"Fight On" - a song for Labor Day

Time to go off-topic from my usual content for a moment. I don’t often write music or even play what I write for anyone else, but once in a while something comes out. There have been a lot of times where I write a song, absolutely love it at first, set it aside, look at it again three weeks later, go “Ugh, what was I thinking, this is terrible,” and trash it. Fortunately, that’s been happening less and less over time. I started writing this back in Spring of 2017, got it about halfway done and just shelved it for a while since nothing else was coming to me to finish it. Then in February 2019 in a random and rare blast of creativity I finished it off (along with writing three others in the span of a week) and decided to try recording it on my own in February 2020 after making a few lyrical tweaks. My great-grandfather, Matti Peltoperä (later Matt Pelto), left Finland for the US on April 15, 1904 with his brother Anton. Two of their brothers came first in 1899, and another brother followed in 1905. My grandfather, three of his four siblings at the time, and their mother came over in 1909. I have spoken to several of their descendants. The song started out after finding a couple things online while researching all of this. First was a photo of my great-grandfather with the Quincy Mine captains in 1908-- I had no idea he was ever a captain since the skilled mining jobs were typically reserved for the English, Irish, Germans, and French-Canadians. Meanwhile the Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, and Finns were usually relegated to hard labor as trammers, track men, muckers, and in the rock house. That connection between the Italians and the Finns is how I ended up with great-uncles named Guido and Hugo while having absolutely no Italian blood. The second item was a piece of Congressional testimony to the Committee on Mines and Mining from Matt Pelto in 1914. I have found at least two Matt Peltos who lived in the Copper Country at this time, one of whom is my aforementioned great-grandfather. I am not sure if the Matt Pelto who testified is him or the other unrelated one. In it, Matt says he joined the strike for a few weeks but then had to go back to work. He testified that he was threatened by the mine bosses if he didn’t return to work, and also by strikers if he did return. He was deputized so that he could carry a gun for self defense. At the time my great-grandfather had eight kids including my grandfather, eventually having fourteen when all was said and done. Originally this was going to be done by my previous band but that ended up not happening. Playing it with them did at least give me a few opportunities to gather ideas on how to assemble it better (and blatantly rip off at least part of Tyler’s mandolin line and try to replicate it myself). I wouldn’t call it a pro-union song necessarily, but it’s definitely pro-labor and pro-worker. It also makes references to Big Annie Clemenc and the Italian Hall disaster, more famously sung about by Woody Guthrie in “1913 Massacre”. My grandfather, his father, and most of his brothers and uncles were all copper miners in Michigan from the start of the 1900s up until the mines closed down in the 1960s. The mines attempted to unionize in the 1910s and failed badly, with locals forcing the president of the Western Federation of Miners out of town not long after the Italian Hall disaster. With better leadership, they unionized on a more permanent and stable basis in the 1940s when mining was expanded due to the need for copper in World War II. Aside from weekends, my grandfather got almost no time off for any reason in his years working the mines-- if he was getting sick, his usual remedy was to boil a pint of whiskey, drink it down and go to bed and get back to work the next day. And yet, he was one of the lucky ones: he managed to keep a job throughout the booms and busts, even owning a car and a record player in the midst of the Great Depression. At the end of it all he walked out from the mine instead of being hauled out in pieces. He left school after 7th grade to work first on the family farm, then as an errand boy at the mines when he was 15 years old-- younger labor was needed due to depletion of the labor force in World War I. He spent a few years in his twenties as a trammer before becoming a timberman and assistant carpenter. So it only seems appropriate that one of the instruments I play on this song was self-made in my first attempt at any carpentry. Instrumentation is pretty simple: acoustic guitar, cigar box guitar, mandolin. The bass line was an acoustic guitar line that I dropped an octave in Audacity. The vocals are a bit shaky because I sing like any drummer not named Phil Collins, Don Henley, Marvin Gaye, or even Ringo Starr. Basically, I probably should stick to backing vocals or-- in the best of all possibilities-- just shutting up, but I think it’s at least passable. Anyways, enough background. This is called “Fight On.”

Added 17 May 2026