When Fighting for Workers' Rights Meant Being Executed for a Crime You Didn't Commit

100 years ago today, Utah murdered IWW activist Joe Hill.

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: Joe Hill's Last Will

Joe Hill was executed by the State of Utah in 1915 on the orders of Big Mining furious over union organizing by the International Workers of the World. He left an actual will telling his fellow Wobblies not to mourn, but to organize.

Uploaded by Rogermiler



Uploaded by Rogermiler

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Should I Ever Be a Soldier"

Written by I.W.W. bard Joe Hill in 1913.

Uploaded by TRacyLC89

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Don't Take My Papa Away"

Written by I.W.W. bard Joe Hill in 1915.

Uploaded by 510rebel

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Workers of the World, Awaken!"

Written by I.W.W. bard Joe Hill circa 1914.

Uploaded by 510rebel

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Where the Fraser River Flows"

One of Joe Hill's earliest songs, about an IWW railroad workers strike in British Columbia in 1912.

Uploaded by Idonegotold:



Lyrics here.

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "The Tramp"

Uploaded by ghostcipher11:

Awesome song by Joe Hill.

Okay, this one isn't actually THAT bad considering I found it today and this is literally the second time I've played it. I was just so excited to put it up, I couldn't wait.

Lyrics here.

Virginia Third-Graders Get Their Joe Hill On

There's a stupendously fabulous BEST PART to this, but you don't get it until the very end, so read this whole thing very carefully.

Kirsten Boyd Johnson at Wonkette:

A group of Virginia third graders composed a song about the spiritual emptiness of greed, which they sang for their fellow public school students at an assembly — good on them, right? Except, UH-OH TIMES A HUNDRED, they included the term “99 percent” in the lyrics. Since when are children allowed to use SOCIALIST PROFANITIES in school, Every Conservative Blogger in America now demands to know. Or maybe the real question is, who let these kids pay attention to the world around them like that?

Let’s first enjoy an excerpt from the children’s lyrics, shall we?

Some people have it all
But they still don’t think they have enough
They want more money
A faster ride
They’re not content
Never satisfied
Yes — they’re the 1 percent

I used to be sad, now I’m satisfied
’Cause I really have enough
Though I lost my yacht and plane
Didn’t need that extra stuff
Could have been much worse
You don’t need to be first
’Cause I’ve got my friends
Here by my side
Don’t need it all
I’m so happy to be part of the 99

And now here is one randomly-selected outraged dingbat of many (which you can Google search, if are you a masochist, but we won’t link to them all here) from BigGubermint.com, who is FEEUREEUS with this group of intellectually superior nine-year-olds:

Remember, these are third graders. The simplistic left wing economic nonsense of this ditty boggles the mind. But to an impressionistic third grader, it plants poisonous seeds at odds with long egalitarian American traditions that disdain class hatred. It mocks American traditions of industry, hard work and accomplishment. It teaches the young to distrust and dislike, which of course is a tactic employed by thug cultures and governments throughout history.

(The literate person’s version of the word is impressionable, by the way.)

Can we at least Blame the Teachers? Not really, says the school board, according to a newz report from some local CBS affiliate:

The song was written and performed by third graders on October 21, 2011 at Woodbrook Elementary School during a Kid Pan Alley program.

Kid Pan Alley is an organization that helps kids write and perform their own songs. Their mission is to inspire kids to be creators.

Students write the songs and school officials are standing by the lyrics.

“They don’t censor what the kids write. They don’t shape what the kids write. It all comes out of the kids own mouths and the kids own words,” said Albemarle County School Board Chair, Steve Koleszar.

Oh THERE’S the problem, we spotted it… they’re encouraging creativity. NONE OF THAT NOW.

The kids WROTE THOSE LYRICS THEMSELVES. Give up conservatards; Socialism Has Won.

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Pie in the Sky"

Originally titled "Long-Haired Preachers," this is Joe Hill's most famous song. Like many of his songs, it uses the tune of a Salvation Army hymn.



Yes, Joe Hill coined the phrase "pie in the sky." The next time you hear somebody say it, sing this song to them. Or at least the chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die

The Singing Went Straight to Their Hearts

My New Year's Resolution for 2012 is to not let a single day pass without doing something, no matter how small, to push back against the plutocracy that has our economy and our nation in a death grip.

This is an old, old fight - older than the nation - and one we've mistakenly thought we'd won more than once. When the Revolution overthrew aristocracy, when the Civil War ended slavery, when TR broke the trusts, and of course when the New Deal and Union Power built the middle class after World War II, we thought the Money Power had been slapped down good and hard.

But it always comes back. More powerful than ever. And overcoming it gets harder every time.

I just started reading the new biography of Joe Hill "The Man Who Never Died." In the introduction, author William M. Adler traces the source of the power of the IWW to rally into one organization workers of both sexes and all races, religions, languages and ethnic backgrounds:

The funeral service on that warm Thanksgiving day in Chicago was testimony to the power of song, a power the IWW had recognized right from its start. "We have been naught," the delegates to the 1905 founding convention sang. "We shall be all."

Wobblies sang in jails, on picket lines, in fields, factories and mines, in train yards and city streets and hobo jungles. The very act of mass singing seemed to embolden and inspire people of varied backgrounds - emigrants from different parts of the world, who spoke different languages, whose skins were of different color - to unite under the IWW flag to the common goal of social and economic justice.

"They had never heard the song before," the novelist B. Traven wrote of a group of strikers, "but with the instinct of the burdened they felt that this was their song, and that it was closely allied to their strike, the first strike of their experience, as a hymn is allied to religion. They didn't know what the IWW was, what a labor organization meant, what class distinctions were. But the singing went straight to their hearts."

The singing went straight to their hearts.

It went to mine. May it go to yours.



I will post one IWW song every day until I can't find any more. Then I'll probably start posting them all over again.

May they inspire us all as they inspired the Wobblies a century ago.