Thursday, 2 September 2010

Jack Delano: Hard Times in the Mill (A Death in Georgia)


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Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film



Every morning just at five,
Gotta get up, dead or alive.
It's hard times in the mill, my love,
Hard times in the mill.

Every morning just at six,
Don't that old bell make you sick?
It's hard times in the mill, my love,
Hard times in the mill...

Ain't it enough to break your heart?
Have to work all day and at night it's dark.
It's hard times in the mill, my love,
Hard times in the mill.



Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Image, Source: intermediary roll film


Hard Times in the Mill: song from South Carolina knitting mills, c. 1890, from American Industrial Ballads (Folkways Records, New York, 1956)
A sawmill in Heard County, Georgia: photo by Jack Delano, April 1941
 Funeral of a nineteen year old Negro sawmill worker, Heard County, Georgia: photos by Jack Delano, April 1941
 Negro sawmill workers getting some lunch in the back of a grocery store, Franklin, Heard County, Georgia: photo by Jack Delano, April 1941

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress
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3 comments:

  1. TC3 September 2010 at 02:46

    The term "hard times" came into use in the mid-19th century, with the recognition of patterns in the changing human condition post the new industrial developments. Early recorded appearances of the term come not in print sources (pamphlets, speeches, newspapers & c.), but in folk songs, which have a way of reflecting the vernacular so much more vividly, immediately and directly.

    "'Hard times'", the historian David Craig writes, "(or 'tickle times', 'weary times', 'bad times') usually meant a period, often a slump, when scanty food and low wages or unemployment bore particularly hard... it could [also] mean the more pervasive state in which people felt that the essential and permanent conditions of their lives hemmed them in inflexibly..."

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  2. Sandra.if3 September 2010 at 08:10

    love this!

    ReplyDelete
  3. TC3 September 2010 at 08:36

    Thank you, Sandra.

    ReplyDelete