‘Don’t mourn: organise” were the last words of the great union songwriter Joe Hill, framed on a murder charge and executed in Salt Lake City, Utah, in November 1915. A reminder to activists that the struggle carries on even though a strike may end in defeat, they’re also a handy maxim for anyone writing songs about the pressures that working people face. If you hope to inspire, rather than just providing a litany of problems, then it’s necessary for your song to offer some vision of redemption. While it is clearly beyond the scope of the songwriter to provide a cure for society’s ills, there is a role to play in calling out where you perceive the problem to lie and suggesting a possible way forward.
Joe Hill’s words came to mind when I heard Rich Men North of Richmond, a song posted on YouTube two weeks ago by Oliver Anthony, a young singer from Farmville, Virginia. The clip has since had 31m views. Yesterday it entered the Billboard charts at No 1, an unprecedented feat for an artist with no prior recording history.
