The Seattle Labor Chorus: Press

From a review of The Great Choral Convergence- a recording of a live concert including the Seattle Labor Chorus.
....One of the most powerful songs on the CD is the simple, straightforward rendition of Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” Another is “Torn Screen Door,” sung by the Seattle Labor Chorus, which captures in that one image the abandonment of our inner cities so painfully evident now in post-Katrina New Orleans.

.....[the] songs on the CD are “the best of the best of a historic concert [in 2004] … well-loved songs of the civil rights struggle, the anti-apartheid struggle and some newly composed songs for these trying times.”

Pete Seeger comments, “The six labor choruses, together, show the power of song as a force for social change.”

Folk music, including choral singing, was strongly promoted by the Communist Party, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and other left and progressive organizations during the 1930s and 1940s.

“The existence of these choruses represents a revival and resurgence of a long history of labor union and fraternal working people’s choruses dating back to the 1920s and 1930s,” she continues. “Most went out of business during the repressive McCarthy period.”

Janet Stecher, director of the Seattle Labor Chorus, told the World that her chorus won first prize among 50 choruses that performed in the annual “Figgy Pudding” open-air street concert to benefit the Pike Place Market Senior Clinic in Seattle.

In September, the Seattle group performed during a “Drink-in” for the Unite Here union at a Westin Hotel in Seattle, in solidarity with Westin Hotel workers. Lou Truskoff, a member of the chorus, wrote a song for the event based on the old hymn, “Bright Morning Stars Are Rising.” His version goes, “We are hotel workers rising and it is time we were paid a living wage.”

Seeger was the father of the Seattle Labor Chorus, said Stecher. “He was coming to perform at the Pacific Northwest Folk Life Festival 10 years ago and he wanted a chorus to back him up.” The rest, she said, is history.

Stecher said labor choruses have had “a long trajectory of ebb and flow. But yes, right now we are on the upswing.” She had not yet received her copy of the CD. “But I was there [at the concert]. If our lives were not so complicated, I would say it is time to have another one. It gives us critical mass when we get together like that, a sense that we are everywhere.”

...People everywhere want to sing—would dearly love to sing—but they’re convinced they can’t.

They’re also welcome in the Eugene, Oregon, Peace Chorus, and the Seattle Labor Chorus, and the Syracuse Community Choir in New York, and the Labor Heritage Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus of the Bay Area, and countless other community choirs across the country. Attention to inclusiveness is part of what sets the community choirs apart from traditional choirs. That, and a serious intention to change the world.

“These choirs are creating a new paradigm for choral singing,” says Val Rogers, director of the Eugene Peace Choir. “We’re motivated by much more than aesthetics alone. We’re singing for liberation, singing for a better society, to reinforce values that are vital to us, and to reclaim some of our cultural commons.”