By Michael George Smith
This is really the story of a remarkable American singer-songwriter named Si Kahn, whose work is very much in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and that young whippersnapper to took that tradition into the mainstream, Bob Dylan, but whose music is nowhere near as well known outside of those working within the folk tradition – with a few well know outliers. This is also the story of another American singer-songwriter, George Mann, who Kahn chose to help him celebrate his 80th birthday by putting together an album. Michael George Smith investigates.
“I’ve known Si for years,” Mann begins, “but we’ve never actually met more than a couple of times – we’ve been in a couple of festivals together and are friends over the Internet. I started recording some of his songs on my albums. In 2016 I did his song ‘Paper Heart’, which is a beautiful song about the death of Joe Hill (the title references the paper target pinned to Hill’s chest at which the firing squad was to aim at the execution of the Swedish-American labour activist in November 1915). A couple of years later I this other song by Si that’s on this album, ‘They All Sang Bread And Roses’ for my 2021 release, and in 2023, for my This Chain album I did ‘Aragon Mill’, which is his best known song. So we kept in touch, and talking last year, by email, he told me how much what I was doing with his songs and arrangements that I was creating and he said, ‘It’s kind of weird but next year I turn eighty and I’ve been thinking I would really like it if there was a Labour folk singer around here would put together an album of some of my songs for my birthday. Do you know anybody?’”
The result is the 21-song album Mann arranged and produced, Labor Day: A Tribute to Hardworking People Everywhere. And the reason that it’s based around the idea of Labour, or Labor in the American, is that, though Kahn did write other kinds of songs, it was his songs celebrating the American Labor movement – the unions – that made his name, and it was as a civil rights and Labor organiser and activist that he spent more than 45 years of his life, founding an organisation named Grassroots Leadership in 1980, a non-profit organization advocating for, among other causes, prison reform, more humane and equitable immigration detention policies (still all too relevant) and violence prevention. As the accompanying press release notes, Kahn is the only artist in the history of Folk Music International to have received both their specially created Triple Crown Award (#1 Artist, #1 CD, #1 Song) and their Spirit of Folk Award.
“Initially Si wanted me to record an album of some of his unreleased songs – he has so many unreleased songs – and I said to him it wouldn’t sell that well. I’m not the biggest folk artist in the world. I’ve toured Australia and made some great records with some great people – I did an album with Pete Seeger that he narrated six months before he died about the Almanac Singers – but I’m not that big. It didn’t make sense to me, but were I to do anything I’d want to do Labor songs, because Labor is where I first heard of him. I mean I’ve been singing some of those songs for years. He wanted me to produce the album, so we started picking through…”
I should point out that Mann has also been deeply involved in the American Labor movement, having himself been formerly been a union organiser and activist up in Ithaca, New York. Now, the thing was what songs to choose from a vast catalogue of previously unrecorded Kahn songs (“At least 400 that I know of,” he tells me). As it happens, Mann passed on my details and Kahn sent me a very long, rambling and intriguing answer, part of which goes… “This is going to sound more systematic than it actually was, but 1) I keep lists by title of my unrecorded songs, organized by topics. In this case, I went to a 2012 folder titled Proud To Be Union, which has 30 songs in it, some unrecorded, some previously recorded. 2) I have folders on my computer with guitar/vocal demos of a number of song cycles I’d written over the years. Some of the recordings are studio quality, so that I can later add instruments and harmony vocals to produce an enhanced album that can be released to the public. I went through half a dozen of these folders … then sent MP3s of the songs I viewed as possibilities to George, so that we’d be able to argue gently about which ones to include, and which not. “
Mann selected nine of the songs Kahn sent him, “and Billy Bragg got one of them,” Mann explains – he covers ‘We’re The Ones’.Kahn writes: “Although I agreed that it would be wonderful to have Billy Bragg do one of the songs, I was totally sceptical about the possibility of him actually doing that, famous as he is. I thought pitching Billy was a total waste of time. George not only persisted, he decided which song was most likely to appeal to Billy – and he was correct.”
And so the album became not only a collection of some of Si Kahn’s previously unrecorded Labor songs as performed by Kahn, but also some extraordinary versions of his songs performed by a bevy of other artists, among them Peggy Seeger (‘Aragon Mill’), John McCutcheon (Kahn’s regular guitarist for many years), Kathy Mattea, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Michael Johnathon and Odetta (a brilliant soul-gospel take on ‘Gone Gonna Rise Again’), Magpie and Tom Chapin with the Chapin Sisters, while Kahn performs five and Mann also sings three of the songs himself and duets with Kahn on ‘Solidarity Day’.
“There were five songs that he recorded 15, 20 years ago,” Mann continues, “with him on the guitar and vocals, and I and my musicians here in Ithaca, New York, the studio that I work out of, added all the other stuff. Then we recorded four new songs from scratch that I sing, and the tenth song is ‘They All Sang Bread And Roses’, which came off my album from a few years ago. But then we started talking and I said, ‘Si, I’ve made these compilations with all these other great artists. So many people recorded your songs. Why don’t we look at some of that stuff too?’ So we started making a list and there are whole albums of his stuff recorded by other people. We started with about 30 that we thought met the criteria – that they were good songs, well recorded and were Labor themed. Not just union but about workers, about the workers’ experience and about unions per se, because we’ve both been in the Labor movement for most of our adult lives. So that’s where we came in with the other ten songs by other artists, pre-recorded. I mean, Odetta singing with Michael Johnathon!”
“There were artists I specially wanted to have on the album,” Kahn noted for me, “particularly John McCutcheon, and Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, not just stunning artists, but among my best friends anywhere. John has recorded about a dozen of my solo compositions, plus at least 50 songs that we wrote together. So George and I worked with John to figure out a properly-themed song that he could record – and he did a beautiful job with ‘Go To Work On Monday.’ Because of the too-short notice I gave them, Cathy and Marcy couldn’t find time in their schedule to go into the studio. But they found a full-band recording of ‘Truck Driving Woman’ they’d done so many years ago that we couldn’t even figure out when it was done, or even in what studio. The only record of that session, unbelievably enough, was on an old cassette tape, not a very promising situation. But George’s long time go-to recording engineer Will Russell at Will’s Electrical Wilburland Studio worked a serious miracle, as you can hear on the album.”
At 80, Si Kahn is no longer really able to perform at the level that would allow him to tour, but George Mann is currently in Australia once again and is sure to perform some of the songs he sang on the Labor Day album.