Wasn’t she a Law Clerk or something?
Joe Hill was a very real guy, Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, a Swedish immigrant (White enough for you? Not Ben Franklin. Swedes are filthy mud people who smell of Herring and Punsch.).
Anyway Joe wrote about half the Little Red Songbook of the Wobblies and is memorialized in most of the rest of it due to his unfortunate execution for a crime he probably didn’t commit because he was an avowed Anarchist and Labor Organizer.
Not that it excuses him from being a criminal mind you, if he was, just that it’s the main reason they hung him.
This is a song he wrote that is notable for coining the phrase “pie in the sky”.
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
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.
And the starvation army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum:
Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out,
And they holler, they jump and they shout
“Give your money to Jesus,” they say,
“He will cure all diseases today.”
If you fight hard for children and wife,
Try to get something good in this life,
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.
Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight:
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry;
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good,
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.