Strike!

While Canada’s WestJet flight attendants walk the picket line this month over unpaid working hours, we’re digging back a hundred years to find out what the lead-up to a strike actually sounded like on record. This week’s three records were never meant as protest songs — Charlie Poole’s “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?” is a wandering man’s plea for shelter, Vernon Dalhart’s “The Chain Gang Song” is a convict’s lament, and Ernest V. Stoneman’s “Sinking of the Titanic” is a disaster ballad about who got a lifeboat and who didn’t. But every one of them was cut by, or built around, someone who’d lived close to the hard end of the working world: a cotton-mill spinner, a coal miner, a family with real prison time behind them. No union rhetoric anywhere in these three — just the daily grind that eventually makes people say enough.