Music and work have long gone hand in hand for Tom Juravich, so it’s no surprise that his fifth album tackles working life in North America today.
The son of a factory worker, Juravich worked on the line as a young man. Growing up in upstate New York, he played in his first band, The Strikers, at 13.
Juravich began singing professionally about work and labor back in late early 1980s, in the middle of the first wave of plant closings in the U.S. His first album, Rising Again was sponsored by the United Auto Workers in 1981.
Juravich went on to record A World to Win on Flying Fish/Rounder Records. Edward Clark, from the clothing workers’ union who helped sponsor the album wrote, "Your songs smell to me like thread, cloth, factory machine oil, social justice and creative genius."
Also on Flying Fish/Rounder, his album Out of Darkness: The Mine Workers Story, became the soundtrack for a film about the coal-miners’ union. According to the film’s producer, Academy-award winner Barbara Kopple, “Tom Juravich has put together an album that stirs the soul and shakes the body. A wonderful soundtrack for any struggle…that deals with the human condition." A reviewer in Dirty Linen wrote that “Tom Juravich is first and foremost a storyteller. He has been traveling the country, hearing and retelling the stories of American sweat and struggle for a long time.”
Indeed, he has always been captivated by stories, and so it was to workers’ stories that he turned for the heart of Altar. “We tend to think that labor songs as coming out of the Great Depression and industrial work during the 1930s and 1940s” says Juravich. “But after listening to people talk about what they are facing today on the job, and I just had to go write and sing about it.”
The lyrics of four of the songs came directly from Juravich’s conversations with workers. “As a songwriter, there’s nothing richer than the actual words people use to describe their experiences,” Juravich explains, retelling the story about worker Glen Bodin, who lost his job when the company he worked for in Pittsfield, Mass., closed down after posting record profits:
I should have seen it coming, how was I supposed to know?
Record production coming out of the plant, past three years in a row
They bought the place in New Hampshire, it wasn’t much of a find
But what are we workers supposed to know, about the altar of the bottom line?
But Altar is not just about factory jobs and battles in the rust-belt. It moves across the landscape from long shifts in hospitals to the bashing of teachers and other public sector workers and reveals the human cost behind the soul-crushing monotony and surveillance of work in call centers for companies like Verizon:
It’s not some kind of office job, I can’t believe the pace
I’m hardly done with one call, they send me another case
They time my every motion, it’s all about the speed
Selling stuff to people, I’m not sure they need.
“There’s incredible resilience there, alongside the anger and frustration,” Juravich says, speaking of the life of Guatemalan immigrant worker Juan, who Juravich spoke with a number times over several years. “There’s a dignity there that we need to capture and celebrate even – especially – if it’s born of harsh and difficult circumstances.” Juan talks about “maybe” sleeping four hours and getting up for work at one of his several jobs.
We work in the kitchens, the back rooms and the laundries
The places you don’t see
We do the work nobody wants to, if they’ve a better place to be
You just want us hidden in the shadows
In the place you make for immigrants like me
Yet for all their different experiences, workers share much in common. So it’s fitting that Altar was sponsored by 17 diverse unions, including a number of international unions and several state union federations and coalitions “There hasn’t been a union support for a cultural project like this in a long time” he says.
Juravich worked with top players on Altar –drummer Dave Mattacks (Fairport Convention, Paul McCartney, and Rosanne Cash), electric guitarist Duke Levine (Mary Chapin Carpeneter, numerous John Sayles films) and Richard Gates on bass (Paula Cole, Suzanne Vega, and Patty Larkin).
“We recorded the band live, working out arrangements together. Juravich who sang and played acoustic guitar on all the tracks, produced the recording, though, as he put it, he just “mostly stayed out the way” and let the music happen.
Juravich was joined by Teresa Healy on vocals, after collaborating on their first joint CD Tangled in our Dreams (Finnegan Music) in 2006. The AFL-CIO called their rendition of “Bread and Roses” “…an unforgettable arrangement of the old labor classic.” “There just something about Teresa’s voice,” says Juravich. “There is a way that it catches with mine and we end up somewhere magical. It shows. Altar sparkles, From the bluesy tones of “Immigrants Like Me” to the hypnotic downbeat of “After Eight” to the rousing rendition of Billy Bragg’s “Power in a Union”, the music burrows through our fears and doubts and raises us up again, gathering our individual weaknesses and forging them back into our collective strength.