Tag: L. S. Chumley

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Events T-Bone Slim

Music, Research, and Activism Conference 2023

Authors: Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, Marija Dalbello, Lotta Leiwo, Saku Pinta and John Westmoreland

Music, Research, and Activism Conference 2023

T-Bone Slim project’s researchers Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (PI), Lotta Leiwo (research assistant), Saku Pinta, Marija Dalbello and musician John Wesmoreland held a T-Bone Slim themed roundtable at Music, Research, and Activism Conference on 11 May 2023. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners engaged in activism and knowledge production around music. This short conference report is combined from the roundtable abstracts.

Our project’s roundtable “T-Bone Slim – a songwriter, an activist and a hobo” was chaired by Saijaleena Rantanen who first introduced the project and T-Bone Slim’s life to the hybrid audience. In the first presentation, PI Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and research assistant Lotta Leiwo discussed about music and poetry in Ashtabula and Erie during T-Bone Slim’s childhood and youth. Their analysis focuses in the Finnish-language books and newspapers published in Ashtabula in the late 19th century, preserved in the National Library of Finland. These fragmentary materials provide some new perspectives to the transnational influences of T-Bone Slim’s poetry. For example, he uses religious satire but also seems to compare himself to the Christ that was often called “Jerusalem Slim” in IWW context. Christ was considered as the first radical and religion had just misinterpreted his message. Salmi-Niklander have observed radical re-evaluations of Christ’s life also in Finnish working-class writing during the same period. Religion is an interesting perspective to Slim’s texts when we know his connection to religious temperance movement – a fact that has been discovered in this project. Furthermore, both Finnish and transnational cultural influences can be observed in T-Bone Slim’s writing: these include the use oral and hybrid genres (proverbs, wellerisms, riddles, rhymes), neologisms and language-twists.

Saku Pinta has observed apologies in the Finnish-language translations of T-Bone Slim’s texts in the Finnish-language IWW daily newspaper Industrialisti. Pinta spoke in his presentation about T-Bone Slim’s forgotten contemporaries and colleagues in the IWW Movement. In his presentation “The Mysteries of Other Popular Wobblies”, Saku Pinta first gave an overall context of the music and culture of the IWW with reference to two of T-Bone Slim’s lesser-known contemporaries: the Finnish American songwriter and poet George Blad and Canadian songwriter and humourist Pork Chop Slim. Pinta explored themes of anonymity, class, and cultures of resistance within the many worlds that T-Bone Slim inhabited.

The working-class poets who wrote about incarceration or migratory life often intended their poetry to be sung to familiar Christian tunes or known popular melodies. Focusing on the period of the late 1910s and early 1920s, Marija Dalbello discussed several narrative poems and ballad-like compositions and presented a preliminary analysis of ”The Rebel Worker group poets” who were active in the late 1910s and early 1920s. They were associated with Leland Sanford Chumley, an IWW activist and editor/business manager of The Rebel Worker, a New-York based bi-weekly newspaper. For example, “My Wandering Boy” is a poem about a jailed migrant worker (‘wandering boy’) intended for public recitation. “We’ll Be There” is a Lew Maisel poem to be sung to the “tune” of T-bone Slim’s “They go wild, simply wild, over me” (itself a parody of a popular 1917 song). Whether performed in barrooms, ballrooms, protests, or jail, these forms reveal a sensibility that Jacques Rancière identifies in the working-class emancipation of the body.

Lastly, musician, researcher, and great grandnephew of T-Bone Slim, John Westmoreland, performed new renditions of some of his Finnish American relative’s published and unpublished songs and poems. Brief reflections and commentary was given between the musical performances as well as an introduction consisting of T-Bone Slim’s own words as printed in his April, 5th 1924 column in the Industrial Worker “Mostly Song”:

“Now, it happens that I have written a few songs —a few songs as rotten as the system itself —no more and no less —ROTTEN. And, I maintain that under proper conditions my songs would have been SWEET as the voicings of an unsuccessful candidate cooing under the protecting wings of the administration. And since this be so and since my songs can not be blamed for the conditions that are, I stand unsullied of any taint of responsibility for the terrible straits in which labor finds itself today and the singing of my songs can not make things any worse than they are.”

ALT: Smiling man standing with a guitar at a lecture hall’s speaker platform. Behind him is a screen of Zoom participants. Names of the participants are smudged. On the left is a bay window with blinds shut. On lower right corner is the project’s round “logo”, which is text “T-Bone Slim Project” in front of handwritten text.
Image: John Westmoreland performing “Mostly Song” at the Music, Research, and Activism Conference on 11 May 2023. Live video from conference dinner can be viewed on YouTube.

For us, Music, Research, and Activism Conference was a “warm-up” for the upcoming T-Bone Seminar we are holding at Kälviä and Kokkola in August 18–19. This time, on MRA conference most of us met online as we usually do every month when we have our project meeting, but in August we finally meet in person here in Finland.

In the seminar, we will give longer presentations on the topics we have been researching during the project but also offer a lot of very interesting cultural programme with art, music and storytelling. The seminar programme will be hybrid so one can follow the presentations via Zoom as well as in person. Cultural programme is available only on site at Jokikylätalo at Kälviä on 18 August and at Kahvila Saha at Kokkola on 19 August. The programme will be published on June 1 on our website’s event page. On that date, the registration for the seminar opens as well. We hope to meet you there!

Categories
Archival "digs" T-Bone Slim

Envelopes

A sketch drawing of a woman (Marija Dalbello) with glasses standing behind a desk, holding a piece of paper in her hand. She is wearing a name sign band. On the table is an Apple laptop, two glasses and a bottle. Above the drawing is the text "MANIFESTO! Marija Dalbello 17.7.22". There is also text below the drawing. Some of the text is unreadable.
Sketchbook drawing by Louisa Preston.
AUTHOR: Marija Dalbello

From my Archival “Digs”
PART II: ENVELOPES

The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) collection in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University documents the immigrant working class struggle from a century ago. Most of the documents are from the period between 1916 and 1922, the time of unrest and war, I.W.W.-led strikes, strikers’ imprisonment, and trials. This atmosphere was echoed through the letters, letter-poems, and some envelopes (yes, envelopes!) leading back to L.S. Chumley, a “wobbly” activist and editor of the Rebel Worker.

Through their transmission, the envelopes’ surfaces can accumulate information such as postal markings and inscriptions. They record interpersonal epistolary exchange. The envelopes are the skins that transmit the correspondents’ touch alongside the letters’ writing, folding, sealing; then tearing, cutting, un-folding them, and reading. In the envelopes, epistolary texts travel — enclosed, safe, and protected. They rarely survive in archival contexts to document transmission. So, when possible, I like to examine them as evidence. I found three such envelopes in my “dig” that carried an ‘excess’ of meaning, real and imagined.

The First Envelope: A Drawing 

On the face of my first archival envelope is a pencil drawing in the style of I.W.W. satirical cartoons that depicts a mail carrier, whistling “Toot Toot,” a sack-full of packages on his back, hand-delivering a letter addressed to “L.C. [sic] Chumley” at 1001 W. Madison St. in Chicago, Illinois. The sender is “The Can Opener Publishing Co., Apts. 25 & 41, CC Can, 440 No. Dearborn St., Chicago, Illinois” (Fig. 1). This ‘publishing company’ was in the Cook County jail, its punned name a sarcastic reference to the ‘can’ (jail) and anything that could be ‘canned.’ The drawing is signed by Raymond Corder. This illustration makes it possible to imagine what this emptied out envelope contained. It could have been used by the ‘canned’ Wobblies to send their writings to Chumley. In the satchel or the envelope arriving to Chumley’s door could be any of the Wobbly letters or poems found in this collection. It could have been the narrative poem “Bisbee” (dedicated to the I.W.W. organized miners’ strike and deportation of over 1,000 strikers, their families, and other citizens in July 1917) including this message to the editor by someone who self-identified by their prison cell and the I.W.W. card numbers:

Dear Sir
How about it, too raw?
I would like to see this little reminder in the Rebel Worker
I am up against it or I would write you a decent letter
Yours truly
Card 575210 No. 300.

Color photo of white envelope. Left upper corner is an ornamental sending address, in the middle is the cartoon drawing with receiver’s address and red 2 cents US stamp in the right upper corner. Other details are explained in the text.
Fig. 1: Envelope addressed to L.S. Chumley, illustrated by Raymond Corder, ca. 1916-1917. Industrial Workers of the World collection, 1916-1922, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Click the image to view it in full size.

Alternatively, the emissary could be delivering the vision of another working-class poet Richard Brazier titled “The Girl Across the Way,” which he wrote in jail in the “year of conspiracy, 1917” and sent it to Chumley. Or it could be the prose poem, with the opening: “On Land or Sea wherever you may be stearing [sic] the ship in the tempests breath or behind prison bars of freedom bereft you who gain riches regardless of danger … ,” and closing: “To fellowworker Chumley. If you have use for this [,] put in the Rebel Worker Wigand Allen.”

The Second Envelope: A ‘Defaced’ Container

Browsing on, I find the envelope from Underwood’s News Photo Service series, World Events in Pictures. A diagonally placed note in black and red alerts to its intended contents (stereographs): “Press Matter, For Editor.” In branded stationery, the envelopes may ‘own’ their content but scribbled on its face is another message. I find the words “Secret Prison Newspaper” in a collector’s or archivist’s hand (Fig. 2). Intended for delivery of stock photos, it doubles as a container for prison journalism. This envelope was meant to keep, not send or receive.

Color photo of brown envelope branded to “Underwood’s New Photo Service”. “First Class” in red capital letters and “Do Not Fold” in black capital letters in the middle. Other details are explained in the text.
Fig. 2: Underwood & Underwood envelope with inscription “Secret Prison Newspaper.” Industrial Workers of the World collection, 1916-1922, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Click the image to view it in full size.
The Third Envelope: The Blast  

Found in the archival folder labeled “Various envelopes,” is one postmarked 1940 with instruction to be filed “with other documents of Blast & E. Goldman” that, surprisingly, contained a letter. The letter was signed by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, dated August 15, 1916. (Fig. 3a-b).

Fig 3a: Color photo of brown envelope. Sender’s and reciever’s address’ are crossed out with red pen. Text “To be filed …” is written in red. Blue 14 cents US stamp in upper right corner with a post-office stamp stating “New York N.Y. Grand Central Annex, Jun 14, 1940, 12.36 pm.” Additional stamp with letters “G. C.”

Fig 3b. Color photo of the same brown envelope. A hand drawing the letter out. Letter has text image stating “The Blast” and typewriter written text.
Fig. 3a-b: Circular letter signed by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, July 22, 1917. Industrial Workers of the World collection, 1916-1922, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Click the image to view it in full size.

Hiding in this envelope was the appeal to save Berkman’s paper The Blast and informing the supporters of intimidation and raids suffered by the editorial staff and offices. This was written less than a month following the anarchist-suspected explosion in San Francisco on July 22, 1917, at a rally favoring the United States entering the war (IISH) and before the couple’s deportation on the “Red Ark” that left Ellis Island on December 21, 1919 (Minor 1919).

As archival materiality, envelopes are surfaces and containers. Like drawers or folders, they are anatomic structures epitomizing archival intimacy in which the researchers’ sensations attract micro-readings.

by MARIJA DALBELLO

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This is the second in the series of blogs From my Archival “Digs” that focus on archival stories. I relate to documents in the mode of “drifting” (Dalbello 2019) in order to present their histories but also the aesthetic emotions and sensations that characterize archival disclosures.

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References  

Dalbello, Marija. (2019). “Archaeological Sensations in the Archives of Migration and the Ellis Island Sensorium,” Archaeology and Information Research, a special issue of Information Research 24 (2), http://informationr.net/ir/24-2/paper817.html. Accessed January 30, 2023.

Industrial Workers of the World collection, 1916-1922, https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_7072761. Accessed January 30, 2023.

International Institute of Social History. (1917-1919). FBI File on Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman Archives, https://search.iisg.amsterdam/Record/ARCH01724. Accessed January 30, 2023.

Minor, Robert. (1919). Introduction to Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace.

Preston, Louisa. (2022). Sketch of Marija Dalbello presenting, “A Hauntological Manifesto for Book History,” at the panel Manifestos! co-organized with Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, presented at annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Amsterdam, July 2022.

Strategic Factory. (2018). “8 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Envelopes,” https://strategicfactory.com/2018/11/8-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-envelopes. Accessed January 30, 2023.

Categories
Archival "digs" T-Bone Slim

Finding Slim!

A sketch drawing of a woman (Marija Dalbello) with glasses standing behind a desk, holding a piece of paper in her hand. She is wearing a name sign band. On the table is an Apple laptop, two glasses and a bottle. Above the drawing is the text "MANIFESTO! Marija Dalbello 17.7.22". There is also text below the drawing. Some of the text is unreadable.
Sketchbook drawing by Louisa Preston.
AUTHOR: Marija Dalbello

From my Archival “Digs”
PART I: Finding Slim!

Entering the collection of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University documents the immigrant working class struggle from a century ago. Among the various pamphlets, prison manuscript newspapers, and correspondence, I found a small letter, written in careful semi-cursive, each letter separate, words distinct, and lines slightly apart and ventilated. The letter is signed by “T-bone Slim” (Fig. 1a and Fig. 1b).

This blog post gives the story of the letter and interprets its significance for this project.

Photo of a sheet of paper on a table with a handwritten letter signed by T-bone Slim
Fig. 1a: T-bone Slim letter to L. S. Chumley, February 13, 1922. Industrial Workers of the World collection, 1916-1922, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Click the image to see it in full size.
Two pictures side by side. On the left is a transcript of the letter and photo on the right is a close-up of T-bone Slim’s handwritten letter.
Fig. 1b: Transcription and excerpt from T-bone Slim letter to L.S. Chumley, February 13, 1922. Industrial Workers of the World collection, 1916-1922, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Click the image to see it in full size or view transcribed text in pdf format.

The letter is dated February 1922 and is addressed to “Felloworker” [sic] L.S. Chumley I.W.W. in New York City. He signs off, “T-bone Slim” and offers an afterthought: “P.S. Am pulling out.” Is Matti Valentin Huhta referencing that he is leaving Minneapolis or rejecting the proposal by Leland Stanford Chumley to write? The opening refers to the accidental receipt of “your comm.” [communication]. “I happened to be here — may the Lord forgive me!” [“here” is underlined in the original]. We can imagine the letter writer on what could be a freezing day of February 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We can only fill in the gaps as to what would be the “accidental communication” reaching Huhta — a written note, a message, or a rumor — which prompted him to respond. The abrupt “Am pulling out” leaves an opening, it cries for interpretation. This epistolary moment connects two fellow-workers, one of them in New York City and the other in Minnesota. They are in different moments of their activist engagement. At that time, Chumley had a long history of organizing restaurant and food workers and about to open his own establishment in New York City. On the other hand, Huhta had started writing for the I.W.W. newspapers. The figures of Slim and Chumley converge in the historical situation of which this letter is a trace.

The letter from Slim to Chumley is an important document for our project because it dates from the period when Huhta was emerging as the columnist for the English-language labor movement press. In 1921, he had started gaining visibility as a professional writer. According to the project database listing of his known documents and published writing (Kone foundation Project “T-Bone Slim and the transnational poetics of the migrant left in North America”), he wrote 46 columns for the English-language I.W.W. newspapers that year. This is also the first known professional letter from the beginning of his career as a writer, labor-movement poet, and newspaper columnist. (Apart from this we do have Huhta’s personal correspondence.) He was then 40 years old. So far this is the first hand-written document he signed by a pseudonym that he was to use for some of his writing. The February 1922 letter is preserved among the materials of the early I.W.W. archives at Columbia University because of its connection to Chumley correspondence.

Significantly, the letter self-references writing. Slim refers to his “literary-blossoms” in the form of “booklet material” (not yet columns in Solidarity, Industrial Worker, and Truth). In a half-joking tone that later epitomized his style, its writer projects a unique and singular voice. He is concerned with expressivity and affects projecting his moods. The evocative pseudonym “T-bone Slim” brings out half pictorialist, half etymological moment conveyed by the juicy “T -bone steak” that humorously conveys outrage and a program of social justice.

The steak could be contrasted with the “slim” existence of a migrant worker, possibly a figure of a starving artist, the life that Huhta himself may have experienced. At the same time, the lightness and joviality of the name resonates with the existential moment in the lives of the “starving labor” and food precarity — the trope of “hunger” that often organized the discourse of labor. The name became emblematic, recorded in the caricature accompanying his editorials (Fig. 2).

T-bone Slim's "logo": a cartoon image of a man with a horned head holding a t-bone steak. The man is wearing a tie and a suit jacket and vest
Fig. 2: “Matti Valentine Huhta” blog entry by John Westmoreland at: https://johnwestmorelandmusic.com/t-bone-slim

Another actor in this epistolary moment and the recipient of the letter is Leland Stanford Chumley. His notes and correspondence relative to labor organizing is preserved in the same collection where I found the Slim letter from the time that marked a professional transition for both of them. Chumley was known as activist in the labor movement who raised awareness about the conditions of workers in the restaurant and other food industry in the 1910s and early 1920s (Rachleff 2005). Formerly organizer and “one-time stagecoach driver,” he opened a restaurant later known as Chumley’s in Greenwich Village in 1922, which remained a meeting place “for Wobs, other radicals and well-known writers and artists” (Rachleff 2005: 123; Saraniero 2020). Like many such museum-like sites in the palimpsest of New York City, Chumley’s remained a place of memory — erased by gentrification of neighborhoods, which locals fondly remember through their disappearance, when yet another New York “institution” of the “old school” gets turned into a boutique or residence. Chumley’s has not re-emerged from the New York covid lockdown in 2020. Ironically, the closing may call attention to an enduring precarity of the food industry and restaurant business.

A color photograph of a typical New York street with buildings built right next to each other. In the background is a terrace extending out onto the street. Traffic signs and small trees with no leaves alongside the sidewalk.
Fig. 3: Former Chumley’s location in Greenwich Village, 86 Bedford St., New York City. Photographed by Marija Dalbello.

The site of the historic venue remains – at the unmarked address at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village (Fig. 3), with signs on two entrances: “not Chumley’s” and “Froggy’s” (with a number for deliveries). This researcher lives and passes this site on her neighborhood walks, now enhanced by the discovery of its connection to Slim.

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This is the first in the series of blogs From my Archival “Digs” that focus on archival stories. I relate to documents in the mode of “drifting” (Dalbello 2019) in order to present their histories but also the aesthetic emotions and sensations that characterize archival disclosures.

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References  

Dalbello, Marija. (2019). “Archaeological Sensations in the Archives of Migration and the Ellis Island Sensorium,” Archaeology and Information Research, a special issue of Information Research 24 (2), http://informationr.net/ir/24-2/paper817.html. Accessed November 20, 2022.

Preston, Louisa. (2022). Sketchbook drawing of Marija Dalbello presenting, “A Hauntological Manifesto for Book History,” at the panel Manifestos! co-organized with Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, presented at annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Amsterdam, July 2022.

Rachleff, Peter, editor. (2005). Starving Amidst Too Much and Other IWW Writings on the Food Industry. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.

Saraniero, Nicole. (2020). “Greenwich Village Speakeasy Chumley’s Closes For Good,” Untapped New York, July 27, 2020, https://untappedcities.com/2020/07/27/greenwich-village-speakeasy-chumleys-closes-for-good/. Accessed November 14, 2022.