Pete Seeger recorded this song in 1941, written by himself and several other members of the band Almanac Singers.
I made this video using Videoscribe as my first project with the software. VideoScribe is loaded with individual whiteboard drawings that show a hand coming in and drawing the pictures. You just load in some audio and match the pictures to the words. It looks like those whiteboard videos that are so popular on YouTube. You can even load your own art and animate the hand drawing it.
For this project I was just kicking the tires and getting the hang of the software for future use. This song wasn’t the best choice for a first project because the dialogue is so fast. This caused me to need to speed up every single animation, one at a time. But kudos to Videoscribe for having the flexibility to do that.
The project took about 10 hours to teach myself and time everything to the song. For a white board narration, that’s not bad. The only non-bundled-software element I needed was the photos from each of the strikes referenced in the song, all of which was able online.
I also purchased the Explaindio software to test alongside VideoScribe, but quickly regretted that decision. As soon as I purchased, I was bombarded with add-ons for things I thought I’d already paid for. The software itself quickly disappointed me with more upsells, and I tabled it to test later.
The song I chose is a classic Pete Seeger song explaining unions, with many now-historical references that were happening contemporary with the writing of the song. I first heard it when I was taking a Constitutional Law course and was surprised to recognize several references.
He mentions strikes in Ford, Bethlehem, Allis-Chalmers, and Vultee in the song, and all of these strikes happened in the exact same year the song was written. I think the closest thing to music that topical that we have nowadays is JibJab’s year in review. Here are the pictures I gathered of each strike:
Ford Strike - 1941
Bethlehem Strike - 1941
Allis-Chalmers Strike - 1941
Vaultee Strike - 1941
Calling strikers traitors and “sabotaging national defense” was something that actually happened and it was used as an excuse to force people back to work using the power of government. Essentially this denied them the right to demand higher pay for their services when demand was high. They couldn’t sue for better pay and conditions merely because their labor was just too important to the national interests.
Pete Seeger's original song Talking Union can be found here:
Talking Union
And here are two other great songs performed but not written by Pete Seeger:
The Draft Dodger Rag
Down By The Riverside
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NOTE: I actually didn't mean for this to be my first post. I wanted my first post to be an introduce yourself post. But I didn't know that uploading to Dtube created a Steemit post. Lesson learned. I plan on making my next post a proper introduction.