1913 Massacre
| "1913 Massacre" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Woody Guthrie | |
| from the album Struggle | |
| Released | 1941 |
| Genre | Folk |
| Songwriter(s) | Woody Guthrie |
"1913 Massacre" is a topical ballad written by Woody Guthrie, and recorded and released in 1941 for Moses Asch's Folkways label. The song originally appeared on Struggle, an album of labor songs, it was eventually re-released in 1999 on Buffalo Skinners: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 4. The song is about the deaths of striking copper miners and their families in Calumet, Michigan, on Christmas Eve, 1913, commonly known as the Italian Hall disaster.
Throughout the 1940s, Guthrie recorded hundreds of discs for Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records. One of the songs that was recorded out of those hundreds was the “1913 Massacre”. Woody started writing this song around 1941. According to Pete Seeger he had the idea of the song after reading about the Italian Hall disaster in Mother Bloor's autobiography, We Are Many (1940). Guthrie's own notes indicate that he got the idea for the song "from the life of Mother Bloor", who was an eyewitness to the events at Italian Hall on Christmas Eve, 1913. A socialist and a labor organizer from the East Coast, Bloor was in Calumet working on the miners' behalf with the Ladies Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners. She was greatly assisted in this work by Annie Clemenc, also known as Big Annie of Calumet – the "lady" in Woody's song who hollers "'there's no such a thing! / Keep on with your party, there's no such a thing.'" Bloor tells the story of the Calumet strike and the Italian Hall disaster in the first half of a chapter called "Massacre of the Innocents." She devotes the second half of the chapter to events in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, the subject of another Woody Guthrie song — "Ludlow Massacre."
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