Joe Glazer came into the world in New York City during 1918 and would later earn recognition as both a folksinger and labor activist. Synagogue performances marked his childhood years, while admiration for Hollywood’s singing cowboys led him to order a guitar through the Sears Roebuck catalog and receive his earliest instruction via the Works Progress Administration. Even though his father, born in Poland, belonged to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, political topics never surfaced at home, so Glazer encountered labor activism only after reaching Brooklyn College in 1936.
Although he knew participants in campus radical organizations, he largely avoided their activities and, following graduation, turned toward songwriting, securing just one placement—the novelty number “Yogi, Yogi the Fakir Man”—with vocalist Reggie Childs. After a short association with the Theater Arts Committee, which backed the political revue Cabaret T.A.C., Glazer took the assistant education director post at the New York City Textile Workers Union in 1944; that role sparked his engagement with labor songs and traditions. Travels through Southern textile towns for educational sessions introduced him to numerous union hymns, prompting the 1950 private-label LP Eight New Songs for Labor issued by the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Later in 1950 he moved to Akron, Ohio, to become education director for the United Rubber Workers-CIO. There he met Bill Friedland, an autodidact singer and guitarist serving as assistant to Michigan State CIO education director Bill Kemsley. Friedland, like Glazer, possessed an encyclopedic command of labor songs, many carrying an anti-Communist slant. The pair cut the album Ballads for Sectarians, issued in 1952 on Kemsley’s new Labor Arts imprint.
Because Glazer resided in Akron and Friedland in Detroit, joint performances or rehearsals remained rare, yet they reconvened in early 1953 for a second Labor Arts release, Songs of the Wobblies. Friedland soon grew disillusioned with the labor movement; after much of 1953 traveling Europe he enrolled at Wayne State University, while Glazer ended the year with a solo 78 that became Labor Arts’ last offering. In 1960 Glazer toured the Midwest supporting Hubert Humphrey’s presidential bid and, that same year, co-wrote Songs of Work and Freedom with Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke.
Glazer left the United Rubber Workers in 1961 to serve as labor specialist for the U.S. Information Agency, a post he held for 19 years. The assignment entailed repeated overseas travel, which he used to convey the American labor movement’s message to counterparts abroad. In 1968 he launched his own Collector label, issuing his recordings—including Joe Glazer Sings Labor Songs, Glazer Sings Glazer, American Dream, and the 12-inch single “The Ballad of Bobby Fischer”—alongside work by an emerging generation of singer-activists.
During 1979 Glazer convened 14 such musicians for a three-day event at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland. Its success prompted the yearly Great Labor Arts Exchange and, in 1984, creation of the Labor Heritage Foundation, devoted to safeguarding labor music’s legacy. Glazer received the foundation’s Joe Hill Award in 1997 and published his memoir, Labor’s Troubadour, in 2001. In 2005 he transferred Collector Records’ holdings and archives to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives.
