Songs about Work: Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A. Reuss. Edited by Archie Green. Special Publications of the Folklore Institute, No. 3. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Pp. vi + 360, illustrations, music, notes, bibliography. $39.95 cloth, $17.50 paper) Social historian and folklorist Richard A. Reuss (1940-1986) believed deeply in democratic ideals of social and economic parity across lines of class, race, and gender, concerns he identified with disenfranchised American labor groups, grassroots workers, and their spokespersons both within and outside of workers' culture. Grounded in liberal thought (16), Reuss two decades ago emerged eminent in his scholarship on social struggle and protest voiced through song. He remains an oft-cited specialist on Woody Guthrie, protest songmaking, and folksong left-wing circles between World War I and the late 1970s, especially in his Songs of American Labor, Industrialization and the Urban Work Experience: A Discography (1983). Dick Reuss was a generous researcher whose brilliant work was cut short by illness. This memorial tribute begins with stirring remembrances by five persons, including both his widow and the distinguished editor, Archie Green, who is largely responsible for the Festschrift's high standards. Fourteen essayssome previously published in folklore journals during the 1980s-present case studies on worksongs, songs about work, and music of social significance. Green wisely eschews the temptation to group the eclectic contributions into organizational categories: If a thread of unity need be defined, it is work's many faces (17). Indeed, all of the essays, like the songs they consider, variously foreground grassroots work experience, trade unionism, workers' protest activism, and mediations between labor and management. Michael Heisley, for instance, brings together such threads among Mexican-American corrido singers and the California farm workers' movement during the 1960s and '70s. In the volume, Anglo-Scots-Irish and African-American working-class conditions in the South loom foremost, though James P. Leary and Richard jointly argue for an expanded ethnic group diversity in a sampling of non-English and dialect immigrant labor songs and recitations from immigrants to the Upper Midwest's farms, lumber camps, and factories. Issues pertinent to singers and musicians, songmaking, and dissemination through print and records also arise here and there; in one example, Neil V. Rosenberg pursues how and why Coal Creek March has achieved durability in folk revival circles and contexts beyond labor history. Two essays on Joe Hill and one on Woody Guthrie would no doubt have immediately caught Reuss's attention. …
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Jan 1, 2011
Imani Sanga 
Open Access
