Monday Music: ‘Which Side Are You On?’

This is the Question of the Week

I try to post about music on Mondays, but there are weeks when other issues take precedence or I don’t post anything.

I don’t have a lot to say that I haven’t up to this point about the election — I’ve explained by vote for Harris, and my fear of a new Trump term. But I wanted to post something and I think Florence Reece’s protest song is the correct mood setter.

Charles Morris, in Financial Times, offers a history of the song. Written by Reece in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931 during the bloody miner’s strike, it has become a pro-labor staple, recorded by Pete Seeger, the Dropkick Murphys, and others.

Reece, writes Morris, wrote from “pure rage” after “she and her seven children were terrorised by a sheriff and his men,” because her husband was union organizer Sam Reece.

Harlan County’s bloody dispute rumbled on throughout the decade, causing death and injury on both sides. Local Sheriff JH Blair openly took the mine owners’ side, and, assisted by troops and hired thugs, used guns, tear gas and beatings against the strikers, who replied in kind.

Reece learnt that Blair and his men were coming for him one night and fled. The sheriff’s men raided and ransacked the family home, searching in vain for him. When they left, a traumatised Florence grabbed a sheet from a calendar on the wall and enraged words poured on to the paper.

The song is a union song, first and foremost, but in its broadest sense it is a song that asks us to choose — between labor and management, between fascism and a nominal democracy, between war and peace, between the past and the future.

Here is the Dropkick Murphys: