Lift Every Voice! The People's Song Book 1957 Part Two: Songs of Historic Struggles, Real People and Freedom f. Paul Robeson

Vintage Leftist Leaflet Project

See the end of this post for details on the project.

Leaflet: Lift Every Voice! The People's Song Book 1957 Part Two: Songs of Historic Struggles, Real People and Freedom f. Paul Robeson

Lift Every Voice! The Second People's Song Book was first published in 1953 and went on to have several reprint editions. With a forward by the great Paul Robeson (see our post from April In Honour of Paul Robeson's Birthday - Music and Resistance) this is an exceptional collection of songs related to peace, labor, historic struggles, real people and freedom.

Today we present the second of two parts looking at the sections with Songs of Historic Struggles, Songs of Real People and Songs of Freedom. (See also the first part: Lift Every Voice! The People's Song Book 1957 Part One: Songs of Peace and Labor f. Paul Robeson) This part is fascinating for its internationalist tone with songs from around the world as well as anti-slavery, anti-fascist and other resistance songs.

Scroll to the end for a video of Paul Robeson singing the great leftist classic Joe Hill, the lyrics and music of which can be found in the first installment.

(Click on scans to enlarge)

See also: I.W.W. Songs of the Workers

When The Left Chapter began part of what I wanted to do on the blog was to show and highlight vintage public leftist election/political leaflets and booklets. While many of these have been offered with commentary to date, a very large collection of hundreds of them from several different sources remains and to preserve these often quite rare documents we will be posting them on a regular (almost daily) basis now often without or with minimal commentary so that people may have access to them as quickly as possible as an historical resource.

While these will all be leaflets from a variety of different leftist viewpoints and countries, they are being posted as an historical/study resource and the views or opinions expressed in them do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog or blogger.

All of these posts (as well as posts made to date) will be listed on the page: Vintage Communist/Socialist Leaflets (which is still being updated with past posts).

If you have any public, vintage leaflets or booklets you would like to contribute to this project please send them to theleftchapter@outlook.com