I spit and chew and bite

[sovay]

This cat picture is not mine; it comes courtesy of of teenybuffalo, who found it on Tumblr:



I was prepared to love this image despite its likely origin as an outsider's sendup of the suffrage movement, but then it turned out to have been an actual suffragette Christmas card, which is even better. derspatchel says he can see "Hestia marching, festooned with violets, hoisting a banner aloft with her tail, ready to pounce on any police resistance." Mice and roses, they sing. Mice and roses.

(The actual song "Bread and Roses" causes me to tear up for reasons I do not entirely understand, because I cannot remember ever singing it as a child or communally, but it turned up as a spontaneous and formal expression of workers' solidarity in a scene in Pride (2014) and I disintegrated.)

Comments

[sovay]

Makes me tear up, too. (Bryn Mawr (college) sings it at thrice-yearly step sings, but I dissolved before that, too.)

That makes me feel less strange about it. Thank you for telling me.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

The history behind it is part of it, but the tune itself just touches something.

(And, you're welcome.)

[sovay]

The history behind it is part of it, but the tune itself just touches something.

I didn't know until yesterday that it was written by Mimi Baez Fariña in the 1970's. It sounds much older. And you can march to it. She did a good job.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

It helps that the poem *was* written way earlier (1911). But yeah, the marching part is one of the thing that's always struck me as a good touch.

(Judy Collins does a slightly different version that I don't like as well.)

[sovay]

It helps that the poem *was* written way earlier (1911). But yeah, the marching part is one of the thing that's always struck me as a good touch.

Right; I knew about the poem by James Oppenheim. I had just always assumed that the melody was contemporaneous. It wasn't, but it really, really works.

(Judy Collins does a slightly different version that I don't like as well.)

I'm not actually sure how I missed learning her version, considering how many of my folksongs came from Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and the rest of the American folk revival, but I did.