Sad but true, for Joe Hill, poet, songwriter, and organizer, was the most popular intentionally proletarian artist in American culture. Not an easy feat, especially considering how many people have tried to be popular proletarian artists.
This album, named after Joe Hill’s famous last words before he was executed by the State of Utah, is a testament to Hill’s power as a musical and cultural figure. It also attempts to secure his place in our memory.
The album consists of two elements, Hill songs performed by important interpreters and songs about Hill, again in historically important performances.
Among the former, number Harry McClintock singing “The Preacher and the Slave,” Pete Seeger doing “Casey Jones (The Union Scab),” and Cisco Houston’s version of “The Tramp.”
The latter category contains the more varied and more interesting contributions. Among these are poet Kenneth Patchen’s spoken word piece “Joe Hill Listens to the Praying,” Billy Bragg singing Phil Ochs’ “Joe Hill,” and both Paul Robeson and Earl Robinson performing the Robinson-penned number Baez made her own, “Joe Hill,” with its classic line, “I never died said he.”
Excellent as an album and as a cultural document, hopefully this album will not let us forget the important legacy, a sense of purpose, Joe Hill bequeathed to our culture.
Biography of Joe Hill:
Joe Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Haggland in Sweden, the ninth son of a railroad worker. His father died when Hill was eight years old, and he went to work in order to help support his mother and six siblings. When Hill’s mother died in 1902, he emigrated to the United States. Until 1910 practically nothing is known of where Hill lived or what he did. It is known that he was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, as Hill sent back an eyewitness account of the horror and devastation caused by this disaster to Sweden, where it was published in a local newspaper. Somewhere along the line he changed his name to “Joseph Hillstrom,” possibly to avoid arrest. By the time Joe Hill finally surfaces in San Pedro, CA, in 1910, it is clear that he had been working a long time as a migrant laborer, and was on intimate terms with the suffering and misery experienced by the families of his fellow workers under the conditions of this era.
In San Pedro, Hill joined the I.W.W. (International Workers of the World, or as popular slang had it, “the Wobblies”), a Chicago-based labor organization which set itself up as a worldwide advocate and agitator for the cause of worker’s rights and the unionization of industries. Towards the end of 1910, Hill published a letter in the I.W.W.’s in-house publication International Worker, identifying himself as a member of the Portland, OR, chapter of the I.W.W. and signing off as “Joe Hill” for the first known time. At the beginning of 1911, Hill is found in Tijuana, attempting to mobilize an I.W.W. offensive to assist the overthrow of the Mexican government. From then until January 1914, Hill’s trail once again runs cold, this time not due to a lack of information, but to an impossible wealth of Joe Hill sightings; Hill became such a legendary “wobbly” that he is accredited as being present at practically all I.W.W. functions nationwide.
It was during this time that Hill established himself as the main event of I.W.W. rallies, singing songs he had written that pilloried capitalist bosses, “scabs,” glorified the ordinary American worker, and urged on the creation of unions. The lyrics to these songs were published in the I.W.W.’s Little Red Song Book and achieved wide distribution therein, but most of the thousands who got to know such songs as “Union Maid,” “The Preacher and the Slave,” “There is a Power in the Union,” and “Workers of the World, Awaken!” heard them sung by Joe Hill in person. The lyrics were usually simple, easily memorized, and set to tunes that were already known to the assembly at the I.W.W. meetings. “A song is learned by heart and repeated over and over,” Hill once wrote, “and if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.”
In January 1914, Joe Hill was apprehended in Salt Lake City, UT, on a still controversial, but seemingly entirely circumstantial, charge of murdering a local grocer who also happened to be a retired law enforcement officer. During Hill’s trial he offered little to no evidence in his own defense, and was more openly hostile to the volunteer attorneys representing him than he was to the prosecution, who sought the death penalty. Hill was convicted and executed by a firing squad on November 19, 1915, over the protestations of the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, Helen Keller, and President Woodrow Wilson himself, all of whom had pleaded with the governor of Utah for a new trial for Hill. Hill’s own unexplainable behavior under these dire circumstances suggests that, though innocent of the charge, he had resigned himself to the notion of becoming a martyr for the cause of the unions. To be fair, it should be stated that Hill’s fellow inmates at the Utah State Penitentiary believed that he was, in actuality, guilty of the charges against him. After his execution, the coffin containing Hill’s body was hastily transported to Chicago, where it was joined by a crowd of 30,000 mourners in a massive I.W.W. funeral procession through the city streets.
Joe Hill’s 30 or so songs were once thought so dangerous that many would dare not sing them in public or risk arrest. To this repertoire was added an additional powerful anthem of the left, entitled “Joe Hill” and written in 1925 by poet Alfred Hayes and set to music by Earl Robinson. This was sung at workers’ rallies in the 1930s and 1940s, when millions were in attendance and the I.W.W. itself was no longer even a factor. Although the red-baiting of the 1950s put a damper on the American left, by this time, the work of Hill had already left its mark on such singers as Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Pete Seeger and other left-leaning folksingers who would further influence Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and those who would become leading voices in the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War. Baez sang the song “Joe Hill” as the first number in her appearance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.
Joe Hill never found himself in a situation where he could be recorded, and his influence was mainly spread from singer to singer. Only in the late ’90s did historians take much interest in Joe Hill as a performer and artist, and the study has already revealed much about the origins of politically oriented folk songs in America. It appears that Joe Hill, whether guilty or innocent of murder, was truly the first protest singer in America, and certain of his specific metaphors, such as his notion of “pie in the sky when you die,” are encountered repeatedly in subsequent generations of folk songs that deal with social and political change.
Some years ago the dj collective “Zero G Sound” made a wonderful mix-cd called “Amandla!”. They built a nice and groovy mix of different kind of african music styles.
Zero G Sound 