May Day, Music and Me: Memories from a Red Childhood

Republishing a biographic essay I wrote for May Day 2014

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

first published 19th April 2014