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Popular Culture Review
extolled the common ownership of resources and the means of production. In
“Jesus Was a Man,” the working-class origins of the man from Galilee are
celebrated. Jesus is a brave carpenter who preaches that the rich should give
their possessions to the poor. Guthrie writes,
He went to the rich and He went to the poor
He went to the hungry and the lonely
He said that the poor would win the world.
So they laid Jesus Christ in His grave
The Jesus envisioned by Guthrie is a revolutionary, who comes with a sword to
achieve justice for the common people. Guthrie concludes.
When the patience of workers gives away;
Twould be better for you rich if you’d never been born!
For you laid Jesus Christ in His Grave.^‘
As his body deteriorated in a New Jersey hospital, Guthrie refused to denounce
Marx or Jesus. Although disease stilled his voice before his death in 1967,
others picked up Guthrie’s legacy. As Jim Caligiuri suggested in his 2004 piece
for the Austin Chronicle, a direct line of popular protest music links Joe Hill and
the IWW to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Utah
Phillips, and Pearl Jam.
Indeed, the legacy of the IWW and Joe Hill are kept alive in the
Robinson and Hayes ballad “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” This song
was performed by Joan Baez at Woodstock in 1969 and more recently at Camp
Sheehan outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where
Baez was protesting another war perpetuating death and fostering great
economic inequality. The song concludes,
“From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill
Where workers strike and organize,”
Says he, “You’ll find Joe Hill,”
Says he, “You’ll find Joe Hill.”
I dreamed 1 saw Joe Hill last night.
Alive as you or me
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead,”
“I never died,” says he
“1 never died,” says he.^“
It is perhaps fitting that an organization which espoused an
international philosophy based upon an equality of condition for race, gender,
and class, albeit led in its heyday primarily by white males, had its anthem
adopted by African American Paul Robeson in the 1940s and 1950s and a Latina
woman, Joan Baez from the 1960s into the present. The larger culture attempts
to ignore and escape the suffering of the masses by worshipping celebrities. It is