Joe Hill was an activist, songwriter and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He was executed in Utah in 1915 for a crime of which most historians say he was innocent. Just before he faced the firing squad he wrote a letter to a union leader, saying, "Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah."
Mary Lou Redden, the Director of Halifax Humanities 101, writes about Joan Baez' Joe Hill:
I first heard this song as part of the Woodstock compilation that came out when I was a teenager. I didn't attend Woodstock, but like many of my generation, was moved by the event and enamoured of the music. But what struck me so much about Joan Baez's performance of Joe Hill was first that it was so pure and simple in the midst of the noisy rock and roll of Woodstock. I've always loved her remarkable voice. But I was also struck by the union of that hippie event with the concerns of the trade union movement. In the city where I lived, there was a strong union movement, based in the dangerous and pollution ridden petro-chemical factories that dominated our landscape. I had naively associated factory workers with right-wing attitudes towards the concerns of my generation and this song made me reflect on those assumptions and see that the fight for a more just society needed to be inclusive.
