Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song

Trump's America ought to be a fertile breeding ground for modern protest songs, but if they're out there, we don't seem to be hearing them. This collection of 20 pre-World War II songs of resistance will prompt further questions about where their 21st century equivalents are. Sung and played in bare-bones fashion by folk singers Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore as you might have heard them on a picket line or around a labour-camp fire, some will be familiar, including several compositions by Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill.

Many, however, have been long forgotten and the real revelation here is a cache of songs variously credited to the Kentucky family of Sarah Ogan Gunning, her half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson and brother Jim Garland. Gunning was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1938 and briefly resurfaced during the 60s folk revival, but the simple directness of her songs such as ‘Come on Friends and Let's Go Down’ (‘down to the picket line’) and ‘I Hate the Capitalist System’ deserves wider currency. Best of all is her ‘Dreadful Memories’ to the tune of ‘Precious Memories’, on which Moore sings Gunning's chilling words: ‘Hungry fathers, wearied mothers/living in those dreadful shacks/little children cold and hungry/with no clothing on their backs.’