The Joe Hill Award is an annual arts festival

Arts festival

An arts festival is a festival that focuses on the visual arts in all its forms, but which may also focus on or include other arts.Arts festivals in the visual arts are exhibitions and are not to be confused with the commercial art fair. Artists participate in the most important of such festival...

 award.

The award is named for Joe Hill

Joe Hill

Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle , and also known as Joseph Hillström was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World...

, a radical songwriter

Songwriter

A songwriter is an individual who writes both the lyrics and music to a song. Someone who solely writes lyrics may be called a lyricist, and someone who only writes music may be called a composer...

, labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Industrial Workers of the World

The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...

. He was executed for murder

Murder

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

ing a local anti-union businessman and his son. Hill was memorialized in a tribute poem written about 1930 by Alfred Hayes

Alfred Hayes (writer)

Alfred Hayes was a British screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy and the United States...

, titled "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" (often referred to simply as "Joe Hill"). Hayes's lyrics were turned into a song in 1936 by Earl Robinson

Earl Robinson

Earl Hawley Robinson was a singer-songwriter and composer from Seattle, Washington. Robinson is probably as well remembered for his left-leaning political views as he is for his music, including the songs "Joe Hill", "Black and White", and the cantata "Ballad for Americans"...

. Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson

Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

 and Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...

 often performed this song and are associated with it. Joan Baez

Joan Baez

Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice....

's Woodstock performance of "Joe Hill" in 1969 is the most well-known recording.

The Labor Heritage Foundation began presenting the Joe Hill Award in 1989. The award, given during the foundation's annual Great Labor Arts Exchange

Great Labor Arts Exchange

The Great Labor Arts Exchange is an annual arts festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, which celebrates the labor history of the United States as well as preserves, advances and promotes the culture of the American labor movement....

 arts festival

Arts festival

An arts festival is a festival that focuses on the visual arts in all its forms, but which may also focus on or include other arts.Arts festivals in the visual arts are exhibitions and are not to be confused with the commercial art fair. Artists participate in the most important of such festival...

, honors an individual for a body of work in the field of labor culture.