Handcox, 81, Didn’t Like Anything Mean : Songwriter for Labor Activism of the 1930s Gets Long-Due Praise

I was in the river, fishing, and my momma and my wife come running down, hollering for me. Their voice was so distressful, I just knew something happen with the kids. But my momma said, “John. You better get away from here.” You see, a friend of mine, a white fellow, he’d been up at the store and overheard them say, “That nigger John Handcox, we gonna hang him. We got the rope and we got the limb, all we want is him.”

Mean things were happening in Arkansas in 1936, the year John L. Handcox learned of the noose with his name on it. Sharecroppers were working from sunup to sundown for 50 cents a day, then sleeping at night on cotton sacks stuffed with straw.

The plantation stores were overcharging tenant farmers, who labored all year just to end up in debt. Even nature sometimes seemed mean, flooding the fertile river valleys, leaving cotton only on the eroding hillsides.

Handcox, a poor farmer with a ninth-grade education, didn’t like anything unfair. He didn’t like anything mean. When he heard that the Socialists were forming a racially integrated labor union, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Handcox thought it sounded like a good idea, and he joined.

Organized Sharecroppers

He helped organize other black sharecroppers into locals, and since he didn’t care for making speeches, he started to write songs for them to sing at their meetings.

From 1935 to 1937, Handcox wrote dozens of poems and songs, including “Roll the Union On,” “Raggedy, Raggedy Are We” and “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land”--classics of the labor movement.

Handcox’s music gave farmers inspiration on the picket lines, but it made the plantation owners mad. His organizing made them mean enough to string a lanky, blue-eyed black from a tree.

I said, “Momma, I’m not going anywhere. If they come ‘round here, if they stick their heads up, I’ll shoot ‘em.” She said, “If you hurt one of them, they gonna kill us all.” That’s right, too. There wouldn’t a been no Handcox left.

I went over on the highway. At that time they just had a gravel road. Two lanes--one going, one coming. I caught a Greyhound. I caught that puppy to Memphis.

Handcox is 81 now and lives in a quiet corner of southeast San Diego. He is rail-thin with an ebony face, salt-and-pepper hair and a white beard. He is still poor, still a union member--United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America--and still singing his songs.

Handcox said it is possible he had heard of folk singer Pete Seeger before receiving letters from Seeger recently, but he isn’t sure. He has never been too good with names.

Seeger, however, had known of Handcox and his songs for more than 40 years. Seeger’s partner in The Weavers, Lee Hays, had taught him some of Handcox’s tunes long ago, and Seeger’s father, Charles, had recorded Handcox on an aluminum disc for the Library of Congress in about 1937, when the elder Seeger worked on a WPA music project.

“John is one of the rank-and-file people who make up the folk songs of the nation,” Seeger said in a telephone interview from his home in Beacon, N.Y. “Some of the songs he wrote in the 1930s became famous throughout the English-speaking world.”

Attempt to Find Handcox

Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie had tried unsuccessfully to find Handcox in the 1940s when they were compiling material for their songbook, “Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.”

“By the time the 1960s came along, I assumed he was dead. Foolish me,” Seeger said.

Handcox was in San Diego, where he settled in 1942 when he discovered the Southland’s good weather. Seeger finally tracked Handcox through folk singer Joe Glazer, who had located him through H. L. Mitchell, a founder of the farmers’ union. After 40 years, Handcox had called Mitchell.

As was common among union troubadours, Handcox never bothered to copyright his songs. Seeger wrote to tell him that he wanted to help Handcox put his name on his work.

Seeger has asked his publisher at Sanga Music in New York City to help Handcox with the copyright work. He also has raised money to buy Handcox an airplane ticket to Washington next month to join in the Great Labor Song Exchange, an annual meeting of labor songwriters and singers.

Letter of Introduction

Seeger says there is no reason Handcox should have heard of him. So, by way of introduction, he wrote Handcox:

“I am only too aware that I am one more white musician who has made a living when black musicians who composed the music often made no money at all.” He told Handcox that even copyrighted folk songs rarely earn a lot of money for their authors, but that someday one of Handcox’s songs could be used in a movie and earn something for his family.

“Do you realize if you’d gotten $25 every time ‘Roll the Union On’ had been printed in a songbook during the last 30 years, you’d have several thousand dollars?” Seeger wrote.

Seeger said Handcox’s songs have rare depth and simplicity that have made them stand up over time. He called “Roll the Union On” “a great picket line song. One of the greatest ever,” and broke into verse over the telephone:

We’re gonna roll,

We’re gonna roll,

We’re gonna roll the union on.

If the planter’s in the way, we’re gonna roll it over him,

Gonna roll it over him, gonna roll it over him . . .

His parents were tenant farmers. Handcox was the third son of 11 children, born near Brinkley, Ark., about halfway between Little Rock and Memphis. He learned to read at home from his mother.

When Handcox was about 12, his father brought home a book of poems by the black author Paul Laurence Dunbar. Handcox loved Dunbar’s funny poems and began writing his own.

“I’d write poems about the kids in school. Something to make people laugh,” Handcox said. He would write poems for Easter celebrations and school programs.

When Handcox was 19 and finishing the ninth grade, his father was killed by a team of mules. Handcox left school to farm and manage the family and didn’t find time to write again until he joined the union nearly a dozen years later.

‘That’s Good News’

When a friend told Handcox about the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1935, he said: “That’s good news. Let’s set up a local.

“The people were being treated unfair. I know they wasn’t getting out of debt. They were just working for what they eat and wore and that wasn’t much. Wasn’t nothing to smile over.”

Handcox went from house to house on his horse until he rounded up enough farmers to set up a union local, and then another. The farmers met in schoolhouses and churches, the places where Handcox had learned to sing. Handcox couldn’t play any instruments, but he could write. He composed poems and songs for the farmers, passed them out at the meetings, and sent them to be published in the union’s newspaper, The Sharecroppers’ Voice.

“All these songs and poems is about the way the people was being treated,” Handcox said. “Singing is inspirational. More inspirational than talk. It arouses people more, makes them feel a part of things.”

In 1936, Handcox helped organize a strike that spread over three counties. The farmers lost the strike and Handcox was run out of town.

Handcox went from Memphis to Charleston, Mo., to St. Louis, working for the union. He made a fund-raising trip to New York and Washington, where Charles Seeger recorded his songs.

Joined Socialist Party

Handcox joined the Socialist Party and headed for Chicago, where he spoke at party meetings and searched for a job. He handed his songs and poems out at meetings, accepting donations of 25 or 50 cents or giving them away for free.

“Life is not a matter of money with me,” he said.

But a man has to make a living. Finding little work in Chicago, Handcox left for Detroit; Kansas City, Mo., then south to Oklahoma, and finally California.

In San Diego, Handcox peddled fish, eggs and fruit out of a truck, ran a small grocery store and a restaurant, and worked as a carpenter.

Handcox’s political involvement slowed, and he stopped writing songs. He had his ups and downs like anyone, but always kept busy.

Today, Handcox survives on Social Security checks, tends his garden and goes fishing when he gets a chance. He clips articles out of the newspaper about Reagan Administration budget cuts and figures out how much the President earns each day.

Handcox says times are far better for his 28 grandchildren and nearly 90 great-grandchildren than they were for blacks in the 1930s and 1940s. But he says blacks still have a long way to go.

“If you’ve never been black, you can’t hardly sympathize with what black people went through. I don’t hate white people. I don’t have no hatred. We’re getting a better break now than we ever did, and we’re not getting a fair deal now,” he said.

Handcox still sings occasionally at fund-raisers for progressive causes. He hopes his songs will help prevent mean things from happening in this land.

“If my songs help make this a better world to live in, I think I did a lot.”