Tonight at 8pm at the Historic Everett Theatre
Tonight at 8pm at the Historic Everett Theatre Courtesy Everett Music Initiative

November 5th marks the 100th anniversary of the Everett Massacre, the violent clash between Sheriff McRae’s goon squad and two boatloads of union workers at the docks of Port Gardner Bay.

The gun battle left at least seven men dead and dozens injured. But just stating those bald facts fails to account for the human complexities of the story that sailed up to those docks a century ago.

Here’s where singer/songwriter Jason Webley comes in. He created a show he’s calling 100 Years Ago Tomorrow, which tells the story of the so-called Everett Massacre using original folk music and experimental puppetry from Jawbone Puppet Theatre. He’s commissioned songs from local musicians such as Tomo Nakayama, Bradford Loomis, Kate Copeland, Kevin Murphy, and Johanna Warren.

The reason why the mayor’s office has tasked a local folk musician to address this story and the reason why Webley accepted the charge has everything and nothing to do with the town’s history.

In 1998, Webley began his musical career as a street performer who fully participated in that rakish troubadour tradition of folk defined musically by accordions and aesthetically by unconventional facial hair. From these beginnings he slowly built up a following around the world, playing up to 250 shows a year. In 2011 he “semiretired” from the touring musician’s grind and started working on other projects.

An improbable series of events pulled Webley out of semiretirement and led to the production of a record called Margaret. It’s a long story, but the short version is this. While digging around in a dumpster in San Francisco, a man named Chicken John Rinaldi discovered an old scrapbook that belonged to a woman named Margaret Rucker, a relation of the prominent Everett family whose 30-ft high pyramid tomb dominates a hill in Evergreen Cemetery. Despite having kept it for over 20 years, Mr. John gave Webley the scrapbook on his chance visit to San Francisco, which followed a recent visit to Rucker’s tomb.

Inspired by the magical nature of the events and of the details of the woman’s life, Webley invited local musicians to look at Rucker’s scrapbook, write a song based on photos and objects contained therein, and then play a show at the Historic Everett Theatre in honor of her life.

The event was a success, and so representatives from the mayor’s office in Everett asked if he’d like to try and duplicate that success but with a more political subject matter.

Webley was at first reluctant to the idea of putting a show together. He’s never been very political with music. And though he grew up in Everett, he jokingly calls it “one of Seattle’s armpits.” And yet, for the last few years, Webley says he’s been slowly developing an affection for the town. He’s got property there, friends, family, and when he walks around downtown people seem to know his name.

But he was also reluctant because he didn’t know much about his hometown’s “Bloody Sunday.” He’s not alone. But the more he studied that day and the events surrounding it, the more interested he became.

To hear Webley tell it, Everett was only 30 years old in 1906. Profits from lumber mills were booming, and the shingle mill was doing the most business. If you worked in a shingle mill, you were probably a “shingle-weaver,” which is a weird name for a hard, dangerous job. In clouds of cedar dust, shingle-weavers cut and trimmed shingles at a rate of 50 per minute. That’s about one shingle per second. Shingle-weavers were known for (and some were proud of) losing fingers. Other workers had to stack the shingles in alternate directions so they stacked flat, which is where the “weaving” part comes in.

They went on strike in order to secure fair wages. The strike dragged on as the mills hired “scabs” and pitted unions against one another. Seattle-based Industrial Workers of the World (aka IWWs aka “Wobblies”) found out about the strike and decided to help out. Sheriff Donald McCrae, a former shingle-weaver and union man himself, resisted the Wobbly intrusion. Their strategy was to get arrested in numbers large enough to bankrupt the town, and McCrae’s counterstrategy was to rough them up and send them out of town.

This conflict came to a head with the “Incident at Beverly Park,” where arrested Wobblies were rounded up and beaten by deputies wearing white scarves. A week later, 300 workers chartered two ships—the Verona and the Calista—and headed north to Port Gardner. They reportedly sang “Hold the Fort,” a union fight song en route to the shore. When they got to the docks there was a standoff between the men in the boat and the approximately 200 deputies on the docks. McCrae supposedly said, “Who is your leader?” The Wobblies said “We’re all leaders.” Then there was a shoot out, which ended in a Wobbly retreat back to Seattle.

There have been several long-fought arguments and open questions since the day. Who shot first? Can you really call it a massacre when “only” seven people died? Were McRae’s deputies really there to mow down Wobblies, or were they only trying to protect their city?

For the show, Webley plans to skirt these long lasting arguments and instead focus on the personal threads that run through the story, the little moments that don’t often come up when the local historians start yelling about who fired the first shot and whose daddy killed whose daddy.

“It’s the 100 year anniversary of the most talked about, ugly, famous thing that ever happened in my home. And I think it’s a good time to sit and look at that. And to sit with it,” Webley says. “My goal isn’t for people to have some big revelation about what it all means,” Webley said. “The thing that seduced me into doing this project was the countless resonants with current times.”

Using the Margaret album as a model, Webley invited a bunch of musicians to review tons of historical materials and to respond in song. He sent me a few demos of the songs on offer for the evening, and they do sound about as current and vital as folk music can sound. Tomo Nakayama sings a pretty and contemplative ballad about Abe Rabinowitz, a “quiet mannered, quite well-read” union worker who took a bullet to the brain during the clash with the deputies on the dock. Buoyed by a sprightly accordion, Webley contributes a sea shanty-type bar song that connects the class struggles of today with those of the Wobblies. On “Cuts,” Johanna Warren trembles through a menacing and dark meditation on the physical and mental sacrifices of shingle-weavers.

Organized labor’s role in shaping the way we think about worker’s rights and civil liberties has greatly diminished since its heyday in the mid-1960s. Partly due to union busting, partly due to criminal reputations, and partly due to the little ways corporations disempower their employees.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just under 17 percent of workers in the state of Washington belong to a union today, down from 20 percent in the mid-aughts, and that number ranks us 5th highest in the nation. Since unions don’t play an active part in many of our lives, it’s easy to dismiss them and the fight to control the means of production as one of those nice socialist ideas that largely died a few years ago, along with earnest calls for World Peace and the American Dream. 100 Years Ago Tomorrow might, in it’s personal and perhaps less abrasively political approach, reinvigorate interest in this form of collective power that we need more than ever.