Joe Glazer

Folksinger and labor activist Joe Glazer was created in NEW YORK in 1918. As a kid he frequently sang in synagogues, and motivated by Hollywood’s performing cowboys he bought a electric guitar through the Sears Roebuck catalog, acquiring his 1st lesson through the Functions Progress Administration system. Though his Polish-born dad was an associate from the International Women Garment Employees Union, politics had been never a topic in the home, and Glazer had not been directly subjected to labor activism until he attained Brooklyn University in 1936. Though friendly with users from the radical organizations on campus, he mainly steered free from their attempts, and upon graduating pursued a profession in songwriting, putting just the novelty tune “Yogi, Yogi the Fakir Man” with vocalist Reggie Childs. After briefly aligning using the Theatre Arts Committee, sponsors from the politics revue Cabaret T.A.C., Glazer in 1944 recognized the helper education director placement for the brand new York Town Textile Employees Union, an event that released his curiosity about labor music and lore. While going to Southern textile neighborhoods to carry out educational conferences, he was presented to countless labor hymns, and in 1950 documented the LP Eight New Music for Labor for an exclusive label operated with the Congress of Industrial Agencies (CIO). Afterwards that same season Glazer relocated to Akron, OH, when he was called education director from the United Silicone Workers-CIO. At the moment he met Costs Friedland, a self-taught vocalist and guitarist after that portion as the helper to Costs Kemsley, education movie director from the Michigan Condition CIO. Like Glazer, Friedland was a strolling encyclopedia of labor music, the majority of his from the anti-Communist persuasion. Jointly they documented an record entitled Ballads for Sectarians, released in 1952 on Kemsley’s fledgling Labor Arts label. Because Glazer resided in Akron and Friedland in Detroit, the duo appreciated few opportunities to execute or rehearse, however in early 1953 they reunited for another Labor Arts work, Tunes from the Wobblies. But Friedland shortly discovered himself disenchanted using the labor motion, and after spending the better component of 1953 vacationing Europe, he signed up for Wayne Condition University; Glazer, on the other hand, closed out the entire year with a single 78 that demonstrated Labor Arts’ last discharge. In 1960 he toured the Midwest to get Hubert Humphrey’s presidential advertising campaign, which same calendar year co-authored the reserve Music of Function and Independence with Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke. In 1961 Glazer exited the United Silicone Workers to simply accept a posture as labor expert using the U.S. Details Company, where he continued to be for 19 years. The work needed that he often travel abroad, and he seized the chance to hire music to transmit the message from the American labor motion to its international counterparts. In 1968 Glazer founded his very own label, Collector, release a his own materials (like the LPs Joe Glazer Sings Labor Music, Glazer Sings Glazer, American Wish, as well as the 12″ one “The Ballad of Bobby Fischer”) aswell as recordings from a fresh generation of performers/labor activists. In 1979 Glazer asked 14 of these labor music artists to a three-day gathering on the George Meany Middle for Labor Research in Silver Springtime, MD. The function was so effective it yielded the annual Great Labor Arts Exchange and, in 1984, the forming of the Labor Heritage Base, a group focused on protecting the musical background of the labor motion. In 1997 Glazer received the foundation’s Joe Hill Award, and in 2001 he released his autobiography, Labor’s Troubadour. In 2005, he donated the holdings and archives of Collector Information towards the Smithsonian Middle for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives.