ON Good Friday in Salt Lake City, Utah, I made a pilgrimage to a place of martyrdom. At the edge of a public park, a blue-haired Catholic anarchist named Pegasus pointed to the patch of grass upon which the labour organiser and songwriter Joe Hill was executed in 1915. There is no monument or plaque, but next to the last crumbling section of the Sugar Park prison wall, we sang the lines from the famous Ballad of Joe Hill: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me/Says I, ‘But Joe, you’re 10 years dead’. ‘I never died’, said he.”
This tribute to the immortal memory of Joe Hill will be familiar to many of the countless people who have attended May Day events in Scotland since the 1940s. The great communist singer Paul Robeson first sang it here during his visit to Edinburgh in May 1949, where he performed a benefit concert for miners at the Usher Hall. Beforehand, Robeson had visited Newcraighall pit canteen and his rendition for the miners was wonderfully recorded for posterity. In 1960, Robeson sang it at Queen’s Park Bandstand at the Glasgow Rally, and again later that month in front of a rapturous audience of 20,000 at the Scottish Miners’ Gala in Holyrood park.
