Music played a large role in Appalachian labor struggles because poetry of this kind could capture the reality of what was going on, and more importantly, spread this reality quickly from camp to camp, mill town to mill town. These songs could be chanted in marches, or sung in back rooms quietly subverting the will of the worker against the will of the owner, the state trooper, the Man.

These songs of Appalachian mill worker, miners, and loggers (but mostly miners) served as the prototype, the start up incubator, of protest songs everywhere. On a not unrelated note, Appalachia is also the progenitor of what would (later) become American Folk Music. This even more so than the protest songs however is a very manufactured genre. The protest songs that the workers of Appalachia used in the 1910’s-1930’s would later be recycled by civil rights protesters in the 1960’s, the anti-war protesters of the 1970’s, and any number of union and anti-poverty protesters from always till now. These songs have carried over into common uses from their hardscrabble hillside beginnings because (I believe) they found hard nuggets of truth in their situation, and then were spread because union organizers found them useful motivational tools.