1st Floor Screening Room,
May Day Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London, EC4Y 1DH
Please arrive promptly for a 7pm start.
Facebook event here.
May Day Rooms page here.
Music has always been at the heart of the IWW. Songs composed by Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, T Bone Slim and others have been sung around the world, on picket lines, demonstrations and on the move.
This November, the IWW has the pleasure of welcoming Canadian political songwriter and wobbly Smokey Dymny to the country. While Smokey’s with us in the capital, London Wobblies will be taking the opportunity to organise a sing-song, aimed at both IWW members and the wider public.
Join us at the ‘Knees Up Mother Jones’ event to connect with our radical music heritage, as well as consider the role of music in our contemporary struggles by crafting some new songs with a modern-day wobbly bard.
The event is free of charge and open to all – all you need to bring is enthusiasm and your singing voice, no matter how rusty.
Jerzy Smokey Dymny, hailing from Quadra Island, Canada, has been a Wobbly since 1986 and a political folk, blues and rock singer for even longer, having written or co-authored nearly 150 songs. He’s developed the technique of leading song-writing workshops with groups as a way to involve folks in writing their own songs, whether they’re striking unionists, environmentalists, anti-globalization activists and children. Once, he wrote a song over the phone from history supplied by a member of the American Indian Movement for the anti-Columbus 500th Anniversary events. Sometimes he’ll even write a song all by himself. He compiled the first Canadian IWW songbook, collected from songwriters from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, which hit the streets on 1st May 1990 when the Wobblies spread the last of Joe Hill’s ashes at the Sears picket line on Jarvis Street.
You can find out more about Smokey and check out just some of his work online here: http://music.cbc.ca/#/bands/Smokey
