Oct 1, 2026 · 14 min · 7 segments
More than a hundred years ago, an immigrant worker named Joe Hill was traveling across the United States, working wherever he could find a job and writing songs along the way. He had a particular…
He grew up in a working-class family, and like millions of other Europeans at the time, eventually came to the United States looking for opportunity.
He worked a string of jobs across the country: laborer, miner, lumber worker, longshoreman.
He knew what it meant to be an immigrant trying to find your place in a new country, and he saw firsthand the conditions that workers faced in the early twentieth century.
[upbeat music] Joe eventually became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the IWW or the Wobblies.
The IWW was founded in 1905 with a radically different version of the labor movement.
One union for workers across all industries organized around the idea that the people who actually produce the wealth should have the power to control their lives and their work.
And Joe Hill understood something about that movement that sometimes gets lost when we talk about labor history.
They need something that can turn a crowd of people who don't know each other into a group that feels like it belongs together.
Hill became one of the great labor songwriters of his era, and perhaps of all time, because his songs were often built from familiar tunes.
He would take a hymn or a popular song and change the lyrics, turning religious promises into jokes about poverty or transforming known melodies into songs about bosses and union organizing.
One of his best-known songs, The Preacher and the Slave, took aim at the idea that hungry workers should simply accept their suffering now in exchange for rewards in the afterlife.
[singing] You will eat, by and by, in that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay.
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
That's a lie.
He grew up in a working-class family, and like millions of other Europeans at the time, eventually came to the United States looking for opportunity.
He worked a string of jobs across the country: laborer, miner, lumber worker, longshoreman.
He knew what it meant to be an immigrant trying to find your place in a new country, and he saw firsthand the conditions that workers faced in the early twentieth century.
[upbeat music] Joe eventually became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the IWW or the Wobblies.
The IWW was founded in 1905 with a radically different version of the labor movement.
One union for workers across all industries organized around the idea that the people who actually produce the wealth should have the power to control their lives and their work.
And Joe Hill understood something about that movement that sometimes gets lost when we talk about labor history.
They need something that can turn a crowd of people who don't know each other into a group that feels like it belongs together.
Hill became one of the great labor songwriters of his era, and perhaps of all time, because his songs were often built from familiar tunes.
He would take a hymn or a popular song and change the lyrics, turning religious promises into jokes about poverty or transforming known melodies into songs about bosses and union organizing.
One of his best-known songs, The Preacher and the Slave, took aim at the idea that hungry workers should simply accept their suffering now in exchange for rewards in the afterlife.
[singing] You will eat, by and by, in that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay.
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
That's a lie.
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