EXCLUSIVE: Willi Carlisle Shares the Timely Workers Anthem 'We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years' Ahead of His New Album, Winged Victory

If there was ever a time we needed Willi Carlisle, it's now.

As newly introduced US economic policies undercut unions, remove child labour laws, boost corporate profits and weaken worker protections even further, the wealth gap in America is becoming insurmountable, making even just everyday groceries unaffordable for most people. While the top 1% of Americans holds 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% combined.

It's in troubled times like these that people need their folk songs and they need their folksingers to sing them, to embolden them and to bring the community together. They need folk songs to pass down their stories, values and traditions from one generation to another. They help people understand where they come from and who they are, and remind them that the forces that they feel coming down upon them have been overcome before.

Willi Carlisle has always been one such folksinger and on his latest album, Winged Victory, he holds tight the conviction that love is bigger than hate, and no-one is expendable.

“These songs feel poised on the edge of the apocalypse, or at least at the beginning of a great transformation in America,” Carlisle says. “During this borrowed time, the weirdos, cowboys and dreamers in these songs dare to love, and often pay for it with blood.”

The album opens with a cover of the protest song 'We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years,' a song written in the early 1900s, during the so-called Progressive Era that followed the Gilded Age, that lays out the historical and ongoing contribution of workers, critiquing the wealth and power structures that benefit from their labour while leaving them impoverished. The song challenges the idea that wealth is earned or deserved by those who control capital, because wealth is built on the sacrifices and suffering of the working class.

“I can think of no better way to set the terms of any argument that I'm going to make than, ‘if, blood is the price of your cursed wealth / by God, we've paid in full,’” Carlisle says, quoting the song. “I love that it’s a voice from time immemorial that is singing out about one of the oldest issues in all of history. These stories are almost always written by the victor, but here is a rare exception–a possibility.”

"This song was written by an anonymous Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) worker (commonly cited as an ‘unknown proletariat’)," explains Carlisle about the song's providence. "It’s been a part of my live set for more than a decade, but I first heard it when I was 18, traveling by bus to visit the Smithsonian Folk Institute in Washington DC. For a month of hard traveling, I had three albums: the Harry Smith Anthology, an Electric Wizard album, and Utah Phillips’ We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years, which has the song on it. By starting the album with this song, I wanted to use the tradition of working class protest songs in folk music as a lens through which to understand the album. It’s a direct address; I love direct address. It takes incredible non-gendered cojones to write something that is from the voice of all workers at all times."

Much like now, in the early 1900s, wealth inequality was exceptionally high, particularly in the United States and Europe and the top 1% held a substantial portion of the national wealth, while most of the population struggled with poverty. How things haven't changed.

Known for its pocket sized Little Red Song Book (AKA Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent) which contains some of the most popular anthems of the labour movement, the IWW used music and songs to create an archive of their history, struggles and politics, with the aim of creating a working class culture and community. ‘We Have Fed You All’ first appeared as a poem in the pages of The Industrial Union Bulletin in 1908, only three years after the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Winged Victory is Willi Carlisle’s fourth album and his first to be self-produced, as he delivers his next chapter in his long-running direct address to the hope that by understanding our collective suffering we might be free of it, holding tight the conviction that love is bigger than hate, and no-one is expendable.

“A good folk music response to the troubles of the First World is saying ‘what are the little things that we can do ... where can we move the needle?’” he says.

Like everything Willi Carlisle has ever sung, these are songs about the power of our own fearlessness in a world in which the people in power want us all to be afraid. Reminding us all that just because they are the ones in power, it doesn't mean the rest of us don't still have our own power within us.

Listen to 'We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years' exclusively on Holler below, with all visuals by Whit Stone.

For more on Willi Carlisle see below: