Continuing our series of songs in labour history, Keith Laybourn discusses a protest ballad performed throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by some of the biggest names in American music.

‘I Dreamed, I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’ is often known as ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’. I first came across this ballad in the 1960s through a combination of events. From the mid-1960s Joan Baez sang the song, raising it to protest status in the campaign against the Vietnam War and, indeed, modified it when her husband was imprisoned for draft dodging as the United States. In 1969 she performed the song at the Woodstock Festival. About the same time, in 1968, the late Patrick Renshaw published his book The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States. Here he examined the history of the Industrial Workers of the World, the revolutionary trade union of American labourers, in which he related how the mine, mill, and timber bosses of America acted to supress their strikes, protests and revolutionary intent. Embedded in this book was the case of a Swedish immigrant who changed his name to Joseph Hillstrom, or Joe Hill, who was found guilty of a trumped-up charge of murder in Utah and executed by firing squad in 1915. He had been a labourer and a song writer, some of his songs appearing in the IWW Little Red Song Book of 1909. Hill’s martyrdom became famous when Alfred Hayes wrote the song, to music by Earl Robinson, in 1936, its refrains becoming well-established in the song books and performances of American folk music, performed by the likes of Woody Guthrie and, although I am not certain of this, Bob Dylan, even before Joan Baez made it an international song of protest, suggesting that the protest of the working class could never be suppressed.

The opening verse ran:

I dreamed, I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me
Says I ‘But Joe, you’re ten years dead’
I never died says he
I never died says he

The last verse summed up the resistance to oppression:

From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill
Where working folks defend their rights
It’s there you find Joe Hill
It’s there you find Joe Hill

There have been many versions of the song since the 1930s and its revival in the 1960s and, most famously, Bruce Springsteen sang it International Workers’ Day, on 1 May 2014, I think it was, in Tampa, Florida. I have been stirred by the song many times but my own personal memory of it was following a Society for the Study of Labour History conference that I organised at Halifax about eight or nine years ago. The conference was organised in honour of Edward Palmer Thompson, who was raised and lived in Halifax and wrote the monumental history of the English working class which was published in November 1963. The key lecturer on that occasion was Professor Bryan Palmer, of Trent University in Canada. At the end of the day. and after a night of celebration, I took him to Halifax railway station for the 10.15 pm train to New Pudsey station. As we sat down, a small band of musicians got on the train and began to sing The Ballad of Joe Hill. Bryan remarked that that would never happen in Canada. I replied that ‘I had never seen it happen in Britain’. Nevertheless, to me it remains a powerful song of protest against oppression for the working classes of the world.

Keith Laybourn University of Huddersfield and York St. John University