My last word (for a while) on a fallen friend and comrade

 Elaine Purkey, 1949-2020. Vintage early 90s, wearing a tee-shirt expressing solidarity for union Steelworkers locked out of Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation from 1990-1992. Story below.

The labor movement and the people of West Virginia lost a powerful voice (literally) last week with the death of Elaine Purkey from COVID-19. Among many other things, she was a singer/songwriter whose music has reached many around the United States and beyond. And she was my friend.

We met during the UMWA-Pittston coal strike of 1989-90, my first big fight after joining the American Friends Service Committee. The strike wasn’t about wages; it was about protecting health care and benefits for retirees, miners with disabilities and their families.

It was a wild and uncut struggle that rumbled throughout the coalfields beyond the Pittston mines. Two union miners were shot, one fatally. I remember burning buildings, vehicles smashed by nonunion coal trucks, evictions from land company property, private “goon guards,” State Police and federal marshals, arrests — but also music, laughter, humor, mischief and love.

(I’m not necessarily proud of this, but some of us were having the time of our lives.)

Elaine’s husband, Bethel, still among us, was a grassroots union leader. Elaine was just finding her voice writing labor songs. At first, I thought Bethel was running the show, at least as far as Logan County was concerned. He was a natural leader who radiated charisma, looked out for everybody and got things done. I’m not even sure he had an official position at the time. A big man with red hair and a red beard, he struck me as your basic Viking, although to my knowledge he never raided an Irish monastery.

I had my first major conversation with Elaine at the Hardee’s in Chapmanville, where she was working at the time. Strike support from the union helped, but it didn’t make up the difference from working miner’s wages.

I was just learning to play guitar, so wanted to talk music as well as strike. I asked an incredibly stupid question in retrospect: Did she flat pick or finger pick? As if a self-respecting mountain singer would arpeggiate on nylon strings. The immediate result was an impromptu concert in the parking lot. It never took a whole lot of effort to get Elaine to perform.

Nothing was ever the same afterward. We did a lot together over the years, not just labor related, but also things like fighting racially motivated police violence and even doing mountain stories and songs with kids.

Elaine grew up in a large musical family near Harts Creek, in Lincoln County. Her father, Winford Moore, was a railroad worker and musical prodigy who could play any instrument he picked up and never bothered with sheet music. Most of the rest of the family was musical, as well. I still remember a magical summer day long ago that I was absorbed in the embrace of several generations of the family.

When Elaine was a child, Winford would pick her up and put her on a rock so that she could sing to whoever was there. While you could never forget that she was a powerful woman, I always also saw in her the little girl singing on a rock for her daddy.

She was very intuitive, like someone who could solve complex math problems without showing her work. Sometimes I’d pitch her a bare song idea, which she’d weave into gold in short order. I think her best is “One Day More,” which was written in 1992, when 1,700 steelworkers were locked out of their jobs at Ravenswood Aluminum Corp. for nearly two years.

Their average age was over 50 and most had worked at the plant for more than 20 years, yet the company declared them permanently replaced, despite the union’s willingness to continue working under their old contract.

Some things are addictive, and a justified fight is one of the best addictions, as such things go.

A lot of people thought the fight in Ravenswood was hopeless. I asked Elaine to write something to boost morale, suggesting a theme like lasting one day longer than the company, something Bethel always said in the earlier fight, and recommending a minor key. Always a lover of snarky banter, Elaine shot back, “Do you want to tell me the words and melody while you’re at it?”

We met in Logan the next morning and I gave her some info on the situation there. At about 11 p.m., I got the call and heard her sing it for the first time. Even then, I felt sure people would be singing it long after we were gone.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple filmed the first performance at the USWA Local 5668 union hall while doing a documentary for PBS on the lockout (I think you can see the neck of my old 12 string on it, too). I knew music was powerful in the struggle, but never saw anything like that, with people crying, clapping and singing along the first time they heard it. The song became their anthem.

And the good guys actually wound up winning.

That song had legs, even showing up in a songbook of the 2011 Wisconsin protests against union busting. I just heard that a co-worker of mine learned it at a rally for hotel and restaurant workers in California in the 1990s. It was included in the Smithsonian’s collection of labor songs. Who knows where it’s been or where it will show up next?

Over the years, we’d sometimes go a good while without seeing or talking with each other, but the connection was always like a live electrical wire. As the ancient Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching says, “That which is firmly established cannot be uprooted.”

I can’t imagine a world without her in it, one way or another.

Along with her family, she took her religion very seriously and was a devoted member of the Church of Christ. If anybody was ever right with Jesus, I’m sure Elaine would make the team, assuming the latter had a sense of humor and a tolerance for banter.

I think her message to us in these dark days would come straight from that song: Hold out, one day more.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail)

Strike songs

There's a longstanding connection between labor struggles and music. Some generate their own songs, like when my friend Elaine Purkey wrote "One Day More" for locked out Steelworkers at Ravenswood back in 1992. Others find new uses for older songs, from "Take This Job and Shove It" to "We're Not Gonna Take It."

One that's shown up a lot in West Virginia these days is Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down." It is a great song, and Petty's recent death probably reminded a lot of us of how much of his music has been part of the soundtrack of our lives.

For me though, another Petty song expresses what most of my fights have been like: "The Waiting." There's often that agonizing period when we can't exactly do anything at the moment to affect the outcome but we can't do much of anything else either. It really is the hardest part.

(UPDATED: if the 5 percent across the board deal happens, I guess we can dust off "We Are The Champions." There's never enough Freddy Mercury anyhow.)

Solidarity forever!

It's a little known fact that "Solidarity Forever," the international anthem of the labor movement,  was inspired by events in West Virginia. Ralph Chaplin, writer and long time rebel worker, lived for a time in the Mountain State and edited a labor paper in Huntington, one of several then published in the state.

While here, he was inspired by the solidarity of coal miners during long and bitter strikes that raged in Kanawha County in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek areas around 1912-1913. It took him a while to finish the song, which is sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Today most people familiar with the song only know the chorus. In honor of West Virginia's teachers, service workers and public employees, here's the whole thing:

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

Chorus

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.

Chorus

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

Chorus

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

Chorus

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Chorus

(Note: this song has shown up in this blog before, but it seem especially relevant today.)

Droning on

Back in the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World, footloose organizers rode the rails into skid rows, lumber camps and hobo jungles to sign up workers for the One Big Union. Often, they used song as an organizing tool, taking familiar tunes and changing the words around "so they made more sense," as the late great Utah Phillips used to say.

The spirit of the Wobblies lives on these days in a friend and co-worker of mine known here as New Hampshire Slim. At least one of his songs has even made its way into the latest version of the IWW Little Red Songbook.

I can picture Slim right now hopping freight trains and spreading the rebel gospel to the downpressed wage slaves of that New England state, whilst regaling one and all with song. Here's his latest effort, which is sung to the tune of a popular Bob Dylan song. It is reproduced with permission. From Slim, not from Bob, that is. Nothing personal, Bob...but these days

Everybody must get droned

They’ll drone you when you’re leaving from the bar,They’ll drone you when you’re driving in your car,They’ll drone you when you’re trying to be discrete,They’ll drone you when you’re marching in the street.

Well I would not feel so all alone,Everybody must get droned.

They’ll drone you when you’re maintaining law and order,They’ll drone you when you’re getting near the border,They’ll drone you when you’re sitting in the park,They’ll drone you when it’s light and when it’s dark.  

Well I would not feel so all alone,Everybody must get droned.

They’ll drone you when your minding your own business,They’ll drone you when you’re improving your physical fitness,They’ll drone you when you’re at a private luncheon,They’ll drone you while performing a bodily function,

Well I would not feel so all alone,Everybody must get droned.

They’ll drone you when you’re at a wedding party,They’ll drone you if you’re early or you’re tardy,They’ll drone you when you’re riding in the bus,They’ll drone you if you’re them or if you’re us,

Well I would not feel so all alone,Everybody must get droned.

Slim has a blog worthy of a look that he updates whenever he is not riding the rods or working the wheat harvest. You can find it here.

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