A Conversation with Si Kahn, Part 1 of 3

Si Kahn talks about his life and his music with folklorist Stephen Winick.

Si Kahn has worked for over 45 years as a musician as well as a civil rights, labor and community organizer. He began his organizing career in 1965 in Arkansas with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the student wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. During the War on Poverty, he served first as a VISTA Volunteer and later as deputy director of an eight-county community action agency in rural Georgia where he also coached the first racially integrated Little League team in that part of the state. As a musician, Kahn has performed internationally at concerts and festivals. His musical body of work includes 15 albums of original songs for adults and children, plus a collection of traditional labor, civil rights and women's songs recorded with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp. His songs of family, community, work and freedom have been recorded by more than 100 artists and translated into half a dozen languages, including French, Welsh, Hebrew, Swedish, Drents (a Dutch dialect), and Plattdeutsch ("Low German"). Such songs as “Aragon Mill” (aka “Belfast Mill,” “Oregon Mill,” “Douglas Mill,” “Weave and Spin”), “Gone Gonna Rise Again,” “Go To Work On Monday,” and “Rubber Blubber Whale” have become a part of the oral tradition, and are sung around the world in folk clubs, in living rooms, at rallies, and on picket lines. He first came to Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress as a teenager and has continued to do research in the archive – now part of the American Folklife Center – ever since.

For transcript and more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-9670

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