Historian completes a labor of love -- 'The Big Red Songbook'

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Historian completes a labor of love -- 'The Big Red Songbook'
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, June 18, 2007

John Neuhaus was a strapping Mission District machinist who joined the Industrial Workers of the World -- the radical unionists called the Wobblies -- in San Francisco in 1930. A passionate man who wore lumberjack shirts and had no use for doctors, lawyers and other bourgeoisie, Neuhaus became an ardent folklorist, researching and collecting the potent and piquant songs that Wobblies of many creeds and colors sang around copper mines and hobo campfires, on picket lines and in jail.
Shortly before he died of cancer in 1958 at age 54, Neuhaus gave his friend and fellow folklorist Archie Green a tin tea box containing all but one of the 29 little red Wobbly songbooks published between 1909 and 1956 (seven more have appeared since, the last in 1995) and a World War II ammunition box filled with original sheet music and other material he'd amassed with the goal of publishing a complete Wobbly songbook. Green implicitly understood the job would fall to him.
"I felt morally responsible to do something with his collection," says Green, one of the editors of "The Big Red Songbook," an engaging new anthology (Charles Kerr, $24) that's been in the works for nearly half a century.
It features the lyrics to 250 or so Wobbly songs, rich with references to job sharks, shovel stiffs, capitalist tools and plutocratic parasites. Wobbly wordsmiths such as the fabled Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Haywire Mac and Richard Brazier set their fighting words to popular tunes of the day, gospel hymns, old ballads and patriotic anthems. Green and his co-editors place the songs in the context of the tumultuous times in which they were written and sung.
"I put it off as long as I could," laughs Green, who turns 90 this month. "Eventually, you run out of time, and I knew that if I didn't finish it, nobody would."

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/18/DDG0GQH1PJ1.DTL



The 27th edition (January 1939) of the Industrial Workers of the World's songbook sold for 10 cents. Photo from "The Big Red Songbook"