Songs of Joe Hill

“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over; I maintain that if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them up in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off of them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science.”  —Joe Hill

IWW SONGS AND POEMS:

• CASEY JONES — THE UNION SCAB (1912)
• COFFEE AN’ (1912)
• DER CHIEF, OF FRESNO (1911)
• DON’T TAKE MY PAPA AWAY FROM ME (1915)
• DOWN IN THE OLD DARK MILL (1913)
• EVERYBODY’S JOINING IT (1912)
• THE GIRL QUESTION (1913)
• IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN TO THE SOUPLINE (1915)
• JOE HILL’S LAST WILL (Nov. 18, 1915)
• JOHN GOLDEN AND THE LAWRENCE STRIKE (1912)
• LET BILL DO IT (1912)
• MR. BLOCK (1913)
• NEARER MY JOB TO THEE (1913)
• THE OLD TOILER’S MESSAGE (1913)
• THE PREACHER AND THE SLAVE (1911)
• THE REBEL’S TOAST (POEM) (1914)
• THE REBEL GIRL (1914-1915)
• SCISSOR BILL (1913)
• SHOULD I EVER BE A SOLDIER (1913)
• STUNG RIGHT (1913)
• TA-RA-RA BOOM DE-AY (c. 1914)
• THERE IS POWER IN A UNION (1913)
• THE TRAMP (1913)
• WE WILL SING ONE SONG (1913)
• WHAT WE WANT (1913)
• WHERE THE FRASER RIVER FLOWS (1912)
• THE WHITE SLAVE (1912)
• WORKERS OF THE WORLD, AWAKEN (c. 1914)

FRAGMENTS:

(picketline songs from the Fraser River strike)

• MARTIN WELCH AND STUART (c. 1912)
• MUCKER’S LAMENT (or MUCKER’S DREAM) (rumored) (c. 1912)
• SKOOKUM RYAN, THE WALKING BOSS (c. 1912)
• WE WON’T BUILD NO MORE RAILROADS FOR OVERALLS AND SNUFF (c. 1912)

JOE HILL’S “OTHER” SONGS

• BRONCO BUSTER FLYNN (1915)
• COME AND TAKE A JOY-RIDE IN MY AEROPLANE (1914)
• MY DREAMLAND GIRL (c. 1914)
• OH, PLEASE LET ME DANCE THIS WALTZ WITH YOU (1914)
• A TRIP TO HONOLULU (1915) [No lyrics, Sheet music in Elizabeth Gurley Flynn papers]
• Joe Hill also is known to have written and sung several song parodies – many to Salvation Army hymns – as a boy in Sweden. To the best of our knowledge, none survive.