Bragg on 42nd Street in  New York City, 1984    photo by Steve Rapport

Love of Labor

For almost 20 years, folk musician Billy Bragg
has been an unflinching voice for the working class

by Ian Peddie

“What will you do when the war is over, tender comrade?”
“Tender Comrade”

Billy Bragg is more than just a bloke with an endearing “up the workers’ style. While the “have guitar will travel” demeanor attached to the Bard of Barking (he was born in Barking, Essex in 1957) remains attractive to promoters, at heart Bragg is, well, ordinary.

Who else could get away with lines such as “I am the milkman of human kindness, I will leave an extra pint,” or “He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in?” Such lyrics are part of Bragg’s attraction; he is a compelling performer who during his concerts is as likely to tell a story as sing a song. The music journalist Adam Sweeting once described him astutely as a cross between a standup comedian and a flying picket.

Bragg has been recording and performing since he left the army in 1981. He passed his basic training for the Royal Armoured Corps and then promptly bought himself out of the army for the princely sum of 175 pounds. Armed with a peroxide hairdo that no one, least of all Bragg himself, believed in, Bragg’s break came at the Futurama music festival in Leeds in 1983. There, sandwiched between the banal music of the early ’80s and the “performance poetry” of John Cooper Clarke, New Musical Express journalist Steven Wells noted Bragg’s distinct appearance: “Then, onstage, is this cockney geezer with a huge nose. He moved like a Thunderbirds puppet and talked in short, clipped, army-like sentences, and he just thrashed the shit out of his guitar and sang his heart out.” 

The “cockney git” with the “huge nose” had made his mark all right, although it might not quite have been in the style he would have chosen. Still, it was better than the army. Even though he had avoided the Falklands War, however, battles of another kind were looming. The Thatcher years were upon Britain, and the bloke who walked like a puppet was not going to work on Maggie’s farm — at least not without a fight.

For Stephen William Bragg that fight was to last the best part of a decade. His war with Thatcherism drew to a close with the demise of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, though his politicization proper had begun in 1983, the year the Conservative Party was elected with a healthy 144 majority. In Andrew Collins’ official biography of Bragg, Still Suitable for Miners, Bragg recalled, “By 1983 the scales had fallen from my eyes.”

It required no special effort to become politicized in an era when the Conservatives justified cuts in school meals on the basis that there could be no school meals at all if Britain failed to maintain a huge arsenal of Cruise missiles. But if the Conservatives provided the initial impulse that led to Bragg’s involvement in politics, it was the miners’ strike of 1984 — a protest against increasing pit closures and what they saw as a derisory 5.2 percent pay increase — that galvanized him into action.

Bragg’s contacts with trade unionists through his gigs on behalf of the Labour-run Greater London Council led to him being asked to perform benefits on behalf of striking miners. His first was at the Docks United Social Club in Newport, Wales, a relatively small affair that raised a couple of hundred pounds for the local miners and their families. It may have been a low-key start to Bragg’s work on behalf of the miners, but he followed it up with gigs all over the country.

By this point Bragg’s image was becoming synonymous with labor issues, which is why his second album Brewing Up seemed curious in its relatively apolitical stance. Bragg’s first album, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy (1983), afforded critics a brief glimpse of his politics, mainly through the ironically upbeat tempo of “To Have and to Have Not,” where teenagers were warned about the perils of job seeking in a land where there were more than three million “officially” unemployed: “If you look the part you’ll get the job / In last year’s trousers and your old school shoes / The truth is, son, it’s a buyer’s market / They can afford to pick and choose.”

Given his extensive involvement with the miners, it seemed incongruous that Brewing Up (1984) included only two overtly political songs. “Island Of No Return,” and “Like Soldiers Do” were both responses to the Falklands War as well as meditations on Bragg’s own brief service in the army.

One of the reasons that Brewing Up lacked the political content one had come to expect from Bragg was that at this point in his career he was still wrestling with the ethics of supporting the miners. It was the Sunderland miners’ benefit gig in September 1984 that allowed him to clarify his motives. There he was questioned extensively on his politics, and, according to Collins, he found himself explaining where he stood “vis-”-vis the class struggle, Marx, [and] the Labour Party.” The miners’ benefits gigs brought forth some of Bragg’s most political songs, a good number of which evoked his deep concern with labor issues. The old Kentucky firebrand “Which Side Are You On?” became a staple, but it was Bragg’s own “Between The Wars’ which seemed to capture the plight of the miners:

I kept the faith and I kept voting,
Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand,
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man,
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor,
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
Mine is the peace we knew
Between the wars

“Between The Wars’ assumed near hymnal status at benefit gigs. Yet it was more than a homily to labor. “Between The Wars’ implied Bragg’s profound belief in the value of tradition that surrounded labor issues, a point to which he would frequently return. It was no coincidence, then, that when Bragg issued an EP in February 1985 that included “Which Side Are You On?” “It Says Here,” and “The World Turned Upside Down,” the track “Between The Wars” was chosen as the EP’s title.

Released a month before the shocking defeat of the miners, “Between the Wars’ remains Bragg’s most poignant salute to labor. It was a hymn of solidarity not only to miners but also to all organized labor, and it spoke of hope amid the gloom of defeat. “Between The Wars’ was part of a thematic quartet that offered a “Bragg’s eye view” of Britain in the mid ’80s. In that sense, all four tracks stood square against the incumbent Tories, though the songs were far more sophisticated than the egregiously oppositional “Anarchy in the UK” sensibility that had informed the punk movement.

Along with the title track, the EP established a sense of history through Bragg’s interpretation of Leon Rosselson’s “The World Turned Upside Down.” This was a song that reached back to The Diggers, who established the first modern commune on common ground at St. George’s Hill, Essex in 1649. In Bragg’s version of the song, the commune is smashed by government troops who cut the Diggers down on the orders of the ‘men of property”:

From the men of property
The orders came,
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn,
They were dispersed
But still the vision lingers on

The “vision” that “lingers on” recalls the tradition of organized resistance endemic to the labor struggle. In an interview with Working USA magazine in 1999, Bragg felt that ‘the importance of tradition to the labor movement can’t be underestimated.”

“Singing those old song that have been handed down through singer-songwriters,” Bragg continued, ’serves to remind people who get involved in strikes that it’s not something that is happening to them in isolation — that they’re not the first people who’ve stood on picket lines and been beaten up by policemen, that there’s a tradition of struggle.”

The turbulence of the miners’ strike inspired Bragg’s most sustained engagement with labor and introduced him to the radical tradition of British folk singers. At benefit gigs he met folk singers such as Roy Bailey and Dick Gaughan, the latter a Scot who recorded True and Bold: Songs of the Scottish Miners, a salute to the Scots pitmen who had stood firm throughout the strike.

Bragg had frequently flirted with the kind of radical folk of Bailey and Gaughan, though at the same time he never denied his debt to punk rock. As a young musician, for instance, he had been enthralled by The Clash. The radicalism of traditional folk protest songs impressed him greatly too, and in the turbulence following the end of the miners’ strike he wrote a song very much in the tradition of folk protest. “There is Power in a Union,” owes much to songs such as “Which Side Are You On?” and it offers more than a reiteration of Bragg’s belief in the tradition of labor struggle. The song illuminates the singer’s belief in a sense of community beyond the union at the local plant, and in that sense it looks forward to the postindustrial crises in both Britain and America where the closing of a factory or mine often meant the end of a community:

There is power in a factory, power in the land,
power in the hands of a worker,
but it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand
There is power in a Union

The point is that for Bragg union awareness is a community issue. Speaking of the loss of community in the wake of a plant closing, Bragg told Working USA, “[I]f the community has some prior awareness of the union, you have a better chance of getting people organized to fight.”

Bragg fought on, demonstrating outside Parliament against mine closures with 150,000 others in 1992. The Tories had won another term in that same year, but their days were clearly numbered. The demise of the Conservatives, followed by the election of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” in 1997, might have signaled a new direction for Billy Bragg. The political targets of the Thatcher and Major years had receded and in popular music there was nowhere near the enthusiasm for politics there had been in the 1980s. Yet Bragg’s old values of labor, community and solidarity remained.

By the time of his 1996 album William Bloke, the rhetoric was less fiery and confrontational but the politics and the ideas were much the same as they had always been. In “Upfield,” perhaps the best song on an uneven album, Bragg sang of his ’socialism of the heart,” a line affirming that Bragg was still a comrade, albeit a more tender one.

Thirteen years after he first played on behalf of striking miners, Bragg sang at the AFL-CIO conference in 1997, and a year later he did a benefit for striking dockers in Liverpool. His involvement in labor issues led to a belief that unions should sponsor concerts as a way of enlightening young people about the valuable community work unions do.

Bragg’s rationale for a closer alliance between unions and popular music was again founded upon ideas of community, where his idea was ‘to create some common ground between unions and young people.” “By drawing younger audiences and bringing them into our orbit, we will be a little more familiar to them, so that when the time comes, they may feel more comfortable supporting our struggle,” Braggs told Working USA.

Bragg’s labor songs and narratives made him the ideal choice to interpret the large unrecorded catalog of work left by the legendary Woody Guthrie. Both Bragg and Guthrie mined their respective traditions of protests songs; for Bragg it was nascent punk and the radical folk tradition, while for Guthrie the spare hillbilly blues or the narrative ballad often formed the basis for his songs. In an interview with the folk magazine Sing Out! (Winter, 1999), Guthrie’s daughter Nora, curator of her father’s vast archive, said Bragg “has a way of getting a message across without being pompous, the same way Woody did.”

Perhaps it was Bragg’s social conscience that appealed to Nora Guthrie in the same way that Woody’s own downhome style made him so appealing. The collaboration, which also includes the American band Wilco, has so far led to two albums, Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Volume II, both of which have received critical acclaim. In the earlier release, the songs are less political than those of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, though the political hue to the work is never far from the surface. “The Unwelcome Guest,” imagines the poor as interlopers at the houses of the rich, who in turn deny the poor an equal share:

And they’ll take the money and spread it out equal
Just like the Bible and the prophets suggest
But the men that go riding to help these poor workers
The rich will cut down like an unwelcome guest

The words are Woody Guthrie’s but they might well have been Billy Bragg’s.

Ian Peddie, a Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester, is writing his dissertation on the American literary left post 1939. A native of England, he has published work on the author Nelson Algren and poets Thomas McGrath and Amy Clampitt.