On a warm October evening in Pittsburgh, seated on the cavernous porch of a Quaker meeting house, Edwin Everhart tuned his guitar and checked his phone. In between he shuffled packets filled with labor song lyrics, and craned his neck to scan the street for the first arrivals.
"We'll see how many people show up tonight," he said. "It depends."
Edwin, the exceptionally enthusiastic director of the Pittsburgh Labor Choir, was eager for this week’s rehearsal to begin, and dressed for the occasion.
A blue pin on his sweater reading "PGH without the PG?" — a reference to the ongoing strike at the Post-Gazette, the region's largest newspaper — glinted in the porch light.
It is a busy time to be a labor choir director in this city.
Unions are taking root in coffee shops, museums, libraries, universities, and public radio.
They’re also taking action at places like the Post-Gazette, where employees have gone years without a new contract or raises.
(The paper’s publisher says the Post-Gazette isn’t making money. Critics note the paper’s ownership company — the Block Communications Inc. conglomerate — certainly is.)
Since forming in 2020, at the cusp of a resurgent moment for organized labor nationwide, Pittsburgh's labor choir has performed at least a dozen times at picket lines and pro-union demonstrations across the city.
"Any time the whole big group is singing along, it's so phenomenal," Edwin said. "You get that electric… What’s the Durkheim word? 'Effervescence' moment."
Full membership, though fluid, can exceed a dozen people.
Only a handful turned out for Monday's practice, which included Edwin, several other in-person singers, a group of people watching via Zoom, and the occasional passerby who gawked at the strangers belting out coal mining songs on a street in Shadyside, blocks from Millionaire's Row.
For an hour and a half the assembled choir members ran through a catalog spanning Woody Guthrie’s anti-fascist anthems and protest songs from Italy, Chile, and beyond.
Edwin offered a little history between each. At the end of Guthrie’s "Pittsburgh Town," capped by the line "They're joining up in the C.I.O.," he asked a child in attendance if they wanted an explanation. The child said no and Edwin relented but then, seemingly unable to resist, offered one anyway, highlighting the 1955 merger that created the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States. The child nodded.
Edwin is an educator by day. He said his choral awakening happened while completing his Ph.D in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His labor awakening happened around the same time, while he was monitoring a cadre of unpaid university interns.
When Edwin left California and returned home to Pittsburgh, he brought the idea for a labor choir with him. Years later, he's leading one of the last examples in the state. (It may, in fact, be the last example.)
"There would have been a million of these things in the 30s and 40s," he explained. "There were socialist choirs and union choirs all over the place. Pittsburgh had multiple choirs per language group: The Lithuanian Socialist Choir, the Polish, the Slovenian, the Yiddish…"
The songbook he uses is something of a historical document itself, filled with century-old "bangers," like "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Joe Hill." A good labor song, according to Edwin, is catchy, accessible, and adaptable — words are swapped to suit a given picket line or grievance.
While the musical substance is heavy, the mood at Monday's practice was not. It was celebratory or, as first-timer Steph Sorensen put it, a moment "more about solidarity than the struggle directly."
Asked why most people join a labor choir, Edwin said it varies, and pulled responses from a survey the choir conducted a while back.
"One person said 'the songs are bangers … and participating in a choir is an embodied experience … just bringing people into contact with one another,'" he quoted.
He paused and then read another: "Social change should not just be against barbarism but for joy."
Read more: - Classic labor songs from Smithsonian Folkways (Smithsonian)
- Calls for solidarity in today's music industry (Vanity Fair)
- Pa.'s old-school unions are evolving (100 Days in Appalachia)
- Why Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists went on strike (NPR)
—Colin Deppen, PA Local editor |
