Longshoreman's Strike (The Poor Man's Family)

DESCRIPTION: "I am a simple lab'ring man / And I work along the shores / For to keep the hungry wolves away / From the poor longshoreman's door." The singer demands fair pay for his work. He complains that foreigners get the jobs while local people starve
AUTHOR: Words: Edward Harrigan / Music: Harrigan and/or David Braham (?)
EARLIEST DATE: 1875
KEYWORDS: strike foreigner poverty
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1875 - Longshoreman's strike that inspired this song. Most of the strikers were Irish immigrants
FOUND IN: US(MA,MW)
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Cazden/Haufrecht/Studer-FolkSongsOfTheCatskills 377, "The Poor Man's Family" (1 text, 1 tune)
Warner-TraditionalAmericanFolkSongsFromAnneAndFrankWarnerColl 28, "Longshoreman's Strike" (1 text, 1 tune)
Dean-FlyingCloud, pp. 82-83, "Long Shoreman's Strike" (1 text)
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, p. 236, "Longshoreman's Strike" (1 text)
Foner-AmericanLaborSongsOfTheNineteenthCentury, p. 239, "The Poor Man's Family; p. 241, "Longshoreman's Strike"" (2 texts plus a broadside print on p. 242)
ST FSC101 (Partial)
Roud #7461
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Last Winter Was a Hard One" (theme)
NOTES [254 words]: For background on Harrigan and Braham, see the notes to "The Babies on Our Block." Cazden/Haufrecht/Studer-FolkSongsOfTheCatskills attributes this to both Harrigan and Braham, but I do not find it in Finson's collection of Harrigan/Braham tunes indexed as Finson-Edward-Harrigan-David-Braham. That might be because the music was not published at the time, but it might mean that Braham did not write the music.
According to John Franceschina, David Braham: The American Offenbach, Routledge, 2003, p. 83, "In November [1874], Harrigan and Hart arrived with "The Clancys," and "The Raffle for Mrs. Hennessy's Clock,' in which Harrigan introduced a new song written and composed by him, 'The Lockout, or, The Longshoreman's Strike.'" If it is true that David Braham did not write the tune for this, it is almost the only time Edward Harrigan had a successful song that didn't use a Braham tune.
Edward Harrigan was well aware of the problems that a strike could bring. In his volume The Mulligans (G. W. Dillingham, 1901), in which he turned parts of many of his dramatic plots into a novel, he describes the troubles of orphaned Jimmy Dempsey and his sister Nellie, cared for only by their grandmother: "Jimmy was out o' work in the shipyard be the big strike, an' our money gave out, sir, an' Jimmy wint lookin' for work, sir," but being only a boy, he found none, and was forced to try to steal.
Also, Harrigan knew about work around ports; he had worked there himself before becoming a professional writer and actor. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.2
File: FSC101

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