Sweet By and By

Sweet By-and-By is part folk concert, part biography, part rough-hewn multi-media presentation. Multi-instrumentalist Daniel Rudholm reprises the rousing union songs of Joe Hill on banjo, accordion, and harmonica, coupled with the story of the labor activist’s life, work, and execution on trumped-up charges in Utah in 1914. Rudholm, a fourth-generation socialist, weaves together letters from his great-grandfather Georg Rudholm, another Swede who left his homeland to look for work in America. The result is a work of passionate folk songs and highly physical characters, performed partly in Swedish and partly in English, contrasting the strong religious convictions of Rudholm’s family with Joe Hill’s idealism and activism. Accompanied by Rudholm’s hand-made animations, collages of historical cartoon and pen-and-ink drawings, this one-man-show is a poignant tale of Swedish emigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, and Rudholm’s own search for meaning in the passions of his family and his musical forebears.