Cunningham, Agnes "Sis"

CUNNINGHAM, AGNES “SIS” (1909-2004). Born in Blain County, Oklahoma, Cunningham was a well-known musician in the tradition of folk and protest music. She followed in the footsteps of her father, who performed as a champion fiddler and a “Debs Socialist.” As a child of poverty, she watched the erosion of the soil expand into the breakdown of the sharecropper community in which she lived. Sis, as she came to be known, also watched the mounting greed of the banks and corporations that claimed southern land during the Great Depression. A musician since childhood, Cunningham accompanied her father, demonstrating skill as a pianist, accordionist, and musical arranger. Attending nearby Teachers College as well as Arkansas’s renowned Commonwealth Labor College, she studied labor organizing and Marxism. To pay for tuition, Cunningham taught music and directed various theatrical productions. It was from these agit-prop performances that she came to understand the power of the arts as a force for unity and expression.

In 1937, Cunningham secured employment as a music instructor at the Southern Labor School for Women, North Carolina, the student body of which was comprised of factory workers and sharecroppers. As Cunningham explained in a 1998 interview, she adapted hymns, fiddle tunes, mountain ballads and union songs, infused with lyrics relevant to the students’ contemporary struggles. Uniquely, she also introduced them to the modernist strains and dark harmonies of “In Praise of Learning” from Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s The Mother. Sixty years later, she recalled: “First I taught the melody to a chosen chorus of ten or twelve of my most eager singers. Then I arranged the piece for three parts, and it became one of the school’s specialties when performed by three young women with beautiful, natural voices—totally untrained. To teach the music of ‘In Praise of Learning’ to those girls who had previously had no chance to participate in something so inspiring—this I have remembered through the years with a feeling of elation.”

In the early 1940s, Cunningham was a founding member of the Red Dust Players, a traveling agit-prop group that made a strong impact on workers around Oklahoma and the rest of the southwest. Yet, so strong was their message and their attempts to strengthen the radical Southern Tenant Farmers Union that the Players were harassed by local law enforcement and Klansmen, their homes broken into, files ransacked, property destroyed, and lives threatened. Cunningham and writer Gordon Friesen (1909-96), soon to become her husband, moved to New York City, immediately seeking out Almanac House, the Greenwich Village home Pete Seeger (1919-2014) shared with other members of the Almanac Singers, including Millard Lampell (1919-1997), Lee Hays (1914-1981) and Woody Guthrie (1912-1967). Credited as the original urban left-wing folk group, the Almanacs were unflinching radicals, militant unionists and anti-fascists. As per Cunningham’s own report, the group joined the Communist Party together. Several years later, their record contract was rescinded and all performances cancelled as the Almanac Singers were slandered by the same press that had praised them as original American voices.

Leaving New York to follow the expansion of unionism in Detroit, Cunningham led a Midwest offshoot of the group while employed in a war plant. By 1945, Friesen had become one of the earliest victims of the official blacklist. He could not secure work as a journalist and bookings for Cunningham were scarce; the couple struggled financially. Post-war, she and Friesen returned to New York, moving into the apartment on Manhattan’s upper west side where she would live for most of the next sixty years. However, facing personal depression, she entered a period of silence: “I no longer suffered from the lost music; I had blocked it out. I could no longer deal with it, so it was not there.”

Cunningham reemerged with the folk revival of the early 1960s, now hailed as an elder. In 1962, with Seeger as mentor and financier, she created Broadside magazine through which the first songs of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Janis Ian, Tom Paxton, the Freedom Singers, Buffy St. Marie, Len Chandler, and many more were published. Broadside trumpeted the works of Malvina Reynolds and the history of protest song as a vital part of the folk revival that was central to the Civil Rights, anti-war campus activism and street demonstrations, into the actions of the 1970s and early 1980s. As the magazine dwindled from a lack of funding, Cunningham released two noted songbooks and performed among the 1980s Anti-Folk movement, hailed as an original and heroine.

Cunningham, Agnes “Sis” and Gordon Friesen. Edited by Ronald D. Cohen. Red Dust and Broadsides. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1999.

Cunningham, Sis. Red Dust & Broadsides: a piece of people’s history in songs, poems & prose. Self-published, 1990.

Cunningham, Sis. Ain’t It Time We Got Mad! Self-published, 1992.

Pietaro, John. Obituary of Sis Cunningham. Z Magazine (Oct 2004).