CHAPTER 15

 

 

 

#86: TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD

 

"Sixteen Tons"

 

from the single "Sixteen Tons"

 

Released: October 1955

 

 

Capitalism thrives on owning its consumers, principally the people who produce its products. It continues to find ways of affirming that ownership but in the 1940s those mainly took the form of the truck system, where employees were paid not in money, but in kind, specifically credit vouchers which were not transferable and could only be used to purchase goods sold at the "company store." This clearly and intentionally made it impossible for workers to have any savings in cash. In addition, workers usually lived in houses or even dormitories owned by their employer, who automatically deducted the rent from their salary and could evict them if they raised even the merest of protests.

 

The song "Sixteen Tons" resembled nothing else in the brightly melancholic gleaming record charts at the time and that was intentional. It took the form of a jazz shuffle, cleverly skirting around the seven-note Dies Irae motif, over which emerges a warmly callous baritone voice. Warm because you get the impression that he's not taking the song too seriously (the chuckle midway through "And the straw boss said, 'Well, a-bless my soul'"), callous because he is fully aware of his power, indispensability and potential for fatality ("A lot of men didn't...a lot of men died").

 

Yet in the end this is a Pa Joad lament as the voice stretches "I owe my soul" in a Robesonian fashion across several Mississippi syllabic deltas before signing off with a quick "to the company store," who he knows fundamentally don't mean shit. Remorseful clarinets suggest a "Avinu Malkeinu" backdrop. The continuous, subtly relentless finger snaps could break the neck of the unwary. It is a genial cry against a system which has robustly failed to be dismantled in the nearly seven decades since its word became audible.

 

Or make that eight decades, because Merle Travis, who wrote and first recorded "Sixteen Tons" for his 1947 album Folk Songs Of The Hills, knew Tennessee Ernie Ford well, having played guitar on his first album. Ford performed the song on his daily NBC television show throughout 1955 to great reaction and received a standing ovation for it at that year's Indiana State Fair. The song's sentiments had been based on feelings expressed in letters written by Travis' brother and father. Recorded in haste as a B-side in September 1955 to fulfil a contractual quota with Capitol, it was flipped, quietly exploded and sold twenty million.

 

The song was a immensely decisive "NO" to the new fifties consumerist dream. It certainly penetrated deeply in the minds of the Scottish people of the period, including my father, and has tragically not yet passed into the past tense. Oh, and what put an end to this anti-culture of debt bondage in the working class United States? The rise of unions. And strikes.