Overview

Joe Hill was a working-class musician whose songs helped fuel a labor movement and got him executed in 1915. He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t trying to be a star. He just made music because he had something to say. And that made him dangerous.

Over a century later, musician Heavy Meadow hits the road to trace Hill’s legacy driving up the West Coast, performing intimate Groupmuse concerts, telling Hill’s story from strangers’ living rooms, and the front seat of his car. In each city, Hill’s voice is echoed, remembered, and reinterpreted. Through interviews with musicians, union leaders, and organizers, the film explores how systems that once silenced protest now absorb it, turning resistance into product, and rebellion into brand.

This isn’t just a historical documentary. It’s a mixtape, a séance, and a conversation between past and present. As Heavy Meadow loops through memory and melody, Joe Hill’s story is told again and again. Not as a relic, but as a question: Can an artist still speak truth to power in a culture designed to buy them out before they become a threat?

One Big Song is about labor, music, myth, and the cost of being heard. It’s a road film haunted by a man who refused to be forgotten and a system that still doesn’t know what to do with artists who won’t play along.

Why This Matters

Joe Hill wasn’t just a labor activist, he was a cultural force. Through satire, song, and solidarity, he weaponized art to organize and uplift working people. His music was bold, funny, radical, and dangerous enough to get him killed. Over a century later, his spirit is still alive, but his story is fading.

And the system has only gotten better at silencing voices like his.

Today, we live in a culture that either eliminates its enemies or buys them out. Protest has become a product. Movements get co-opted, sanitized, and sold back to us in limited-edition drops. Even the illusion of resistance is marketable now. We’re encouraged to post, share, and swipe in place of taking real action.

That’s why Joe Hill matters more than ever.

In an era of algorithmic pop and AI-generated art, the idea that music could be dangerous again feels almost absurd. But it’s happening. Artists, organizers, and musicians are still out there loud, independent, and unwilling to play nice. Whether they know his name or not, they carry Joe Hill’s legacy.

This isn’t just a documentary. It’s a resurrection and a refusal to be co-opted.

Artist’s Statement

My entire adult life has been devoted to building beloved community, neighborhood solidarity, “union” through musical ritual.

In 2012, I started Groupmuse, the most extensive grass-roots classical, jazz, and roots music house concert network in history. Last October we organized our 10,000th “groupmuse”. Since 2021, I’ve been a touring musician myself, sharing my eco-spiritual, psychedelic folk songs with crowds across the country. I lived out of my RV for years, traveling between the coasts, building musical community all over this landmass. To keep my programming mission aligned with Groupmuse, I started studying and sharing Joe Hill songs, as a way of rooting my show in a historical tradition.

The more I learned about Joe Hill, the more audiences I shared his story with, the more I realized this is a tale that really needs to be told. Music, culture, justice, struggle, a love triangle, and, ultimately, martyrdom; this one has it all. I’ve worked with my dear brother Monty many times, making many films. This is our most ambitious (and important) project yet.

—Heavy Meadow

Writer