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 Joan Baez, released in 1971 as part of the soundtrack of the film Sacco e Vanzetti. The lyrics are by Baez herself and the music is by Ennio Morricone.

Background

The song is a tribute to two anarchists of Italian origin, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. At the time of writing, it was a popular assumption in left-wing circles that their conviction to the death penalty in 1920s United States was wrongful. The case is known as the Sacco and Vanzetti Affair.

The song is Part 3 of a 3-part piece, Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti composed for the soundtrack of the film directed by Giuliano Montaldo. The lyrics are taken from an actual letter by Bartolomeo Vanzetti: "Father, yes, I am a prisoner / Fear not to relay my crime". This inspired Baez to write the lyrics. Music by Ennio Morricone, the composer of a great number of film soundtracks and film scores, is the repetition of the same musical line for 10 times, with the first two without any lyrics. In the United States and worldwide, the song became a veritable human rights movement in the 1970s.^{[citation needed]}

It is also used in the 1977 quasi-documentary film Deutschland im Herbst, accompanying footage of the 1977 funeral march for Red Army Faction members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe that had died in prison (see German Autumn). Besides the film Sacco e Vanzetti, the song also appears in the 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Music was also used in the video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots as the closing theme as well as the recently released gameplay trailer for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes.

Covers

The Israeli singer Daliah Lavi sang it in English, French and German.^{[citation needed]} In 1997, Nana Mouskouri interpreted it with Les Enfoirés starting with a classical rendering that develops into a blues song, intermittent with versions of Georges Moustaki in French and finally in English.^{[citation needed]}. For its appearance in the end credits of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots the song was arranged by long time series composer Harry Gregson-Williams and sung by Lisbeth Scott.

Hayley Westenra and Ennio Morricone perform Here's To You on the album Paradiso released 2011 and nominated for the Classic Brit Award 2012