Chopping Wood by Pete Seeger & David Bernz

Author:Pete Seeger & David Bernz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jawbone
Published: 2024-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

One day while walkin’ down forty-fifth street

I ran into a guy who looked dead on his feet

He had no green button or smile on his face

Kept pushin’ a truck round, kept getting’ no place

He’s a fool (he’s a fool)

He’s a fool (he’s a fool)

He’s a fool for not joining the union

They’d get a whole crowd of people singing that. It had several verses about how he finally wises up and he joins the union. The last chorus was:

He’s no fool (he’s no fool)

For he up and he joined with the union.

I learned that song around 1941, when Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays and Millard Lampell and me and some others formed a group called The Almanac Singers, and we’d sing that song around.

My younger half-sister, Peggy Seeger, sings songs about work. Like me, she came out of a very academic background, her father a musicologist and mother a composer of avant-garde string quartets, but then she hitched up with Ewan McCall. In my opinion, she’s one of the more talented songwriters of this century. Her song ‘I’m Gonna Be An Engineer’ is known all around the English-speaking world now.

She’s written a lot of other good songs too, and she’s written songs about work, and I’m sure she’s sung lullabies to her kids, so she’s sung work songs. But I’m curious. I guess I got to ask Peggy, ‘Did you ever think of writing a song to make dishwashing easier, or scrubbing the floor easier?’ I’ve washed dishes and I’ve scrubbed floors, and I have to confess I’ve never made up a song for it.

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