Union Maid by Woody Guthrie © 1947 Storm King Music Inc.

Guthrie borrowed the tune of "Redwing" to pay tribute to an unnamed organizer for the Tenant Farmer's Union in Oklahoma City. As he recounts in his Songbook, she had been "stripped naked and beat up, and then hung to the rafters of a log cabin until she was unconscious." Nevertheless, she was soon back to her rabble-rousing!

This song provides an example of how women's history gets lost or minimized: while the first two verses are a fitting tribute to her courage, the third reduces her to a supporting role.

According to David Joseph Arkush of Washington University in St. Louis, Woody wrote the first two verses for Ina Wood, a feminist union organizer who chided him for not having any songs which included women. The discordant third verse was added soon after by Millard Lampell to make the song longer, and has become part of the "canon."

Rather than drop it, I "complete" the song with a fourth added by Fanchon Lewis and Rebecca Mills, recorded by the New Harmony Sisterhood Band on their 1977 album entitled ...And Ain't I a Woman? That's the folk process!

You can find a printed version in The Liberated Woman's Songbook and Here's to the Women. You can visit David Arkush's Woody Guthrie page at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~davida/woody.html

There once was a union maid, who never was afraid

Of the goons and the ginks and the company finks

And the deputy sheriff who made the raids

She went to the the union hall

When a meeting it was called

And when those company boys came round she always stood her ground

Oh you can't scare me I'm sticking to the union

I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union

Oh you can't scare me I'm sticking to the union

I'm sticking to the union till the day I die

This union maid was wise

to the tricks of company spies

She couldn't be fooled by company stools

She always organized the guys

She always got her way when she asked for higher pay

She'd show her card to the National Guard

And this is what she'd say:

You girls who want to be free, just take a tip from me

Find you a man who's a union man

And join the Ladies Auxiliary

Married life ain't hard, when you got a union card

A union man leads a happy life if he's got a union wife

We modern union maids are also not afraid

To walk the line leave jobs behind

And we're not just the Lady's Aid!

We fight for higher pay, and we will have our say

We're workers too, the same as you

And we fight the union way