Welcome to the inaugural post of Lyrics of Labor, a series digging into songs that live at the intersection of music, unions, and workers’ rights. In each entry, we’ll look at both the lyrics and the conditions that shaped them—what was happening to workers at the time, what the song is trying to say, and why it still matters.

For our first stop, we’re going straight into the deep end with Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre.”

Woody Guthrie and the sound of the working class

Woody Guthrie sits at the root system of American protest music. The plainspoken, working-class storytelling you hear in Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and countless others traces straight back to Guthrie’s guitar and his matter-of-fact delivery.

He wasn’t singing about these things from a distance. Guthrie lived through many of the crises he later wrote about: the Dust Bowl, mass migration to California, the upheaval of World War II, the Red Scare, and the rise and repression of unions. His songs aren’t just stories; they’re dispatches from someone who watched the system grind people down up close.

It makes sense that Guthrie would become a recurring presence in this series. And it’s fitting that we start with one of his most brutal and focused pieces.

Stepping into Italian Hall

“1913 Massacre,” written around 1945, looks back to a Christmas Eve tragedy in Calumet, Michigan, during a massive copper miners’ strike. Guthrie opens by directly inviting the listener into the memory: he asks us to come with him, to walk up the stairs of Italian Hall, and to look around.

Inside, the party is warm and ordinary. Miners and their families are crowded into the hall: workers who are, as Guthrie reminds us, underpaid and overworked, temporarily setting their struggles aside for food, music, and a little rest. There are children. There are wives. There’s a piano playing and people dancing. For a moment, it’s just a community trying to carve out a small pocket of joy.

Guthrie builds that calm on purpose. The song needs us to feel the normalcy of the gathering before it breaks.

Panic on the stairs

The mood shifts when Guthrie turns our attention outside the hall, to the “copper boss thugs” who linger around the building. Whether or not that label is historically precise, it’s emotionally direct: in the world of the song, these men represent the company’s hostility to the strike and to any sign of worker solidarity.

Then comes the act that turns celebration into disaster: someone yells “Fire!” into the crowded hall.

From there, the song tightens into a nightmare. The main exit is a steep set of stairs; the doors become jammed; people surge toward the front, piling onto one another in panic. Guthrie makes room for the detail of a father trying to carry his daughter to safety, only to be overtaken by the crush on the stairway. Others call out that there is no fire, but panic moves faster than reason.

When the chaos finally stops, Guthrie walks us through the aftermath. Bodies are pulled from the pile. Children are laid out in rows. He sings that seventy-three children are dead; in reality, there were seventy-three victims total, fifty-nine of them children, but the impact is the same: almost an entire generation is wiped out in a few minutes on a staircase.

Guthrie ends not with ambiguity, but accusation. He turns directly to the mine owners and asks them to look at what happened, landing on the devastating final line:

“See what your greed for money has done.”

There’s no metaphor, no soft landing. It’s a straight line drawn from corporate power to human loss.

History behind the song

Guthrie’s version of events drew heavily from an eyewitness account, and for the most part it tracks closely with what we know about the Italian Hall disaster.

At the time, the Western Federation of Miners was on strike, demanding union recognition and better conditions in the Calumet copper mines. The Christmas party at Italian Hall was a union event for striking miners and their families.

The total death toll was seventy-three people, the majority of them children. Details like the steep staircase and the blocked exit are accurate to reports from the time. There is still debate over who actually shouted “fire,” but witnesses claimed the man was wearing a badge associated with the Citizens’ Alliance, an anti-union organization that opposed the strikers.

As with most labor history, some angles are contested, and some facts are filtered through memory, politics, and grief. But even with those uncertainties, the core remains: a crowd of striking workers and their families was thrown into deadly panic in a context where tensions between labor and capital were already razor sharp.

Why “1913 Massacre” still matters

What makes “1913 Massacre” so powerful is its refusal to drift into abstraction. There’s no grand speech about “the worker” in the abstract; instead, Guthrie gives you a specific room on a specific night, full of kids in their holiday clothes, and then shows you how quickly that can be destroyed.

He never lets the event float free of its politics. The disaster isn’t framed as a random tragedy or an “act of God,” but as part of a larger pattern of how companies treat workers and their families when they organize. The final line isn’t just about one staircase in Michigan—it’s about the cost of putting profit above human life.

For a labor movement trying to build power, songs like this serve a dual purpose: they mourn and they remember, but they also accuse. They insist that what happened in 1913 isn’t just a sad story—it’s evidence.

As the first entry in Lyrics of Labor, “1913 Massacre” sets the tone for what this series will be: a close listen to songs that don’t just describe work, but confront the systems around it.