Pine In The Sky

I've put in these last two songs because they represent to me the best of the American labor movement as a singing movement. The songs weren't just there to make people happy or to make them applaud. The songs were there to make them think. The songs were there to help people define problems and define solutions. They were dead simple because these were simple rough-spoken people who were experiencing these problems.
These two songs were written by Joe Hill. He was an immigrant, a worker, a boomer; he did a lot of different kinds of jobs. He learned to look at the country, especially the West, from the bottom up, instead of from the middle down, or from the top down. He had a lot less distorted view than you find in our history books today. Joe paid the price for thinking and believing and writing the way he did. He was executed by the state of Utah, November 19, 1915, basically for writing songs that made people mad and made them think.
I've heard a lot of stories about "The Preacher and the Slave" or "Pie in the Sky". An old?timer up in Seattle said, "I think that song was written in Yakima when Joe came into the IWW's and found that the organizers were sitting around on their duffs while the whole street was full of people who were unemployed." They'd be down there gathered around the Starvation Army or they'd be standing in the labor shark's line, standing outside the soup kitchen And Joe said, "Let's go down on the street, and if we don't do anything else, let's at least sing something to these people that makes sense. Get them to cross over the street and join the union so they can begin to change their lives."

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 are on the bum.

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:

Final chorus:
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry;
Chop some wood, do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
(That's no lie!)

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