Day 11: Sit Down... And Strike!

Lyrics:
Come on and get down
Come on and get down

Well, I'm a squatter, and I know what's right
You wanna fight, you gotta get real low
They set the bar to a lesser height
Well I'm elite at doing the limbo

Come on and get down
Come on and get down

Put your ass down on the floor
If they order you to move, don't budge
'Cause it's time to even up the score
And you're a juror for a different judge

Come on and get down
Come on and get down

So you want to go to battle
And you want to stand upright
Well, now it's time
To sit down and strike

Well, I'm a lover with a bleeding heart
I wanna start another revolution
All they do is try to keep us apart
The Free Market doesn't like a Union

But sitting here together
We'll change the institution
They say we're just a problem
We're giving them solutions

If we get down
Come on and get down

So you want to go to battle
And you want to stand upright
Well, now it's time
To sit down and strike

Details: Today is the last day of Timmy Riordan's Fearless Songwriting Challenge (though I still have 20 days left to go in my Song-a-day January challenge), and the prompt was "Your Battle Song". I strongly considered doing a song about Battle Creek, Michigan (aka, Cereal City USA) just to be different, but I also wanted to do a driving song, which lent itself to a more traditonal battle theme.

A couple days ago, I was researching the Ludlow massacre, and today I still had a hankerin' for a song about the labor movement. I came up with the basic riff very quickly, and I instinctually kept saying "come on and get down!" I thought it would be fun to use that as a rallying cry for a sit down strike. So it's kind of an acoustic punk verstion of a Woody Guthrie tune, I guess.

It took about 3 hours to write, and only 10 minutes to record.