Which Side Are You On?

Friday's Labor Folklore

Florence Reece

(1900-1986)

The bloodiest battles to build a union have been in America's coalfields -- in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Kentucky. And one of the toughest and meanest of all the coal fields where miners fought for a voice and a place in the sun was "Bloody Harlan" in Kentucky.

During the Great Depression Kentucky's coal miners were forced to engage in a brutal class war in order to protect their families from extreme poverty and hunger. When, in 1931, the coal operators imposed wage cuts and layoffs, Harlan County miners went out on strike.

During that strike armed company deputies roamed the countryside, terrorizing mining communities and looking for union leaders to beat, jail, or kill. But Kentucky's coal miners knew how to fight back.

Florence Reece was born in 1900 into a Tennessee mining family. Her father was a coal miner, killed in a roof fall when Florence was a teenager. Her mother was a school teacher. She was married to Sam Reece, a union leader during the 1931 Harlan County strike.

Sam and Florence Reece were married for 64 years.

Sheriff J. H. Blair and his men came the Reece's home looking for Sam. Florence was alone with her seven children. The gun thugs ransacked their home and then kept watch outside, ready to shoot Sam if he returned.

During the standoff Florence tore a sheet from a wall calendar and wrote the lyrics to "Which Side Are You On?" She borrowed the tune from "Lay the Lilly Low," a traditional Baptist hymn.

Florence Reece in her own words.

From the Barbara Kopple documentary Harlan County, USA.

(1.34 min.)

Which Side Are You On?

by Florence Reece

Come all of you good workers,

Good news to you I'll tell

Of how that good old union

Has come in here to dwell.

CHORUS

Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner

And I'm a miner's son,

And I'll stick with the union

Till every battle's won.

They say in Harlan County

There are no neutrals there,

You'll either be a union man

Or a thug for J.H. Blair.

Oh, workers can you stand it?

Oh, tell me how you can.

Will you be a lousy scab

Or will you be a man?

Don't scab for the bosses,

Don't listen to their lies.

Us poor folks haven't got a chance

Unless we organize.

Which Side Are You On?

(rock version, 3.43 min.)

George Mann

Sources from which I summarized, paraphrased or quoted directly: Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Protest. New York : Dover Publications, c1973; Music of Coal, Mining Songs of the Appalachian Coalfields. Big Stone Gap, Va. : Lonesome Records and Publishing, c2007; Florence Reece. Against the Current. Knoxville, Tenn. : Keith Press, c1981. Note: Joe Glazer, "labor's troubadour" and co-author of the Songs of Work & Protest songbook sang Which Side hundreds of times at union rallies and conventions.

Friday's Labor Folklore

Saul Schniderman, editor