WE NEVER FORGET: Fellow Worker & Rebel Songwriter Joe Hill, 100 Years Later
Submitted by JayRaye on Tue, 12/08/2015 - 12:59pmGoodbye, Joe: You will live long in the hearts of the working class.
Your songs will be sung wherever the workers toil,
urging them to organize.
-W. D. HAYWOOD
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Joe Hill on the Writing of Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent:
A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over; I maintain that if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them 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.
This is the last of the WE NEVER FORGET series honoring the memory of our Fellow Worker and Rebel Songwriter, Joe Hill. Celebrations of the life and songs of Joe Hill have been going on across the nation. Joe Hill's songs are still being sung one hundred years after the State of Utah attempted to silence him forever. New recordings have been made by many talented singers, so that now, even most of FW Joe Hill's lesser known songs are featured in one or more youtube videos.
Joe Hill Centennial Celebration: Joe Hill's Great-Great Niece, Lovisa Samuelsson
She is playing on the guitar of Utah Phillips which contains some of Joe Hill's ashes.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFrZvjkh2pY width:560 height:315]
More from Centennial Celebration:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joe+hill+centenial+celebration