Joe Hill is a hundred and four years dead today, but Joe Hill ain't never died. Where workers strike and organize, Joe Hill is at their side.
Joe Hill is in a bit of a weird position, because he's a songwriter known best for a song about him, rather than by him. (Although, my, what a song! Here's Bruce Springsteen's version of Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson's song.)
I grew up on the slightly abbreviated Joan Baez version of the song (she sang it at Woodstock 50 years ago) but I'd say the canonical version is Paul Robeson's. Here's a newsreel about him singing it 70 years ago to Scottish miners.
But as Utah Phillips says in the intro here to Preacher and the Slave, Joe Hill was murdered because of his songs. Phil Ochs once sang about Woody Guthrie, "he wrote them for a reason, why not sing them for the same." So here's a thread of Joe Hill songs.
Power In A Union is surely Joe Hill's best song. (Utah Phillips agrees with me.) As originally written, it's a compelling vision of a working-class masculinity, in which being a man is acting in solidarity.
(Utah Phillips sang a version with slightly changed lyrics to remove the masculinism, which is surely an improvement.)
The opposite of a manly Wobbly was Mr. Block, who believed the bosses' lies and deserved nothing but scorn.
Mr. Block was a fool who imagined he'd be president some day, thought he could rely on the law to solve his problems, and wanted to meet the Astors and Rockefellers in heaven. He was wrong; "you'll find them down below."
Who else will you find down below? The scab Casey Jones, who was sent there after the Angels Union local 29 organized to have him sent there. (This is my other favorite Joe Hill song, here sung by the great Pete Seeger.)
The gender politics of Rebel Girl are, uh, troubling, but I do like Alyeah Hansen's rendition of it. Elizabeth Gurley-Flinn is another working-class hero whom we should do better about memorializing.
Hazel Dickens reclaimed Rebel Girl and made it better.
A thread of Joe Hill songs wouldn't be complete without the great Joe Glazer, but I left him without any good songs to sing, so here's Joe Hill's final will, as Joe performed it on his Joe Hill record.
I'll end with another song about Joe Hill: the Ballad of Joe Hill, by Phil Ochs, from his 1968 concert in Montreal.
This is embarrassing, but I'm pretty sure I got the date wrong, and that Joe Hill was actually killed on November 19. I'm not sure why I had it so firmly in my head that it was the 15th.
In any case, now you have a lot of songs to listen to on Tuesday.
Also, cheers to @AsDuchasDochas, who is the only person who called me out on my mistake.
