dave McCarn) [Victor 40274, Recorded 5/19/30.]
Cotton Mill Colic [Blue Sky Boys, "Presenting the Blue Sky Boys," JEMF 104 (reissue of Capitol ST 2483).]
Cotton Mill Colic Joe Sharp, Scottsboro, Tennessee, recorded by Alan Lomax, 1939. Archive of Folk Culture, 1629 B2, Library of Congress.]
Cotton Mill Girl (Earl McCoy and Jessie Brock) [Columbia 15499, Recorded 1/31/30.]
Cotton Mill Man (Jim andJesse McReynolds) [Epic 5-9676, 1964.]
Fiftieth Anniversary Poem (Decie Smith) [Doug DeNatale interview, composed 1970.]
For The Time Study Man (Decie Smith) [Doug DeNatale interview, composed 1957.]
Flying Squadron (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Give Me That Textile W orkers Union (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Hard Times (Unknown)
Cotton Mill Blues [Lee Brothers Trio, Brunswick 501, 11/14/30.]
Cotton Mill Girl [Lester Smallwood, Victor V-40181, Recorded 10/18/28.]
Cotton Mill Girls ["Hedy West." Vanguard VRS 9124.]
Hard Times at Little New River [Mrs. Coker, Townley, Alabama] (G)
Hard Times in the Mill [Lessie Crocker, Columbia, South Carolina, collected by William Wolff, 1939.] (G)
Hard Times in the Mill [Workers in the Columbia Duck Mill, Columbia, SC, collected by Margaret Knight and Norris Tibbetts, TWUA, 1940s.]
Hard Times in this Old Mill [Dorsey Dixon, "Babies in the Mill: Nancy Dixon: Dorsey Dixon: Howard Dixon." Testament Records T-3301. Adaptation of song learned from sister, Nancy Dixon.] Spinning Room Song [Nancy Dixon, "Babies in the Mill: Nancy Dixon: Dorsey Dixon: Howard Dixon." Testament Records T-3301.
Learned in Darlington, South Carolina, ca. 1898.]
Here We Rest (Unknown) [Workers in Merrimac Mill Village, Huntsville, Alabama, 1934.] (G)
ILD Song (Ella May Wiggins) (G)
Let Me Sleep In Your Tent Tonight Beal (Odell Corley) (G)
Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine (Unknown) [Collected from unknown singer, West Virginia, by Will Geer. This song is related to Wilmer Watts's "Cotton Mill Blues." See forthcoming case study by Archie Green, "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme."] (G)
Little Mill Worker (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Lowell Factory Girl (Unknown)
Factory Girl [Nancy Dixon, "Babies in the Mill: Nancy Dixon: Dorsey Dixon: Howard Dixon." Testament Records T-3301. Learned in Darlington, South Carolina, ca. 1899.]
The Factory Girl [Dorsey Dixon, "Babies in the Mill: Nancy Dixon: Dorsey Dixon: Howard Dixon." Testament Records T-3301. Adaptation of song learned from sister, Nancy Dixon.]
Untitled [Unknown singer, Fort Worth, Texas, collected byJohn Lomax, 1913, from "wandering singer" who had learned the song in Florida.]
No More Shall I Work in the Factory [Peoples' Songs Library. Greenway attributes to North Carolina, but probably reworked from John Lomax version. See Tamburro (1974-75:49)] (G)
Pity Me All Day [Hedy West, "Getting Folk Out of the Country." Bear Family 12008.]
Marion Massacre (Welling and McGhee) [Paramount 3194, Recorded 10/22/29.] (G)
The Marion Strike (Unknown) [Peoples' Songs Library.] (G)
The Mill Mother's Lament (Ella May Wiggins) [Margaret Larkin, "Ella May's Songs."] (G)
North Carolina Textile Strike (Welling and McGhee) [Paramount 3194, Recorded 10/22/29.]
Old Days At Hadley-Peoples (Decie Smith) [Doug DeNatale interview, composed 1968.]
On A SummerEve (Daisy McDonald) [Margaret Larkin Collection, Peoples' Songs Library. See Greenway 1953:138.] (G)
Poor Man, Rich Man (Dave McCarn) [Victor 23506, Recorded 11/19/30.]
Cotton Mill Blues [Lester Pete Bivins, Decca 5559, recorded 6/9/38.]
Reade Shirt Factory Blues (Cleda Helton and James Pyl) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.] (G)
Roane County Strike at Harriman, Tenn. (Hershel Phillips) [Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress AFS 31761; also Mike Seeger, "Tipple, Loom & Rail," Folkways FH 5273.]
Serves 'Em Fine (Dave McCarn) [Victor 23577, recorded 5/19/31.]
Snoopy Is The Stretchout Man (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Soliloquy to the Shirt M ill Workers on Strike ( Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Some More About My First Years (Decie Smith) [Doug DeNatale interview, composed 1974.]
Song of the Danville Strikers and Their Children (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
The S peakers Didn't Mind (Daisy McDonald) [People's Songs Library, see Greenway, 1953:136.] (G)
Spinning Room Blues (Dorsey Dixon) [Montgomery Ward 7042, Recorded 6/23/ 36.]
Stretch Out Blues (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Ten Little Textile Workers (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
The Twenty Third Shirt Factory Psalm (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.]
Tribute To M r. Gregson (Decie Smith) (Doug DeNatale interview, composed 1973.]
Two Little Strikers (Ella May Wiggins) [Wiley-source?]
Up in Old Loray (Odell Corley) [Peoples' Songs Library, see Greenway 1953:135.] (G)
We Are Building a Strong Union (Unknown) [Fowke and Glazer 1960:72.]
The Weaver's Blues (Fisher Hendley) [?]
Weaver's Life (Dorsey Dixon) [Bluebird B-7802, Recorded 2/18/37.] (G)
The Weaver's Blues [Recorded by Jimmie Tarlton, Victor 23700, 2/28/32.]
Weave Room Blues (Dorsey Dixon) [Bluebird B-6441, Recorded 2/12/36.] (G)
Cotton Mill Blues [Cecil Kinzer, collected by Archie Green.]
Weave Room Blues [Recorded by Fisher Hendley, Vocalion 04780, 11/3/ 38.]
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (Unknown) [Zilphia Horton Folk Song Collection, Tennessee State Library.] (G)
APPENDIX B
Early Southeastern Textile Recording Artists
This list is by no means exhaustive and represents only those artists identified as mill workers in secondary sources. Further documentary research would no doubt reveal that many other recording artists came from a mill-worker background.
ATLANTA AREA:
Fiddlin 'John Carson: alternated between mill work and painting.
Bill Helms: b. 1902, Thomaston, Georgia. Leader of Upson County Band, loom fixer in Thomaston, Georgia, mill all his life.
Lee Brothers Trio (Archer Chumbler, Howard Coker, Henry Thomas): all worked in the New Holland Mills. Played in another band with two mill foremen.
Elias Meadows: member of Georgia Yellow Hammers, boss weaver at Echota Cotton Mill.
Lester Smallwood: b. 1900, Gainesville, Georgia. Began work in New Holland Mills, Gainesville, at age fourteen.
SPRAY/DANVILLE/ROANOKE AREA:
Lonnie Austin: member of North Carolina Ramblers, worked in Spray.
Kelly Harrell: b. 1889, Drapers Valley, Virginia. Worked in Fries, Virginia. Leader of Virginia String Band.
R. D. Hundley: worked in Fieldale mill, member of Virginia String Band.
Cecil Kinzer: Fries, Virginia.
Charley Laprade: b. 1888, Franklin Co., Virginia. Family moved to Spray in 1900, later moved to Danville. Leader of Blue Ridge Highballers.
Gil Nowlin: member of North Carolina Ramblers, worked in Spray.
Fletcher "Red" Patterson: b. ca. 1900, Leaksville, North Carolina. Went between farm and mill work in Leaksville; moved to Fieldale in mid-1920s and played with fellow mill workers Kelly Harrell, Lee and Dick Nolen. Leader of Piedmont Log Rollers.
Charlie Poole: b. 1892, Randolph Co., North Carolina. Family worked in various mills throughout north central Carolina Piedmont, living in Spray by 1918, leader of North Carolina Ramblers.
Fred Richards: member of Four Virginians.
Posey Rorer: b. 1891, Franklin Co., Virginia. Worked in Spray, North Carolina, played with North Carolina Ramblers, Virginia String Band.
Odell Smith: member of North Carolina Ramblers, worked in Spray.
Walter "Kid" Smith: b. 1895, Carroll Co., Virginia., worked in Spray.
Alfred Steagall: worked in Fieldale mill, member of Virginia String Band.
Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman: b. 1893, Monurat, Virginia., worked in mill with Henry Whitter.
Henry Whitter: b. 1892, Fries, Virginia., worked in Fries. Learned "Wreck of the Southern Old 97" from a fellow millworker.
Norman Woodlief: member of North Carolina Ramblers, worked in Spray.
CHARLOTTE AREA:
Lester Pete Bivins: b. near Shelby, North Carolina, life-long mill worker.
Claude Casey: b. 1912, Enoree, South Carolina, worked at Schoolfield Cotton Mills, Danville, Virginia. Member of Briarhoppers.
Dorsey Dixon : b. 1897, Darlington, South Carolina, family moved to East Rockingham, North Carolina. Member of Dixon Brothers, associate of Jimmie Tarlton, life-long mill worker.
Howard Dixon : b. 1903, Darlington, South Carolina, family moved to East Rockingham, North Carolina. Member of Dixon Brothers, associate of Jimmie Tarlton, life-long mill worker.
Lester Flatt: worked in Sparta, Tennessee, silk mill and in Covington, Virginia, mill before joining Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys.
Gwen Foster: worked in Gastonia, Belmont, Dallas, North Carolina mills. Member of Carolina Tar Heels, Carolina Twins, recorded with David McCarn.
Charles Freshour: b. Gaffney, South Carolina, worked in Belmont mill, member of Lonely Eagles.
Roy "Whitey" Grant: b. 1916, Shelby, North Carolina, worked at Firestone Cotton Mill, Gastonia in 1930s. Member of the Briarhoppers.
Arval Hogan: b. 1911, Robbinsville, North Carolina, worked at Firestone Cotton Mill, Gastonia in 1930s. Member of the Briarhoppers.
Roy Lear: b. Pineville, North Carolina. Worked in Cone Mills in mid-1950s to supplement music work. Member of Tennessee Ramblers, Carolina Crackerjacks.
Howard Long: Gastonia mill worker, recorded with David McCarn.
Daddy John Love: worked in Concord, North Carolina mill. Member of Mainer's Mountaineers, Hilliard Brothers, Dixie Reelers.
J. E. Mainer: b. 1898, High Cove, Weaverville, North Carolina, worked in mills in Knoxville, Tennessee, Glendale, South Carolina, and Concord, North Carolina. Leader of Mainer's Mountaineers.
Wade Mainer: b. Weaverville, North Carolina, worked in Glendale, South Carolina and Concord, North Carolina, mills. Member of Mainer's Mountaineers.
David McCarn: b. 1905, McAdenville, North Carolina, worked in Belmont and Gastonia, recorded with Howard Long and Gwen Foster.
Julius Plato "Nish" McClured: b. 1897, Cleveland Co., North Carolina, worked in Newton, North Carolina, mill. Member of Hickory Nuts.
Claude "Zeke" Morris: b . 1916, Old Fort, North Carolina, worked in Concord Mill. Member of Mainer's Mountainers.
Palmer Rhyne: worked in Gastonia mill, member of Lonely Eagles.
Earl Scruggs: Cleveland County, North Carolina. Worked in textile mill during World War II.
Arthur Smith: b. 1921, Kershaw, South Carolina. Father was loom fixer in Spring Mills plant, and the director of a mill brass band. Worked in Spring Mills plant. Leader of Arthur Smith and the Carolina Crackerjacks.
Jimmie Tarlton: b. Chesterfield Co., South Carolina, worked at Little Hanna Pickett mill, East Rockingham, North Carolina, 1930-32.
Wilmer Watts: b. ca. 1896, Mount Tabor, North Carolina. Worked in mills around Belmont and Gastonia. Leader of Lonely Eagles.