Lyr Add: Radium Girls (Rachel Sumner)

Subject: Lyr Add: Radium Girls (Rachel Sumner)
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jun 21 - 05:51 PM

I think of Mudcat as an archive for new songs written in traditional style. I give you Radium Girls written by Rachel Sumner. This song both got her into Kerrvile New Folk and Great River Folk Fest Songwriter as a finalist. Watch it here You Tube link

RADIUM GIRLS
(Rachel Sumner)

In the days when Rosie beckoned girls to join assembly lines
A mixture, simply named "Undark" made wristwatch faces' shine
And women with star-spangled hearts sat faithfully in rows
Bent to help the boys entrenched stave off those dark shadows

Day-by-day they all were tasked to paint two hundred dials
With brushes made of camel hair and radium dust in vials
The numbers on the clocks were painted dainty, slim, and slight
So, the girls were taught to use their lips to point the bristles tight

The taste was a little foul, but no one really seemed to mind
The pay was more than three times what a girl back then could find
Radium was championed a new found fount of youth
And the few who knew the dangers kept the public from the truth

For a time, each painter prospered, though the work they did was tough,
And were delighted when they'd clock out covered in the magic stuff
They'd decorate their drabbest dresses, paint skin so they'd sparkle
No earthly sight quite like a glowing angel in the darkness

Curie eleison

Even lights that shine the brightest will eventually dim
But you never do expect it just as someone's life begins
As each timepiece passed through nimble fingers, painters dreamed and planned
But they had, in fact, so very little time left on their hands

Soon these young girls ached as if they'd aged for eighty-years
And radiating pain turned into radiating fear
Doctors did their best to treat an unknown malady
But no remedy could keep those bodies from unraveling

So, aching turned to limping, and sore mouths began to bleed
Then jaws began to break and smiles gave way to crumbling teeth
Families became buried beneath doctor bills and loans
And grief, like radium, began to settle in their bones

Curie eleison

To have so many sick at once seemed no coincidence
But the company - confronted - had maintained its innocence
Yet they'd secretly received results that told a different story
And they knew, despite their lies, that they were liable for the suffering

Those who had enlisted ladies to leave luminescent marks
Were now working overtime to keep them in the dark
Not a single protocol was changed at all, though there was danger
And ailing workers failing fast were easily exchanged for

Healthy, younger women unsuspecting and naive
Who craved to carve their own piece of The Great American Dream
Nothing pierced those stone hearts fortified by corporate greed
Even when the women's own hearts, one-by-one had ceased to beat

Curie eleison

I wish that I could tell you that somebody'd found a cure
Or that when the court case first came round, the crime was answered for
These women walked among the living having one foot in the grave
And still they used what fight that they had left so others could be saved

To this day no one can say how many lives were lost
Had they been sooner taken seriously it might have cut the cost
You may claim women have been long-since elevated in this world -
But how can that be? Our ashes still speak louder than our words...


I had a great time interviewing her too.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Radium Girls (Rachel Sumner)
From: Joe Offer
Date: 20 Jun 21 - 07:56 PM

What a powerful song!

In 2014, National Public Radio did a story marking the death of one of the last of the "Radium Girls":

https://www.npr.org/2014/12/28/373510029/saved-by-a-bad-taste-one-of-the-last-radium-girls-dies-at-107

And there was a Radium Girls movie in 2020:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/radium-girls-movie-review-2020

And there's a Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

The Wikipedia article says that the U.S. Radium Corporation employed young women to paint luminescent watch dials at plants in Orange, New Jersey; in Ottawa, Illinois; and in Waterbury, Connecticut. The New Jersey factory opened in 1917. The young women were sickened by the ingestion of radium, and the first worker died in 1923. The employees didn't start winning lawsuits against US Radium until the late 1930s. Techniques were gradually made safer, and radium was used in dials as late as the 1970s.