Author Michael K. Honey at Griffin Bay Books

Contributed Photo

If you are a fan of folk songs and history, live music and song, don’t miss the event Griffin Bay Bookstore is hosting for Michael K. Honey on Saturday, September 13, 7:00 pm. The University of Washington-Tacoma author and professor will present his latest book: Sharecropper’s Troubadour. This special event will also include a slide show and short movie.

Sharecropper’s Troubadour tells the story of John Handcox. Descended from African American slaves, Native Americans, and white slave owners, John Handcox was born to a family of poor Arkansas sharecroppers at one of the hardest times to be black in America. Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, he survived attempted lynchings, floods, droughts, and the ravages of the Great Depression to organize black and white farmers alike on behalf of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. He also became one of the most beloved folk singers of the prewar labor movement, composing songs such as “Roll the Union On” and “There Is Mean Things Happening in this Land” that bridged racial divides and kept the spirits of striking workers high.

Though he withdrew from the public eye for nearly forty years, missing the “folk boom” of the 1960s, he resurfaced decades later—just in time to denounce the policies of the Reagan administration in song—and his work was embraced by new generations of labor activists and folk music devotees. This fascinating and beautifully told oral history gives us John Handcox in his own words, recounting a journey that began in a sharecropper’s shack in the Deep South and went on to shape the labor music tradition, all amid the tangled and troubled history of the United States in the twentieth century.

“John’s story will not be forgotten, now that Michael Honey has got it down on paper. As long as human beings like to sing . . . I believe his songs will live on. In that sense, John will never die.” – Pete Seeger, from the Foreword

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