The Preacher and the Slave

The story

"The Preacher and the Slave" was written by Joe Hill in 1911 as a parody of the Christian hymn "In the Sweet By-and-By". Borrowing the hymn and its musical style was also a way to take over the feeling such music carried and turn it to a purpose that was not religious. The song was first titled "Long Haired Preachers" and is often called "Pie in the Sky"; it was first published in the fourth edition of the Little Red Songbook in 1911.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as the Wobblies, spent much of its effort organising migrant workers in the lumber and construction camps. When the workers came back to the cities, the Wobblies met the Salvation Army, which they mocked as the "Starvation Army" and which was said to have tried to drown out the IWW with its religious music. Hill had first met the Salvation Army as a child in Sweden. Several songs parodied the Salvation Army's hymns, and "The Preacher and the Slave" was the most successful of them; in it Hill coined the phrase "pie in the sky".

Harry McClintock is credited as the first to sing it in public, and Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Utah Phillips sang it later. The novelist Wallace Stegner used its title for a novel based on Joe Hill's life.

What it says

A satire on the preachers and the Salvation Army bands who, the song says, answer hungry working men with promises of food in heaven "bye and bye" while they collect their coins, and who call a man a sinner for fighting to get something good for his wife and children in this life. In the last verses it turns to the workers of all countries, called to unite and fight for freedom, and throws the hymn's promise back at the "grafters". The mood is mocking and comic, sung to a gentle hymn tune.

The words