During the 1920’s unions and their employers battled for dominance and control over wages, standards of living, time demanded in a work day, health and insurance options and benefits. Exemplifying the ‘working man’ in this highly electric setting through music was a man known as “Joe Hill”. In 1902, Joe Hill (also, known as Joel Emmanuel Haggland) emigrated from Sweden to New York as an orphan when he was only 12. At this point, he had already been a child laborer for four years and had contracted TB. Because of this disease, he had to suffer many skin operations that butchered his face. Being alone and friendless in a strange place, he quickly left New York in favor of traveling. During 1906-1910 for some unknown reason, he changed his name to “Joseph Hillstrom” and settled in San Pedro, California where he began to work with the “Wobblies” (Industrial Workers of the World). He used the pen name “Joe Hill” as he wrote an angry letter about police brutality to the IWW’s newspaper editor. He began his career as a song writer jotting down songs for the IWW’s Little Red Songbook for the labor union. In 1916 in Salt Lake City, Utah, however, he met much less luck. He was suspected of robbing a store, and killing two people in the process, but the case had plenty of holes in it. He was found guilty. “Big Bill” Haywood, a leader in the union rights movement for many years, used Hill’s case as a rally cry for the IWW and made Hill a public martyr for their cause. His broadside, like this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Kxg9uFDes) speaks about the injustices facing the labor movement during the 1920’s. His style of theme of music inspired Woody Guthrie, who in turn, inspired Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Thus, reverberations of Joe Hill can still be seen in modern singers and song writers, still battling between employee and employer, though with less ferocity that there once was.
As Courtney Brown explained in the “Industrialization and the Rise of Labor Music”, music worked as a common underlying thread of the American Labor movement during its fledgling years. This was practical as well as artistic, for music was exceptionally easy to disseminate to the masses and spread quickly. The IWW’s Little Red Songbook was vital for the labor movements at that time, for as they shared common goals and understandings of the world around them, they were not co-ordinated enough to organize efficiently. All it took was one person to know the song and teach it to others, and so on and so forth until the entire union knew it and could stand behind its message. Joe Glazer, himself, equates the unifying spirit of labor music to church and the military for the masses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaQ7qWo6120). He also explains the importance of broadside ballads as a way of communicating ideas and concepts to undereducated working class people and having them better received in song form than in any other format.
Joe Hill published in 1911 “The Preacher and the Slave” as a sarcastic comment about depending on the church and other religious institutions filled with promises about the afterlife rather than depending on yourself and fulfilling your wants and desires today through hard work by yourself. A more contemporary version of this by Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips in 1999(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhhzElzTZJw) includes in the second verse a brief, well believed rumor that the original writer of the song “Joe Hill” was actually executed due to his union ties, rather than the crime he was convicted of. The fact that this very song survived 88 years with the central message intact speaks volumes for the value of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, as it were, which has now become part of American values as deeply as democracy to us.
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