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NUMBER 9 Army, and sometimes used it at strike meetings or on picket lines." If Deakin's memory served him well, the borrowed or, rather, adapted song could have been used by the dockers at least by 1889, the year of the first and most famous of the dock strikes that Tillett led. Very likely, then, it was the dockers who took the song into the Transport Workers; but a mystery remains as to who adapted it and when and by whom it was carried to the United States. It may have been brought in through the IWW's connections in Great Britain.

Here the story takes a curious turn. Although the modern labor version of "Hold the Fort" is known as a song of the British Transport Workers, and has been sung as such in union meetings in both the United States and Australia, the Transport Workers appear not to have sung it for a long time. Indeed, Ellen McCullough first heard it in the United States more than a decade ago. It was this experience that interested her in the song and led her, upon her return to England, to query Deakin about it on behalf of her friend Joe Glazer. As a consequence, Glazer observed that it "has obviously been lost in England," where the English sing it only "as something imported from the United States." In England, in fact, he once saw a song sheet curiously describing "Hold the Fort" as a "British Transport Workers Song (sung in the United States)." Evidently there has been no change in the music, for the union song "sounds the same as the old hymn."

Labor's modern version of "Hold the Fort" thus achieved a place among the labor songs of the United States and continued to be published and heard despite the mortal illness of the Wobblies. It is said that the song was popularized (or perhaps repopularized) during the Paterson silk strike in 1928. Its words and music appeared in the Rebel Song Book, which the Rand School Press published in 1935. About four years later several verses and the chorus came out in a songbook published by the Southeastern Regional Office of the Textile Workers Union of America. Parts of it also appeared in 1941 in a songbook of the United Auto Workers (UAW), and about the same time in various songbooks of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). All of the words were in the 1945 edition and, more recently, in the 1964 edition of "The Little Red Song Book" of the Wobblies, who would not give up. Sometime before Philip Murray's death in 1952, Tom Glazer recorded "Hold the Fort" for a CIO album of Favorite American Union Songs. The song was also recorded by the Almanac Singers in The Original "Talking Union"; by Gene and Francesca Raskin in We Work