song, "I'll Be All Right Someday," during a strike in Charleston, South Carolina, in late 1945 and early 1946.[152]
But what about "Hold the Fort," given the changing times? Even though it is still found in current union songbooks, does anyone really sing it anymore?
When the Rubber Workers struck the O'Sullivan Rubber Corporation in Winchester, Virginia, in 1956 in a latter-day battle of Winchester that dragged on for several years, there were at least some occasions when as many as a hundred strikers sang "Hold the Fort." In those years, as Joe Glazer wrote in 1959, it was "still current, very useful and a good rousing song." It was heard now and then at union summer schools and on picket lines, but it was not as popular as "We Shall Not Be Moved," "Roll the Union On," or Ralph Chaplin's great Wobbly song, "Solidarity Forever."[153] In 1961 New Yorkers heard it in Washington Square when a noisy crowd of about 2,500 students grabbed and tore up copies of The Worker that were being distributed by the Labor and People's Committee for May Day. As the fur began to fly, according to a reporter who was there, "the chorus on the platform moved strongly into 'Hold the fort for we are coming; Side by side we battle onward.'" Soon, however, a counterpoint was heard in the crowd below: "We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, baaa, baaa, baaa."[154]
Joe Glazer probably has done more than anyone else in his time to popularize the modern labor version of "Hold the Fort," for he has been singing it, together with other labor songs, since he was with the Textile Workers Union of America in the years 1944–1950, when he pioneered in modern group singing among union workers. A talented composer as well as a singer of labor songs, he has written about a dozen altogether, including "The Mill Was Made of Marble."[155] He sang "Hold the Fort" for and with a group of Rubber Workers at the December 1967 convention of the AFL–CIO at Bal Harbour, Florida. Union members, Joe Glazer has observed, may not remember all the words but they always can and do sing the chorus.[156]
"Hold the Fort" has a fixed place in the musical firmament. In the opinion of Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, the surviving labor version is "much better" than the version of the old Knights of Labor and is one of only a handful of complete songs of its genre that have survived from the previous century.[157] Its survival, perhaps the result of a kind of musical Darwinism, surely will please those who take satisfaction from the con-
