Si Kahn, the man who’s often described as the most well-known Charlottean whom most Charlotte residents haven’t heard of, is back in town this week. Kahn, who has spent most of his life balancing political and labor organizing with his passion for music, has a new album, Aragon Mill: The Bluegrass Sessions, recorded with the German bluegrass band the Looping Brothers. The album has hit the top spot on the Folk Alliance International charts, just as the band nears the end of a tour with a Charlotte performance Friday, benefitting the Charlotte Folk Society.
While his Charlotte musical appearances were infrequent at the time, Kahn built a nearly mythical reputation among fans all over the U.S. and Europe, where his records sell well and he regularly fills concert halls. His songs cover myriad subjects, but he’s most known for his music about workers and their families, such as the song “Aragon Mill.” The song has become a labor anthem and comes to brilliant life again with the lively bluegrass arrangement it receives on the new album.
The partnership with the Looping Brothers (the name is a takeoff on country music’s legendary Louvin Brothers) is yet another in Kahn’s long list of unpredictable life changes. The son of a rabbi, from a family that lost many members to the Nazi Holocaust, Kahn nurtured a dislike of Germany that at first kept him from performing there after he was invited by the Looping Brothers. Kahn’s father told him his attitude was a big mistake, and so Si set about on yet another unlikely journey, this time to create justice and understanding at the most personal level.
The native Pennsylvanian’s adult journey began in the mid-1960s when he came south to organize for the civil rights movement. After taking part in that epic struggle, he stayed in the South, where he followed his passion for social justice. In the 1970s, Kahn was involved in helping Harlan County, Ky., coal miners in their landmark strike for union recognition and better safety measures in the Brookside Mine, which was owned by Duke Power Co. (now Duke Energy). The strike was the subject of the Oscar-winning film Harlan County USA, now considered one of the greatest documentary movies ever made. It was during the Brookside strike, Kahn says, that he realized he wanted to help others get organized to fight grassroots battles for their rights and well-being.
In the ensuing years, Kahn worked in the long effort to unionize J.P. Stevens textile mills. That battle, which the Chicago Sun-Times called “the biggest labor-management war of the last two decades,” finally ended in 1980 with the unionization of 10 Stevens plants in the Carolinas and Alabama. Kahn then helped found the Carolina Brown Lung Association, an aggressive and creative advocacy group that successfully changed the way textile plants operated. Shortly after the brown-lung fight, Kahn founded Grassroots Leadership, which has been helping ordinary people around the South and Southwest to organize to protect their interests for more than 30 years, including successful fights against private prisons in Texas. More recently, Kahn has headed up Musicians United to Protect Bristol Bay, a group publicizing the fight to stop the building of a huge open pit mine in Alaska next to rivers that contain the largest salmon fisheries in the world. He sang at a Charlotte Moral Monday protest in August.
While becoming a legend in political organizing circles, Kahn also recorded around 20 albums of music, toured in the U.S. and Europe, and wrote four books and three plays, including a couple of musicals. I get tired just re-reading that last sentence.
As a childhood resident of a South Carolina “mill hill,” I had to ask Kahn how he came to feel such understanding and empathy for working-class Southerners. “I’d say it’s family history,” he said. “My grandfather was a pick and shovel guy who came to the U.S. from Russia; he eventually ran a store in a Lowell, Mass., mill village, and one of my aunts was a spinner in one of the Lowell mills. My father was an intellectual who was dedicated to supporting justice for all. I guess I’ve combined those two sides of the family history. I’m a good car mechanic and carpenter, and I’m a Harvard-trained historian, too.”
So how did the focus on history instigate such a passion for social justice? Kahn replied with a smile: “I’ve always said that a good working knowledge of the medieval feudal system was probably necessary for an understanding of organizing in the South.”
Si Kahn and the Looping Brothers will perform Friday, Oct. 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the Great Aunt Stella Center. The concert is free but donations to the Charlotte Folk Society are appreciated.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2013.
