Friday's Labor Folklore 
Con Carbon, Minstrel of the Mine Patch








The Saga
 of
 Ma Joad
sung by
Melody Gardot
The Grapes of Wrath
by
John Steinbeck 
In the evening a strange thing happened.  The twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all.  The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.  And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning.  A family which the night before had been lost and fearful might search its goods to find a present for a new baby.  In the evening, sitting about the fires, the twenty were one.  They grew to be units of the camps, units of the evenings and the nights.  A guitar unwrapped from a blanket and tuned - and the songs, which were all of the people, were sung in the nights. 
Tom Joad
by 
Woody Guthrie
Tom ran back where his mother was asleep;
He woke her up out of bed.
And he kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved,
Said what Preacher Casey said, Tom Joad,
He said what Preacher Casey said.

"Everybody might be just one big soul,
Well it looks that a-way to me.
Everywhere you look, in the day or night,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm a-gonna be.

Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain't free.
Wherever folks are fighting for their rights,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm a-gonna be."

 Grapes of Wrath 

(movie)

Henry Fonda's

Ghost of Tom Joad

(music video)

Bruce Springsteen.

 A woman looks at it 

that way.

Well Pa, a woman can change better than a man. A man lives sorta, well, in jerks. 

Baby born and somebody dies and that's a jerk. He gets a farm or loses it, and that's a jerk.

 

With a woman it's all in one flow, like a stream. With eddies and waterfalls. But like the river it goes right on.

A woman looks at it that way.

 

-- Ma Joad played by Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath (the movie.) 
Honor Dr. King
Fight for the Unemployed!