Page:20040823 Jibjab Copyright Scans.pdf/2

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IN THESE TEN SONGS you will hear a lot of music of a lot of races. Songs of every color. Every people loves and copies the songs and the music, the ideas, the customs, of all the other races.

SONGS LIKE THESE soak into every wall, hall, factory, every hull of every ship, every hammer coming down on every, every seed falling down into every row, every hand moving dust rag, a wheel, a lever, a dial, a handle, a button pushed.

IF YOU WILL LISTEN TO YOURSELF while you do you will hear yourself hum and sing your own song about. You are making up a folk song. You have really made ballad. If you take the time to write down all of these and tunes in your own mind about the folks that you  be famous as a composer.

I HAVE NEVER HEARD a nation of people sing on editorial out of a paper. A man sings about the little things that help him or hurt his people and he sings of what has got to be done to fix this world like it ought to be. These songs are singing history. History is being sung. I have sung them in several hundred Union Halls and not one single time have I seen them fail. People clap and yell, get hot and sweat, unloosen their collars, and sing on for hours.

OUR SHIPS ARE MANNED BY MEN OF ALL TONGUES and colors and I saw the whole world there before my eyes while I sang to the men a dozen spells a day, between working hours washing dishes. No matter who you are or where you're from, no matter what your color or your language, you will taste, hear, see and feel an old spark of your whole life somewhere in these songs. Cubans, Mexicans, Philipinos, Chinese, Scotch, Irish, Russian, French and German, all have told me, "This sounds exactly like it is in my country". These songs are a world mixture. The tunes and the words have been sung across all of the oceans by all of us, and up out of the past dark centuries.

I HAVE WALKED AND LISTENED to these songs in the Tennesseee [sic]Valley and heard versions on top of Pike's Peak and along the Columbia River. But I did not hear any of them on the radio. I did not hear any of them in the movie house. I did not hear a single ounce of our history being sung on the nickel juke box. The Big Boys don't want to hear our history of blood, sweat, work, and tears, of slums, bad housing, diseases, big blisters or big callouses, nor about our fight to have unions and free speech and a family of nations. But the people want to hear about all of those things in every possible way. The playboys and playgals don't work to make our history plain to us nor to point out to us which road to travel next. They hire out to hide our history from us and to point toward every earthly stumbling block.