What Anne Feeney Told Me At Frank Little's Grave in Montana

PITTSBURGH, PA. – Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary when legendary labor folk singer Anne Feeney died from COVID-19 at the age of 69.

I often think of Anne’s travels while I’m drinking coffee in one of the mugs that her children, who were my childhood friends and neighbors, gave me after Anne died. The dozen or so mugs are from an eclectic collection from Anne’s travels in the labor movement. One is dark blue and from the Wabash Valley Labor Council in Indiana, another from the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, another mug that’s a collector’s item from the Labor Party in the late 1990s that lists their 1-800 number for activists to call to get involved, and my favorite mug: Anne’s own mug of the Pittsburgh local of American Federation of Musicians in 1997.

I find myself daydreaming about the mugs and the parties that Anne played for labor activists in tough fights. Anne’s songs were catchy, electric, upbeat songs that could make folks dance to songs with somber lyrics like “We just come to work here, we don’t come to die,” describing workers fighting back against unsafe workplaces. She opened for people like Loretta Lynn and Pete Seeger and had a gift for getting workers in tough fights to get together and dance.

According to her obituary in Rolling Stone, Anne played over 4,000 shows in her lifetime and made a living as a musician traveling the road to aid workers on strike. She often played more than 200 shows a year and struggled to make ends meet. In the early 2000s, she pioneered crowdfunding through email listservs long before Patreon or crowdfunding became a thing. She was a legend in the labor movement and folklife.

https://paydayreport.com/what-anne-feeney-told-me-at-frank-littles-grave-in-montana/