I’ve been a member of the Local 47 musicians’ union in Los Angeles for 32 years, and I’m a proud card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World - it lives on! My mom was a union high school teacher, and the Morellos were hardworking coal miners in central Illinois. I’m a union man and an unapologetic musical rabble-rouser. Much of my career has been one long audition to become a part of that legacy. Without them, there’d be no “This Land Is Your Land,” no “We Shall Overcome,” no “Masters of War,” no “London Calling,” no “Killing in the Name.” The Wobbly songwriters also laid the sonic and ideological groundwork for those who followed: Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Utah Phillips, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Nina Simone, Bruce Springsteen, the Clash, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine. aimed to “ create a new society within the shell of the old,” and I hope you can hear that new world echoing here, where song meets struggle. What’s the antidote for divide and conquer? Work together, fight together, sing together.ĭefiant and hopeful, these songs have an unapologetic mission: to fan the flames of discontent by lifting the spirits of those fighting for a more just and humane planet.
“ Casey Jones (The Union Scab),” “ We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” “ Bread and Roses,” “ Ain’t Done Nothin’ if You Ain’t Been Called a Red” - often set to familiar tunes and popular hymns of the day, these songs united workers from diverse backgrounds under the banner of solidarity. Its songs, some more than 100 years old, addressed the same issues facing us today: poverty, police brutality, immigrant rights, economic and racial inequality, militarism, threats to civil liberties, union busting. songs - like “ The Preacher and the Slave” and “Solidarity Forever” - looked an unjust world square in the eye, sliced it apart with satire, dismantled it with rage and then, with mighty sing-along choruses, raised the roofs of union halls and holding cells, “from San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill.” It was always known as a singing union, and its songs were written by hobos and the homeless, itinerant workers and immigrants.
was formed in 1905, advocating a militant revolutionary unionism, a cocktail of socialist, syndicalist and anarchist labor theory put into practice. The Industrial Workers of the World - the shock troops of the early-20th-century labor movement - virtually invented the protest song for the modern age. Harmonizing and hell-raising, rhythm and rebellion, poetry and politics, singing and striking. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
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