Who said dont mourn organize

Getting to know him is a step in acknowledging our cultural forebears. For many performers—including some of those appearing on this album—learning and perpetuating stories and songs of Joe Hill is a rite of passage. Who was Joe Hill? The songs, poetry, and spoken word begins to tell you—describing his life, his death, even the disposition of his ashes.

The I. Utah authorities arrested Joe Hill in for the murder of a grocery store owner John Morrison and his son Arling. He was tried and convicted on less than convincing evidence. His supporters considered the charges a class-oriented conspiracy to quiet an instrument of the growing union. The case had already attracted widespread publicity while Joe Hill waiting in jail for the justice he expected, but after he was executed 19 November it attained a powerful symbolic status within the labor movement.

Thirty thousand mourners wearing crimson and singing songs of battle attended his funeral. The point was insightful. Now, after 75 years, the name Joe Hill is not known as widely as his influence is felt. The songs, the images, the legends and memories of Joe Hill—and other songwriters within this tradition—are used to forge a sense of community. Singers often repeat stories about Joe Hill to provide a framework for their own performances.

These stories are spread through songs and narratives, circulated by means of live performances, or films and recordings, or books and articles. The songwriters who followed Joe Hill are links on a chain of political music , as Pete Seeger wrote in his autobiography The Incompleat Folksinger.

Songs and stories by performers about their heroes continue to link musical and political traditions among musicians including those above, Pete Seeger, Si Kahn, Hazel Dickens, Utah Phillips, and many others. Joe Hill alone does not bring together the artists assembled in this collection.

The lives of the songwriters and performers represented here are intertwined not just in musical influences but in social, musical and other activities. Chicago: Lake View Press, Foner, Philips S. The Letters of Joe Hill. New York: Oak Publications, Glazer, Joe. Songs of Joe Hill. Folkways FA Green, Archie. Our latest edition is out in print and online this month. Subscribe today and start reading. An extensive exoneration campaign failed. A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over; and I maintain that if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them the facts up in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off of them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science.

There is one thing that is necessary in order to hold the old members and to get the would-be members interested in the class struggle and that is entertainment.

The rebels of Sweden have realized that fact, and they have their blowouts regularly every week. And on account of that they have succeeded in organizing the female workers more extensively than any other nation in the world. The idea is to establish a kind of social feeling of good fellowship between the male and female workers, that would give them a little foretaste of our future society and make them more interested in the class struggle and the overthrow of the old system of corruption.