Boing! Anarchist Collective in Salt Lake City is hosting a fundraiser August 8th for the Joe Hill Centennial Celebration.
Performing are
Chris Jackson, Low Cotton, and Widdrim.
WHAT: Fundraiser for the Joe Hill Centennial Celebration
WHEN: Saturday August 8, 7pm
WHERE: The Boing! House, 608 S 500 E, Salt Lake City, Utah
Big thanks to all at the Boing! house for hosting.
Curious about Boing!? Watch this profile with Salt the Block.
Guy Davis will have the park rocking with the blues at the Joe Hill Centennial Celebration on September 5th.
Musician, composer, actor, director, and writer. Guy Davis is a bluesman. The blues permeates every corner of Davis’ creativity. He dedicates himself to reviving the traditions of acoustic blues through great blues masters, African American stories, and his own original songs, stories and performance pieces.
Guy is the son of actors and prominent civil rights activists Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.
Guy will be performing with The Guy Davis Trio, Nerak Roth Patterson on electric guitar, and Chris James on Mandolin.
Guest post for the Joe Hill Organizing Committee.
It’s a bleak, early spring day in Stockholm, year 1900. A young man has just gone off the train from Gävle. Outside the Central Station he attracts some attention, not for his youth, not for his slender figure, but for the rashes that cover his face and neck. Is it something contagious? Not leprosy, right?
His name is Joel
His name is Joel Hägglund (1879 – 1915). A few years later, in America, he’ll take the name Joseph Hillström. After yet another few years his name will be Joe Hill, and he will go down in history under that name—as an agitator, union leader and singer-songwriter. In the year 1915, he’s executed in America, convicted.
With this, the labor movement got a martyr, and this year is the centennial for Joe Hill’s execution.
This agitator, whose songs were sung and whom many sang about on the other side the Atlantic ocean—for example, Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen—has a well-preserved legacy, maybe more in America than in Sweden. Stephen King gave a son the name Joseph Hillstrom, which the son shortened to Joe Hill. On social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, comments are flooding in about the death sentence and comparisons between now and then.
The centennial could just as well be a multi-centennial on the discrimination of people on the edge of the labor market. Today’s unprotected guest workers in Stockholm and other cities have a lot in common with the so called low-skilled work force that Joe Hill wanted organized in the IWW, Industrial Workers of the World.
This organization is described like this by one of Kerstin Ekman’s characters in Menedarna (1970):
“The IWW is something they founded to get a union that also works as a place for the trash. Those who don’t want to educate themselves and would rather not do anything at all.”
The agitator was sentenced and executed in the Mormon state Utah. The U.S. President appealed for a pardon for Joe Hill. The pardon was rejected and the radical Swedish American moved on to the afterlife for what was probably a miscarriage of justice.
The rashes brought Joel to the capital
But let’s move on to the stay in Stockholm. The rashes brought Joel to the capital. The disease symptoms were already apparent in the mid-1890s. He first sought medical attention in his hometown for the rashes on his right hand and one of the alas of the nose. He went to the hospital when they didn’t heal and was treated with x-rays. The diagnose was cutaneous tuberculosis. He quickly went home with a bandage around his hand and a referral to a specialist in Stockholm, Dr. Tage Sjögren on Hamngatan. Sjögren, medical doctor working on a Battalion aid station with skin diseases as a speciality, used phototherapy (or light therapy). Back then this was a new method.
Two to three times a week, Joel had to lie down on an examining table and reveal his skin for the ultraviolet light from a lamp.
“Watch your eyes!”
After the doctor’s or a nurse’s orders, the light was turned on. It’s not difficult to imagine how Joel would rather have his eyes closed than protect his eyes with patches previously used by other patients.
When health wasn’t a hindrance, this soon-to-be revolutionary labor singer hurried out on the streets of Stockholm. With rising restlessness, he waited for the treatment to stop. In the end, he made a virtue of necessity, which already was a saying back then. He started to look forward to the hospital visits, where he had to lay still—which could be healthy for both mind and body.
Hospital care was required
His condition did not improve. Eventually, hospital care was required.
April 15, 1900, Joel was hospitalized in “Serafimerlasarettet” for cutaneous tuberculosis. Forearm and nose glands in particular.
He was treated with phototherapy again, as well as medicines and surgery. Joel was periodically very weak. Friends to his family who came to visit had a hard time talking to him as he was covered in bandages.
The doctors were still hopeful. The youngster’s lungs were strong and the tubercles didn’t seem to reach them.
Serafimerlasarettet, founded in 1872, is usually described as Stockholm’s first hospital and was used until 1980. The buildings on Hantverkargatan on Kungsholmen, opposite the city hall, are still there. Joel’s records were, unfortunately, cancelled after a while, according to the National Archives.
Naturally, the patients didn’t have their own rooms but lay in beds in big hospital wards.
Many patients were workers. Joel laid and listened to wheezing and throat clearing from the patients in the other beds. Some found each other in obvious topics—such as sharp condemnations towards injustices and repression.
When he wasn’t in agony and weakness, Joel participated in the conversations. Otherwise, he laid and stared up at the ceiling. At this point, fight songs from religious melodies started to materialize.
His home in Gävle was pious, but his relationship to God was, with today’s vocabulary, flexible. His grade in Christendom was a C, and one of his most famous songs is about how “you got pie in the sky when you die”.
For two years, he resided in Stockholm
Most of the time, Joel was a lodger on Västerlånggatan in Gamla Stan (the Old City). For two years, he resided in Stockholm. Longer than planned. This was because the treatment took longer than the doctors thought. It was more expensive than Joel’s family expected as well; the hospitalization costed about 75 Swedish öre per day. The family payed, at least initially.
Afterwards, Joel had to pay with what he earned from his temporary jobs. He called himself an ironworker, but he also worked as a paper salesman. Paper salesmen were often seen on the street, young boys in their characteristic hats handed out papers such as Stockholms Dagblad and Stockholms-Tidningen. Joel with his hat might have had a hard time reconciling with both the informal headgear and the often defencist messages in the columns.
Many of the newspapers at the turn of the century, on the other hand, propagated for something as sympathetic as equal and universal suffrage.
He had his political sympathies
Joel was not a searching young man but was clear early on about where he had his political sympathies. Already in Stockholm, he identified as a revolutionary syndicalist and had contact with radical publications such as Brand. When he wasn’t in the hospital, Joel spent evenings at cafés and in parks. Among the new friends were young social democrats who later would become active anarchists or syndicalists.
May 1st started to be celebrated as a labor movement’s worldwide day for demonstrations in the year 1890. Naturally enough, there are no documents that show whether Joel demonstrated or was in the hospital May 1st ten years later. But, wherever he was, he would have agreed with slogans against the throne, sword, and altar. According to a biographer, Ingvar Söderström, was Joel radicalised in Stockholm. The distress and poverty was greater than in Gävle.
His family dispersed
When both his parents were dead, his family dispersed. Out of the nine kids, six survived their first years and grew up. Four sons and two daughters. One son, Ruben, moved to Stockholm. Another brother, Paul, went along with Joel to America. While Joel became a hero in Sweden and America, Paul became the exact opposite. At least in Gävle. This was because he had left his wife and kids.
Paul was married and, a few years later he remarried in America, without divorcing his first wife, says one of Joe Hill’s relatives, namely Rolf Hägglund, who is the grandson to another one of Joe Hill’s brothers, Efraim.
Rolf lives in Västerhaninge. When I take the shuttle train there, it feels like I’m in “Joe Hill-land”. In the centrum, the atmosphere is tough. Many of the unemployed could become members of a modern day counterpart to the militant IWW. On the pub’s patio, some regulars are shivering. And, it was in Västerhaninge that the Mormons built their first Swedish temple.
We talk about how Joe Hill was sentenced to death for murder and executed. A shopkeeper, J.M. Morrison, and his son had been murdered the 10th of January year 1914 in Salt Lake City in Utah. Joe Hill, early suspected for the murder on the shopkeeper, refused to tell the police what he had done that dire evening.
“They have nothing on me”, he said time and time again in his cell, a line that’s repeated in Kerstin Ekman’s work.
Hägglund cherishes the memory of the historical relative
Hard to know why he kept quiet. I believe that the explanations are 25% honor and 75% naïve belief in the judiciary. He couldn’t believe that he was going to be sentenced, since he was innocent, says Rolf Hägglund, who cherishes the memory of the historical relative.
Hägglund’s five kids did their special projects about Joe Hill. So did also two of their cousins. The fact that there are no personal documents left from his time in prison, Robert calls a “historical misdeed”.
For a period, the prison sent Joe Hill’s letters, drafts of song lyrics and other documents to a relative in Sweden. Their widow later burned everything, completely fixated to eradicate the traces of a condemned and executed member of the family.
October 5th it was time for Joel to leave Stockholm and return to Gävle. He walked with some toil towards the central station, made a stop in Järnvägsparken and looked at the statue of Nils Ericson, an engineer but above all railroad worker, just like Joel’s dad, who died after an accident at work. When Joel was only eight years old, his dad who was a conductor, fell under a moving railroad car. He later died from the injuries, one of countless of people who die at work without getting a memorial.
Just as he arrived to the station, the lanky man attracted some attention. His rashes were gone but were replaced by scars. The nose was as thin as a line, one of the alas thin as a leaf, which has been observed by many late beholders of his portrait.
Martyrs’ looks and charisma usually cause endless associations. This was also the case with Joe Hill. But what survived the illness and poverty—indeed, survived death—is above all the songs.
In that sense, a monument has also been erected of a working “Hägglund”.
Jan-Ewert Strömbäck
journalist and writer, Stockholm, Sweden
Translation from Swedish: Dan Strömbäck
Are you interested in publishing your writing on Joe Hill? Write to us and let us know. We welcome your writing and artwork.
Guest post for the Joe Hill Organizing Committee.
The Supreme Court 5-4 on June 29, 2015, approved a substitute drug cocktail that does not rule out botched executions. Justice Breyer wrote an inspiring opinion for the abolition of the death penalty.
We all came to Joe Hill for different reasons. My reason as a trial lawyer is that the death penalty corrupts the system as much today as in Joe Hill’s time. What outrages me the most in the Hill case is the lack of experienced trial counsel and the complete lack of a system that would clean up the messes left by juries. One hundred years later, our system for cleaning up the messes left by the jury system doesn’t seem much better.
I understand the ideology behind Hill’s work. I appreciate the cleaver puns and originality. I understand the importance to the labor movement.
I feel the injustice of the 1914-1915 legal system. As Adam Pritchard said, we lawyers are freed from ambiguity. We don’t need to suggest other suspects or concoct conspiracy. For us, all that is needed to succeed is reasonable doubt. There is always reasonable doubt as to this jury verdict, and I think we have argued persuasively that reasonable doubt should have prevailed in the Hillstrom trial.
It is too much to expect that a jury system, often with elected prosecutors and judges, in a prejudiced community, will spit out the answer 100% of the time. Add in novice lawyers, a missed peremptory challenge, and the rejection or non-presentation of the most reliable exonerating evidence rises to the level of “unusual” if not cruel.
Justice Breyer’s dissent of this week makes exactly that argument. Joe Hill makes my case for abolition of the death penalty.
Kenneth Lougee
Kenneth Lougee is a trial lawyer with 30 years experience. He practices with the Salt Lake Firm of Siegfriend and Jensen. He has Bachelors and Masters degrees in history as well as a law degree. He is the author of Pie in the Sky: How Joe Hill’s Lawyers Lost His Case, Got Him Shot, and Were Disbarred (2011).
Are you interested in publishing your writing on Joe Hill? Write to us and let us know. We welcome your writing and artwork.
Guest post for the Joe Hill Organizing Committee.
From his jail cell, the condemned prisoner Joe Hill began a lengthy correspondence with fellow worker and IWW organizer extraordinaire Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Despite being railroaded onto death row with the slightest of evidence, the letters between the two legendary IWW leaders reveal Hill’s enormous humanity and generosity—placing humor and concern towards his fellow workers above his own situation.
A month before Hill’s first letter to Flynn, Hill had mentioned Flynn’s effectiveness at organizing women into the IWW. He mentioned Flynn in a published letter in the IWW magazine Solidarity, where he stated that the union needed to be more inclusive of women workers since “they are more exploited than the men.”
Hill wrote of the “sadly neglected” women on the West Coast that the IWW had not reached and “consequently we have created a kind of one-legged, freakish animal of a union,” and he urged the IWW to use Flynn solely for the goal of recruiting more women organizers into the IWW.
When Flynn received her first letter from Hill in January 1915, she was an internationally and nationally recognized public figure. Her ten years work for the IWW had Flynn leading the historic free speech campaigns in Spokane, Washington, and Missoula, Montana, and organizing the great textile strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and in Paterson, New Jersey, the following year.
Flynn was an exceptional high school student in the Bronx, and, much to the disappointment of her teachers and parents, when she was seventeen years old, Flynn left high school before she graduated to empower the disenfranchised into the IWW.
The IWW was the ideal choice for Flynn. A restless soul herself, Flynn enjoyed her life on the road with the Wobblies. The IWW, unlike the recently formed American Federation of Labor, IWW organizers were committed to their vision of OBU (One Big Union) and consistently practiced solidarity: “If you are a wage worker, you are welcome. . . . The IWW is not a white man’s union, not a black man’s union, not a red man’s union, but a workingman’s union.” The AF of L initially focused only on skilled labor workers and avoided women and people of color; the AF of L holding on to the incorrect premise that such workers could not be organized.
When Flynn was sixteen years old, she stepped up to the soapbox and delivered her first speech in Harlem, “What Socialism Will Do for Women.” Flynn possessed an innate brilliance and delivered her oratory easily. With her long black hair, petite frame and blue eyes, Flynn was a striking jawsmith and a vision to behold. Much to the dismay of the local politicians and the local law enforcement, who were always at the ready to squash any Wobbly assembly, wherever or whenever, Flynn stepped onto the soapbox. She drew the biggest crowds ready to hear her message of empowerment. Before long, the Los Angeles Times described her as a “leather-lunged hellion that breathed reddish flame,” and a “she-dog of anarchy.” By the time Flynn would step down from the soapbox, a Philadelphia reporter stated that “the perpetual inebriate forgot about the swinging doors” and “the corner loungers stood straight.” Flynn’s jawsmithing was legendary and remained one of her most effective organizing strategies.
After Hill’s first letter to Flynn on January 18, 1915, they became regular correspondents. Hill was astounded by Flynn’s prodigious ability to perform a great many tasks within her days and complete them so competently. She was a full-time labor organizer as well as a divorced woman and single parent to a six-year old son. “Have been trying to figure out how you can have the time to write me such nice, fat letters and hold big meetings every night besides,” Hill wrote in a letter to Flynn in March, “but I guess you are like Tommy Edison, you don’t sleep more than four hours a day and work twenty.” In another letter, Hill imagined seeing Flynn “boil spuds, iron clothes, and sling ink all at the same time.”
A month after his first letter to Flynn, Hill began to compose “The Rebel Girl” in appreciation of Flynn’s work and with the hope that the song would “help to line up the women workers in the OBU [One Big Union].” Hill would later acknowledge to Flynn that, given her great influence on him, when he composed the song, “you were right there and helped me all the time.”
Forty years later, Flynn would use the song’s title for her autobiography, The Rebel Girl.
In May 1915, the Rebel Girl Gurley Flynn was able to arrange a visit with Hill, when she would be lecturing on her first national tour since her son was born. It was an ambitious trip: Flynn would be lecturing in forty-seven cities over nineteen states, but it was her May 6th meeting with Hill that was her most anticipated stop.
Previous to meeting Hill, Flynn held some optimism that Hill would eventually be exonerated from this “crude frame-up” given the flimsiness of the evidence the state used to convict him.
The visit would be for only one hour, to be held in the sheriff’s office with others present. Flynn would be his first visitor since his sentencing. Writing about her visit with Hill in Solidarity magazine, Flynn was struck by the juxtaposition of the beauty of Salt Lake City’s streets “with its windswept streets. . . green shimmer, high altitude and clear pure air” against the rank odors of the “fetid jail odor,” cut by the “sickening smell of disinfectants.” They were denied even the smallest pretense of privacy.
It would prove to be their only visit. “He is tall, good looking, and naturally thin after sixteen months in a dark, narrow cell, with a corridor and another row of cells between him and daylight, and ‘nourished’ by the soup and bean diet of a prison,” Flynn wrote in Solidarity.
Flynn called Hill a “free spirit” and “inimitable songster and poet of the IWW.” Flynn wrote of their meeting, “Let others write their stately Whitmanesque verse and lengthy, rhythmic narrative. Joe writes songs that sing, that lilt and laugh and sparkle, that kindle the fires of revolt, in the most crushed spirit and quicken the desire for fuller life in the most humble slave.”
Hill retained true to his characteristic trait of deflecting attention away from himself and had Flynn talk at length about the IWW’s progress. “And so the hour was spent in giving him the news of the movement,” she wrote. “I’ve seen men more worried about a six months’ sentence than Joe Hill apparently worries about his life. He only said: ‘I’m not afraid of death, but I’d like to be in the fight a little longer.’”
Flynn was noticeably shaken when their hour had nearly run itself through. She felt as though she was leaving a tomb and thought about Hill’s prospects when the state of Utah was determined to have Hill executed.
When they said their good-byes at the barred door, Hill pointed outside to “an expanse of a beautiful lawn” and attempted a joke about the brevity of his own life. “He’s lucky, Gurley. He’s a Mormon and he’s had two wives and I haven’t even had one yet.”
Back in New York, Flynn worked with Big Bill Haywood in Chicago and IWW writer Ed Rowan in Salt Lake City on Hill’s appeal, to educate and agitate the people on the travesty of justice in Hill’s case. In the coming few months of Hill’s life, as he was becoming more of a symbol than a real man, and, noticing the rapid use of the IWW’s diminishing resources, Hill had urged the IWW through a letter to Flynn to have the IWW cut short their work on his behalf. Hill had wrote that it was senseless “to drain the resources of the whole organization and weaken it fighting strength just on account of one individual.”
While acknowledging Hill’s concerns, Flynn and hundreds of thousands of people would not allow themselves to let Hill remain a condemned man while they were able to fight for him.
Flynn remained his strongest champion. With only forty-eight hours before Hill’s execution date, she had presented Hill’s case to President Woodrow Wilson. Flynn had contacted friend and colleague Edith Cram, a Democrat of high social status and political connections—her husband was the “fixer” for the boss of New York’s Tammany Hall political machine. Cram and Flynn had been granted an interview with Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty. The secretary had suggested a protocol-breaking plan of having the Swedish Prime Minister issue an appeal to Utah’s Governor Spry on behalf of its Swedish citizen, Joe Hill. He would also forward the appeal to the President himself.
That night, while Flynn and Cram were conferring about the case, the warden of the Utah State Penitentiary placed Hill under a death-watch after his announcement that preparations for the execution had been completed.
When the appeals from the Swedish Prime Minister Ekengreen and President Wilson went ignored by Utah’s Governor Spry, and, after a deluge of telegraphs to President Wilson, Flynn and Cram were given an audience with the President inside the Oval Office. Cram’s husband, John Sergeant Cram, and her brother-in-law, Gifford Pinchot, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, accompanied them.
“The president greeted us cordially, in fact, he held Mrs. Cram’s hand,” Flynn recalled in The Rebel Girl. President Wilson listened “attentively” and recalled the failed intervention at the request of the Swedish Minister. Wilson wondered “if further insistence might do more harm than good.”
“But he’s sentenced to death,” Flynn interjected. “You can’t make it worse, Mr. President.”
After the President’s final appeal to Governor Spry’s humanity was denied, Hill wrote again to Flynn, his humor and courage shining through as he faced death alone in his cell:
“Well Gurley I guess I am off for the great unknown. . . . They can kill me I know, but they can never make me ‘eat my own crow’. . . . I would like to kiss you Good-bye Gurley, not because you are a girl but because you are the original Rebel Girl.”
He also thanked Flynn for the photograph she had sent him of her son and told her of the song he had written for him. “You certainly have a right to be proud of your boy,” Hill wrote, “He’s got a forehead like old Shakespeare himself.”
Hill telegrammed Flynn on his last night:
“And now, good-bye Gurley dear. I have lived like a rebel and I shall die like a rebel.”
At ten pm, just before he fell into a heavy sleep, and, thinking that the bluntness of the telegram wasn’t enough, he wrote Flynn his last thoughts:
“I have been saying Good Bye now so much now that tit is becoming monotonous but I cannot help to send you a few more lines because you have been more to me than a Fellow Worker. You have been an inspiration and when I composed The Rebel Girl you was right there and helped me all the time. . . . With a warm handshake across the continent and a last fond Good-Bye to all I remain Yours as Ever.”
The next morning, Hill was executed. Hill’s invited visitors, Ed Rowan among them, were not given access inside the prison as Hill had requested. Hill’s visitors stood outside the prison walls and heard the firing squad carry out their orders.
Ed Rowan immediately telegraphed Flynn in New York:
“JOE HILL SHOT AT SUNRISE. HE DIED GAME.”
Nancy Snyder
Recording Secretary Emeritus, SEIU Local 1021
Are you interested in publishing your writing on Joe Hill? Write to us and let us know. We welcome your writing and artwork.
When we juxtapose the terms, it points out that they do not mean the same thing. In fact, since the political concept of right-to-work was introduced in 1936, Americans have misunderstood it to the full degree that was intended. Right-to-work laws make it illegal to require employee support for the union that negotiates a contract, even though the union contract must benefit every employee. Even as we notice how unfair this is, right-to-work is creating a separation of views – those who uphold union membership and those who look only for benefits. Right-to-work, aka right-to-freeload, destroys the strength of employees’ united voices, exactly as desired. These laws are devised to corrode employee solidarity and leave every individual with a diminished and disregarded view about workplace safety, fair pay, work hours, and every other condition we have come to expect in a job.
Free bargaining laws preserve our real right to fair, safe work. When statutes support union security with 100% affiliation, everyone has a role in the contract and, therefore, the quality and safety of the work. Currently, American worker solidarity assures an average of $5971 in higher annual wages, higher health benefits, lower poverty rates, and less than half the risk of workplace fatality in right -to-work states. Union secure laws promote a healthy balance of workplace authority and vigorous environments for ideas, standards, and regulations.
A hundred years ago, Joe Hill may have envisioned the potential of free bargaining laws. He definitely understood the power of a united workforce to achieve the kind of safe work and fair income now on the decline with lower union membership. A Joe Hill song about right-to-work would likely portray the clever anti-labor politician, Vance Muse, who successfully dupes a working class caricature with another “pie in the sky.”
This guest post was written by
Elizabeth Weight
American Federation of Teachers Utah
Secretary-Treasurer, Central Utah Federation of Labor
Do you wonder if young people even know who Joe Hill is?
Here’s an answer.
Chloe Stewart, Mina Projansky Ono, and Haley Segura chose Joe Hill as their topic for the National History Day contest this year. The national theme for 2015 is Leadership & Legacy.
These Salt Lake City teens interviewed members of the Joe Hill Organizing Committee, played songs of Joe Hill, and provided extensive research notes along with their presentation.
The three won the Salt Lake regional competition in March, and they placed 2nd at the Utah state competition in April.
Now, they are raising funds to go to Washington, DC, for the national contest June 14 – 18, 2015. Help them out if you want to see them win National History with Joe Hill this year.
We’ve been busily collecting commitments from artists, and we’re ready to tell you all about the great performers you will see at the September 5th Joe Hill Centennial Celebration.
UPDATED!
Mark Ross, a traveling musician carrying nearly 500 songs along with him on the road. Mark performed at the 75th anniversary concert in 1990.
Anne Feeney, travels most of the year singing defiant songs of social justice and organizing. She is the granddaughter of a mineworkers’ organizer, carrying on the tradition. In 2005, Anne received the Joe Hill Award from the Labor Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.
David Rovics, started as a busker in Boston, and now he’s traveling the world, singing for the revolution. On April 19, 2015, he performed with Kristian Svensson at the Joe Hill Museum, Gävle, Sweden.
Joe Jencks, a fine vocalist and vocal harmony arranger who will give you chills. Joe won songwriting awards at Tumbleweed, Walnut Valley, Plowshares, and South Florida.
Guy Davis, a bluesman who will tell you a story and get you moving. Guy is the son of actors and civil rights activists Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. He will be performing with the Guy Davis Trio, Nerak Roth Patterson on electric guitar and Chris James on Mandolin.
Mischief Brew, they think they “might be the only punk rock band to feature a vibraharp.” Maybe they’ll use it to play “The Preacher and the Slave,” when they relearn it—all three chords of it. Hey, all it takes is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth.
Rio Bravo Conjunto – Los Castillos, established as a band by Anastacio and Elisa Castillo and now performing with three generations of the family—with the addition of daughters Chrystal and Sonya and grandson Vinnie. They play music from Texas, Mexico and Latin America.
Lovisa Samuelsson has been active in the Scandinavian music scene for the past decade. She has toured Europe and Central and South America from her home in Gothenburg, Sweden. Lovisa’s great-grandfather was the younger brother of Joel Hägglund. Lovisa will headline the after-party on Sunday evening.
Judy Collins, who released her debut album, A Main of Constant Sorrow, in 1961, barely out of her teens. In the five decades since, she has continued to sing songs of social activism, had several top-ten hits, released 50+ albums, and has grown her body of work to include filmmaking, writing, and speaking. We look forward to her “music of hope and healing that lights up the world and speaks to the heart.”
Our main stage will have 8 acts over 10 hours, with a few more additions possible. Regional musicians and spoken work artists will perform on the side stage.
UPDATED 7/17/2015 with the addition of Guy Davis.
UPDATED 8/5/2015 with the additions of Rio Bravo Conjunto – Los Castillos and Lovisa Samuelsson.
The Joe Hill Organizing Committee launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to pay the musicians performing at the September 5th concert in Salt Lake City.
Every backer will be listed in the concert program, from $1 to $25 to $100 all the way up to $8,000 (for a private concert). Everyone counts.
Looking for posters and postcards to promote the Joe Hill Centennial? They are waiting for you.
“[T]he thought that we were in the throes of the Joe Hill Centennial year of 2015 and that there were attendant celebrations afoot never actually creased my consciousness until I stumbled upon a stack of posters a week or so back while wandering the sacred aisles of Ken Sanders Rare Books in downtown Salt Lake City.” ~Jay Meehan, “Joe Hill Centennial,” Park Record
Stop by Ken Sanders Rare Books at 268 S 200 E in Salt Lake. Posters and postcards are free. Buttons in two sizes are $1 or $2.
Thanks for the mention, Jay.