Sat 7/13 @ 5-8PM
In 1941, with the effects of the Depression still lingering and labor union activism on the rise, four folk singers combined their talents to form the Almanac Singers. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell toured the country, playing songs about the struggle of ordinary working people to audiences of ordinary working people.
Their pro-union, pro-peace, anti-racism repertoire most famously included labor union songs like “Which Side Are You On,” Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” and Lampell, Hays and Seeger’s “Talking Union.”
With corporate power over all facets of our country even greater and the counterbalance of unions weakened, while workers get a tinier share of the pie than they did in the ’40s, those songs have never been more relevant.
So Rik Palieri, a veteran folksinger whose bio says he learned to play banjo from a Pete Seeger songbook, and George Mann, a New York-based former labor union organizer who created the anti-Bush CD series Hail to the Thief, are taking them out on the road on their Almanac Trail tour. They’re even playing some of the same places the original group played.
They’ve put the show together with the assistance of the Woody Guthrie archives and Seeger himself, who recently turned 94. They’re giving the shows with the same informal, participatory slant too, inviting local musicians to join in, hootenanny style.
The duo will perform in Cleveland at P.J. McIntyre’s at Kamms Corners, a bar that’s the west side headquarters for liberal politics.
They’ll be joined by Pittsburgh’s Anne Feeney, a lawyer, musician and labor activist and self-described “hellraiser.”
As she says on her website, “I’ve been ‘comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable’ since I graduated from high school in 1968. … It has been my privilege to spend most of my waking hours with people who are trying to make a difference in this world… people on strike, or in a union or community organizing drive, or defending women’s rights, the environment, human rights … working to end poverty and racism … teaching peace.”
The event is free.
https://www.facebook.com/events/476694165757956/