Banned in Red Scare Boston - The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the MTA

Friends and Colleagues,

I've written hundreds of articles in my life, but I've never had as much fun as I did researching and writing (with my coauthor Jim Vrabel) this article about the history and politics of the "MTA" song  (made famous by the Kingston Trio in 1959) about "a man named Charlie" who was stuck on the subway and forced to "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston." The article, Banned in Red Scare Boston:  The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the  "MTA,"  was just published in the Spring 2008 issue of Dissent magazine.  You can read the article on my website.  The Spring issue, and our article, should be up on the Dissent website in a few weeks. If you're interested in political history,  folk music,  popular culture, the Cold War, the link between politics and culture, or just want to learn about these interesting people and events, I hope you'll take the time to read the article.

The "MTA" song is now well-known, sung at summer camps and elsewhere, and frequently parodied, and has been recorded by dozens of artists, as recently as last year.   The new subway card in Boston is named the "Charlie Card" in honor of the song.  But few  people  know that the song was originally written as a campaign song for Walter O'Brien's left-wing mayoral campaign in Boston  in 1949 on the Progressive Party ticket, as a way to dramatize his opposition to a fare increase on the city subway system.  The article recounts the story of O'Brien and his campaign,  how the song came to be written, how O'Brien and the song were blacklisted during the Cold War and Red Scare, how the Kingston Trio learned the song and "depoliticized" it (removing O'Brien's name from the lyrics), and what happened, over the past 50 years, to the people who inspired, wrote, and recorded the song.  We uncovered a lot of material that hasn't been written about before, including some aspects of the tragic history of Boston's own Red Scare period.  We felt our research was like investigating a mystery to get to the truth. The more we looked into it, the more interesting the story became.  Even Mitt Romney makes a cameo appearance in the article.

For Jim and I, researching and writing this article was a real labor of love.  We began the research over a year ago.  We interviewed lots of interesting people, looked through old newspapers and other archival materials (including FBI files), and read articles and books about the people and events we write about in the article.  I  had the pleasure of interviewing the song's coauthors Bess Lomax Hawes and Jackie Steiner, Pete Seeger, Will Holt (who made the first commercial recording of the song in 1957), Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds (the two living members of the original Kingston Trio),  and others.  Jim interviewed Walter O'Brien's daughter Julia, a number of people who were active in the Progressive Party and O'Brien's 1949 campaign, and members of the original Boston People's Artist group who recorded and sang the song during the campaign.    

We received a great deal of help from many people, including historians, folklorists, archivists, and political activists,  who are thanked at the end of the article. The fact that neither of us got paid a penny for any of this work was completely overshadowed by the interesting people we met, interviewed, and made contact with.

By a wonderful coincidence, Bess Lomax Hawes' fascinating memoir, Sing It Pretty, was just published by University of Illinois Press. You can order it here.

And as long as I'm hyping Bess' book, I'd also encourage you to consider subscribing to Dissent, which for over 50 years has been an important voice of progressive ideas. Each issue is full of thought-provoking articles about politics, culture, and society.

Many of my friends -- who've had to listen to me for over a year talking about the people and events recounted in the story  -- will be grateful that the article is finally published so I'll stop talking about it.

Please feel free to forward the article to anyone whom you think might be interested.

Peter