LUDLOW MASSACRE (DT Lyrics)
(Woody Guthrie)

It was early springtime that the strike was on
They moved us miners out of doors
Out from the houses that the company owned
We moved into tents at old Ludlow

I was worried bad about my children
Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge
Every once in a while a bullet would fly
Kick up gravel under my feet

We were so afraid they would kill our children
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep
Carried our young ones and a pregnant woman
Down inside the cave to sleep

That very night you soldier waited
Until us miners were asleep
You snuck around our little tent town
Soaked our tents with your kerosene

You struck a match and the blaze it started
You pulled the triggers of your gatling guns
I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me
Thirteen children died from your guns

I carried my blanket to a wire fence corner
Watched the fire till the blaze died down
I helped some people grab their belongings
While your bullets killed us all around

I will never forget the looks on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day
When we stood around to preach their funerals
And lay the corpses of the dead away

We told the Colorado governor to call the President
Tell him to call off his National Guard
But the National Guard belong to the governor
So he didn't try so very hard

Our women from Trinidad they hauled some potatoes
Up to Walsenburg in a little cart
They sold their potatoes and brought some guns back
And put a gun in every hand

The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corner
They did not know that we had these guns
And the red neck miners mowed down them troopers
You should have seen those poor boys run

We took some cement and walled that cave up
Where you killed those thirteen children inside
I said, "God bless the Mine Workers' Union"
And then I hung my head and cried

@union @soldier @murder
filename[ LUDLWMAS
TUNE FILE: LUDLWMAS
CLICK TO PLAY
SOF

wouldn't you know it? Woody was on top of the Ludlow Massacre too. God bless him.

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Traditional Ballad Index Entry:

Ludlow Massacre, The

DESCRIPTION: Faced with a strike, the mine owners drive the workers from their (company-owned) homes. The National Guard moves in and kills thirteen children by fires and guns. Since President and Governor cannot not stop the guard, fighting continues
AUTHOR: Woody Guthrie
EARLIEST DATE: 1945 (recording, Woody Guthrie)
KEYWORDS: mining strike violence death labor-movement
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Sept 1913 - Beginning of the strike by coal workers against John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Iron and Fuel Co.
April 1914 - A state militia company (actually composed of company thugs) attacks the Ludlow colony of strikers using machine guns and coal oil. 21 people die, including two women and thirteen children; three strikers are taken and murdered. Eventually federal troops are called in
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Scott-BoA, pp. 279-281, "The Ludlow Massacre" (1 text, 1 tune)
Greenway-AFP, pp. 152-154, "Ludlow Massacre" (1 text, 1 tune)
Silber-FSWB, p. 134, "The Ludlow Massacre" (1 text)
DT, LUDLWMAS*
RECORDINGS:
Woody Guthrie, "Ludlow Massacre" (Asch 360, 1945; on on AmHist2, Struggle2)
NOTES [429 words]: There is a recent book on the Ludlow Massacre, Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Masscre and Class War in the American West, Rutgers University Press, 2007. It notes on the very first page that although there is a freeway exit for Ludlow, the town itself doesn't really exist any more; the mines have mostly failed and all that is left is a sort of memorial park.
The book does not even mention Woody Guthrie in its index -- rather surprising, given that Guthrie wrote at a time when the massacre was still part of living memory, which it obviously was not at the time Martelle was writing.
The numbers Guthrie gives in this song are perhaps a little dubious. Martelle, p. 2, gives this report:
T"he nadir came on a sunny Monday morning in April 1914, when a detachment from the Colorado National Guard engaged in a ten-hour gun battle with union men at Ludlow, where a tent colony housing some eleven hundred strikers and their families had been erected. Seven men and a boy were killed in the shooting, at least three of the men -- all striking coal miners, one a leader -- apparently executed in cold blood by Colorado National Guardsmen who had taken them captive. As the sun set, the militia moved into the camp itself and an infern lut up the darkening sky, reducing most of the makeshift village to ashes. It wasn't until the next morning that the bodies of two mothers and eeven children were discovered where they had taken shelter in a dirt bunker beneath one of the tents. The raging fire had sucked the oxygen from the air below, suffocating the families as they hid from the gun battle.
T"he deaths of the women and children quickly became known as the Ludlow Massacre, and the backlash was vicious and bloody."
Martelle's Appendix B, pp. 222-224, lists all the victims known to have died in the 1913-1914 labor war. Martelle says that at least 75 people were killed in the course of the labor war. He lists five uninvolved bystanders, 37 strikebreakers and guards (some of them killed from hiding), and 33 strikers and family. This means that more than half those killed on the miners' side died in the Massacre of April 20. The adult women killed were 37-year-old Patricia Valdez, along with four of her children, and 27-year-old Fedelina Costa, along with two of her children; one of the men killed outside was Charles Costa, although I don't know if they were husband and wife. Five other children were also killed in the bunker. The oldest of the suffocated children was nine years old; six of them had not yet reached their fifth birthday. - RBW
Last updated in version 4.0
File: SBoA279

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