on the job, you may get a song. But there's no song from a signed labor contract." With lumberjacks, Joe says, it is much the same; they used to sing about the hazards of rolling logs, but they now sometimes fly to work and worry whether their steaks are thick enough.[150]
In recent years, many if not most of the new workers' songs have come out of the South where the labor unions have not been strong, or from the migratory workers in the Southwest and West who, several years ago, formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL–CIO, under Cesar Chavez. Under the leadership of Chavez the Farm Workers are carrying on the tradition of the Knights of Labor, the British dockers, the Wobblies, and the older AFL–CIO unions, all of whom have told in song of their struggles and hopes for a better life. Such are the songs used by the grape pickers in their successful strike against the growers of Delano, California. They were heard at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in July 1967 when Luis M. Valdez of the Farm Workers led his troupe—between the skits of El Teatro Campesino, the Farm Workers' propaganda theater—in songs that were "strongly reminiscent" of the strike songs of the troubled 1930s.[151]
Probably the most dramatic use of song by and on behalf of the underprivileged in recent years has been in connection with interracial sit-ins and marches. No one who was present at the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 can ever forget the moving experience of hearing the hopeful multitude sing "We Shall Overcome":
We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome some day.
Oh, oh, deep in my heart I do believe
That we shall overcome some day.[*]
This, like the labor version of "Hold the Fort," is based upon a religious song whose antecedents lie far in the undocumented past. In its present form it owes much to several persons, including Pete Seeger who learned the labor version, "We Will Overcome," from Zilphia Horton who had learned it in 1947 at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, from members of the CIO Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union. It had been adapted by these workers from an old church
* We Shall Overcome. New words and music arrangement by Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, and Pete Seeger. Copyright 1960 and 1963 Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by Permission. Royalties derived from this composition are being contributed to The Freedom Movement under the trusteeship of the writers.
