A cheap paper songbook, small enough to fit in a coat pocket, carried a tune called “The Preacher and the Slave.” It was a parody set to a familiar hymn, and it spread through lumber camps, rail yards and mining towns faster than any sermon. The man behind it was Joe Hill, an American union organiser, poet and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical labour union known as the IWW. By the time that song appeared in print, Hill was already the most prolific and famous songwriter the union had. He was born on October 7, 1879.
Borrowed melodies and pie in the sky
Hill had a method that made his songs stick. He borrowed the melodies of existing hymns and popular tunes, so a worker could hum along before the first verse ended. “The Preacher and the Slave” became the most popular and frequently reprinted song in the IWW’s little red songbooks. It mocked the Salvation Army’s promise of heavenly reward with a line about pie in the sky, and it gave striking workers something to sing on a picket line. The song did not ask for pity; it laughed at the boss and the preacher in the same breath.
That sharp wit made Hill dangerous to employers, but it could not protect him from the law. In 1914, he was accused of killing a grocery store owner and the owner’s son in Salt Lake City. Hill denied the charge, yet a jury found him guilty. The evidence was thin, and the verdict looked to many like punishment for his union work. Protests erupted around the case, and the IWW led a campaign for clemency. The union turned Hill’s trial into a national cause, printing leaflets, holding rallies and demanding a new hearing.
For a while, the pressure seemed to work. The execution was halted in 1915, and even Sweden’s ambassador and President Woodrow Wilson urged a review. Hill sat in a Utah prison cell, writing songs and letters, still refusing to beg. But the reprieve did not last. On the 19th of November that year, Joe Hill was shot by a firing squad in the Salt Lake City prison. He died at dawn, still insisting he was innocent.
Ashes mailed across the world
His body did not rest quietly. Hill’s funeral was held twice, first in Salt Lake City and then in Chicago, where thousands of workers marched behind the coffin. His body was cremated, and the ashes were divided and scattered across the world, sent to union branches and sympathisers on every continent. The IWW wanted no single grave where the movement could be buried with him. Instead, they made Joe Hill into something scattered and unkillable, a presence in every meeting hall and strike camp.
Instead, they made Joe Hill into something scattered and unkillable, a presence in every meeting hall and strike camp.
The story did not end with the ashes. A folk ballad called “Joe Hill” spread through labour circles, telling workers that he had never died. The song kept his name alive in union halls for decades. An English composer, Alan Bush, later wrote an opera about him, a full-scale work for the stage that carried the title “Joe Hill, the Man Who Never Died.” The opera premiered in the nineteen-sixties, half a century after the firing squad, and it treated Hill not as a criminal but as a working-class hero.
Today the court case is widely seen as a miscarriage of justice. The trial that convicted Joe Hill relied on circumstantial evidence, and the governor’s own doubts were not enough to stop the execution. His songs outlived the verdict. “The Preacher and the Slave” is still sung in union gatherings, and the little red songbook still carries his name. Joe Hill became the proof that a songwriter with a borrowed melody and a sharp tongue could frighten the powerful more than any speech.
The last image of Joe Hill is not a man in a cell but a packet of ashes in an envelope, mailed to a far-off union local. His friends did not want a monument; they wanted a movement. So they sent him everywhere, to every place where workers gathered to sing.