A Countdown of the Top 100 political songs, to help provide a soundtrack to the 2011 Canadian Election. Researched and written by a proud New Democrat.
With her call to get back to the Garden of Eden and her bombers that turn into butterflies, Joni Mitchell's Woodstock captured a new consciousness of the late 60's and early 70's.
Joe Hill was an activist, songwriter and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He was executed in Utah in 1915 for a crime of which most historians say he was innocent. Just before he faced the firing squad he wrote a letter to a union leader, saying, "Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah."
Mary Lou Redden, the Director of Halifax Humanities 101, writes about Joan Baez' Joe Hill:
I first heard this song as part of the Woodstock compilation that came out when I was a teenager. I didn't attend Woodstock, but like many of my generation, was moved by the event and enamoured of the music. But what struck me so much about Joan Baez's performance of Joe Hill was first that it was so pure and simple in the midst of the noisy rock and roll of Woodstock. I've always loved her remarkable voice. But I was also struck by the union of that hippie event with the concerns of the trade union movement. In the city where I lived, there was a strong union movement, based in the dangerous and pollution ridden petro-chemical factories that dominated our landscape. I had naively associated factory workers with right-wing attitudes towards the concerns of my generation and this song made me reflect on those assumptions and see that the fight for a more just society needed to be inclusive.
The Woodstock performance, when Country Joe played the I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-To-Die Rag to fill the gap in between the sets of two other performers, is my preferred version. In Pete Fornatale's book Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock and How It Changed a Generation, he tells the story through a pieced-together recollection of the conversation around the gap in performances:
Bill Belmont - I went up to Joe and said, "Listen, we're kind of in a bind. There's nobody to go on, we can't find anybody, a couple people are showing up, but they're not going to be here for an hour and a half. We don't want the crowd to get restless."
John Morris - He and I had done a tour together in Europe a couple years before and we had had a conversation about a solo act. He's wearing an army field coat, and I walked over to him and said, "You're about to start your solo career." I believe his words were "Are you out of your fuckin' mind? I don't even have a guitar." So we found him a guitar.
