Pittsburgh Town
A folk song about Pittsburgh's labor and pollution in 1941.
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via Wikipedia: Pittsburgh Town · see source
"Pittsburgh Town" is a folk song Woody Guthrie wrote to a traditional tune, first recorded by Pete Seeger. Guthrie composed it during a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania stop on an Almanac Singers' tour, and the lyrics address the labor and environmental troubles the city faced in 1941, when the song was written. Because environmental legislation later cut the pollution that once plagued Pittsburgh, some performances swap the original smoky verses for lines that praise the city.
Quick Facts
- Writer
- Woody Guthrie
- Year written
- 1941
- Original recording artist
- Pete Seeger
- Location of composition
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Associated group
- Almanac Singers
Facts from the source article.
Creation
Historians give different stories for the song's start. One account ties it to the Almanac Singers' 1941 national tour: on July 7, 1941, the group cut fourteen songs for a small New Jersey label, used the $250 they earned to buy a 1932 Buick, and drove off. In Pittsburgh they played two nights of concerts for steel workers who were unionizing, and stayed in a cockroach-infested hotel.
During the second show Woody Guthrie began making up lyrics on the spot to the folk tune "Crawdad Hole," and the whole song came out of that jam. Millard Lampell then polished the second verse. A different story, from the liner notes of Seeger's Songs of Struggle and Protest, 1930–50, says Guthrie wrote the song while on a flight into Pittsburgh, quickly jotting down the lyrics after looking out the window at the smoky skies.
Lyrics and themes
The verses switch between Pittsburgh's environmental troubles and its labor fights. The first verse calls the city a "smoky ol' town," and the third says the speaker does nothing but "cough and choke" because of the steel mills' output.
At the time the song was written, steel mills on the banks of the three rivers made the sky glow red and poured out smoke all the time. Modern environmentalist reviewers think the pollution verses were meant to protest the conditions workers had to live in. The second verse puns on Jones and Laughlin Steel, asking "What did Jones and Laughlin steal?" The fourth and final verse ends by saying all the mill workers are "joining up with the CIO."
Recordings and adaptations
Pete Seeger put out a studio version on his 1956 album American Industrial Ballads and a live version on his 1964 album Songs of Struggle and Protest, 1930–50; both have him singing and playing banjo alone, with the live one catching the crowd clapping and singing along. Pittsburgh-area folk bands like the NewLanders have recorded and performed Seeger's version. Composer Paul Hindemith's Pittsburgh Symphony, written in 1958 for the city's 200th anniversary, quotes the melody (which Hindemith called "Pittsburgh Is a Great Old Town") in the final movement.
Gunther Schuller called that use "the ultimate in paucity of imagination and tastelessness," but Stephen Luttmann felt Schuller missed why Hindemith used the tune. In 1959 Vivien Richman released an adaptation on her album Vivien Richman Sings Folk Songs of West Pennsylvania, adding verses about the region's landscape and geography. Students at Pittsburgh Public Schools have covered the song with less political verses, closer to Richman's version than Seeger's; they replaced lines about smokiness with "Pittsburgh Town is a Great Old Town," partly because enforcement of the Smoke Control Ordinance of 1941 had cleaned the air by the mid-1950s.
More in Woody Guthrie Songs
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Pittsburgh Town (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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