Song of the Day 9/2: Bruce Springsteen, “Joe Hill”

I was watching the PBS series about Reconstruction recently and heard a bunch of historians lament how that part of American history is so little studied and poorly understood. That’s true, but an even bigger piece of American history has nearly been wiped from collective memory — the history of capitalism’s war on the labor movement, the bloodiest such struggle of any industrial nation’s. So I wonder how many in the audience knew who Bruce Springsteen was singing about when he opened a tour in in Tampa, Fla., on May Day 2014. Or even knew it was May Day. Springsteen posted the video on YouTube a week later.

The tune was composed in 1936 by Earl Robinson to accompany a poem written by Alfred Hayes a few years earlier. It was frequently performed by Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, whose version gives it the elegiac tone it deserves.

Joe Hill was an interesting if mysterious character, a Swedish immigrant who traveled the country as an itinerant laborer, a not uncommon situation for poor immigrants in the early 20th century. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World and became a labor organizer. He gained fame for his cartoons for IWW publications and his protest songs, many of which were adapted from hymns played by the Salvation Army, which Hill referred to as the “Starvation Army.” Perhaps his most famous tune was “The Preacher and the Slave,” a direct indictment of religion’s role in preserving the capitalist status quo in which Hill either coined or popularized the term “pie in the sky.” Here it is performed by Harry McClintock, who actually knew Joe Hill. Hill was executed in 1915 in Utah for a double murder after a dubious trial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXGuHCsjXro