Yes, the inspiration photo of folks arriving at Ellis Island in 1907 is perfectly evocative of my own family history.
But this was a song I felt I needed to write because of current events.
And I wanted to do a live recording as a shout-out to my colleagues who may be worried about immigration status, work authorization, and travel right now.
You’re welcome here. Your presence is a gift. We’ll get through this.
With what little he had my great granddad bet big on a new country
When he stepped on a ship from a stone staircase in Southern Italy
To first set foot on what he hoped would be his family’s new homeland
Fresh off the boat at Ellis with nothing but his hat in hand
Like the hopeful and the hard done by
Of a hundred nationalities
He came from overseas
She couldn’t tell all would be well when grandma got the hell out of Eastern Germany
Running ahead of a tide turning read toward the Land of Liberty
She never made much working factory and field, but she didn’t cross the pond for greed
She wanted American dreams for my generation, her labor nurtured the seed
If you’re like me there’s foreign soil
On the roots of our family trees
Transplanted from overseas
We’re the nation we are ‘cause we opened the door to the tired the hungry the wretched and poor
The world’s huddled masses taking their chances to do right by their families
By fours and fives and sixes
And in ones and twos and threes
They came from overseas
Some would say things are different today, so when the ragged come knocking we should turn them away—
As much now as then you couldn’t be wronger to betray what’s always made America stronger
So many hands and hearts and minds
That built our prosperity
Came from overseas
I originally called this song "Overseas." But I came to feel "By Fours and Fives and Sixes (and Ones and Twos and Threes) was the right way to represent how there were so many different stories and experiences.
(There's a little bit of async between the audio and video - apologies for that--still working out the optimal recording set up.)
Where to begin? I would have said Work Without War had a rich origin story prior to the current crisis. Present circumstances moved me to revisit and re-record it.
First off I ought to credit singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. His style and lyrics–sometimes anthemic, at others empathetic–influenced me. (“The World Turned Upside Down” was a favorite of the former, while on the latter front I probably listened to “A New England” multiple replays in a row, many times, when I was younger.)
Then I ought to celebrate public investment in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information program that caused photos like this song’s visual inspiration to exist. (And, as well, the stance of openness that allows for free, unconstrained use of all of them.)
I don’t see any path from “I have in mind a Billy-Braggish sort of new song” to the lines “From Montecassino to Guadalcanal, godspeed to our boys / And here’s to their sisters putting tanks together with tools that once made toys” without this specific image and caption.
Conversion. Toy factory. Stephanie Cewe and Ann Manemeit, have turned their skill from peacetime production of toy trains to the assembly of parachute flare casings for the armies of democracy. Along with other workers in this Eastern plant, they have turned their skill to the vital needs of the day, and in many cases have seen to it that the machinery they used to use does Uncle Sam’s most important work today. Here, they are assembling parachute flare casings, using the same electric screwdrivers they formerly used to assemble the locomotives of toy trains.
Having touched on the visual and musical inspirations for the song, here comes its “something else” that’s a fair bit more involved and wonky than most other tracks.
The United States entered World War II in a depression and exited to prosperity. In 2008 article (paywalled) economist Paul Krugman sums up why he sees this as a causal connection:
What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.”
Paul Krugman, “Franklin Delano Obama”, New York Times, 2008
Frustration with what I saw as needless and preventable suffering during the 2008 financial crisis and the recession it triggered got me started on this project. It seemed obvious to me then (as it does now) that the Federal government’s response in 2008 was too small, especially in view of the natural experiment WWII created.
We’ve always ponied up big for wars, a public investment that might seem bad for the economy: after all, we’re paying lots of people to build things that are mostly only useful for destroying otherwise productive infrastructure and people, while employing lots of others (soldiers) to do a job that gets many of them injured or killed.
Imagine if we paid lots of people to build things that are bang-on useful for constructive purposes, and employed lots of others doing jobs that don’t. (Another economist, Christina Romer, is worth reading about lessons from the Great Depression, including an analysis of how elements of the New Deal worked just like this, and helped, but were much too small.)
Today I feel as if we’ve jumped the shark on tolerating needless and preventable suffering in multiple ways–at least at the Federal level.
We actually have an enemy we want to kill: the coronavirus. We could be mobilizing people otherwise out of work to do things that help that cause.
We could literally treat our response like waging war.
But even beyond that, if we entertain wartime-scale investment, we could simply pay people their salaries as long as it takes to get control over its spread. Germany and Denmark, for example, have already done this. Our congresswoman, Pramilla Jayapal, has proposed a bill to do this.
Aside from keeping people doing something at least somewhat to their jobs, it would also provide an opportunity to those who can’t do their normal work 40 hours per week to “skill up” on something new–and 100% useful in peacetime.
In any event, then and now the question of “why can’t we put people to worl”–at massive scale, whatever it takes to win–“without war” was and is on my mind.
These lines came first, because I felt it was necessary to start in 1929 (and, of course, taking inspiration from the photo, to mention the toy factory):
Unemployment lines in ’29 stretched from sea to shining sea
‘Round here they shuttered the five and dime downtown
And mothballed the toy factory
The narrative flow should seem fairly “inevitable” given the inspirational elements I’ve described knocking around in my head while I was writing it. There was an inherent timeline to follow. It was a little more like “paint by numbers” than free form, if I had to use a visual arts metaphor.
Except for one bit of joyful surprise. The couplet “Now there’s rumors of a draft afoot for our fathers and our sons / And you know if they’re gonna see trouble they’re gonna need guns” is the linchpin of the song for me, both as part of the story and a novel element.
It’s the “well of course we need to re-purpose shuttered factories–and, also, bring women in to work at them, as many as it takes” moment.
You simply can’t fight a war without guns–as many as your army needs!
And that ties back to the refrain: it seems to me you equally obvious that you can’t beat a depression without jobs–as many as your people need.
Let’s hope that lesson of history sinks in sometime soon.
So it’s Sunday morning. I’m walking around the kitchen / dining area in a Bruce Springsteen concert t-shirt, nursing my coffee while I listen to some of my own songs, trying to decide which are individually ready and collectively right to include in an EP.
And at close to exactly the same time, I happen to think “resolute, and always a little sad” and also catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
All at once, I’m wondering whether I’m thinking about the specific song playing, my songwriting in general, the emotional cadence some of the Boss’s best work–or some combination of all three.
The previous night a friend asked me if I could offer any insight on how to write songs.
And it seemed like a perfect moment to capture and then unpack.
How do I know when a song is done? A phenomenological answer is “I pace around listening until the answer is ‘obviously yes,’ ‘obviously no’–or ‘something in between.'”
And then I wonder what isn’t quite right. Sometimes that takes a single day. Sometimes it takes 10 years (no joke).
Where do songs even come from? For this project I can sometimes point to a photograph without which I am sure a particular song would never have come about. But the larger point is about some sort of underlying tension.
Woody Guthrie said “a folk song is what’s wrong, and what to do about it.” You don’t need redemption if you ain’t done bad (The River). You don’t need resolve if you aren’t fighting something hard (like the Great Depression, the 2008 recession, or the current crisis). But the struggle could be with homesickness (Sloop John B) or heartbreak (Blue Moon)–or Jolene.
But where to even start? Part of the beauty of folk and rock is that it’s OK to find a straightforward place to stand.
Just sit in the skin and time you’re in yourself–or imagine being someone else, some other time–and let some combination of chords, words, and melody find a way to be together.
For me, it’s usually words that want a melody. But sometimes chords want words. “Wanna use ‘some Neil-Young-y chords'” is how this song started. It is in “C-F-G” –or “I-IV-V” form.
This all may not be super helpful yet to someone wanting to get into flow writing songs. But I would love to pay forward the gift of enjoying creating songs. My songwriting instructor at something like $75 a class for small group, community college-sponsored adult ed program change my life permanently, for the better.
So this post kicks off a series about songwriting based on some that I think she’d be especially proud of. I’ll be posting an EP this week for which the title track is I Ain’t Got Money, but I Got Wise. Each song has lines that give me joy when I reflect on “how they came to be.”
I hope describing that process will help others find a path to a similar spot.
Bonded and Bought is one of my favorite songs in multiple respects. To me it sounds like a classic New England-slash-maritime folk song. It’s perfectly suited for strumming the rhythm while belting it out in my range. And every word of the lyrics feels perfect.
It wasn’t always so.
In fact, I scrapped some initial lyrics and the first concept for the song as a whole. Then when I felt like I’d gotten it almost finished, I was absolutely stumped as to what the title ought to be. Finally, it all came together. Here’s how.
The inspiration photo was something of an “and now for something completely different” moment for me.
The fishing boat was a big departure from images of the Dust Bowl or breadlines.
But having grown up in New England, I was certainly familiar with Gloucester and the cod fishing trade. I landed quickly on more or less the chords and rhythm you hear today, but original refrain was about fishing as an alternative when jobs onshore were lacking:
Go to sea young man, go to sea, young man--
You can always go to sea
When there's no work at hand here on dry land
You can always go to sea
That was fine as it went, but was unresolved alongside the original source of tension in the song. I knew many fishing families were Portuguese immigrants and by extension deeply Catholic. So there was a religious tone to the evocation of the risks those who went to sea would face:
When you’re pushing late into the season
And hard weather rolls around
You’re praying for the mercy of Mary and Jesus
But you’d settle for some solid ground
And it was…OK. The breakthrough came when I realized the song wanted to be about treating resources as something to be plundered and workers as expendable. The fishermen were facing danger not because there weren’t jobs on dry land, but rather because the cod had been over-fished.
The song got to 90 percent of where it is today, and I was nonplussed about a title. “Gloucester” and “The Flemish Cap” weren’t terrible but didn’t inspire me. It was as if I couldn’t firmly grasp the essence of the song.
Something of an esoteric phrase unlocked it: “bonded and bought.” The ideas was that treating natural resources as imports and commodities without care for their sustainability led to workers being treated, in practice, as expendable. We had both the bridge, and the title, and the perfect set up for the denouement:
Seems even the bounty of nature
Can’t last when it’s bonded and bought
Whether forests plowed under for profit
Or seas where the cod’s all been caught
Now the industry's greed won't be sated
Till all the fish are dead
But ain’t it worse if what comes first
Is using up the fishermen instead?
Give it a listen: for me, it’s what it wants to be. (Oh and, by the way: my view of the unspoken end of the song is that the crew does make it back safely after a harrowing trip. The underlying tension is whether the protagonist goes back out the next time…)
True fact: I’ve written (and recorded) a song in a single day. Summer ’29, however took me ten years.
By 2009 I’d written the first stanza, filling almost exactly the first minute with chunky chords in the key of C and some of my favorite lyrics (then and still):
I pulled my ring from a calloused hand sir
Went and pawned it for our daily bread
We took our vows with dreams of for richer
But we must make do with for poorer instead
That July sun on my naked finger
Burnt near bad enough to kill a man
Walking dusty roads home
To where my wife was waiting
When I’d paid the rent
With our wedding band
And then I was stuck.
I’d been leaning on images of abandoned farms for inspiration (like this one). I worked on and off on finishing the song from that angle, but never felt satisfied the song was what it wanted to be.
A first stanza, rhythm, and melody I loved were left stranded at the altar, so to speak.
For years.
It was only when I started to follow a thread looking at photos of couples (Diamonds was inspired by one) that a different way forward started to dawn on me.
This image opened the door.
Title: White sharecropper couple near Hartwell, Georgia
The agony of parting with the wedding ring to pay the bills wasn’t because love had been diminished, or hard times put it at risk. Entirely the opposite: because it endured. Because there was no question, for better or worse, it would last through hard times. I still didn’t know how to finish the song, but I could pivot with lines that snapped to the rhythm and melody:
Courtin' at the county fairs
And revival hall dances...
Things began to come together from there. The addition of an Am chord in the final stanza is a tried-and-true tool in the songwriting toolbox. In this case, it brings forward the ominous, but stands in contrast to shifting back to a major chord at the very end: we’re sad.
No lie: Trouble’ Round the Corner was inspired by close to an even balance of a photograph, a rhythm I had on my mind, and learning something new. Here’s how this song came to be.
For whatever reason, I wanted to use a Bo Didley-esque, punchy strum on a new song. (It didn’t turn out to be exactly the Bo Didley rhythm – nice tutorial on YouTube – but that’s OK, it was an inspiration rather than the destination.)
Messing around with chords and lyrics that seemed to fit got me as far as what you’ll hear in the first twelve or so seconds:
There’s trouble ‘round the corner,
There’s trouble down the street—
And you probably ain’t still breathing
If you ain’t feeling the heat
And that was that. I had no idea what ought to come next.
Now I started to know. I was struck by two things. “Help us” hit me as a human-to-human request. This was hammered home by her direct gaze into the camera.
And the “please.” Please–like it’s for real, it’s serious.
And then I learned something. I suppose I “kinda sorta” knew that what I would describe as a “striker” or “someone with a picket sign” could be described as a “picket.” But “strike pickets” struck as learning something knew. The people could be “pickets.”
“Make yourself a picket” — to “help us win” had to be in the song.
And the song had to be all about a personal appeal to respond to the threats the pickets faced. This led to the motif of using specific names; verse one came first:
There’s trouble ‘round the corner,
There’s trouble down the street—
And you probably ain’t still breathing
If you ain’t feeling the heat
So notify your neighbors
Be they Molly, Moe, or Mike—
They’re busing in the Pinkertons
To break our Local’s strike
Things came together really fast from there. The narrative flow was : there’s trouble coming; it’s based on willful deception; by banding together we can fight back against a stacked deck.
I had the idea of a musical “clarion call” in mind alongside the verbal ask for help. The harmonica starting at 0:37 was exactly the second take of trying to capture “standing at the ramparts, bugling–only with a mouth harp.”
Give it a listen and let me know what you think.
There’s trouble ‘round the corner,
There’s trouble down the street—
And you probably ain’t still breathing
If you ain’t feeling the heat
So notify your neighbors
Be they Molly, Moe, or Mike—
They’re busing in the Pinkertons
To break our Local’s strike
They say the Reds are getting violent
And it’s time for it to stop—
But the “Commie with a gun”
Was an undercover cop
So help us get the word
To every Sally, Sam, and Sue—
They say the workers started trouble
But we know it isn’t true
We know there’s trouble round the corner
‘Cause the governor’s in the tank
For the foremen at the factory
And the fat cats at the bank
So make yourself a picket
Every Johnny, Jane, and Jack
‘Cause we ain’t got guns or money--
But we’ll have each others’ back
Image Dwellers in Circleville’s “Hooverville,” central Ohio, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, U.S. Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 006580-M
Lyrics
Idle hands don’t suit me, I don’t know how to spend my day
Idle hands don’t much suit me, don’t know how to spend my day
Sign on the gate said ‘No men wanted’—
I waited in line there anyway
‘Cause I tried asking for work, then raising my fist in the air
I tried asking for work sir, and then raising my fist in the air
But the bossman he don’t need me—
An the bankerman just don’t care
See when I did worked the factory, I felt no shame being poor
But on account of them big boys ain’t no jobs here no more
That’s why you’ll find me a ghost of who I once was
‘Cause a man’s only as good as what a man does
So the devil lies waiting for the idle it’s true
But the devil must be waiting for the bankerman too
‘Cause to kill a man’s pride surely must be a sin
So I’m gonna save a place here in this hell that I’m in
Image: One dead, fifteen wounded in strike clash, Photograph shows armed deputy sheriffs attacking a crowd of pickets at the Spang-Chalfant Seamless Tube Company plant, near Pittsburgh. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington LC-USZ62-26197
Lyrics:
Passionate hearts, and skilled, willing hands
You’d have thought play some part in the bosses’ grand plans
But the Big Boys back East want to shut this plant down
Takin’ jobs down South, to some non-union town
Or over the border, down Mexico -way—
Where desperation’s making workers beg for pennies a day
‘Cause the boss man’s banner is the dollar, and his battle cry is “More!”
And he’s been doing all the shooting in this haves-on-have-nots war
See the bosses won’t stop pushing till your back’s against the wall
And the bosses won’t stop taking, until they’ve took it all
They’ll take from you by law, and they’ll take from you by theft
They’ll take what you’ve got coming, and they’ll take what you have left—
It’s getting to the point a man can’t care for a family anymore
From losing of battle after battle in this haves-on-have-nots war
All the politicians counsel “turn the other cheek”
Singing praises for the worker while they sell him up the creek
What they call “negotiation” means “they take and you give back”
“Just look, son, to the brighter side of getting ‘squat’ or ‘jack'”
It’s hard to play the hand you’re dealt when every deck is stacked
‘Cause the bosses’ plan ain’t compromise, it’s “attack, attack, attack”
It’s 99-to-one or worse if you’ve been keeping score
Advantage to the rich man, in this haves-on-have-nots war
See the bosses won’t stop pushing till we’re too afraid to take a stand
And there ain’t a union left unbroken across this whole hard land
They’ll do it by dividing us and breaking locals one by one
With contracts or their cronies—or with the Pinkerton’s gun—
It’s getting to the point my friend where a man can’t hardly live
In this war on working people mister something’s got to give
Image: Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas. The families of evicted sharecroppers of the Dibble plantation. They were legally evicted the week of January 12, 1936, the plantation having charged that by membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union they were engaging in a conspiracy to retain their homes; this contention granted by the court, the eviction, though at the point of a gun, was quite legal. The pictures were taken just after the evictions before they were moved into the tent colony they later enjoyed U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs LC-USF34- 014009-E
Lyrics:
Some say a good lord sits in judgment
Of how we treat our fellow man
But the Boss, he don’t believe it—
I just don’t see how he can
While putting screws to desperate workers
When times are hard and things get tough
He’ll squeeze you till you’re barely breathing
And takin’ all you had’s still not enough
Some say a good lord sits in judgment
Of how we treat our fellow man
But the Banker don’t believe it—
I just don’t see how he can
While putting families on the street sir
‘Cause they’re behind on a mortgage note
In good times he’ll slap your back and share you credit
In bad you’ll find his foot on your throat
Some say a good lord sits in judgment
Of how we treat our fellow man
But the Governor don’t believe it—
I just don’t see how he can
While doing the bidding of the Bosses
And carrying the Banker’s water too
He’ll shake a poor man’s hand and talk your ear off
But there ain’t a damn thing he’ll do for you
Oh it’s clear he’s got no fear of
Owning what he’s done in this life
He’s all smiles to your face sir
But you turn your back, he’ll twist the knife
Some say a good lord sits in judgment
Sir I do hope this is true—
That for these hard times we might see justice
For all the evils that men do
For all the evils that men do
Hard Times Hundred & One 