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:: Saturday, March 13, 2004 ::

Labor's Punk Songman by Tom Robbins
American labor has always had its troubadours, most of them writing and singing away in the same obscurity as the working people they've championed. Legendary songwriter and organizer Joe Hill was an itinerant laborer in the early 1900s when he turned an otherwise harmless ditty about an engineer named Casey Jones into a pro-union anthem, and transformed the pious 'Sweet Bye and Bye' into a stinging satire on preachers who ignored their congregations' suffering ('You'll get pie in the sky when you die'). Hill understood that, when it came to agitating, flyers and pamphlets get tossed aside, but a good tune burrows inside the brain and won't let go.

The New Woody Guthries ocweekly
Billing himself as the Night Watchman, Morello proved that Audioslave is really just a bad anomaly - his subsequent 12-bar odes to Ohio steelworkers, West Virginia miners and Guatemalan sweatshop workers "who got your job" could've been played for the Wobblies. Morello dedicated his final song to the uniformed security forces eyeballing him, "with hope that one day they realize that they have more in common with the people [in the crowd] than the corporate leeches who pay them to protect them.

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