Joe Hill Quotes
You'll have pie in the sky when you die.
Hill, Joe. "The Preacher and the Slave." Little Red Songbook, Industrial Workers of the World, 1911.
In 1915 the Balkans was contorted by War and political intrigue. Serbia in particular was totally unrealistic about making any concessions to Bulgaria. Grey and his associates tried to explain the realities to the Serbian Ambassador who, before the British could articulate the whole situation, told them that he and the rest of the Serbian leadership would rather die than give up any territory. Grey later observed :
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, familiarly called the "Wobblies"). A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky"), "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.
