Chapter 13 - We’re Up Against It Now

Summary

It’s hard times. The stock market climbs to a precipitous height while farmers sing, "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" Cotton prices are down, and they sing about it. Railroad strikes fail, and they sing about it. The Scopes Monkey Trial pits science against superstition, and they sing about it. The musical Show Boat breaks the Broadway color line, but Black blues singers still sing of their own invisibility in a racist culture. Arguments rage over primitivism in Black musical culture. Blind Lemon Jefferson takes on the inhumanity of capital punishment, and many more sing against the unjust execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. There is trouble sung on the Ford production line and in rural holdouts resisting the coming dominance of the automobile. But modernity has arrived with a vengeance – not least in the form of the “Flapper” and the “New Girl,” a subject of worry in the more macho sectors of song. On the Gastonia front line, the striking textile worker and balladeer Ella May Wiggins takes a fatal bullet in the chest, and in Spanish Harlem, Rafael Hernández Marín composes his “Lamento Borincano,” Puerto Rico’s own “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”