Track Listing

1. Boss
2. We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years
3. Sheep and Goats
4. Timberbeast's Lament
5. Dump the Bosses off Your Back
6. Lumberjack's Prayer
7. Mr. Block
8. Preacher and the Slave
9. Popular Wobbly
10. Casey Jones
11. Where the Fraser River Flows
12. Bread and Roses
13. Joe Hill
14. Union Burying Ground
15. Two Bums
16. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
17. Solidarity Forever
18. There Is Power in a Union

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41756 in Music
• Brand: PHILLIPS,UTAH
• Released on: 2009-02-02
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Live
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Album Description
Like Woody Guthrie before him, Utah Phillips is a folksinger who knows that a song can be a powerful weapon in the politics of class struggle. On this album, he performs songs from the celebrated "Little Red Songbook" of the Industrial Workers of the World union (better known as the Wobblies). First published in 1909, the IWW songbook offered parodies of Salvation Army favorites, plus other well-known tunes which were used as rallying cries in the early days of labor organization, including "Joe Hill," Guthrie's "Union Burying Ground" and Mac McClintock's "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum."

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Customer Reviews

Humor and sing-alongs for working people
I had this record on tape for years and just about wore it out, so I was ecstatic to find it here on CD. The Wobblies' songs definitely take some shots at religion -- the sort of religion that promises "pie in the sky when you die" and advises the oppressed and exploited to wait until then to get some of it. But anyone who cares about making *this* world better needs this record.

Wobblies of the World Untie!
In some ways more of a document, this album would probably shock some people into fits. "The boss", the opening track, is, well, shocking for some people.

None the less, the song listing for this is incomplete, the title song is tehre, "sheep and goats", "casey jones the union scab", "bread and roses" and "The Popular Wobbly" are all here.

It's a collection of old Wobbly songs, and a pretty good historical liner on what a wobbly was.

Personally, I find much of the album refreshing, but I'm not typical, nor do I hold with the typical person's sanctity of religious matters.

If you're devout, it's probably going to make you twitch.

If you're not, this is a take on what happens when the common man goes chaotic.

Utah Phillips, as always, is great.

The Joe Hill song collection
This is mostly a collection of the songs and poetry supposedly written by the legendary I.W.W. martyr Joe Hill. It is interesting more as an historical collection of the earliest songs of the I.W.W union movement than for its musical content. Much of music used in these songs where written by others. Joe Hill would change the original lyrics to promote the I.W.W. and its socialist movement, and call the so-called hated enemy names.