Joe Hill, Preacher and the Slave

"Joe Hill (Gävle, Sweden, October 7, 1879 – Salt Lake City, Utah, November 19, 1915), born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström,[1] was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, familiarly called the "Wobblies").[2] A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco.[3

] Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the union.

His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky"),[4] "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.[5]

In 1914, John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City area grocer and former policeman, and his son were shot and killed by two men.[6] The same evening, Hill arrived at a doctor's office with a gunshot wound, and briefly mentioned a fight over a woman.
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Yet Hill refused to explain further, even after he was accused of the grocery store murders on the basis of his injury. Hill was convicted of the murders in a controversial trial. Following an unsuccessful appeal, political debates, and international calls for clemency from high-profile figures and workers' organizations, Hill was executed in November 1915.

" the last of Hill's ashes (but not the envelope that contained them) was turned over to the IWW in 1988. The weekly In These Times ran notice of the ashes and invited readers to suggest what should be done with them.

Suggestions varied from enshrining them at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC to Abbie Hoffman's suggestion that they be eaten by today's "Joe Hills" like Billy Bragg and Michelle Shocked. "

Bragg did indeed swallow a small bit of the ashes with some Union beer to wash it down, and for a time carried Shocked's share for the eventual completion of Hoffman's last prank

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"In 1990, while living in Austin, Barnes formed the Bad Livers with bassist Mark Rubin and fiddler Ralph White. The band's 1992 debut album, Delusions of Banjer, was produced by Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers and released on Quarterstick Records. It gained the band some attention in the alt-rock-country scene; they followed it up with another album for Quarterstick, Horses in the Mines, released in 1994.



 The band then released three albums on the Sugar Hill Records label. During his tenure with the Bad Livers, he was acclaimed as "a prodigiously talented picker, and a glorious singer"[12] with "an ideal bluegrass voice.""