About: Chinaman, Laundryman

"Chinaman, Laundryman" is a song composed by Ruth Crawford Seeger. The song depicts the exploitation of an immigrant Chinese laundry worker. In 1932 Ruth Crawford Seeger composed two songs for a commission from the Society of Contemporary Music in Philadelphia, which she called . The first, is a tribute to the infamous executions of the two Italian Anarchists after whom the piece is named, in Massachusetts. The second, Chinaman, Laundryman, depicts the exploitation of an immigrant Chinese laundry worker. Both are settings of politically militant poems written in 1928 by a young Chinese author, H.T. Tsiang. When she wrote the songs, Crawford was a member of the Composer’s Collective in New York City, a group under the control of the American Communist Party, which sought to enlist art in t