During my research for an upcoming article on Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s creative friendship, which preceded the years depicted in the recently released Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, I stumbled across the story of one of their union-friendly songs, “Union Maid.” It was one of many of their songs that would later be sung in union halls and picket lines across the country for decades to come.
In one of the earlier examples of the great American road trip, a young Woody Guthrie picked up an even younger Pete Seeger to make their way from the historic and urban lands of the northeast to the sprawling prairies of Texas. The two were politically charged folk singers, some of the first to combine all the moving pieces of songs sung by everyday working folks in churches, on picket lines, and in the fields to establish a national folk movement.
Neither was famous at the time, but Guthrie was making waves on New York radio stations while Seeger worked under the great folk archivist Alan Lomax in D.C. The events that unfolded on the trip would make an entertaining feature-length film—writing songs, singing on the street for gas money, and securing pharmaceuticals for a hitchhiker with no legs who went by Brooklyn Speedy—but it wasn’t until they reached the home of Communist Party organizers in Oklahoma City that they realized they’d made a serious blunder.
Upon visiting party organizers Bob and Ina Wood, the couple swiftly lined up an itinerary of stages and fields for them to sing in. Communists were known throughout the country as being the fiercest union organizers and advocates for the unemployed, and so when arriving in the town, it was Guthrie’s idea to immediately establish contact. From striking oil workers to the Unemployed Workers’ Alliance, the Woods threw the pair out in front of the struggles facing Oklahoma workers at the time.
But Ina, in her infinite wisdom and bluntness, made a simple observation: Neither of them had written any songs about women.
“Isn’t it about time you wrote a union song for women?” Ina asked them, as told in David Dunaway’s biography of Pete Seeger. The gender gap in their musical oeuvre was a bit embarrassing for the pair, who called themselves communists and therefore sought to fight against “male chauvinism.” It was a problem that was immediately addressed.
Although tired from traveling, they sat down to write a song. “Pete flopped out acrost a bed, and I set over at a Writing Machine, and he could think of one line and me another’n until we woke up with a great big fifteen-pound blue-eyed Union Song, I mean Union, named ‘Union Maid,’” Woody later wrote. Seeger was initially critical of the lyrics. It was, however, the singing of the song that won him over.
“Like almost everything Woody wrote, including most of his prose, it was written for the ear more than the eye,” Guthrie biographer Joe Klein wrote.”[I]t sounded better than it read.” Set to the tune of “Redwing,” the chorus, “Oh you can’t scare me I’m stickin’ to the union,” is hard to get out of your head.
“Union Maid” was altered over the years, as most good folk music is. It wasn’t long after that the Almanac Singers, which included Seeger and Guthrie, recorded their album Talking Union, that featured “Union Maid” with a new verse written by Almanac member Millard Lampell. It was later criticized by feminists for calling for union women to get freedom by marrying “a man with a union card.” This was later revised.
By the late 1940s, the tide had changed, with the U.S. going from being allied with the Soviet Union to turning against it (and anyone espousing communist ideology or doing working-class organizing). Everyone associated with the Communist Party or the progressive Henry Wallace presidential campaign, which, in Seeger’s case, included both, was all of a sudden out of work. The anti-Communist “left” was growing, and the government was trying to pick apart the Communist Party. The Cold War was on. This led to another verse addition by anti-Communists that mocked “the games the C.P. factions played.”
It was only months after Seeger and Guthrie’s visit to Oklahoma in 1940 that Bob and Ina were arrested and charged under the 1919 Oklahoma Criminal Syndicalism Act for selling “radical” books in their bookstore. They were sentenced to ten years in prison, and their books, all of which were already available in local libraries, were reportedly taken to the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds and burned.
While Guthrie later claimed the song was inspired by a Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union organizer who was tortured for her activism, Ina was clearly the more direct influence—a true embodiment of a union maid who never was afraid of the “company finks and the deputy sheriffs that made the raid.”
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