How to change culture (for Dolores and all the others)
Scots-Irish and English immigrants (settlers who may have been indentured servants, religious and economic refugees, colonizers, possibly all of the above) brought the seeds of this song to the US and then unto Appalachia. Besides Nick Cave, the Louvin Brothers, Lemon Drops, BR549, Outlaws, and many others have covered “Knoxville Girl.”
I suspect some don’t
even think twice about singing from the point of view of the murderer who is
sitting in jail feeling sorry for himself. Perhaps this song was once meant to
scare young people off from fooling around before wedlock, but it often come
across, at least to me, as more sympathetic to a man grieving for the loss of
his freedom rather than the loss of a young woman’s life. Perspective means
everything. Anyway the words are at the bottom of this post so see for
yourself.
Although I grew up hearing a lot of folk music, I only really learned about the lineage of murder ballads my first year back in the States, when I spent my second semester at Friends World College doing an apprenticeship and self-guided study on urban Appalachians, migration, and culture. My advisor was an ethnomusicologist who supported my investigations of country music on juke boxes in downtown Cincinnati dive bars. Grandma Bonnie Blanton Vance kinda territory. I learned as much from the other patrons’ stories as I did from the lyrics we sang along to over shots and beers.
For part of my apprenticeship at the Urban Appalachian Council, I put to good use skills I had honed organizing punk shows helping out with the musical and storytelling stages of the annual Appalachian Festival. Because I was once again behind the scenes and not in the audience, I got to meet the likes of the Dillards, Dry Branch Fire Squad, Rich Kirby, Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, and Sheila Kay Adams, whose version of “Knoxville Girl” is one of the best I’ve heard, sung in the true ol’ timey way.
I got to work with some
of the godfathers and godmothers of the Cincinnati hillbilly music scene, one
of whom invited me to his house after the festival to confess he had fallen in
love with me, a 22- year-old less than half his age. I went because a group of
us had been meeting there to plan the thing. After that, I withdrew and was
never involved with that group of people again.
I formed a band and found my voice while working out harmonies and writing lyrics that were basically revenge fantasies in which the fair maiden gets revenge on the man who led her down the proverbial path in the woods to a muddy, soon bloody riverbank.
My songs weren’t nearly as good as Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard’s recordings of feminist folk songs from the 1960s and 70s, but can be seen as stemming from that tradition, with the addition of the electric guitars and distortion pedals of 1980s punk and 1990s shoegaze. Changing culture takes decades of work over many generations.
I’ve often thought that by getting me out of Knoxville when
I was a jaded and angry 15-year-old punk, my parents steered me off a bad
trajectory. I was able to get a much better education and came to understand
the world in ways that I simply could not had I stayed in my hometown. I gained
perspectives that East Tennessee preachers and some of my schoolteachers tried
to shield me from, because such knowledge liberates one from the narrow
cultural, political, and religious grips in which they wanted to keep me and
the other Knoxville girls.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Cheryl and I have been friends for 30 years, meeting early on in her organizing career and staying in touch through the years. What Cheryl doesn't mention is her deep family ties to Rhode Island and that she has moved back to Rhode Island after a long organizing stint in California. - Will Collette
One thing that moving away didn’t save me from was the kind of violence against women that is normalized by traditional songs and popular cultures around the world. Leaving didn’t save me from the day-to-day assaults that young women face in the streets or domestic settings. Many of the punk scenes I wandered through were rife with dark corners, alleyways, and pits that weren’t safe for me, other women, and certainly not trans people. In the decade before riot grrl, I didn’t know enough to seek out punk feminist spaces that might have provided a refuge.
At times, I outright rejected DIY efforts led by
women because they didn’t seem hard enough. So engrained was the misogyny of
the family and cultures that I had been raised up in that I failed to recognize
how much I needed the solidarity of women and people who do not identify as
men. Thankfully, I made a few friends who showed me how badass women can be.
They are still like sisters to me.
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The same year that Australian punk god Nick Cave released “Knoxville Girl” and the Murder Ballads LP, I moved back to home for my first community organizing job. This was the start of what would end up being an amazing 30-year career working with labor and community-based groups that took me to Tennessee, DC, California, and now, back to the South. The privilege of working in unions and non-profits comes with personal costs for everyone employed by or volunteering for these types of organizations. Some of them take advantage of people who want to help other people find liberation or are driven to try to save the world.
That first job, I met Sister of Loretto
nuns whose service brought them to impoverished communities in rural East
Tennessee. I also worked with members and other organizers who didn’t have very
good boundaries around their desires and the work we were trying to do
together. Just like every other institution cracking under the pressures of
this time, our movements for social, economic, and environmental justice have
always been weakened by the presence of parasites and predators in our midst.
The recent revelations about Cesar Chavez’ rapes of multiple women when he was leading the United Farm Workers have rocked parts of my world, especially those with experience in Central California. People there knew. Every union woman I’ve talked to has heard things or has their own a story, stories.
Maybe of rape, mostly not, but certainly of a man who
said, “I’m only doing this because you’re so pretty,” or who pressed her up
against a wall or licked his lips or looked at her chest and not into her eyes
while talking about something important. We all have stories of union guys who
didn’t step in to stop the jokes or ask that the guys knock it off when they
called the women working in the union’s front office “skirts.”
Many of us rank-and-filers in the labor movement have been
triggered over the past weeks. We have diverted energy that could be spent
organizing into reliving past traumas and facing up to the realities of current
work situations. For the most part, conversations are held in private because
putting details out there isn’t safe. There isn’t a collective strategy that I
am aware of. But I hope that changes. One national leader I talked to believes
that this is an opportunity to change the culture of unions and has seen how
the presence of other strong women leaders has changed dynamics on national
boards that she sits on.
Changing culture is and will be hard. Speaking out puts jobs
and careers on the line. The juries of the labor movement are still dominated
by the friends of the men who did the hurting. All of us are aware of the push
back to #MeToo and see nothing much happening in this country about the Epstein
files. Changing culture takes generations but there are moments when great
leaps forward happen. There are also moments when great leaps backward occur.
Right now, we are experiencing both. And so, we hurt, take a little time to get
our shit back together, then get on with the next meeting, the next task to
stave off catastrophe.
This Cesar Chavez Day, I am honoring all the women who did the work while suffering at the rough hands of a man, of men, of respected leaders who use their righteousness to cover for the very unrighteous abuse of power over women. I grieve for Dolores Huerta and all the girls and women who were raped by Cesar Chavez and then spent decades covering up for him because la causa was bigger than any one of them. I will pray for the tender and wounded parts that got buried under mounds of work, under slogans and strategies and yes, victories. Si, se puede!
Labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill famously said something to the effect of: Don’t mourn, organize! Mourning, I have read, is the public expression of grief. We absolutely need to take this moment to feel, to grieve, and then to mourn together. It is time to light candles and speak out, for Dolores and the tens of thousands of brave women farmworkers who dreamed and put their bodies on the line for a better life for their children.
This Cesar Chavez Day, I will not celebrate men and traditions that continue to
inflict violence upon women and children, but I will honor those who give us
their labor and put their heads and hands, hearts and souls into campaigns for
justice and better working conditions for those who put food on our table.
In their honor, I will speak up in spaces where it feels right to do so. This past weekend I was at a meeting of a multi-racial group dedicated to organizing workers in the South. I sat back and waited to see if someone else brought up Cesar Chavez and the complexities of this moment. No one did.
And so late Saturday afternoon, I raised my hand and asked if we might need to examine the culture of the unions we are part of and of our own alliance being built to engage more workers. We need to be aware, I said, of what we are bringing women workers and organizers into and then semi-apologized for opening a can of worms at the end of a long day.
The next day, however, the dynamics in the room were different. A man who was fairly new to the group happened to be leading the morning’s discussion. He was a good facilitator, but the same he and other a few other white men tended to speak over and over, while Black, working-class, and female participants held back. Finally, one woman spoke up, and then another.
We supported each other’s positions and held
our ground. During a break, two women stood together in the center of the room
and talked, then three, then five and then we realized we were at least half
the people there. We took a group photo to remember, exchanged phone numbers,
and I hope brought some awareness to the larger group. And that is a good step
in changing culture and rewriting the endings to stories that have gone on too
long.
I’d love to hear about any collective efforts to change the
culture of the labor movement you are involved in or aware of, so please send
comments or DMs!
Si, se puede!
(The) Knoxville Girl
I met a little girl in Knoxville, a town we all know well
And every Sunday evening, out in her home, I’d dwell
We went to take an evening walk about a mile from town
I picked a stick up off the ground and knocked that fair girl down
She fell down on her bended knees, for mercy she did cry
“Oh Willy dear, don’t kill me here, I’m unprepared to die”
She never spoke another word, I only beat her more
Until the ground around me, within her blood did flow
I took her by her golden curls and I drug her round and
around
Throwing her into the river that flows through Knoxville town
Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl with the dark and roving eyes
Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl, you’ll never be my bride
I started back to Knoxville, got there about midnight
My mother, she was worried and woke up in a fright
Saying, “dear son, what have you done to bloody your clothes so?”
I told my anxious mother I was bleeding at my nose
I called for me a candle to light myself to bed
I called for me a handkerchief to bind my aching head
Rolled and tumbled the whole night through, as troubles was for me
Like flames of hell around my bed and in my eyes could see
They carried me down to Knoxville and put me in a cell
My friends all tried to get me out but none could go my bail
I’m here to waste my life away down in this dirty old jail
Because I murdered that Knoxville girl, the girl I loved so well
