Famous last words

Despite the overlying circumstances of the entire affair—execution by firing squad in Utah in 1915 for a crime he didn’t commit—Swedish-born songwriter and union activist Joe Hill died a good death.

As modern-day troubadour and Hill devotee John McCutcheon put it in a recent phone interview, Hill was an itinerant laborer who used his spectacular knack for words to “inform, inspire and enflame” Wobblies (members of then-prevalent radical labor union Industrial Workers of the World).

Hill’s commitment to leftist politics and sardonic sense of humor were so unaffected by his death sentence that two of his jailhouse telegrams are still remembered (and sometimes mistakenly attributed as his last words). The first partly reads, “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” Another reads, “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.” His actual last words came when he interrupted the firing squad’s commands (“Ready, aim …”) with “Fire—go on and fire!”

Unfortunately, the only people who quote Joe Hill nowadays are folksingers and fans who’ve worked their way through Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others back to Hill (whose best-known songs include “The Preacher and the Slave” and “There is Power in a Union”). McCutcheon, a Sierra Nevada Big Room regular and prolific musician himself who’s released more than three-dozen albums since the 1970s and who’s been praised by the likes of Johnny Cash and Seeger himself, is doing his part to change that. McCutcheon recently released an album of work written or inspired by Hill called Joe Hill’s Last Will, and he will be performing the songs and a one-man play of the same name during a national tour that will bring him to the Big Room on Monday, June 8.

“[The album and the play] started with the awareness that 2015 is 100 years after Joe Hill’s death, and most people don’t know who he is,” McCutcheon said. “He’s the fella who pioneered writing songs about contemporary issues, which is interesting because it made a lot of his work obsolete almost immediately after he wrote and performed it.”

McCutcheon explained that, despite the ephemeral nature of some of Hill’s topics, the themes of much of Hill’s work—like people struggling to make ends meet while the rich get richer—are timeless. He also related how Hill’s sense of humor was what hooked him nearly five decades ago.

“When I started playing in the 1960s, we had Vietnam, the civil rights movement, all these things going on that were so deadly serious,” he said. “Then I listened to 50-year-old Joe Hill songs and the things he was singing about were also deadly serious, but he went at them with a sense of humor, that really appealed to people.”

On the album, McCutcheon concreted his bond with his predecessor with the titular song, featuring lyrics penned by Hill during his final days set to music of McCutcheon’s making. The lyrics show Hill as not just a wisecracking radical, but also a true poet: “My body? Ah, if I could choose/I would to ashes it reduce/And let the merry breezes blow/My dust to where some fading flowers grow/Perhaps some fading flowers then/Would come to life and bloom again/This is my last and final will/Good luck to you.”