Songs for America

Folk legend and fair-labor advocate Joe Glazer will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and perform at the 31st annual New Jersey Folk Festival.

By: Aleen Crispino

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Staff photo by Name
JOE GLAZER


   Joe Glazer and his Martin guitar have been together for 55 years. The acoustic instrument has accompanied the folksinger, labor educator and social historian to 49 states and 60 countries in his long career as "Labor’s Troubadour."
   Mr. Glazer will be presented with a New Jersey Folk Festival Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual student-run event, to be held on the grounds of the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University in New Brunswick April 30. Not content to rest on past accomplishments, he will perform two sets. At age 86, he is far from retired.
   Over the years, he has sung and played for union workers at countless meetings, rallies and picket lines; at Civil Rights demonstrations; and at campaign rallies for Democratic presidential candidates such as Hubert Humphrey, whom he knew well. A highlight of his career is a celebration for Labor Day 1980, when he led 1,000 labor leaders on the South Lawn of the White House in singing "We Shall Not Be Moved" for President Jimmy Carter.
   In a telephone interview from his home in Chevy Chase, Md., where he resides with his wife of 63 years, Mildred, Mr. Glazer reflects on his long career.
   "When I was 15 years old, I got my first guitar by mail order from Sears & Roebuck," he reminisces. "I sent in a money order. For $5.95 it included a soft case with a picture of a cowboy on it — I got a better one later," he says, referring to the Martin, made by the Nazareth, Pa., company that is well-known to acoustic guitarists.
   "I was brought up in the Bronx — there were not many cowboys there — but I heard cowboy singers in movies and on the radio and I got started singing cowboy songs," he says.
   Mr. Glazer describes in his autobiography, Labor’s Troubadour, how as a teenager his younger sister Gail would help him jot down the lyrics to about 50 folk songs they heard on the radio. It was 1933, in the midst of the Depression, and the Glazer family, with seven children, could not afford a phonograph.
   Afterward, in his high school library, he discovered a book that would have made his research a lot easier, The American Song Bag by Carl Sandburg.
   "I couldn’t believe it!" Mr. Glazer wrote. "Just about every one of the songs I had so laboriously collected were in Sandburg’s book. There was ‘John Henry’ and ‘Jesse James,’ ‘The Old Chisholm Trail,’ ‘The Streets of Laredo,’ ‘The Little Old Sod Shanty,’ ‘When the Work’s All Done This Fall,’ and dozens more."
   After high school, Mr. Glazer earned degree in physics and math at Brooklyn College. He served during World War II as a civilian instructor teaching mathematics and physics to Air Force students, and he enrolled in a graduate mathematics program at the University of Wisconsin. His wife was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in labor economics, and he became fascinated by the history of the labor movement through reading her textbooks. He soon switched majors to labor economics and industrial relations and took several related courses, whereupon the war ended and, with it, his Air Force job.
   In 1944, at age 26, Mr. Glazer was hired by the education department of the Textile Workers Union of America to give classes in collective bargaining, public speaking, running meetings and labor legislation. He began his work in New Jersey, helping to organize the 10,000 woolen and worsted workers of Passaic. He worked for the TWUA for six years, traveling to textile plants all over New England and the South to teach classes and rally the workers with rousing union songs.
   "Music grabs the soul," he says. "Sometimes a speech doesn’t move you."
   Between 1961 and 1980, Mr. Glazer was employed by the U.S. Information Agency, best known for its Voice of America radio broadcasts, and served through five presidential administrations, from Kennedy to Carter, to "interpret American life in song and story" to overseas audiences.
   He speaks with pride of being the first to record the song "We Shall Overcome," in 1950, before it had been adopted as the anthem of the Civil Rights movement. Written as the Christian hymn "I’ll Overcome Some Day" by Charles Tindley in 1900, it was sung as "We Will Overcome" during a strike by members of the Food and Tobacco Workers Union in Charleston, S.C. in 1945 — followed, in the next verse, by "We will organize." Mr. Glazer notes that, ironically, he led thousands of mostly white textile workers in singing this version of the song throughout the South, later recording it on a 78 rpm record titled Eight New Songs for Labor.
   Also on Eight New Songs for Labor, the first of 30 recordings by Mr. Glazer, is a song he wrote, "The Mill Was Made of Marble." It depicts an idealized version of a textile mill in which "The mill was made of marble/ The machines were made out of gold/ Nobody ever got tired/ And nobody ever grew old."
   In addition to labor and union songs, Mr. Glazer sings songs about immigrants and of the struggles of men, women and children to make a life for themselves in America. The songs in his 1994 CD, Folk Songs of the American Dream, run the gamut from "America, America!" to "No Irish Need Apply," "Starving to Death on My Government Claim" and "Babies in the Mill." A 1996 recording, Joe Glazer Sings Labor Songs, contains classic union songs such as "Joe Hill," "We Shall Not Be Moved/Roll the Union On," "Which Side Are You On" and "John Henry."
   Mr. Glazer says he never has liked to be introduced at labor or political events as an "entertainer."
   "I don’t go as just entertainment," he says, adding he prefers to be called a singer of "songs that tell a story" or "songs for America."
   Though the subject matter of his songs is often heavy, Mr. Glazer has a mellow baritone voice and many of the songs in this genre have upbeat, country-and-western-style melodies. Unlike some blues songs, for example, in which the depths of one person’s sorrow are met head on in the hope of an emotional catharsis, in this style of folk songs the serious subject matter is tackled with an oblique touch of humor and irony. One imagines that these songs were written to cheer the downtrodden, to inspire the sympathy of others and to rally the whole group to action.
   Mr. Glazer started his own record label in 1970. Collector Records specializes in "labor, protest and political songs, with special emphasis on labor and union songs." The catalog includes cassettes and CDs by Mr. Glazer as well as those of other labor singers.
   He is co-author, with Edith Fowke, of the classic Songs of Work and Protest. He is the founder, in 1978, of the Labor Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization for the promotion of labor music, art and culture.
   And he is the focus of a 40-minute documentary titled Labor’s Troubadour: Joe Glazer Sings Songs of Work and Freedom, which is scheduled to premiere at the Smithsonian Institute June 18.
   At the New Jersey Folk Festival, Mr. Glazer will be on the Skylands stage during the awards and acknowledgements portion of the program, from 12:15 to 12:30 p.m., after which he will perform his first half-hour set of labor songs. Later, he will perform "Songs from the American Immigrant" at 3:10 p.m. on the Pinelands stage.
   Norwegian culture is the theme of the 31st New Jersey Folk Festival. Performers will include the duo Daughters of Scandinavia, who play traditional Hardanger fiddle music; the Nansen Norwegian Folk Dancers; another duo, Scandinavian Delight, who play bell accordion and tuba, and Sonja Savig, singer of medieval ballads and traditional folk songs. A Viking ship replica and encampment by the Ostvik Viking historical re-enactors round out the theme-related portion of the program.
   Local favorites on the bill include singer-songwriter Bob Norman of Lawrence, Truman Goines of the Sourland Mountains folk/blues duo Bliggins and Goines, and the Sugar Sand Ramblers, who specialize in folk songs of the Pinelands region. There will be a juried craft market, a folkmusic marketplace, storytellers, ethnic foods and children’s activities.
   If you are looking for Mr. Glazer, you will find him on stage, in front of a crowd, leading a song and encouraging others to join in.
   "When you sing something that grabs the people, when you’re fighting for a cause, and they become more inspired and have more solidarity." That, Mr. Glazer says with enthusiasm, is the greatest reward.
The 31st New Jersey Folk Festival will take place on the grounds of the Eagleton Institute on the Douglass campus of Rutgers University, George Street and Ryders Lane, New Brunswick, April 30, 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Free admission. For information, call (732) 932-5775. On the Web: njfolkfest.rutgers.edu
Labor’s Troubadour by Joe Glazer (University of Illinois Press, 2001) is available in paperback. To request a catalog of recordings from Collector Records, write: Collector Records, 9225 Wendell St., Silver Spring, MD 20902.