Subject: Harry Simms - The unionman Sun Apr 19, 2009 4:50 pm
Harry Simms, an NMU organizer, was gunned down near Pineville, KY, on the way to collect truckloads of food and clothing which had been collected from out-of-state for the striking Brush Creek miners.
Harry Simms was a National Miners Union organizer from Birmingham, Alabama, who came to Kentucky to help the striking miners. He was shot and killed by gun thugs near Pineville, Kentucky, on his way to meet members of the Waldo Frank Committee, a group of writers who visited the region in February 1932 to distribute food and clothing to the embattled miners.
Simms, only nineteen years old, was a member of the Young Communist League and a good friend of Aunt Molly's brother, Jim Garland. Garland spoke at the funeral in New York City in front of 25,000 mourners; when he returned to Kentucky he composed a song about the tragic death of his murdered friend. Aunt Molly would later claim to share credit for the ballad's lyrics:
Harry Simms was a young Jewish organizer who was murdered on Brush Creek, Knot County. He was walking along the railroad track with another fellow - they were going down to meet some writers who came to Bell County to study the conditions of the miners--when the gun thugs shot him. They took him and the other fellow back to town. They put the other fellow in jail.
They left Harry sitting on a rock in front of the town hospital with a bullet in his stomach. He sat there on that rock an hour or more with his hands on his stomach bleeding to death. He was sitting there because the hospital wouldn't take him in till somebody guaranteed to pay his bill. After a while a man said he would pay the bill so they took Harry in. But it was too late. This song was composed right after that in 1932 by me and my brother Jim Garland.