About Anne Feeney
“Anne Feeney is the best labor singer in North America” — Utah Phillips
Anne Feeney still lives in her hometown – Pittsburgh, PA. Granddaughter of a fearless mineworkers’ organizer, Anne is part of a large extended family that sings at weddings, wakes and reunions. She plays a 1967 Martin D-28 that she bought new. She is the mother of two – Daniel Feeney Berlin, a Cornell grad & Peace Corps volunteer now living in Washington, DC and Amy Berlin, student and activist living in Portland, OR and Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2002, she married Swedish labor artist Julie Leonardsson. She tours regularly in Sweden and Denmark.
Feeney doesn’t just sing about social change, she works for it every day. She serves on the Board of Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center, the hub of peace and justice activity for the past 30+ years. She’s been a NOW chapter president and state executive board member. She’s been a researcher, a newsletter editor, a delegate to the Central Labor Council, a CLUW Vice President, and she’s the only woman ever elected President of the Pittsburgh Musicians’ Union. She has traveled through forty states and four provinces raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for striking workers, for women’s centers, for anti-war actions and other worthy causes. Music and politics have always been part of Anne’s life. Her first public concert was at an anti-war rally in November of 1969. That day she sang a scorching set of Phil Ochs songs. She’s probably got well over 500 songs memorized … traditional tunes, Irish songs, bluegrass, sixties and seventies pop, folk songs, union songs – songs her friends have written, and award winning songs of her own.
Anne’s voice rang out at the Lincoln Memorial during the Great Peace March in 1986, at the Washington Monument for the 1989 March for Women’s Lives, at the Washington Monument on Solidarity Day 1991, and on April 25, 2004 for 1.5 million people at the March for Women’s Lives and Women’s Equality…. She has inspired and energized audiences at the United Nations, at EU protests in Copenhagen, at the LO Kongress in Stockholm, the historic WTO protests in Seattle … she’s an activist and eyewitness from the frontlines… ‘minister of culture’ to the environmental, labor, women’s and anti-war movements. Few women have taken Woody Guthrie’s path – but Anne Feeney has made a career of it for the past thirty-five years.