Si Kahn, singer, songwriter, writer, community organiser, union activist and environmental campaigner will play in a joint festival fundraising concert with Anne Feeney at the Firkin Crane Centre on Thursday 31st July at 8.30.
Tickets for the concert are available through www.tickets.ie or from Plugd Records at the Triskel Arts Centre, the Maldron Hotel or phone 086 1651356.
Si will hold a songwriting workshop at the Maldron Hotel on Monday 28th July at 8pm. All singers/songwriters or those interested in songwriting are very welcome to come along and meet Si, where he will hold a practical session.
We can confirm that Si will also speak about his life and his current campaign to protect Bristol Bay in Alaska on Friday afternoon 1st August at 2pm.
Si’s songs of family, community, love, work and freedom have been recorded and performed by hundreds of artists, including Planxty, Patrick Street, Eleanor Shanley, Dolores Keane, the Fureys, the Dublin City Ramblers, Dick Gaughan, June Tabor and the Oyster Band, Alec Campbell, Brian McNeill, Eddi Reader, Peggy Seeger, Renaud, Kathy Mattea, John McCutcheon, the original Red Clay Ramblers, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Blue Rose, Robin and Linda Williams, Hazel Dickens, Laurie Lewis and to Rozum, the Dry Branch Fire Squad, Charles Sawtelle, and Rosalie Sorrels.
Aoife Delaney as a young Mary Harris at the launch of the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival at the Maldron. Aoife will appear at the Mother Jones Gala Concert at 9pm at the Firkin Crane on Wednesday 30th July.
A Press Launch to announce the lineup for the 2014 Spirit of Mother Jones Festival was held at the Maldron Hotel, Shandon on Thursday, 26th June. The launch was attended by members of the Cork Mother Jones committee and by some of the local groups and individuals who will be speaking or performing at the festival which takes place in the Shandon area from 29th July to 1st August this year.
The local media were well represented and continued to take a keen interest in the festival. The launch included a number of live performances which set the scene for what promises to be a very full and interesting festival.
Richard Cooke of the Cork Mother Jones festival committee with Eileen O’Keeffe of the Cork Rokk Choir at the press launch
Eddie Noonan of Frameworks Films, filming on location at Mt. Olive cemetery, Illinois with Dave Rathke and Terry Reed.
A new documentary on a unique woman from Cork will be screened at 8pm on Friday 1st August in the Firkin Crane, Cork as part of the Cork Mother Jones Festival 2014. ‘Mother Jones and her Children’ has been produced by Frameworks Films, a Cork based film production company, in collaboration with the Cork Mother Jones Commemorative Committee. ‘Mother Jones and her Children’ outlines the life of the most famous Cork woman in America – Mary Jones, formerly Mary Harris. The documentary tells of her extraordinary life – her early years in Cork, her survival of the Famine and emigration to Canada, her move to the US and her marriage to George Jones, her life as a mother to four young children, her tragic loss of her entire family and later her business, her entry into the labour movement and her growing involvement in organising workers to the point where she is dubbed ‘the most dangerous women in America’. With contributions from leading experts on Mother Jones, the documentary will restore her memory, particularly in her native city.
Emma Bowell of Frameworks Films (right) with author / historian Marat Moore on location in New York.
The documentary will also be broadcast on Cork Community Television on Saturday 2nd August 2014 at 8pm (available on Channel 803 on UPC’s digital cable package) and streamed live on www.corkcommunitytv.ie‘Mother Jones and her Children’ was produced with the support of the Sound and Vision scheme, an initiative of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. For further information, please contact Frameworks Films on info@frameworksfilms.com or 021-4211010.
Eddie Noonan from Frameworks Films on location in Chicago with author Elliott Gorn
Film has been an important part of the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival since the beginning. This year we will be showing five films covering the struggles of people in extraordinary situations in the fight for justice and rights. All film showings are free of charge. All welcome.
Tuesday 29th July – Friday 1st August 2014
Admission is free and all are welcome. Firkin Crane Centre Shandon 6.00: “Mother Jones, America’s Most Dangerous Woman” a film by Rosemary Feurer and Laura Vazquez. Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman is a documentary about the amazing labor heroine, Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones. Mother Jones’ organising career influenced the history of early 20th century United States. She overcame class and gender limitations to shape an identity that allowed her to become an effective labor organizer in the early 20th century. Mother Jones transformed personal and political grief and rage about class injustices into an effective persona that led workers into battles that changed the course of history. The terrible conditions and labor oppression of the time motivated her to traverse the country, in order to organise against injustices.
Release Date:May 2007 (Canada)Runtime: 24 min
Thursday: 31st July
(Firkin Crane Centre downstairs)11am: Film: The Battle for Orgreave, (A film by Yvette Vanson, Producer/Director.www.yvettevanson). In this film we witness the violent struggle of miners trying to save their jobs in what became one of the biggest public disturbances Britain has ever seen. The camera focuses on the blood covered face of an angry protester, he looks defiant as he is led away by riot police. This is no criminal but a man trying to protect his livelihood. 55 miners faced long prison terms because of their involvement in the disturbance at Orgreave. This film looks at their fight for justice. Orgreave in the North of England was the focal point for a mass protest by miners in June 1984. At this time miners were angry over proposed pit closures and reacted by striking and pressurising other pits to close. The culmination of these protests was a mass gathering of miners from all over the country at Orgreave. On the morning of 18th June miners were escorted into Orgreave. At this point police tactics already resembled a military campaign. After a push by the miners the police acted with force charging the pickets on horses. The protest soon turned violent with the police using heavy-handed tactics such as dogs and batons in an attempt to suppress the riot. In this film we interview defendants about their experiences of being at Orgreave and the tactics used by police.
Release Date:1985Runtime: 52 min5.30 pm
“Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre” a film from Greece by Lamprini Thoma and Nickos Ventouras. (Irish Premier) The Ludlow Massacre and the assassination of Greek immigrant and labor leader Louis Tikas (Elias Spantidakis) is one of the decisive moments of the American labor movement, an event that connects, a century later, the United States of 1914 to the labor and immigrant demands of Greece of 2014. Lamprini Thoma and Nikolaos Ventouras examined the memories, the history and the legacy of Louis Tikas and the Ludlow massacre in Colorado, talked with prominent historians, artists and descendants of Ludlow miners, and documented the scars left by this tragedy on the body of working America. Release Date:2014 Runtime: 92 minhttp://www.palikari.org/
Friday 1st August. Mother Jones Day.
(Firkin Crane Centre downstairs)11am: The extraordinary life and death of Tadhg Barry from Blarney St. (Frameworks Films) with Trevor Quinn SIPTU, Jack O’Sullivan CCTU. This documentary tells the story of Tadhg Barry (1880-1921), a native of Cork city, who has largely been forgotten. It seems hard to believe that a man whose funeral closed shops and factories could be relegated to a footnote in history. And yet this is what has happened to a man who was one of the last people to be killed by British forces during Ireland’s War of Independence, just weeks prior to the signing of the Treaty.
Release Date:2013
Tadhg Barry Remembered has been produced by Frameworks Films in collaboration with the Cork Council of Trade Unions for broadcast on Cork Community Television. It was first broadcast on Cork Community Television on Sunday 5th May at 8pm. The documentary was funded under the Sound & Vision scheme, an initiative of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
8.00 pm: “Mother Jones and her Children”. (Firkin Crane upstairs.) Documentary Premiere by Frameworks Films. Release Date:2014
The full programme of events for the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival 2014 is now available to download on this site and printed version is currently in production.
This year’s festival runs from Tuesday 29th July to Friday 1st August. You can download the full programme by clicking on the link below:
The Cork Mother Jones Committee is delighted to announce that Si Kahn, singer, songwriter, writer, community organiser, union activist and environmental campaigner is coming to Cork for the 2014 Spirit of Mother Festival.
Si has been an active supporter of the Spirit of Mother Jones festival in Cork since it began in 2012 and will perform his sole Irish concert at this year’s event.
The concert will take place at the Firkin Crane centre on Thursday 31st July at 8.30.
Background.
Si was born in 1944 and was greatly influenced by the Civil Rights movement. He began his organising career in 1965 in Arkansas with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the student wing of the Civil Rights movement.
During the 1970’s, he worked with the United Mineworkers of America in the Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and was an area director of the J.P. Stevens campaign for the ACTWU in Roanoke Rapids in North Carolina. These historic labour struggles are portrayed in the movies Harlan County USA and Norma Rae.
Aragon Mill
In the early 70’s he spent a few days in Aragon, Georgia where a textile mill had closed down putting about 700 people out of work. He wrote the folk classic Aragon Mill which is a haunting song of quiet despair after the closure of the local mill.
“And the only tune I hear
Is the sound of the wind
As it blows through the town,
Weave and spin, weave and spin”
“There’s no children at all
In the narrow empty streets
Now the looms have all gone
It’s so quiet I can’t sleep”
Aragon Mill was included in “New Wood”, Si’s first album. It has been recorded by Planxty, Hazel Dickens, Hans Theessink and many others. The Furey Brothers recorded it as Belfast Mill and there is a version called Douglas Mill.
Si’s songs have been recorded by many of artists including Dolores Keane, Eleanor Shanley, Dick Gaughan, June Tabor, Peggy Seeger, the Dublin City Ramblers and Kathy Mattea.
Si has toured all over Europe, Canada and North America. He has released 14 albums of original songs, a CD of original songs for children, “Good Times and Bedtimes”: a collection of traditional labour, civil rights and women’s songs recorded with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp.
In 1980, Si founded Grassroots Leadership, a Southern-based national progressive organisation, and he served as its Executive Director for 30 years, retiring on May Day 2010. For the past 13 years, Grassroots Leadership has worked to oppose privatisation and to defend the public sector.
He is currently very involved with a campaign to stop what would be the world’s largest open pit mine in Alaska and by doing so to save Bristol Bay, one of the greatest remaining wild fisheries in the world. He released an album in 2013 entitled “Bristol Bay” and is active with Musicians United to Protect Bristol Bay. He is also campaigning against mountaintop removal in West Virginia.
Si is also an accomplished author. In 2010 he wrote “Creative Community Organising: A guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists and Quiet Lovers of Justice (Berrett-Koehler 2010).
An earlier book in 2006 “The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatisation Threatens Democracy” was co-authored with feminist philosopher Elizabeth Minnich, his long term partner and spouse. Two earlier widely used organizing handbooks, “How People Get Power” and “Organising: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders”, have sold over 80,000 copies.
“Si Kahn is one of the best….a solid thinker who is able to humanize the political……Ihope he lives to be 120”
longstanding friend and fellow songwriter’s Pete Seeger’s view of Si.
“I put Si in the same category as Woody Guthrie, as Pete Seeger and in a strange way my Dad, who shared his righteous sense of humanity and his love of the meek who he truly believed would inherit the earth.”
Rosanne Cash
Si has recently completed a musical about Mother Jones, “Mother Jones in Heaven” and hopes to perform it some day in Cork. With his permission some of the songs from this musical were originally performed at the inaugural Mother Jones Festival in 2012 by Jim Williamson. The dream of the Cork Mother Jones Committee is to see the full musical, “Mother Jones in Heaven” performed in Cork, the birthplace of Mary Harris.
We are indeed very honoured to welcome Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich to Cork for the 2014 festival.
It’s that time of year again folks and the Cork Mother Jones committee are busy preparing the final line-up of speakers and performers for the 2014 Spirit of Mother Jones Festival which will take-in an extended programme from Sunday, 27th July to Friday, 1st August 2014 as part of Cork City’s official Mother Jones Week.
Over the coming weeks we will introduce our performers to give a taste of what’s to come. We start with Jim Green who will deliver the 3rd Annual “Mother Jones Lecture” at the Firkin Crane, Shandon at 7.30pm on Tuesday, 29th January.
Professor James Green is a writer, teacher and activist. He is professor of History at the University of Massachusetts where he founded the Labour Studies BA degree program and the Labour Resource Centre; he currently teaches history and directs the public history graduate program. He has had a long and distinguished career in ensuring that the history of social movements such as trade unions, civil rights groups and community empowerment groups is detailed and their stories told.
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois and raised in Carpentersville, a small factory town outside of Chicago and educated at Northwestern University.
He is the author of five history books on labour and protest movements in America and he is working on the story of Mother Jones the West Virginia mine wars which will be published by Grove Atlantic. The book will be the basis of a television documentary film for the Public Broadcasting System to air as part of the award-winning American Experience series. He also teaches courses on the history of Boston, working class history and a course on Social Justice.
Originally inspired by John F Kennedy and later by Martin Luther King, Jim Green admired politicians such as senators Paul Douglas, Eugene McCarthy (he worked for his Primary campaign) and George McGovern.
He earned a PhD in history from Yale University in 1972.He had played an active part in the student and anti-war movements in the late 60s and early 70s. He had developed an interest in social movements and sought ways through his scholarship to bring their stories to a wider public.
In his website jamesgreenworks.com, Jim describes how “four experiences offered me stimulating opportunities to practice history in the world outside the academy: first, living and working in a contested neighbourhood, Boston’s South End; second, participating in the Radical America editorial collective; third, teaching in England and discovering the History Workshop movement and four, joining the faculty at the College of Public and Community Service, located within the University of Massachusetts Boston.”
During the 1980s he became very active in the trade union movement where he taught courses for union members such as the United Mine Workers of America as well as lecturing at the Harvard Trade Union program. He helped to make a video with film maker Barbara Kopple of the Pittston Strike in Appalachia in 1989.
In 1995-96 he was a historical consultant to the documentary film “The fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers” produced by Paradigm Productions, San Francisco.
In 1998 he was selected as a Fulbright Senior Scholar and taught at the University of Genoa in Italy. One result of this was the publication of his book “Taking History to Heart” in 2000 which he describes as “a personal and political reflection on making movement history”
Jim has held lectureships at Warwick University in England and at Harvard University, where he has taught in the Trade Union Program since 1987. He has published widely in many international academic journals. In 2002 he was elected president of the Labour and Working Class History Association, and in 2004 he was awarded a fellowship by the Bogilasco Foundation to study and write at the Liguria Study Centre in Italy. In 2009, the Sidney Hillman Foundation presented Professor Green with the Sol Stetin Prize for his accomplishments in the field of labour and working-class history.
He has also had a particular interest in the events at Ludlow in Colorado on 20th April 1914 when children, women and men were massacred and which has become infamous in American labour history. His article entitled “Crime Against Memory at Ludlow” available on his website is particularly powerful.
A further book “Death at the Haymarket” in March 2006 allowed Jim to tell the epic story of the events that took place in Chicago on 1st May 1886, events which had a huge influence on generations of labour and trade union activists around the world including Mary Harris. 20,000 copies of this have been sold and it has been adopted in many college courses.
With almost 50 years of active contribution to the telling and documenting of the history of working class and social movements behind him, Jim is a very welcome and worthy contributor to the 2014 Spirit of Mother Jones Festival.
The following is line up for the Mother Jones Theatrical Musical Concert in the Firkin Crane, Wednesday,July 31st at 9pm is as follows:
Group: Cork Rokk Choir who will perform a medley of songs from the Mother Jones area for ( 15 minutes).
Next we will have Cork Shakespearean Company who will perform a MJ monologue for ( 7 minutes).
James P. McCarthy, Musician/Singer will perform more MJ songs (15 minutes ).
Shakespearean Company will then performing another theatrical monologue on MJ (7 minutes).
Muddy Lee will blast out Cork Songs and the new Mother Jones song titled: A True Cork Rebel by (15 minutes ).
William Hammond and friends will finish off the Concert with some popular high spirited tunes.
Maldron Hotel Concerts 2013
Wednesday, July 31st – 10.00pm: Hank Wedel & Friends
Tuesday, July 30th – 9.30pm: The very popular Cork Singer’s Club.
Lunch Time Concerts
Wednesday, July 31st – 1pm – 2pm: Cork Rokk Choir members will perform popular songs and Muddy Lee performing good auld songs of Cork as part of the Gathering as well as the Mother Jones Song titled: A True Cork Rebel.
Thursday, August 1st – 1pm -2pm: Cork Memory Lane Group will perform popular songs.
Jimmy Crowley Workshop
Wednesday, July 31st at 4.30pm – Jimmy Crowley with Songs of the Beautiful City.
Admission Free
There is considerable interest in the unique Andy Irvine concert which will take place as part of the Cork Mother Jones Festival on Wednesday, 1st August in Cork’s historic Shandon Church, starting at 8.30pm. This is the first time Shandon has hosted an event of its type and Andy Irvine is proving to be a very popular choice with heavy demand for tickets. If you want to see Andy perform in Shandon you will need to act fast. Tickets are still available on http://www.tickets.ie at this link and a small number are also available at the Maldron Hotel, John Redmond Street. Price is just €10. The Mother Jones committee also have some tickets, for details ring Ger on (086) 3196063.
The concert will begin at 8.30pm, immediately after the unveiling of the Mother Jones commemorative plaque at John Redmond Street. We would ask all those attending to ensure they take their seats as soon as possible once the unveiling ceremony is complete. A reminder also that on the same evening there will be a live session in the Maldron Hotel with a selection of local musicians and other performers. There will be no admittance fee to the Maldron event which will begin at 9.30pm.
an important part of the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival since the beginning. This year we will be showing five films covering the struggles of people in extraordinary situations in the fight for justice and rights. All film showings are free of charge. All welcome.
