This song was first recorded commercially by Pete Seeger in 1956 and is currently available on "American Industrial Ballads" (Smithsonian Folkways, #40058). In the notes for that album, Irwin Silber says the song was heard by actor Will Geer from a West Virginia mountain singer who made it up herself to the tune of "Warren Harding's Widow." The full story is more complex.
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, in her article "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Image" (Journal of Southern History 69.1, 2003) says that the southern writer Grace Lumpkin heard the traditional song, "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme," while researching the Gastonia, North Carolina textile strike (1929) for her novel, To Make My Bread (1932). She published its lyrics in The New Masses (May, 1930). Lumpkin believed it had never before appeared in print and describes the night she first heard the song, sung to the tune of "John Hardy," while singing before a meeting at the North Carolina's National Textile Workers Union Hall in Charlotte:
In the group was a woman named Daisy McDonald, a Gastonia worker who supported a sick husband and seven children on $12.90 a week. Like Ella May [Wiggins], McDonald had a gift for putting new words to familiar tunes, and she had transformed the "Wreck of the Old 97" into a stirring union song. At the end of one of the ballads, McDonald asked her husband to lead the group in "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme." Years before, he said, "he had worked at the loom next to a man in a mill in Buffalo, South Carolina.... [T]his weaver had spoken out the words of the Rhyme under the noise of the looms, making them up as he worked. And the song has gone from one worker to another and now it is known to hundreds of cotton mill hands....
The song usually ends as it does in Peggy's version, with a millenarian vision:
Just let them wear their watches fine.
And rings and golden chains
But when the Day of Judgment comes
They'll have to shed those things.
For the Gastonia strike, however, the term "Day of Judgment" was changed to the "Great Revolution."
Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread was transformed into Let Freedom Ring, a Broadway play that opened in New York City and toured labor halls throughout America. Will Geer, who had a starring role, had previously heard the song at a Huntington, West Virginia Baptist church social (1933). He remembers it being sung by one Edith Mackie of Parkersburg to the tune of "Poor Boy." Archie Green, devotes a chapter to this song in Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and tells us that Geer remembered "Poor Boy" when he shaped his own satirical song, "The Ballad of the Wives and Widows of Presidents and Dictators," (sung for a Library of Congress recording in 1938). Trying out for his role in "Let Freedom Ring," he also set "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme" to this tune -- hence the somewhat distorted tune title, "Warren Harding's Widow." "The Ballad of the Mill Hand" (as "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme" was known in its theatrical version), was heard by two Birmingham labor activists in the New York audience, Joe and Esther Gelders. TheGelders in turn adopted it for an Alabama labor song, "The Ballad of John Catchings" (1936), which they later recorded for the Library for Congress (1937). Pete Seeger told Archie Green (1974) that he had never heard Will Geer sing the song, but he did hear the Library of Congress recording of the Gelders, with whom he later became friends. Somewhere along the line, Seeger must have made the connection between those two songs set to the same tune.
Peggy says she learned "Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine" (as "A Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme" is now called) from Pete. She sings it less as a rousing labor anthem than as a solemn indictment of class injustice and exploitation.
lyrics
LET THEM WEAR THEIR WATCHES FINE
words, music: traditional USA
arrangement: Peggy Seeger, Calum and Neill MacColl
Worked in a town away down south
By the name of Buffalo
Worked in the mill with the rest of the trash
As we're often called you know.
You factory girls who hear this song
Will surely understand
The reason why I love you so
Is I'm a factory hand.
I get up early every morn
I work all day real hard
To buy our little meat and bread
Our sugar, tea and lard.
We work from weekend to weekend
We never lose a day
And when that awful payday comes
We draw our little pay.
We then go home on payday night
And sit down in our chair
The merchant knocks all on the door
He's come to get his share.
When all our little debts are paid
And nothing left behind
We turn our pockets wrong side out
But not one penny can we find.
Our children they grow up unlearned
No time to go to school
Almost before they have learned to walk
They have learned to spin and spool.
The boss man jerks them round and round
And whistles very keen
I'll tell you what, our factory kids
Is really treated mean.
We work from weekend to weekend
We work from soon to late
We got no time to primp and fix
Or dress right up to date.
The folks in town who dress so fine
And spend their money free
They won't look at a factory girl
That dresses like you and me.
As we go walking down the street
All wrapped in lint and string
They call us fools and factory trash
And other low down things.
Let them wear their watches fine
Their rings and pearly strings
But when the day of judgment comes
We'll make them share their pretty things.
Peggy is one of the most influential folk singers on either side of the Atlantic. She is Pete Seeger’s half-sister and Ruth
Crawford Seeger’s daughter; her first life partner was the English songwriter Ewan MacColl, who wrote First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for her. She has made more than 22 solo recordings to date. Please check ewanmaccoll.bandcamp.com for other albums featuring Peggy....more
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