Joe Hill Totally Explained

Everything about Joe Hill totally explained

Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, and also known as Joseph Hillström (October 7, 1879 – November 19, 1915) was a Swedish-American songwriter, labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies. He was executed for murder after a controversial trial. After his death, he became the subject of several folk songs.

Early life and IWW activity

Hill was born in Gävle, a city in the province of Gästrikland, Sweden. He emigrated to the United States in 1902, where he became a migrant laborer, moving from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio, and eventually to the West Coast. He was in San Francisco, California, at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Hill joined the Wobblies around 1910, when he was working on the docks in San Pedro, California. In late 1910 he wrote a letter to the IWW newspaper Industrial Worker, identifying himself as a member of the Portland, Oregon IWW local.
Hill rose in the IWW organization and traveled widely, organizing workers under the IWW banner, writing political songs and satirical poems, and making speeches. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky", which appeared in his song "The Preacher and the Slave" (a parody of the then well-known hymn "In the Sweet Bye and Bye"). Other notable songs written by Hill include "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones — Union Scab".

Trial and execution

Joe Hill was an itinerant worker, who moved around the west, hopping freight trains, going from job to job. Early 1914 found Hill working as a laborer at the Silver King Mine in Park City, Utah, not far from Salt Lake City.
   On January 10, 1914, John G. Morrison and his son Arling were killed in their Salt Lake City butcher store by two armed intruders masked in red bandannas. Arling had drawn a handgun from behind the counter and wounded one of the masked men before being killed. The police first thought it was a crime of revenge, for nothing had been stolen (the elder Morrison had been a police officer, possibly creating many enemies).
   On the same evening, Joe Hill appeared on the doorstep of a local doctor, bearing a bullet wound. Hill said that he'd been shot in an argument over a woman, whom he refused to name. The doctor reported that Hill was armed with a pistol.
   Considering Morrison's past as a police officer, several men he'd arrested were at first considered suspects; twelve people were arrested in the case before Hill was arrested and charged with the murder. A red bandanna was found in Hill's room. The pistol purported to be in Hill's possession at the doctor's office wasn't found.
   Hill resolutely denied that he was involved in the robbery and killing of Morrison. He said that when he was shot, his hands were over his head, and the bullet hole in his coat — four inches below the bullet wound in his back — seemed to support this claim. Hill didn't testify at his trial, but his lawyers pointed out that four other people were treated for bullet wounds in Salt Lake City that same night, and that the lack of robbery and Hill's unfamiliarity with Morrison left him with no motive.
   The prosecution, for its part, produced a dozen eyewitnesses who said that the killer resembled Hill, including Merlin Morrison, the victims' son and brother, who said "that's not him at all" upon first seeing Hill, but later identified him as the murderer. The jury took just a few hours to find him guilty of murder.
   The case turned into a major media event. President Woodrow Wilson, the blind and deaf author Helen Keller, and people in Sweden all became involved in a bid for clemency. It generated international union attention, and critics charged that the trial and conviction were unfair.
   Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915, and his last word was "Fire!" Just prior to his execution, he'd written to Bill Haywood, an IWW leader, saying, "Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah.
   His will, which was eventually set to music by Ethel Raim, read:
ť My will is easy to decide

   For there's nothing to divide ť My kin don't need to fuss and moan

   "Moss doesn't cling to a rolling stone." ť My body? - Oh. - If I could choose

   I would to ashes it reduce ť And let the merry breezes blow

   My dust to where some flowers grow ť Perhaps some fading flower then

   Would come to life and bloom again ť This is my Last and final Will

   Good Luck to All of you ť :Joe Hill

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the execution of Joe Hill, Philip S. Foner published a book, The Case of Joe Hill, concerning the trial and subsequent events. It is still in print and is a concise introduction to Joe Hill’s life. Dr. Foner, like so many others, concludes that the case was seriously miscarried.

Remains

Hill's body was sent to Chicago, where it was cremated. This was fitting, as he'd joked that he wouldn't be caught dead in Utah. His ashes were purportedly sent to every IWW local. In 1988 it was discovered that an envelope had been seized by the U. S. Postal Service in 1917 because of its "subversive potential". The envelope, with a photo affixed, captioned, "Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915," as well as its contents, was deposited at the National Archives.
After some negotiations, the last of Hill's ashes (but not the envelope that contained them) was turned over to the IWW in 1988. The weekly In These Times ran notice of the ashes and invited readers to suggest what should be done with them. Suggestions varied from enshrining them at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC to Abbie Hoffman's suggestion that they be eaten by today's "Joe Hills" like Billy Bragg and Michelle Shocked. Bragg did indeed swallow a small bit of the ashes and still carries Shocked's share for eventual completion of Hoffman's last prank. The majority of the ashes were cast to the wind in the US, Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Nicaragua. The ashes sent to Sweden were only partly cast to the wind. The main part was interred in the wall of a union office in Landskrona, a minor city in the south of the country, with a plaque commemorating Hill. That room is now the reading room of the local city library.
One small packet of ashes was scattered at a 1989 ceremony which unveiled a monument to IWW coal miners buried in Lafayette, Colorado. Six unarmed strikers were machine gunned by a Colorado state police force in 1927 in the (first) Columbine Massacre. Until 1989 the graves of five of these men were unmarked. Another famous Wobbly, Carlos Cortez, scattered Joe Hill's ashes on the graves at the commemoration.

Influence and tributes

Hill was memorialized in a tribute poem written about him c. 1930 by Alfred Hayes titled "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", sometimes referred to simply as "Joe Hill". Hayes's lyrics were turned into a song in 1936 by Earl Robinson.

Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger often performed this song and are associated with it, along with Irish folk group The Dubliners. Joan Baez's Woodstock performance of "Joe Hill" in 1969 is the most well-known recording. She also recorded a live version on her 2005 album Bowery Songs. Scott Walker recorded a version for his album The Moviegoer.

Ralph Chaplin wrote a tribute poem/song called "Joe Hill" and referred to him in his song "Red November, Black November."

Phil Ochs wrote and recorded a different, original song called "Joe Hill", using a traditional melody found in the song "John Hardy," which tells a much more detailed story of Joe Hill's life and death, and includes the lines that have since been associated with Ochs' own life and death, "It's the life of a rebel that he chose to live; It's the death of a rebel that he died". Ochs' song concludes with Hill's words, "This is my last and final will; Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill, Good luck to all of you."

After Phil Ochs' death, Billy Bragg reworked the Hayes-Robinson song as "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night".

Frank Tovey sings about Joe Hill in his song 'Joe Hill' from the 1989 album Tyranny and the Hired Hand. In this song he uses some of the words from the Alfred Hayes poem.

Bob Dylan claims that Hill's story was one of his inspirations to begin writing his own songs. His song "I dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" is loosely based around the story and Robinson's version.

Chumbawamba's song about Joe Hill, "By and By", appears on the 2005 album A Singsong and a Scrap.

In 1990, Smithsonian Folkways released Don't Mourn — Organize!: Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe Hill. This compilation featured the likes of "Haywire Mac" McClintock and Cisco Houston performing his songs as well as narrative interludes from Utah Phillips, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others.

The Swedish socialist leader Ture Nerman (1886–1969) wrote a biography of Joe Hill. For the project, Nerman did the first serious research about Hill's life story, including finding and interviewing Hill's family members in Sweden. Nerman, who was a poet himself, also translated most of Hill's songs into Swedish.

Wallace Stegner published a fictional biography called Joe Hill in 1950.

Authors Stephen and Tabitha King named their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, after Joe Hill.

Gibbs M. Smith wrote a biography "Joe Hill", which was later turned into the 1971 movie Joe Hill also known as The Ballad of Joe Hill directed by Bo Widerberg.

A chapter of John Dos Passos's novel 1919 is a stylized biography of Joe Hill.

Robert Hunter wrote the opening verse about Joe Hill for the song "Down the Road" which he wrote for Mickey Hart's Mystery Box.

The Nightwatchman (a.k.a. Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave) refers to Joe Hill in his song "The Union Song".

For Rage Against the Machine's second Album, Evil Empire, a suggested reading list was included. Included is the biography Joe Hill written by Gibbs M. Smith.

Joe Hill's name is invoked in Steve Earle's song, "Christmas in Washington."

The Swedish punk rock band Randy refers to Joe Hill and the organization Industrial Workers of the World in a song called "If We Unite" on their album The Human Atom Bombs from 2001.

Kev Carmody's piece "Comrade Jesus Christ", includes the line "he'd fight with Joe Hill".

The song "Down the Road" written and performed by Robert Hunter and recorded on Mickey Hart's Mystery Box, is a song about revolutionaries, and includes a verse about Joe Hill.

In his book An Undividable Glow, Robert Brady speaks about an area of Manchester, England as Cheetham "Joe" Hill. Seattle composer and bandleader Wayne Horvitz created a musical tribute for Joe Hill in 2008. The orchestral work which premiered at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, features the Northwest Sinfona and guest soloists Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb, Danny Barnes, and Rinde Eckert. http://www.waynehorvitz.com/

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