THE LEGENDARY WOBBLY AND SONGWRITER, EXECUTED 110 YEARS AGO, WAS CELEBRATED WORLDWIDE FOR HIS RESILIENCE AND HUMOUR ~ Owen Clayton ~ Born Joseph Emanuel Hägglund in Sweden in 1879, Hill was brought up amid hardship after his father died when he was still a child. Without formal training, he imbibed a love of music from both parents, his father having played the organ and his mother being a talented singer. As he grew up, Hill sharpened his musical and lyrical skills by creating parody songs, something for which that he would eventually become famous. His talents also extended to cartoons, a popular working-class medium. Hill emigrated to the USA in 1902. There is patchy evidence of what he did for the next 5 years, but it presumably involved moving around the country as a transient worker, otherwise known as a hobo. These workers moved around by illegally hopping freight trains, working in mines, mills, laying railroad track, and generally building up the American capitalist West. We know that Hill was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake because he wrote about it for his boyhood paper back in Sweden. By 1908 he was in Portland, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or ‘wobblies’), the only union that did not exclude people on the basis of ethnicity and which also tried to organise all workers, instead of just those in more ‘skilled’ positions. The wobblies believed that if all workers were in ‘One Big Union’ then this could lead to a general strike and, from there, seizure of the means of production. They eschewed party politics and the ballot box in favour of a revolutionary stance, which made them public enemy number one in what would later become America’s ‘First Red Scare’. Hill was present during the famous 1909-1910 free speech fight in Spokane, Washington. This was a struggle over a ban on the rights to free assembly and speech. The IWW called on hundreds of activists to descend on Spokane with the deliberate intention of being arrested for public speaking. Spokane’s jails were soon filled with an army of rambunctious wobblies, about whom one governor despaired that he could not get them to stop singing. The cost to the State was astronomical, and so the prisoners were eventually released and the ban lifted—an event that echoes in the ongoing Palestine Action mass arrests. Around this time, Hill and fellow wobblies began using street music to combat the Salvation Army bands that deliberately tried to drown out IWW speakers. It was a pivotal moment for the IWW, which has ever afterwards been known as a ‘singing union’: putting out regular editions of its ‘Little Red Songbook’, also known as ‘music to fan the flames of discontent’. Hill went on a prolific songwriting spree. His most famous song is ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ (also known as ‘Long Haired Preachers’), which criticises the ‘Starvation Army’ for promising ‘pie in the sky’ (a phrase that Hill invented) instead of giving more immediate help. As he had done in Sweden, Hill often adopted religious or popular melodies, partly because his songs were often parodies, but it also because this made his songs easier to learn. Hill said that ‘if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them (the facts) up in a cloak of humour…he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers’. And his music was immensely popular: of 12 songs in the 1913 edition of the Little Red Songbook, 10 were by Hill. Valuing his music as a form of propaganda, the IWW sent him to a strike location in Canada so that he could write a new song on the spot. Hill believed in the importance of reaching female workers, who were, he wrote, ‘more exploited than the men’. He wrote one of his most famous songs, ‘The Rebel Girl’, in honour of wobbly organisers like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (the term Rebel Girl is probably a pun on ‘Gurley’), Katie Farr, and Anges Thecla Fair. He also wrote letters arguing that the wobblies were spending so much time organising male workers that they were neglecting to organise women. It goes without saying that in making these arguments he was well ahead of his time. In 1911, Hill manifested his revolutionary sentiments in a more practical way. With many other wobblies, he joined the Mexican revolution that successfully deposed the US-backed dictator Porfirio Diaz. The revolution was soon betrayed, as so often happens, by its one-time Liberal allies: who, once Diaz was out of power, turned the Mexican army on the rebels. Hill was fortunate not only to escape with his life, but also to successfully return to the US. In 1913, however, his luck ran out. As is well known, he was shot in what he claimed was a dispute over a woman on the same night as a murder took place of a grocer and his son. Though the evidence was extremely flimsy, Hill’s trail judge, Morris L. Ritchie, was so biased that Hill was found guilty of those murders and sentenced to death. The IWW launched a mass public campaign about his unfair trial, though Hill expressed misgivings about becoming a martyr, or a ‘Tin-Jesus’ as he sarcastically put it. When the time finally came, he was stoic and not a little ironic: reportedly gave his firing squad the order to shoot. Just before his execution, he dashed off a poem called ‘The Last Will of Joe Hill’, which proclaims that ‘my will is easy to decide/For I have nothing to divide/My kin don’t need to fuss and moan/Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.’ The poem also expresses a wish to be cremated, which the IWW honoured. His ashes were divided into six hundred envelopes and sent around the world, so that a part of Joe Hill could inspire future generations. In one of his most famous final letters, Hill told IWW leader ‘Big’ Bill Haywood: ‘Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize’. But really it seems more appropriate to do both. Hill’s influence only grew after his death. This was in part because of the popular 1936 song-poem ‘Joe Hill’ by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, in which Joe returns in a dream, claims that he ‘never died’, and says that he is present ‘In Every Mine and Mill/Where workers strike and organize/There you’ll find Joe Hill’. Musicians such as Joan Baez, Tom Morello, Billy Bragg and the Finnish hiphop star Paleface have all cited Hill as an inspiration. His name was even taken in homage by the horror writer Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of Stephen King (who had himself given his son the middle name Hillstrom). And most importantly, his songs are still sung in marches and on pickets lines worldwide, as workers and activists seek to fulfil Joe Hill’s promise of a better world. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Joe Hill, ‘Oh You Hoboing’, sent by letter to Charles Rudberg, 2 September 1911 The post Remembering Joe Hill appeared first on Freedom News.