Lost Your Job To Outsourcing?

Annie & Phil Sing About It!

Video: A Ballad For The Outsourcing Blues

Rick Merritt

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Lost your job to outsourcing? Phil and Anne feel your pain. The veteran duo of folk protest music wrote and performed a song at a café here recently about the all-too-familiar phenomenon in Silicon Valley.

The song, My Job’s Across the Wide Blue Ocean, is sung to the tune of  My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its lyrics (below), like many of Phil and Anne’s protest tunes quickly turn to a call for policies that support people over corporations.

“They keep cutting taxes and the jobs go away [because] cutting taxes doesn’t make jobs stay,” the lyrics say. “Tax breaks just mean higher profits, and the jobs just keep going overseas,” they add.

Phil and Anne play a wide range of folk music under many names. Some of their most pointed protest songs are sung as part of the Annie and the Vets trio, including a moving tribute to the Vietnam War Memorial, Touch a Name on the Wall. They also play traditional music under the stage names of Ambergrass and the Flatpick Sidekicks.