May Day, Music and Me: Memories from a Red Childhood
Melbourne Trades Hall is a rambling pile of bluestone in the middle
of Carlton, and I know it very well. The bannister of the main staircase
is the BEST one for sliding down, ever. I spent a great deal of time
there, growing up. Particularly around May Day, an annual ritual in my
family. Both sides of my family have been reds for generations. The
family histories – also very much a part of Australia's refugee history –
merge a couple of generations back, when immigrant communities were
brought together in the rag trades of working-class Carlton.
For the month of April, my whole community spent every spare moment at
Trades Hall, frantically preparing for the annual May Day celebration.
Every afternoon and weekend was basically a working bee. There was a
gang of us red babies there, of various ages. The grownups assumed that
we would look after each other, which we did. We also scared each other
with shaggy dog stories, dared each other to brave dark corridors and
try door handles, and climbed over and under all sorts of places we
shouldn't.
I had a good time at all the build up events: the ball, the film night,
the wreath laying at the 8 hour monument (where I always tried to be
solemn and always got the giggles for some reason). But the best day was
always May Day itself. Everybody in my extended family was there,
including people I only ever got to see on that day. (Shorty O'Neill,
for example. I was convinced that he came south every year just to hang
out with us kids). And though I loved the march, (carrying a red flag,
watching the Kurdish circle dances and blocking traffic, riding back to
Trades Hall on the back of the truck), the best bit, as far as I was
concerned, was the after dinner concert in the Trades Hall Ballroom. It
was always packed with people. Everyone got a copy of the May Day
Songbook (reprinted every year, for some reason. It never really changed
much). And we sang socialist songs. All of us, together.
My propensity for political music was basically formed during these
community sing-along events. (My interest in soapboxing comes from the
events at the Yarra Bank, but that's another story). When I grew old
enough to carry a tune, I joined the May Day singers, the choir that
formed up every year to lead the singing. And I still carry the words
and tune for those songs around in my head. It was those community
singing sessions, a packed room of people raising the rafters, that has
fixed the equation between solidarity, history and music in my mind. I
love to watch a good band, listen to a concert. When I sing myself,
though, I always want to sing along with others, and I have joined many a
choir over the years.
And though those particular singalongs stand out for me, they run
against a continual background of exposure to the singer-songwriters
that carried on these traditions of working class story and song. Pete
Seeger was on high rotation at home, of course, and I loved to sing
along to those records. Paul Robeson, (whom I became obsessed with at
about the age of 14 - possibly there were hormones involved) does the
best version of the “Ballad of Joe Hill”, although my inner social
historian loves the way this song has been rewritten throughout the
twentieth century. A little later on, I discovered Billy Bragg, and an
English music tradition, and wonderful Scottish-Australians like Eric
Bogle and Alistair Hulett- and I sing along with all that too. (Well,
not Paul Robeson. To him, I just listen, in awe).
The songs that I really relate to are the ones where the tune is
appropriate to the lyrics. I can't explain it any better than that. “The
Men Behind the Wire” is one example. “Bella Ciao”, although that was
probably sentiment, too, since it represents my (Italian communist)
great-grandfather in my mind. Eric Bogle's “Singing the Spirit Home.”.
El Pueblo Unido.
A lot of the really good songs in that songbook were written by the
Industrial Workers of the World. The first song I consciously remember
learning the words to is Ralph Chaplin's “Solidarity Forever”.
Australian socialist historiography is based on a strange mixture of
British and American influences, and nothing reflects this better than
the pages of the May Day songbook. The IWW - not the Australian
movement, strangely enough, but the American one - is an important part
of the musical narrative. The Wobbly songs keep popping up.
A solidarity song can emerge from the collective emotional experience
of a struggle, such as "Bread and Roses". It's useful to know actual
story behind it- the story of Lawrence textile strike of 1912 (Utah
Philips tells it best), but not necessary. The song itself is poetry,
it's about meaning and desire, which makes it universal. Some songs,
teach history directly, in a way that cements it in the mind. To recall
the story of the Queensland Shearers Strike, for example, I just have to
hum the first few bars of the "Ballad of 1891", and up it pops. Joe
Hill once said, “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than
once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over...”*
It's no coincidence, to my mind, that the best contemporary political
musicians are red card holders or fellow travellers. Musicians joining
the IWW is a tradition, and for good reason. This personal memory shows
(I hope) why the stories of May Day and the IWW are deeply intertwined
in my mind, along with this triangle of social change, radical history,
and song.
*p.19, Smith, Gibbs M. Joe Hill. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, c1969
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