![]() ![]() ![]() Accordingly, six of Gunning’s songs are featured here while her sister and brother, Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland, also feature. She was recorded in the 1930’s and rediscovered in the folk boom of the early 1960’s and it was her inclusion in Lomax’s book which led Moore to investigate it. Gunning sang about the working conditions of the coal miners, their families and the struggles of the unions against thuggish owners. Moore’s interest in the songs of Sarah Ogan Gunning, an activist and singer from the coal mining regions of Kentucky, was the spark for the album. It’s a reminder that times were certainly tough back then and also that the American working class were much more radical with communism and anarchy popular while strikes were often broken with savage violence by the forces of capitalism. ‘Working- Class Heroes’ finds folk singers Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore revisiting 20 songs mainly culled from ‘Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People’, a book compiled by Alan Lomax with notes on the songs from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, which was published in the sixties. You know times must be tough when an album of pre World War 2 working class American songs sounds topical. ![]()
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