![]() From The Ballad of Joe Hill to This Land Is Your Land, much of what is now called the Great American Songbook emerged from grassroot struggles, songs created to organise, inspire and console. ![]() ![]() He stood in a long line of working-class troubadours. He was first and foremost a union activist, and it was out of his activism that his music flowed. Handcox was not simply a singer or songwriter. It also shows the degree to which the working-class tradition that Handcox helped forge has decayed, politically and culturally. In some ways, Rich Men North of Richmond echoes the themes of Handcox’s song, giving voice to a sense of a world divided into rich and poor, and of ordinary people as menaced by those in power. A jobbing country singer from Virginia, Anthony’s video of his song Rich Men North of Richmond has gone viral over the past week, clocking up more than 20m views on YouTube, rising to the top of the streaming charts and becoming an anthem for conservatives from Marjorie Taylor Green, the reactionary Republican congresswoman from Georgia, to the rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh, all viewing Anthony as a righteous figure, whose “rawness” and “authenticity” speak to real Americans. I don’t know if Oliver Anthony knows of Handcox. His family, like thousands of others, had been made destitute, crushed between the droughts that afflicted the dust bowl and the ruthlessness of east coast bankers and of the old plantation owners, the white oligarchy that had retained its power in the south after the civil war. Handcox was a tenant farmer and union organiser in Arkansas during the Great Depression. So runs the opening verse of John Handcox’s classic 1930s song There is Mean Things Happening In This Land. There is mean things happening in this land ![]()
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