Agnes ("Sis") Cunningham (1909–June 27, 2004) was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters. She was also a songwriter: her song "How Can You Keep on Movin' Unless You Migrate Too?" found its way into Woody Guthrie's Dustbowl Ballads, and was also recorded by Ry Cooder (who was unaware of its authorship and attributed it as "Traditional"). [1], [2]

Daughter of Chick Cunningham, a Blaine County, Oklahoma sharecropper, fiddler, and Eugene Debs socialist, she learned piano, accordion, and music arrangement as a child. She attended the Oklahoma Teachers' College and then went on to the Commonwealth Labor College near Mena, Arkansas, where she studied labor organizing and Marxism. [Pietaro, 2004], [3]

In 1937, she became a music teacher at the Southern Labor School for Women in North Carolina. She taught politically oriented music, including labor-union standards, political songs such as those written by Bertholt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, and topical songs, including some of her own original compositions. [Pietaro, 2004]

In late 1939 or early 1940, she was a founding member of the Red Dust Players, an agit-prop group in Oklahoma. Fleeing harassment, she and fellow Communist Party member Gordon Friesen married on July 23, 1941 in the course of fleeing to New York City. [Pietaro, 2004], [4]

In New York, they moved into the Greenwich Village household known as Almanac House: housemates included Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and Cunningham was briefly a member of the Almanac Singers, appearing on the 1942 album Dear Mr. President for Keynote Records. After attempting unsuccessfully to start a Detroit, Michigan, Michigan equivalent of the Almanacs, she took a job in defense plant, while Friesen went to work as a reporter for the Detroit Times . [5]

After World War II, Cunningham and Friesen were among the first victims of the anti-communist blacklist. She secured a few bookings as part of the roster of Pete Seeger's booking agency, People's Songs , but between ill health, trying to raise a family in poverty, and personal depression, she largely fell out of the music world for over a decade. [Pietaro, 2004], [6]

In 1962, Cunningham reemerged into the public eye as the founding editor of Broadside magazine. This magazine published the songs of many of the 1960s most influential topical songwriters, including Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Janis Ian, Tom Paxton, The Freedom Singers , Buffy Ste. Marie, Len Chandler , and Malvina Reynolds. Although the magazine, in John Pietaro's words "a vital part of the folk revival", survived until 1988, it was always a shoestring operation — several times, subsidies from Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi Seeger kept it afloat. [Pietaro, 2004], [7] Among its legacies was a five-CD box set called The Best of Broadside, 1962-1988.

During most of her later life, Cunningham and Friesen lived on West 98th Street in Manhattan. Toward the end of their lives they wrote a "joint autobiography" (in which Pete Seeger also collaborated), Red Dust and Broadsides (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, ISBN 1558492100). Friesen died in 1996, Cunningham in 2004. [Pietaro, 2004], [8]

Reference

• Sis Cunningham article on the Smithsonian Folkways site.
• Pietaro, John "Sis Cunningham:1909-2004". Z Magazine, September 2004, pp. 2–3.