There's Harold Hammer Beasley, a first rate man at seaWoody brought his completed work to a songwriting meeting in early November and everyone agreed he'd come up with a sensational idea for a song, but all those names were a bit... boring. You didn't have to go through all that to personalize it, Seeger argued. A rousing agitprop chorus could get the same message across. If you combined a chorus with ballad verses describing the event in detail, it might make a better song. Woody agreed to give it a try and reworked the verses, while Seeger and Lampell developed the chorus that would make the song one of the Almanacs' best-known....
From Hinton, West Virginia, he had his first degree.
There's Jim Franklin Benson, a good machinist's mate
Come up from North Carolina, to sail the Reuben James.Dennis Howard Daniel, Glen Jones and Howard Vore
Hartwell Byrd and Raymond Cook, Ed Musselwhite and more
Remember Leonard Keever, Gene Evans and Donald Kapp
Who gave their all to fight about this famous fighting ship.
"This song was mainly written by Woody Guthrie. He wrote all the verses but was stumped for a chorus. The other Almanacs felt the song was very good and kept steady pressure on Woody to finish it. For a while Woody tried to build a chorus around representative names taken from the casualty list appearing in the 'New York Times.' He wanted to convey the idea that the crew of the Reuben James symbolized the fighting unity of melting pot America and fairly begged for some such treatment. On it were Scandinavian, Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish, Spanish derived names -- Ghetzler, Evans, Ortizauela, Johnston, Polizzi. But the idea was too broad for condensation into short petry. Finally at an Almanac session on the problem, someone suggested the line: 'What were their names.' Woody took it from there and finished the song."
ORIGINAL ISSUE: "DEAR MR. PRESIDENT" (KEYNOTE ALBUM 111), Jul 1941
[PETE SEEGER, lead vocal]
Have you heard of a ship called the good Reuben James
Manned by hard fighting men both of honor and fame?
She flew the Stars and Stripes of the land of the free
But tonight she's in her grave at the bottom of the sea.CHORUS:
Tell me what were their names, tell me what were their names,
Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?One hundred men were drowned in that dark watery grave
When that good ship went down only forty-four were saved.
'Twas the last day of October we saved the forty-four
From the cold icy waters off that cold Iceland shore.It was there in the dark of that uncertain night
That we watched for the U-boats and waited for a fight.
Then a whine and a rock and a great explosion roared
And they laid the Reuben James on that cold ocean floor.Now tonight there are lights in our country so bright
In the farms and in the cities they are telling of the fight.
And now our mighty battleships will steam the bounding main
And remember the name of that good Reuben James.
