Working Man's Dead: 5 Songs For Labor Day
This week's songs are from Johnny Cash, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, ZZ Top, Steve Earle & the Dukes, and the Both
In honor of Labor Day in the US next Monday, we’re going to have a look at some songs about the worker. Complaining about the boss in song is a pillar of American Music—because of slavery of course. Blues and American folk music—both setting the foundation for popular music since was born from a country founded on the notion that work should be free. That push-and-pull between the worker and the boss or company creates a power dynamic that never (and will never) fully resolve. It mutated, shifted, and expanded through the industrial revolution, the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl. Hardship, poverty, and mass migration in search of jobs was far more common than it is today. Songs that passed down through communities captured the plight of the worker and they carried the music with them when they sought opportunity elsewhere. Oklahomans brought country music out to California; Blues, Jazz, and Gospel spread to St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, Detroit, and Chicago along with the Great Migration; The “Hillbilly Highway” carried Appalachian “Hillbilly music” into Ohio, Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore. Woody Guthrie made his way living this way of life, and made his name writing, singing about the working man, unions, and speaking truth to power. It’s the bottom-up music.
Instead of going straight at the subject, this week’s 5 songs will touch on worker’s uprisings, Marxists, getting paid, the alienation of late-stage capitalism, and working for others.
“To me, country music is the music of the people, the songs of working class people—songs of their work, their home life, love life—it’s usually of the culture of well, maybe the lower-middle-class or working class.” - Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash - “Joshua Gone Barbados”
Johnny Cash, like many musicians of his generation, was known to be creatively adrift in the 1980s. “Joshua Gone Barbados,” from 1983’s Johnny 99 is an exception. The album also includes two covers from Springsteen’s Nebraska and contributions from Hal Blaine and Dave Mansfield. “Joshua Gone Barbados,” originally written and recorded by Eric Von Schmidt. Aside from this song, Von Schmidt is best known as one of the many folk singers a young Bob Dylan cribbed from—Dylan would include a copy of The Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt among the records in his lap on the cover of Bringing it All Back Home. There’s a bootleg of Dylan playing the song in the complete Basement Tapes.
The song itself, about a 1962 sugar cane strike on St. Vincent. Von Schmidt arrived to the island on vacation just a few weeks after the events he would write about, and the accuracy of his retelling is in dispute. Ebenezer Joshua rose from union worker to labor leader, and ultimately the first Chief Minister of St. Vincent, leading to the rumor that he fled to Barbados when labor unrest broke out.
The song has a meditative, elegiac energy to it. The instrumentation quietly flows along, while many layers of vocals float on, above, and just under the surface. The rainy and loose production sounds a lot like the formula Dylan would use to spark his own creative revival with Time Out of Mind 15 years later. But it’s Cash’s voice that really sells the underlying sadness that positions the story as a tragedy.
“You can't really start a rock band and hope to get the economic structure of the world to crumble. But you can make people excited about it.” - Dennis Lyxzén
The (International) Noise Conspiracy - “Smash It Up”
Epitaph Records Punk-o-Rama vol. 5 was a seminal album for me. It was the first label compilation I ever had. First, the idea that you could get 28 songs from 28 bands for $5 was mind-blowing to me. As a 14 year-old, sometimes quantity > quality. Pre-streaming/Big Internet, label compilations were a great way to find new music “Corporate Radio” wasn’t playing (Punk-o-Rama 4 would introduce me to Tom Waits, which is a puzzle that took another 8 years or so to unpack). The (International) Noise Conspiracy’s “Smash It Up” was on vol. 5.
Leader singer Dennis Lyxzén is better known as the singer of the seminal Swedish hardcore band Refused. In 2002, I saw them at as an opening act at the Metro, where Lyxzén’s stage banter was a prepared lecture about how we must destroy capitalism and replace it with dancing. If his revolution was successful, he would be very wealthy because the guy danced up a storm. At one point, he climbed from the drum set to the bass cabinet and jumped off into the splits, and bounced back up, like James Brown doing Parkour. “Smash It Up” has a spidery bass groove, drums that break and splash like a wet cobble stone street, and an organ like a polite car horn. If you’re trying to start a revolution, you better make it sound fun.
“I want to smash it up for all the workers who spent hours into nothing
I want to smash it up for all my sisters who got caught up in this funky system
I want to smash it up just like a locust, like a satellite shooting rockets
I want to smash it up in every way I can”
“While it’s true that our audiences encompass all social and economic strata, it’s the blue-collar folks who are definitely most enthused and supportive. Our respect for people who earn what they have is boundless, and it seems to go both ways.” - Billy Gibbons
ZZ TOP - “Just Got Paid”
Nothing will make you forget about starting a revolution like a decent paycheck. ZZ Top rips this jam with an edge that sounds like their payday came from robbing a bank. Off of their second album Rio Grande Mud, ZZ Top was just starting to tour out of Texas at the time of release. While it’s the most well-known song from the album, it wasn’t release as a single. It was the follow up Tres Hombres that would help them crack the Top Ten.
The song’s kick-ass guitar riff is loose and wild, but only because the rhythm section allows it to. ZZ Top’s distinct sound—Texas Blues—is as Blue Collar American as it gets, but among their primary inspirations was Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac. “Just Got Paid” was inspired by the British Blues band’s “Oh Well.” While trying to figure the song out, Gibbons said he “got all tangled up, and it just stayed tangled” (As a bonus, check out Gibbons jamming on “Oh Well” with Steven Tyler, and other original members of Fleetwood Mac).
“It's the root of evil and you know the rest
But it's way ahead of what's second best”
“In the end, you either cheer people up with your songs or help them exorcise some problems they have—and people need a bit of both right now. The mood of the country as a whole is that things aren’t as they are being advertised. Lots of people are going hungry. Even more have had to downscale their expectations. They are confused. They remember everything they heard about this country in school and they wonder what happened to it.” - Steve Earle (1986)
Steve Earle & the Dukes - “Burnin’ It Down”
Remember when everyone was just mad about Walmart killing small towns all over the country? Simpler times. Steve Earle has and is a vocal and principled artist. He puts his beliefs and opinions at the forefront of his work in a very direct way. For one, the guy hates Walmart.
“I haven’t bought anything from Walmart in eleven years, and the reason is, I think they’re fucking evil on every level. There’s nothing about the way they do business that has any respect for human beings whatsoever.”
So with “Burnin’ It Down,” from 2013’s The Low Highway, he takes those feelings and puts them in a character with less artistic, and more violent, means of expressing himself. It’s one of those songs where there isn’t much to the lyric, or the narrative (at the end of the song, he’s still only thinking about it), but the story being told is fully realized. And it’s also one a lot of people would recognize. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and mass merchandising hollowed out the economy of his small town, and any sense of humanity he’s got left. The face of that change is the only store left in town. Like the character in the song, the music lingers around a central idea—the chorus comes and goes but the dynamics of the instrumentation don’t change. It’s pondering at the bottom rung. Unfortunately for the character in the song, his plans will only make matters worse—the only store in town would be Dollar General.
“Lord knows my lapsed Catholicism gets sprayed all over the page sometimes.” - Ted Leo
The Both - “Volunteers of America”
Aimee Mann and Ted Leo formed The Both after performing with each other frequently on a joint tour. Listening to their only album together (2014’s The Both), it’s very easy to hear why they formed the band. Their voices work very well together—in duets and harmonies, the songs are great, and the energy is infectious, it sounds like a lot of fun—even the slower songs. It’s Power Pop at its absolute best. In 2018, seeing Aimee Mann at a free show in Millennium Park, we were lucky enough to have Ted Leo join for a few songs—their shared vocals on “Voices Carry” (from Mann’s old band Til Tuesday) is still stand-out in my memory. Ted can hit the high notes.
“Volunteers of America” might be the most out-and-out fun song on this list. It’s got one of those choruses that by the second time it comes around you already know the words and the song is in your head for days on after. I’ve mentioned before my affinity for a distorted bass; here it thumps down on the ground so the rest of the tune can soar. While the song’s subject broadens beyond striking workers to those generally struggling to get by and those who help them, it becomes something of an anthem for pretty much anyone doing a kindness for someone else, and celebrating how every small act of kindness is unique and worth celebrating. One can assume these workers are less likely to hate their boss.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs: