I first heard it in the 60's and it opened a discussion on the question "what is working class music?" which is still apposite. My first interlocutor on the question was my father, who thought that the point of any socialist revolution was to make irrelevant such questions - "we want to abolish classes, not celebrate them," is the thrust of his argument in a nutshell. I wasn't sure then and I'm not sure now. My work these days is the recovery of what we call vernacular song from small newspapers in BC's small mining towns. We've made a CD of such songs from our home town ("Now It's Called Princeton") and have done enough research to assure ourselves that Princeton and its newspapers was not unique - there are clearly hundreds of "working class" or vernacular songs between here and the Alberta coalfields. The creators of the Iron Muse certainly planted a seed!

Jon Bartlett