Strike!
By Boneapart / August 4, 2026 / No Comments / Three Tune Tuesday
While Canada’s WestJet flight attendants walk the picket line this month over unpaid working hours, we’re digging back a hundred years to find out what the lead-up to a strike actually sounded like on record. This week’s three records were never meant as protest songs — Charlie Poole’s “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?” is a wandering man’s plea for shelter, Vernon Dalhart’s “The Chain Gang Song” is a convict’s lament, and Ernest V. Stoneman’s “Sinking of the Titanic” is a disaster ballad about who got a lifeboat and who didn’t. But every one of them was cut by, or built around, someone who’d lived close to the hard end of the working world: a cotton-mill spinner, a coal miner, a family with real prison time behind them. No union rhetoric anywhere in these three — just the daily grind that eventually makes people say enough.
Lyrics
May I Sleep in your Barn Tonight, Mister?
It’s cold lying out on the ground
And the cold north wind is whistling
And I have no place to lie down
I have no tobacco nor matches
I’m sure that’ll do you no harm
I will tell you my story, kind mister
Though it rests in my heart like a thorn
It was three years ago last summer
I never will forget that sad day
When a stranger came out from the city
And he wanted to stop for his health
Now the stranger was fair, tall and handsome
And he looked like a man who had wealth
Said he wanted to stop in the country
Said he wanted to stop for his health
Now my wife said she’d like to be earning
Something to add to our home
And she talked ’till I finally decided
That a stranger’s to enter our home
Last night as I came from my workshop
Whistling and singing with joy
I’s expecting a kind-hearted welcome
At the gate from my wife and my boy
Placed in the room on a stand
And the moment my eyes lay upon it
I picked it right up in my hand
Now the note said Stella and the stranger
Had run away and taken my child
And I’m sure there’s a God up in heaven
That will do as the stranger deserves
Sinking of the Titanic
That the great Titanic began to reel and rock
Then the people began to cry, saying, “Lord, I’m a-going to die.”
It was sad when that great ship went down
It was sad when that great ship went down
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when that great ship went down
When they were building the Titanic, they said what they could do
They were going to build a ship that the water couldn’t not go through
But God with his mighty hand showed to the world it could not stand
It was sad when that great ship went down
It was sad when that great ship went down
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when that great ship went down
When they left England, they were making for the shore
The rich, they declared they wouldn’t not ride with the poor
So they sent the poor below, they was the first that had to go
It was sad when that great ship went down
It was sad when that great ship went down
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when that great ship went down
With friends all around them, didn’t know their time had come
Lord, Death came riding by, sixteen hundred had to die
It was sad when that great ship went down
It was sad when that great ship went down
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when that great ship went down