Continuing my Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People Series, this time I’ll put up two songs written by a couple of Woody’s Fellow Travelers and deviate from the original script that I set up which was to take only songs from the book by the same name as this series. Woody never belonged to the official version of the Fellow Travelers and the only things he had in common with what those words used to mean was that he was a fellow speaking up for other fellows and he traveled around a great deal. But he never joined any organization such as an “official fellow traveler” might have done. Let me add another fine point here and that is to note that the three men entertaining on these videos, Grant Rogers, Pete Seeger and Jim Garland were all blacklisted in one sort of another, either during the McCarthy era or as Union men. Kind of like what the Republicans have done or are trying to do to a lot of people, including what they are doing to some fine lawyers, the so called by Fox News “Gitmo Nine” lawyers.

But getting away from the past and back to the present, let’s not forget that our current situation with job losses started and accelerated under Bush and is just now starting to level off. It took President Obama a year but there are still a lot of unemployed people out there right now. So these songs are for all of those folks who don’t have a job or have a job that doesn’t allow them to live up to their full potential.

In addition, I’ve added a category for the songs posted in this series and will be going back and adding all the songs I’ve put up in this series so you can just click on the topic in the bottom left hand corner of these posts soon and see a list of all the songs in the series. Both of these selections come from a series that Pete Seeger had on Public Television called Rainbow Question. You can see all these YouTube entries for Pete’s old musical television show by clicking this link .