The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre
'The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim' edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre
Allen Ginsberg wrote that he felt “sentimental about the Wobblies,” the anarcho-syndicalist union, the IWW, that challenged the corporations as well as the AFL and the CIO in the early 20th century.
He might have been thinking about T-Bone Slim, a prolific writer for the IWW press and a lyricist whose words (set to folk melodies) were include in a 1921 anthology, Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent. Some of those lyrics are included along with Slim’s journalism and essays in The Popular Wobbly.
The child of Finnish immigrants, Slim abandoned wife and children for a life on the road, especially the railroad. He went by many names as a traveled America by train, a hobo and a transient worker who embraced the IWW during World War I. His pen was sharp, his tone sardonic yet hopeful, a militant Mark Twain shaped by the “hobohemian” milieu described by this book’s editors as “arguably the first American counterculture.” According to them, Slim’s newspaper columns reached thousands of radicals and disaffected workers during the 1920s and his songs were sung by thousands more. His “aphorisms and observations were repeated and dissected in IWW halls and around campfires as well as sketched on walls and boxcars.”
For Slim, humor was serious business, an act of rebellion. He was an erudite hobo, quoting not only Shakespeare and Dickens but Seneca the Younger. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1942.
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