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September 2004

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Sis Cunningham: 1909-2004

By John Pietaro
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Agnes Cunningham was born in Blain County, Oklahoma in 1909. She described her father, Chick, as a champion fiddler and a “Debs Socialist.” As a child of poverty, she watched the erosion of the soil expand into the erosion of the sharecropper community she lived in. Sis, as she came to be known, also watched the mounting greed of the privileged class, banks, and corporations as they claimed the land that had been cared for by poor hands for generations.  

A musician since childhood, Sis regularly performed with her father. She quickly demonstrated her skill as a pianist, accordionist, and arranger. It was rare to have a trained musician in such circles and she soon became a music teacher. During the Great Depression, Sis went to nearby Teachers College and then to Arkansas’s renowned Commonwealth Labor College, where she studied labor organizing and Marxism. For the first time, Sis was surrounded by outspoken people who fought for the rights of workers and the dream of a socialist U.S. In order to help pay her tuition, Sis taught music and directed many college theatrical productions. It was from these agit-prop performances that Sis came to understand the power of the arts as a force for unity and expression. 

In 1937, Sis took a job as the music teacher at the Southern Labor School for Women in North Carolina. She brought to these students much of the militancy she had developed from hard times in Oklahoma and her experiences at the Labor College. Most of the women she taught were factory workers, largely from a share cropping background. Much of the music she presented was adapted hymns, country tunes, and soft ballads infused with relevant, timely lyrics about their own struggles. In addition to originals, there were union standards such as “We Shall Not Be Moved” by John Handcox, “Solidarity Forever” by Ralph Chaplin, and much of Joe Hill’s repertoire. 

There were also songs like “In Praise of Learning” by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. Like all their works, this piece from their production of The Mother proclaimed the people’s struggles through its lyrics, dark harmonies, and modernist melodies. Some 60 years later, Sis told of her experience bringing Brecht and Eisler to U.S. workers: “First I taught the melody to a chosen chorus of ten or twelve of my most eager singers. Then I arranged the piece for three parts and it became one of the school’s specialties when performed by three young women with beautiful, natural voices—totally untrained. To teach the music of ‘In Praise of Learning’ to those girls who had previously had no chance to participate in something so inspiring—this I have remembered through the years with a feeling of elation” (interview with Sis Cunningham, July 1998). 

In the early 1940s, Sis was a founding member of the Red Dust Players, a traveling agit-prop group that made a strong impact with workers around Oklahoma and the rest of the southwest. They strung together classic street theater with group singing and discussion—a kind of drama therapy for the dispossessed. Yet, so strong was their message and their attempts to strengthen the radical Southern Tenant Farmers Union that the forces of reaction did their best to destroy the group. During this particular “red scare,” both overt and covert harassment became the rule of the day; members of the group had homes broken into, files ransacked, property destroyed, and families’ lives threatened. Uniformed deputy sheriffs blurred into hooded Klans- people as oppression morphed into grave danger. Understandably, the group broke up under the pressure and the members disbursed. Shortly thereafter, Sis and writer Gordon Friesen, soon to become her husband, left the state that no longer welcomed them. 

In New York City, Sis and Gor- don immediately sought out Almanac House, the Greenwich Village home Pete Seeger shared with other members of the Almanac Singers. With hindsight, the Almanacs were the super-group of protest songs. Its original line-up of Seeger, Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays had already been expanded to include Woody Guthrie when Sis joined them. Credited as being the first of the urban left-wing folk groups, the Almanacs were unflinching in their radicalism. Closely associated with the Communist Party, the group sang of militant unionism and lasting peace at a time when the country was on the verge of world war and a no-strike pledge led by the American Federation of Labor. Later, the Almanacs, too, would join the war effort, incorporating music of the battle against fascism alongside songs of the common person (their “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” is the best example). Still, as the war pressed on it was not long before the right-wing media exposed their activism and earlier anti-war music. Dubbed as “reds” by the same reviewers who once praised them as original American voices, the Almanacs became victims of a pre-blacklist blacklist and they disbanded. 

Leaving New York to follow the expanse of unionism in Detroit, Sis led a midwest offshoot of the group for a time. She took a job in a war plant, moving from membership in NYC’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians to Detroit’s United Auto Workers. Even a post-war return to New York would not relieve her of this self-described period of “silence.”  

By 1945, Friesen became one of the earliest victims of the official blacklist. He could not secure work as a journalist and bookings for Sis, even via Seeger’s post-war People’s Songs organization, were scarce. Money was drastically tight. Memories of a childhood filled with poverty haunted her. Succumbing to personal demons of anxiety and depression that had always dogged her, Sis could no longer sing (“I no longer suffered from the lost music; I had blocked it out. I could no longer deal with it, so it was not there,” she wrote many years later). 

Sis reemerged with the folk revival of the early 1960s. In 1962, with Seeger acting as mentor and financier, she created Broadside magazine. Through this vehicle, Sis and Gordon (and their daughters) gave to the world such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Janis Ian, Tom Paxton, the Freedom Singers, Buffy St. Marie, Len Chandler, and many more. Broadside also trumpeted the works of Malvina Reynolds and the lost history of protest song. Broadside first published “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Little Boxes.” It gave a voice to Phil Ochs’s philosophical editorials and the growing movements for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. 

Broadside remained a vital part of the folk revival and survived long enough to see the passage of the Voting Rights Act, campus activism and street demonstrations, the disgrace of Nixon, the explosion of women’s rights, conservation, gay liberation and Black Power movements, and the last embers of the war. It kept a lower profile as the music’s popularity diminished, but grew again, briefly, along with a new generation of folk singers. As the magazine dwindled due to a lack of funding, Sis released two songbooks, mostly dealing with issues of corporate greed and the right-wing oppression of Reagan’s administration. It was easy, even for a tired older militant, to become angry again and Sis did. There were not a great many performances after this, but she was always there, always a part of the heritage of the cultural worker. In more recent years, Sis grew weary with illness and age. Always happy to meet with fans and younger musicians of conscience, Sis Cunningham ultimately had to leave her long-term home on Manhattan’s upper west side for a re-hab community upstate. 

Sis finally transitioned out of this life on Sunday June 27, 2004. She must surely be once again leading choirs, playing her accordion, and singing the organizing songs of old. If you listen carefully, you can probably hear the faint echoes of “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” along the saddened strip of West 98th Street.  

John Pietaro is a protest singer, labor organizer, and writer from Brooklyn, New York. 
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