Earl Robinson; Ballads Chronicled Labor Movement

Earl Robinson, the American balladeer whose tributes to the working man include the celebrated lament “Joe Hill,” has been killed in a car accident in Washington.

The King County medical examiner’s office said late Sunday that Robinson, 81, was killed Saturday night outside his native Seattle after his car was struck by a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

The other driver, a 64-year-old man, suffered minor injuries. The accident is under investigation.

From early labor songs in the 1930s to elegiac tributes to Paul Robeson in the 1980s, Robinson’s songs were indelibly intertwined with the leftist folk musicians of the century: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Robeson, Carl Sandburg and most recently Joan Baez.

Such popular music titans as Frank Sinatra recorded his “The House I Live In,” a tribute to the ethnic diversity of America written in 1942 by Robinson with lyrics by Lewis Allan.

That particular piece of patriotism became the centerpiece of the 1986 centennial celebration for the Statue of Liberty.

Generally, Robinson’s music chronicled the U.S. labor movement since the Great Depression.

His better-known songs also include “Ballad for Americans,” sung by Robeson; “Hurry Sundown,” performed by Peter, Paul and Mary; and “Black and White,” which became a hit for Three Dog Night in 1972.

But his musical legacy will probably turn around “Joe Hill,” the labor organizer whose fighting spirit lived on after his execution by a Utah firing squad in 1915 on what have been seen as trumped-up murder charges brought because of his radical politics. Hill became an international symbol for the Industrial Workers of the World--the “Wobblies”--and Robinson’s song, based on a poem by Alfred Hayes, was heard by new generations when Baez revived it at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Her plaintive rendition also was featured in the 1970 documentary about the festival:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

Alive as you or me.

But, Joe, I said, you’re 10 years dead.

I never died, said he. . . .

And standing there, as big as life,

And smiling with his eyes,

That Joe that they could never kill

Went on to organize.

It became an unofficial anthem for the Flower Children of the ‘60s and ‘70s as it had been for their working-class mothers and fathers.

Most recently Robinson sang it in April at a labor music conference in Port Townsend, Wash., said Ross K. Rieder, president of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Assn.

Unlike Guthrie and Seeger, Earl Hawley Robinson did not rise to prominence from dusty camps and smoke-filled union halls but from the corridors of academia and such teachers as Aaron Copland.

He graduated from the University of Washington in 1933, intent on a career as a serious composer who would earn a living as a teacher.

But, as he told The Times in 1987 in connection with a concert for the Los Angeles Fringe Festival:

“I graduated in the middle of the Depression, and it seemed the one thing the country didn’t need was music teachers.”

Robinson went to New York and joined a Works Project Administration theatrical group. It was there he became involved in labor issues, joining the Communist Party, for which he was blacklisted during the 1950s.

“I stayed in the Communist Party too long,” he said in another interview. “I quietly dropped out in the blacklist days. The party still has something to say, but I’m not sure it has anything worth listening to. The latest thing for me is spiritual.”

He became an unofficial adviser to the Almanac Singers, an urban folk ensemble formed in the early 1940s by Seeger and Guthrie that was a forerunner of the commercially successful Weavers singing group of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Later he wrote for films and radio, lived for a time in Los Angeles, where his collaborators included such commercially successful lyricists as E. Y. (Yip) Harburg, and came to be seen as a bridge between the young protesters of Vietnam and older laborites who saw the demonstrators as “un-American.”

Recently Robinson had added what he described as “a new string to my bow . . . the New Age. I have a song called ‘Four Hugs a Day.’ I have audiences who come looking for the left material only and I bring them into the New Age.”

Unlike his generation, Robinson said that today “there are children around the world who are not here to feather their own nests but to bring us together.”