The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #46708   Message #1528814
Posted By: JohnInKansas
26-Jul-05 - 12:38 PM
Thread Name: There's a man going round taking names
Subject: RE: There's a man going round taking names
The mimeo (not Xerox) "book" that I saw belonged to a union member in Wichita Kansas. The pages were apparently fairly old when I saw them ca. 1969 or 1970. The owner made reference to having copied "a lot of them" from a published book of union songs, but so far as I can recall never specifically identified the book. I don't know whether this particular song was a published one, or was something he picked up somewhere else.

Google gives lots of hits for "Union Songs" but nearly all of them have nothing except a link back to Union Songs This site has a search box, but has no index or table of contents, so the only way to find a song is to know its title so you can search for it. I searched for some variants of "Man taking names" with no luck. The site does claim to have QuickTime/mp3/midi sound files for some or all of the tunes they have - but no indication of how many tunes are there.

One other page, at UnionSong has titles for about 280(?) songs, with links to the lyrics for each of them. It looks like it's part of the same site linked above - perhaps that missing TOC, but I couldn't figure out how to get from one to the other.

A few other sites each have a handful of songs, but they seem mostly to be the "well known" ones (Joe Hill, Factory Maiden, etc.) or "specials" like the one site that has only "union songs written by women" posted (and only 5 of them). Sorry, I didn't collect the site URL for this one.

Several unions, large and small, have periodically published song books, but it seems you have to be (or know) a member to get one. I have a suspicion that the "source" for my associates copies may have been a UAW or AFL/CIO "official songbook," but that's just a guess.

Another possible resource might be SingOut!. I've seen a few such songs scattered about there, but you'd need the annotated index to dig them out piecemeal. I've indexed my copies of Vol I and Vol II of the SingOut! "collections" and don't find this union song in them.

John