Joe Hill

recorded: -

Hill was memorialised in a tribute poem written about him c. 1930 by Alfred Hayes titled “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”, sometimes referred to simply as “Joe Hill”. Hayes’s lyrics were turned into a song in 1936 by Earl Robinson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill

Paul Robeson sang this song while in Edinburgh to perform a miners’ benefit concert in the Usher Hall for 3000 miners and their families sponsored by the Scottish National Union of Mineworkers as featured in the documentary film A Star Drops In (1949):

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/474544/index.html

“Robeson had long been something of a hero to the British mining community, ever since he starred in the film Proud Valley (d. Pen Tennyson, 1940) as an American sailor stranded in Cardiff who finds work in a Welsh colliery (the newsreel opens with a short clip from the film).

Robeson then visits an Edinburgh colliery and sings 'I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’ in its canteen. Joe Hill was a poet and union organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), executed on a trumped-up murder charge in 1915 and subsequently immortalised as a workers’ hero of similar stature to Robeson himself.”

1. Joe Hill

   • • Paul Robeson

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   • • singer