Biography

RADIO PROMOTION BY Art Menius Radio
art@artmenius.com https://artmeniusradio.com

"Like all prayers, the great union songs connect us across time. What matters when we close our eyes and link arms are the images that float before us: of picket lines, strikes, shift meetings, marches, demonstrations, vigils, jails. We hear the places we have been, ourselves and others like us, in the lilt and lift of the songs. We hear the people we want to be." - Si Kahn

Fifty years ago, shortly after Labor Day 1974, Si Kahn and a small group of then young musicians gathered in a DJ’s living room in the Appalachian mining town of Wise, Virginia. Two days later, buoyed by friendship and a four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, they sent the now classic folk album New Wood off to the pressing plant. The impact was immediate and profound. “Si Kahn is the first artist since Woody Guthrie,” Ariel Swartley wrote in the Boston Phoenix, “to swoop down on a body of traditional material, transform it utterly, and send it home with a shine on.” From legendary music critic Robert Christgau in The Village Voice: “Subtlety, originality and sheer conceptual elegance.” And from Studs Terkel, “Si Kahn fuses life with song.” Today, Si is the only artist in the history of Folk Music International to have received both a Triple Crown Award (#1 Artist, #1 CD, #1 Song) and their Spirit of Folk Award.

Labor Day came about as Si was trying to decide what kind of album to release to mark both his 80th birthday in 2024, and the 50th anniversary of his first album. “I finally decided,” Si says, “that it should reflect not only my 50 years as a performing and recording musician, but my 60 years as a civil rights, union, and community organizer.”

That fit perfectly with what Si’s friend George Mann, a fellow member of American Federation of Musicians Local 1000, was thinking. “I wanted to produce an album to honor Si and his songs on his 80th birthday,” George says, “that would also give the labor movement a new collection of songs about workers, unions and the struggle for a better world. There were two guiding principles: getting a bunch of Si’s previously unreleased songs and recordings out there, and including selections from some of the many great artists who have recorded Si’s songs over the years. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than 100 artists have recorded Si’s songs – and he still has hundreds of songs that have never been recorded, not even by him. So it wasn’t easy whittling it down to 21 songs.”

But whittle they did. On Si Kahn and George Mann’s album Labor Day, legendary artists including Peggy Seeger, John McCutcheon, Tom Chapin & The Chapin Sisters, Kathy Mattea, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Michael Johnathon & Odetta, and Billy Bragg perform not only some of the great numbers from New Wood (Aragon Mill, Gone Gonna Rise Again, Lawrence Jones, Truck Driving Woman), but from Si’s vast catalog of songs that have never before been released, not even by Si himself. Si and George contribute nine songs to the album, eight of which are previously unreleased.

Labor Day is indeed, as in its subtitle, “A Tribute to Hardworking People Everywhere.” But as Si Kahn turns 80, it is also a tribute to Si’s lifetime work as a passionate fighter for justice, and as an artist whose songs will continue to be sung so long as working people organize, and work to build unions and better conditions for all workers.