Which Side Are You On?

Artist:
Guy Carawan

Description:

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by Florence Reece

Listen at 56k || Listen at 256k

Strike in Harlan County in 1939, the year the operators recognized the UMW. Photo: Life Magazine. Click to pop up.

The attempt of the United Mine Workers to organize the coal industry in Harlan County in the 1930s resulted in outbreaks of violence, drawing national attention. In 1937 a US Senate subcommittee began an investigation into allegations that workers' civil rights were being violated. Further violence ensued. The governor sent the National Guard in to protect the owners' property. Victory came in 1939 when the UMW was recognized as bargaining agent for most of the state's miners.

This storied song arises from the early part of that period. Guy Carawan of the Tennessee Highlander Center introduces it this way:

One song, goes way back in Highlander's history -- and the woman who wrote it Florence Reece is still living, she's about 80 years old, lives in Knoxville -- is "Which Side are You On?" And she wrote that back in the 30s when the gun thugs tried to murder her husband for trying to organize a union up in Harlan County...."

1939 strike. Click to pop up. Photo: Life Magazine.

Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer tell it like this:

The bloodiest battles to build a union have been in the coal fields -- in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois, Colorado, and Kentucky. And surely the toughest and meanest of all the coal field where men fought for a voice and a place in the sun was "Bloody Harlan" in Kentucky.

...

In 1931, coal miners in Harlan County were on strike. Armed company deputies roamed the countryside, terrorizing the mining communities, looking for union leaders to beat, jail, or kill. But coal miners, brought up lean and hard in the Kentucky mountain country, knew how to fight back, and heads were bashed and bullets fired on both sides in Bloody Harlan.

Florence Reece celebrates her 85th Birthday at Highlander Center, April 1985. Photo: Gary Hamilton.

It was this kind of class war -- the mine owners and their hired deputies on one side, and the independent, free-wheeling Kentucky coal-miners on the other -- that provided the climate for Florence Reece's "Which Side Are You On?" In it she captured the spirit of her times with blunt eloquence.

Mrs. Reece wrote from personal experience. Her husband, Sam, was one of the union leaders, and Sheriff J. H. Blair and his men came to her house in search of him when she was alone with her seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, ready to shoot Sam down if he returned.

One day during this tense period Mrs. Reece tore a sheet from a wall calendar and wrote the words to "Which Side Are You On?" The simple form of the song made it easy to adapt for use in other strikes, and many different versions have circulated.

The tune is usually said to be an old Baptist Hymn, "Lay the Lily Low," but the British folklorist, A. L. Lloyd, points out its similarity to that of the British ballad, "Jack Munro," which uses "Lay the Lily Low" as a refrain.