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Commemorations

Joe Hill: Alive As You and Me August 10, 6-7 pm

An evening dedicated to the legacy of Joe Hill, a songwriter and labor activist who was murdered by Utah authorities in 1915 in an attempt to silence his voice. This multi-media event, featuring actor and folk singer Tom Kastle, will bring to life Hill’s enduring songs and story, from his contributions to the Industrial Workers of the World to Joan Baez’s iconic performance of “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” at Woodstock.

Saturday, August 10, 2024 6 p.m.

Woody Guthrie Center, 102 E. Reconciliation Way, Tulsa OK 74103

Free for Woody Guthrie Center members; $5 nonmembers

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Commemorations Joe Hill songs

Joe Hill in Edinburgh

Actor and musician Joseph Shaw is performing his one-man show, “Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died,” July 31 – August 25, 2024. The show, part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, features songs and readings from Hill’s letters.

C Arts, Lauriston Halls, 28 Lauriston Street, Edinburgh EH3 9DJ. https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/joe-hill-the-man-who-never-died

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Commemorations

Joe Hill monument unveiled in Salt Lake City

A monument to IWW organizer and songwriter Joe Hill was unveiled in Salt Lake City’s Sugarhouse Park (site of his 1915 judicial murder) on November 18.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/11/18/sugar-house-park-has-new-memorial/

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Commemorations Concert tour Joe Hill songs

Joe Hill: en man med manga identiter

(Joe Hill: A Man of Many Identities)

A play by Emma Boström

Touring Sweden

Nov. 22, 2023 – Regional Theater in Uddevalla

Nov. 23 – House of Music in Gothenburg

Nov. 25 – The People’s House in Sala

Dec. 2 and 3 – Gävle, Scotland’s Music Theater

April 11-13, 2024 – Reflexen in Kärrtorp, Stockholm

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Commemorations Concert tour

Joe Hill Road Show in Memphis

The Shelby Bottom Duo will reprise their Joe Hill Road Show multimedia program Sunday, March 5, at 1 pm. First Congo Church, 1000 S. Cooper, Memphis TN

 

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Commemorations Joe Hill songs

The Joe Hill Revival – a musical

Joe Hill Revival cast

The Joe Hill Revival musical will be performed Sunday, February 6, at 2 pm at the Triad Theater in New York City. In-person and streaming tickets are available.

“The Joe Hill Revival,” is a new musical that brings back to life the story of labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill, framed up and executed by the state of Utah in 1915. This will be an encore one-night-only performance at the Triad Theater in Manhattan on Sunday, February 6, 2-4pm. The book and original music and lyrics are by Dan Furman, with additional lyrics by Joe Hill and others. The musical is directed and choreographed by Jerome Harmann-Hardeman, with a cast featuring Laurént Grant Williams as Joe Hill and Caitlin Caruso Dobbs as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. They are joined by Nicola Barrett, Laura Bright, Curtis Faulkner, Julia Fein, Drew Hill, Christopher Isolano and Ace McCarthy and supported by a 4-piece band.

The show was first performed at the Outdoor Patio @ Rustik Tavern in Brooklyn, Sept. 14-Oct. 6, 2021. A song from the musical is available online (as is more information on the show and links to purchase tickets) at: http://www.brooklyntaverntheater.com/the-joe-hill-revival.html?fbclid=IwAR0n0s3zf9YD16OLJJmR-fq6pWz4KEswkaMXP1FH8YtiLwMGrQ-80cNRdjY

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Commemorations Joe Hill songs

Remembering Joe Hill on May Day

View at Medium.com

Joe Hill, or Mayday with the Wobblies

Born in Sweden, in 1879, as Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, he and his brother Paul Elias moved to the United States in 1902. There, he lived as an itinerant worker, going where he could find work and facing periods of unemployment. In 1910, as he worked the docks in San Pedro, CA, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly referred to as Wobblies, an international labour union established in Chicago in 1905. He, then, spent the next few years travelling the country, helping workers organize in unions and writing songs of protest. In early 1914, Joe Hill was working near Salt Lake City, UT, when a grocer and his son were killed in their store by a couple of armed intruders. Although the evidence pointed to Joe’s innocence and despite a large mobilization of the people in favour of his acquittal, he was nonetheless sentenced to death by firing squad, which took place in late 1915. This leads us to conclude that his condemnation was motivated by a desire to silence his activism for the rights of workers.

One of the most notorious songs by Joe Hill is The Preacher and the Slave, written probably around 1910 or 1911, during the time of his early activity in the IWW. This song is a parody of the religious hymn In the Sweet By-and-By, written and composed by S. F. Bennett and J. P. Webster in 1868. The subject of the song is how religion and its ministers use the people’s faith — their fear of God and the promise of a better life in Heaven — as a mean to keep them obedient and servile under the yoke of their oppression.

Let us enjoy a rather recent interpretation of this song by synthpop creator Intellectual Dark Wave (video at the bottom):

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ‘bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet:

CHORUS
You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
(That’s a lie)

And the Starvation Army, they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum:

CHORUS

Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out
And they holler, they jump and they shout
Give your money to Jesus, they say
He will cure all diseases today.

CHORUS

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell.

CHORUS

Workingmen of all countries, unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grifters we’ll sing this refrain:

You will eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry
Chop some wood, ‘twill do you good
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
(That’s no lie)

Lucius Papyrius

28M | Portugal

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Commemorations

German-language broadcast on Joe Hill’s ashes

German public broadcaster SWR is airing a German-language program on its internet radio station SWR2 this Sunday: “The Ashes of Joe Hill – The Resurrection of a Legend” Sunday, December 6, 2020 2:05 p.m., SWR2 Feature on Sunday, https://www.swr.de/swr2/doku-und-feature/die-asche-von-joe-hill-swr2-feature-am-sonntag-2020-12-06-100.html?fbclid=IwAR2c-eQ-7tx4rVEiekdkY0Zj61r7PFuy3Sygi6IcAKhwARs4dYB-RBOTkxI

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Commemorations Joe Hill songs

Joe Hill Roadshow live broadcast, Saturday May 30

https://youtu.be/4NfL9QNKmuc

Michael & Nell will do a YouTube Live broadcast of their acclaimed Joe Hill Road Show on Saturday May 30, 8 pm central time.
This entertaining multimedia show consists of oral history, live music and over 75 historical images. After the show we will have a discussion, based on your Chat comments, about  the relevance of this history to what is going on today. We need a strong labor movement now more than ever!   Please mark your calendar and join us.  Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/4NfL9QNKmuc
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Commemorations Media

Magpie’s “When We Stand Together” a noble effort in the Wobbly song tradition

 By FW Greg Giorgio, Industrial Worker Fall 2017 

Magpie, the folk duo Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino, wear their working class roots and union memberships proudly. The native Ohioans met at Kent State, where Terry dodged National Guard bullets in the infamous murders of four students in 1970. The social justice and environmental activists began performing together soon after and have never wavered from their strong messages for freedom. 

When We Stand Together, subtitled Songs of Joe Hill, the IWW, and Fellow Workers, is a noble effort in the history of Wobbly songs. Its broad vision that includes songs penned by Ronnie Gilbert, Tish Hinojosa, and Si Kahn, Phil Ochs, and others closes a circle to incorporate the vision of a world where there is room for the justice around which we organize. Greg and Terry have added an important new take on the singing union tradition of the IWW. 

Two years ago Magpie signed on to tour with FWs Charlie King and George Mann for the “Joe Hill Road Show,” during the centenary of the Wobbly bard’s execution in Utah. They had already fallen in love with many of Joe’s songs. They were so thrilled, in fact, they took out red cards on the tour, adding to their credentials as stalwarts in AFM Local 1000, the traveling musicians’ local. It’s exciting to hear them lead off this CD with Hill’s “Workers of the World Awaken.” Joe’s reboot to the “Internationale” riffs some of its lines but adapts it to a higher plane. One verse (“If the workers take a notion they can stop all speeding trains,” etc.) outlines the mechanics of stopping exploitation in the workplace and ending war. Magpie’s revelatory attempt here illustrates how their musicianship and sense of history are second to none in modern folk music. 

Hill’s best efforts expropriated the boss-class popular culture and accentuated themes of “building a new society within the shell of the old,” as stated in the IWW Preamble. Hear Greg and Terry’s spirited offerings on Hill’s “It’s a Long Way Down to the Soup Line” or the anti-war anthem “Don’t Take My Papa Away from Me.” Terry’s vocal on the latter is rich, emotional, and evokes the era in which it was penned. While many have recorded Joe’s “The Rebel Girl,” Magpie treats it with a reverence they share about Hill’s compositional prowess. 

Magpie’s originals show their strengths as songwriters. “Poor Old Dobbin” is a tribute to the IWW that could have been written a century ago. And “Canton 1918” chronicles the famous speech by Gene Debs that resulted in his lockup in the federal pen for “sedition.” You can hear the emotion coming through your speakers with Greg’s lead vocal as he sings so reverently about the time and the town as it was then. 

The 19 cuts that grace the recording include songs by many non-IWW authors, but their inclusion enriches the mix. Like Flo Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” where Terry embodies Flo’s unique vocal style, working-class imperatives in “Build High the Bridge,” environmental justice in “Something in the Rain,” solidarity in “Links on the Chain,” and immigrants and labor in “Borderlines” are all powerful reminders of the work that still needs to be organized. Do you know “Paper Heart”? Si Khan and Charlotte Brody wrote this about Joe Hill, and Magpie’s heart-tugging harmony is sad and beautiful. And now the circle is complete.

Please see www.magpiemusic.com for information on this and other recordings by Magpie.