Here's to You (song)
| "Here's to You" | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Single by Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone | |
| from the album The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti | |
| Released | 1971 |
| Recorded | 1971 |
| Genre | Folk |
| Writer(s) |
Joan Baez (lyrics) Ennio Morricone (music) |
"Here's to You" is a song by Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez, released in 1971 as part of the soundtrack of the film Sacco e Vanzetti, directed by Giuliano Montaldo. The lyrics are by Baez herself and the music is by Ennio Morricone.
The song is a tribute to two anarchists of Italian origin, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who were sentenced to death by a United States court in the 1920s. The consensus of critical opinion has concluded since that the ruling was based on abhorrence to their anarchist political beliefs rather than on any proof that they committed the robbery and murders of which they were accused.
Despite the weaknesses of the jury's decision, correspondence by the novelist Upton Sinclair to his lawyer John Beardsley (penned in 1929 and unearthed in 2005) corroborated the guilty verdict against Sacco and Vanzetti for the murder of a payroll clerk and his guard. Sinclair told Beardsley that he had met with Sacco and Vanzetti's defense attorney, Fred Moore, and Moore informed the famous author that his clients were guilty as charged. Moreover, several forensic experts agreed that Sacco fired a shot from his Colt pistol at the scene of the crime. Thus, "Here's to You" contributes to a questionable but widely accepted narrative about the pair's innocence and heroism in the face of a supposedly bigoted American public. The case is known as the Sacco and Vanzetti Affair.
The lyrics for Here's to You make use of a statement attributed to Vanzetti by Philip D. Strong, a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance who visited him in prison in May 1927, three months before his execution.
If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as we now do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.
...
Wikipedia