A Musical View: 100 years after his execution, Joe Hill’s music still resonates

For the centennial of Joe Hill's execution, I submitted opinion pieces to various newspapers and journals in the U.S. and Canada, trying to give them local or regional interest. Here's one that appeared in the Duluth (Minnesota) News Tribune on November 13, 2015.

Joe Hill was the bard of the itinerant and the immigrant, the unskilled and the unwanted. He took the raw material of working-class lives and turned it into music: songs to amuse, to organize, to “fan the flames of discontent.”

And 100 years ago this month, the forces of capital and the state of Utah executed him.

Born Joel Hagglund in 1879 in Gavle, Sweden, Hill emigrated to the United States in 1902, bummed his way across the country, Americanized his name and eventually joined the Industrial Workers of the World. Popularly known as the Wobblies, the IWW was formed in 1905 with the goal of organizing those workers more mainstream unions avoided — migrants, the unskilled, immigrants, minorities — in an effort to combine the entire working class into one big union. The Wobblies had success organizing workers in various regions: migratory farm workers in the West and Midwest, lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest and South, immigrant factory workers in New England, and miners in the West and Southwest.

The IWW also made a strong mark in Duluth, for instance, running the Work People’s College in Smithville from 1914 through 1940.

As a Wobbly, Hill was active in free-speech fights in Fresno and San Diego, a railroad strike in British Columbia, and even a revolution in Mexico. And all the while, Hill composed songs to be sung on soapboxes, picket lines or in jail.

Though he did occasionally compose his own music — as in songs like “Rebel Girl,” his tribute to Wobbly organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn — most of Hill’s songs, such as “Casey Jones—Union Scab” or “It’s a Long Way to the Soupline” parodied popular tunes or hymns.

“With all his tune choices,” musician and labor scholar Bucky Halker said, “he was like other working-class writers and had the same goal: Use tunes that workers knew already for labor songs and then they’d be easy for workers to sing.”

In 1914, Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City for killing a storekeeper, allegedly in a botched robbery. Despite the lack of motive or evidence, Hill was convicted and sentenced to death, with the prosecutor urging conviction as much on the basis of Hill’s IWW membership as any proof of his guilt. An international amnesty movement pressed for a new trial, but the Utah governor refused, and Hill was executed on Nov. 19, 1915. In a final message, Hill urged fellow workers, “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize.”

The year after Hill’s execution, Rebel Girl Flynn helped organize a strike of iron miners on the Mesabi Range.

Since his death, Hill has strongly influenced later generations of socially conscious songwriters, including Duluth’s and Hibbing’s Bob Dylan, who wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, that, “Joe wrote ‘Pie in the Sky,’ and was the forerunner of Woody Guthrie. That’s all I needed to know.”

Halker, an Ashland native, is honoring the centennial of Hill’s death with a CD of new interpretations of Hill’s music. Anywhere But Utah: The Songs of Joe Hill, which is available online at CD Baby, takes its title from Hill’s dying wish that his remains be transported out of state because he didn’t want “to be found dead in Utah.”

Music was essential to Wobbly organizing campaigns, Halker believes.

“The IWW cleverly used singing and chanting as a way to garner attention from workers, the media, and the authorities,” he said. “Fifty workers singing makes a lot more noise at a rally or in a jail cell than one speaker on a soapbox or one person ranting in the joint.”

Hill’s mastery of American vernacular is especially impressive given that English was not his primary language. As Halker commented, “His work is filled with humor, irony and sarcasm, hardly easy skills to gain in your second language.”

“I think there are many people who hear his songs and immediately sense that the issues raised by Hill remain important to our national discussion,” Halker said, “including decent wages and working conditions, immigrant rights, discrimination based on race, the oppression of women, the right to form a union, and the right to free speech.”

Halker added, “I think that Hill and other Wobbly bards and writers should get some credit for their use of sarcasm and irony in the development of American literature. They had sharp wits and tongues that worked deftly and at great speed. The authorities and their lackeys dislike radicals and they really hate them when they’re much smarter than they are.”