Joe Hill
The early twentieth century saw labor activism and protest culture intersect with folk music and vernacular poetry, giving working-class movements a distinct artistic voice. Joe Hill, born on October 7, 1879, in Gävle Parish, Sweden, worked at that intersection, carrying his craft across national borders and into the heart of American labor organizing.
A citizen of both Sweden and the United States, Hill worked as a singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and trade unionist. The protest song was the form that defined his output — a vehicle suited to the conditions he encountered as a laborer and organizer. He composed in English and worked in Swedish as well, and his dual citizenship reflected a life lived between two worlds. Where other voices addressed the grievances of working people through speeches or pamphlets, Hill turned those grievances into lyrics, giving them a cadence and memorability that plain argument could not always achieve. His work in protest song drew on displacement and the everyday experience of labor in ways that set it apart from more formal modes of expression.
Hill died in Salt Lake City on November 19, 1915, at the age of thirty-six. The brevity of his life — from Gävle Parish to the labor movements of the United States, working across two languages and two national identities — stands as the clearest outline of what the facts of his biography contain. His occupation as trade unionist and singer-songwriter placed him at the junction of artistic practice and collective action, and it is within that junction that his life and work are most accurately situated.
Quotes by Joe Hill
Joe Hill's insights on:
No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom. Check it out: I’m twenty years old, and I’m one of the top five SS-Scrabble players in the whole state. I guess that might say more about Iowa than it says about me.
He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.
She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.
Reality had briefly slid aside one of its black, opaque panels, to give him a glimpse of the gears that ticked behind it. Saunders had discovered a universal constant, like gravity or the quantum nature of light. No matter where you went – no matter how ancient the traditions, no matter how grand the history, no matter how awe-inspiring the landscape – there was always a market for a cheap Happy Meal.
It’s easy to dismiss religion as bloody, cruel, and tribal. I’ve done it myself. But it isn’t religion that’s wired that way – it’s man himself. At bottom every faith is a form of instruction in common decency. Different textbooks in the same class.
She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When.
Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.
You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you – finish you – as much as you create you.
Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last.