Feeney for the people

 

Bill Knight column for 2-4, 5 or 6, 2021

 Anne Feeney’s fiery, flowing red hair somehow contrasted with her silky singing as she played a rousing set of protest songs, folk and bluegrass and other numbers from the back of a truck.

And from the heart.

She was full of fun and fury.

That was in 1995 at a Decatur demonstration following a march of hundreds of Auto Workers, Rubber Workers, Paperworkers and supporters protesting Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and A.E. Staley.

Now, her strong voice is silent.

Last week, the popular 69-year-old troubadour died from COVID-19 at a Pittsburgh hospital.

She and I crossed paths a few times over the decades, but the hard-working musician activist was inspiring for many people for many years.

We both protested at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach and demonstrated at the Detroit Newspaper strike/lockout in the 1990s, but we actually interacted just twice, at a performance at an Illinois community college and at the Decatur rally. There, her performance invigorated a crowd already moved by speakers ranging from AFL-CIO president Tom Donahue, Mine Workers vice-president Cecil Roberts and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Also speaking was Father Martin Mangan, who describing downstate Illinois during strikes and lockouts as “a war zone.”

Feeney’s tune “War on Workers” that year became a grassroots hit, and ever since a crowd-pleasing anthem, along with “Have You Been to Jail for Justice,” memorably covered by Peter, Paul & Mary.

She made a dozen albums and appeared onstage with Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, John Prine, Loretta Lynn and the Indigo Girls, playing 200 to 300 times a year at rallies, festival, concert halls and especially demonstrations until a 2010 lung cancer diagnosis, which she beat for five years.

After it recurred, she performed sporadically and was hospitalized for therapy for a broken back when she contracted COVID.

Guitarist Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine said, “The great folk musician Anne Feeney was a fearless and formidable force for justice and workers’ rights onstage, in the studio, and on the picket line. Through her art and through her example our comrade will continue to be a beacon of hope and solidarity for future generations.”

The granddaughter of William Patrick Feeney, an Irish immigrant and organizer for mine workers, Feeney started to play guitar as a student at a Catholic high school and first performed live at an anti-war rally in 1969. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and its law school, and practiced law for a while, upending prosecutors’ presumptuous line “for the people” by actually representing “the people”: domestic-violence victims, refugees and the dispossessed.

But in 1987 she left that vocation for another calling, quitting as a trial attorney to embark on a rank-and-file music career wielding her Martin guitar in some 4,000 shows throughout North America and Europe.

The shows mostly were to help people raise money or raise awareness, or to “boost the troops”: steelworkers and farm workers, railroad workers and car wash workers, and more. She played at 1999’s World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington in 2004, at 2011’s Wisconsin Uprising in Madison, and countless gigs in union halls, churches and picket lines to provide a soundtrack to people’s struggles.

In 2005, the Labor Heritage Foundation recognized her lifetime achievements with its Joe Hill Award.

A local leader in the American Federation of Musicians, she also was a “Wobbly” in the Industrial Workers of the World and a member of the National Organization for Woman.

“She made an incalculable contribution to the movement,” commented Alexandra Bradbury, editor and co-director of Labor Notes. “She is irreplaceable and gone too soon.”

Often describing herself as a “performer, producer and hellraiser,” Feeney elaborated in 2017, telling the independent United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America’s publication UE News her appreciation for music and social justice.

“I can’t even imagine the Civil Rights movement without singing,” Feeney said. “I can’t imagine the early CIO days without singing. Music instills power and bravery. Those kids, sweating in those Alabama churches, singing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ then walking right out into a barrage of police dogs and fire hoses.

“It’s the music that allowed them to face all of that, and build the movement and change the world,” she said.

Her family and friends conveyed her wish that instead of flowers, people mail donations in her memory to the Thomas Merton Center, a grassroots organization working to educate and ask moral questions about poverty, workers' rights, racism, environmental and economic justice, peace and nonviolence: 5129 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15224.