Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912-1936

Western Folklore, Winter 2006 by Huber, Patrick

REDNECK MINERS AND RED BANDANAS

One significant and meaningful way in which the UMW and other unions sought to cultivate this fragile multi-racial unionism among white, black, and immigrant miners was their redefinition of the epithet redneck and their adoption of the nickname, along with red handkerchiefs, as badges of union identity and class solidarity. Industrial folklorist George Korson, for example, collected a song tided "Red Necks," which a Pennsylvania miner named Fred Brown composed around 1927 to the tune of the Tin Pan Alley song "Red Lips Kiss My Blues Away." According to Korson, a miners' quartet introduced the song at a 1927 UMW rally honoring the union's national president John L. Lewis at Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and it soon became "widely popular" among striking miners in the western coalfields of that state (1927:430). The song contrasts the proud miners, identified as "Red Necks," with the despised strikebreakers known as "scabs." The lyrics, as transcribed by Korson, follow:

Red Necks, keep them scabs away,

Red Necks, fight them every day.

Now any old time you see a scab passin' by,

Now don't hesitate-blacken both of his eyes.

Red Necks, don't admit defeat,

Don't give up this fight.

We're goin' to win this strike

Things again are goin' to be all right.

You've got to keep the scabs away! (Korson 1943:430)

Another mining labor song, "West Virginia Hills," also contrasts the terms redneck and scab. A Baptist preacher and coal miner named Walter Seacrist wrote the lyrics to this song parody in the early 1930s and set them to the tune of the state's unofficial anthem. The chorus goes:

Over the hills, beautiful hills,

There's a union in the West Virginia hills!

Tho' o'er scab fields I should roam,

Still I'll dream of happy home,

And the Rednecks in the West Virginia Hills (Fowke and Glazer 1960:56-57).

The term redneck as a positive identity marker also appears in Jim Garland's 1932 song "Welcome the Traveler Home." Garland, an NMU miner and organizer, composed the song in early 1932, after he was forced to flee Harlan County, Kentucky, because of indictments against him for criminal syndicalism stemming from his strike organizing activities. "I was going back [to Harlan County] after being in the North for a period of three months," he explained. ".... I was expectin' to be put in jail, for that reason before going back, I composed this song" (Lomax, Guthrie, and seeger 1967:172). One of the defiant verses of "Welcome the Traveler Home" goes:

When I get back to Kentucky,

And I get my .45's on,

There'll be another Boston Tea Party

If they try to welcome this red-neck home (Garland 1983:174).

One final example of redneck in song situates the term in southern Colorado. Woody Guthrie's ballad "The Ludlow Massacre," originally released on Asch Records in 1941 on Struggle: Documentary No. 1, commemorates the fierce 14-hour gun battle between a tent colony of striking miners and an armed force of Colorado national guardsmen and company guards on April 20, 1914, which left approximately 33 miners, their wives, and their children dead. One verse follows: