Sis Cunningham
Agnes “Sis” Cunningham (February 19, 1909 – June 27, 2004) was an American folk musician, songwriter, and magazine editor. She was born in Watonga, Oklahoma, and grew up on a small farm. Her father was a socialist and fiddler, and Sis learned piano and accordion. She studied music at Weatherford Teachers’ College (now Southwestern Oklahoma State University) and later studied labor organizing and journalism at Commonwealth Labor College in Arkansas, where she began writing labor songs.
Cunningham worked to recruit for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and taught music at the Southern Labor School for Women in 1937. In 1939 she helped form the Red Dust Players, an agitprop group that used short plays to educate farm workers about organizing. She married Gordon Friesen in 1941, and to escape harassment during the Red Scare they moved to New York City, living in a Greenwich Village house called Almanac House with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. She briefly joined the Almanac Singers and appeared on the 1942 album Dear Mr. President.
She helped found People’s Songs in 1945, a radical music group in New York. Although People’s Songs went bankrupt in 1948, its Bulletin inspired Broadside Magazine, which she co-founded in 1962 with Friesen. Broadside was a small, community-driven magazine that published topical songs and essays; it was supported by Pete Seeger and others and became a launching pad for many famous folk artists. The magazine ran until 1988 and influenced the folk-music movement nationwide. Their apartment became a gathering place for musicians like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.
Cunningham was also a songwriter. She wrote “How Can You Keep on Movin’ (Unless You Migrate Too)?” which appeared on the New Lost City Ramblers’ 1959 album Songs of the Depression; Ry Cooder later recorded it. Her Dust Bowl ballad “My Oklahoma Home,” co-written with her brother Bill Cunningham and performed by Seeger in 1961, was revived by Bruce Springsteen in 2006.
After World War II she faced anti-communist blacklist pressures and periods of illness and poverty, but Broadside kept her connected to the music world. In 1976 Folkways released Broadside Ballads, Vol. 9: Sundown, her solo album. In 2000 Smithsonian Folkways released The Best of Broadside: 1962–1988, a collection of Broadside songs that earned two Grammy nominations. Sis and Friesen published Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography in 1999. Gordon Friesen died in 1996, and Sis Cunningham died in 2004 at age 95.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:53 (CET).