Songfacts®:

• Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants sent to the electric chair in 1927 for a double murder committed during the course of a payroll robbery in 1920 in Massachusetts. After a long series of appeals, they died protesting their innocence.
  
  Their case drew worldwide attention and was still in the news decades later; Woody Guthrie was commissioned to write a concept album about them, Ballads Of Sacco & Vanzetti, released in 1945. A generation later, Joan Baez did the soundtrack to a 1971 biopic called Sacco & Vanzetti, which made the case that the pair were wrongly convicted. This is the first of three parts of "The Ballad Of Sacco And Vanzetti," coming out firmly on the side of Sacco and Vanzetti:
  
  Blessed are the persecuted
  And blessed are the pure in heart
• With lyrics by Baez and music by Ennio Morricone, this song actually begins with an extract from the sonnet The New Colossus ("Give to me your tired and your poor..."), which was written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 as part of a fundraising drive for the Statue of Liberty. She died in 1887, but later her all but forgotten sonnet would find its way into the statue itself. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England