Listen to the songs on the syllabus.  These songs were written and performed by coal mining people in the midst of their struggle.  According to Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy, Florence Reed wrote “Which Side Are You On?” “on a page torn from a wall calendar and sung to the tune of an old Baptist hymn, ‘Lay the Lily Low.'”  Of the song’s theme, Reece stated, “In Harlan County there wasn’t no neutral.  If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man.  You had to be.”[1]

How does listening to the songs enhance your understanding of class conflict in Harlan County, Kentucky in the 1930s?  How does it enhance your understanding of poverty and privation in the Great Depression?

[1] Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy, ed., American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 390.