This composition, a pair of songs for piano and voice, marks a major turning point in the career of Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of America's toughest and most avant-garde composers of either gender. She called herself a "warrior" of avant-garde music in America.

By the time Ruth Crawford (1901 - 1953) married her teacher Charles Seeger in 1931, she had written several short pieces of a concentration and originality to rival those of Austrian twelve-tone composer Anton Webern in their "advanced" style. This line of work culminated with her String Quartet 1931. Marriage to Seeger made her a step-mother to Seeger's children (including future folksinger Pete) and, eventually a mother herself, but she and Charles had no trouble with her mixing the roles of "mother and music-maker."

Instead, what changed the direction of her music, beginning with this pair of longish (four and a half minute) songs, was the couple's involvement with New York's far-Leftist scene. Charles became the music critic of the Communist paper The Daily Worker, and both were leaders in the "proletarian music" movement. Following the example of Moscow, this movement discouraged avant-gardism in arts on the grounds that it did not communicate to the masses, a concern that was based partly on the Party's demand that artists communicate its ideas to the masses.

The texts of these two songs are two wordy poems by H.T. Tsiang. In both the vocal lines are direct, hectoring in mood, and made of completely different material from the dissonant, angry piano accompaniment. Gone entirely is Crawford Seeger's earlier interest in simultaneous polyphonic or heterophonic melodic lines.

The first poem (both of which were originally printed in The Daily Worker in 1928) is called Sacco, Vanzetti, which is about Italian anarchists who were sentenced to death and executed in 1927 following their participation in a protest march that turned violent, resulting in death. The piano part proceeds in hard chords while the singer cries for them, chides the audience for insufficient militancy, and even attacks Sacco's own cause: "You did say 'Long live anarchy,' But you should not forget, That when you climb up to heaven You must use the ladder!"

The other poem, Chinaman, Laundryman, is about exploitation of immigrant labor in America, with a reminder that life would be even worse in China because "bosses are robbers everywhere." Here the words come so fast that the melodic line is nearly speech.

Crawford Seeger's music is still strikingly original and powerful of expression in these songs, even though she is clearly deserting her original style, in these songs, which were premiered at the Workers Music Olympiad in 1933.

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