Why Do We Say "Pie in the Sky"?

If something is described as pie in the sky, then it’s unlikely, unreasonable, unrealistic, or just downright ludicrous. But why call it a "pie"? And why, for that matter, is it "in the sky"?

For such a bizarre and ridiculous-sounding turn of phrase, curiously this one has a rather bleak history behind it. And, perhaps even more curiously, given how hazy the origins of many phrases can be, we not only know when this term was first used but also precisely who came up with it and why.

The Songwriter Behind the Saying

Born into a family of amateur musicians in the city of Gälve, in eastern Sweden, in 1879, Joe Hill—originally known as Joel Hägglund—was an itinerant folk singer-songwriter and labor activist. He emigrated to the United States in 1902 after the death of his mother and spent much of the 1900s traveling America looking for work.

After eight years, Hill at long last arrived on the West Coast in 1910, and there joined the local San Pedro, California, branch of an anti-capitalist labor organization called the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. Hill soon became closely involved in the IWW’s actions (later serving as the secretary of the San Diego chapter), and in 1911 published what would go on to become one of his, and its, most popular anthems.

The Song That Gave Us "Pie in the Sky"

Hill based his song "The Preacher and the Slave" on the well-known Christian hymn "In the Sweet By-and-By," which at the time was often played by the Salvation Army street bands as a means of disrupting and counter-protesting the IWW’s activities. In response, Hill turned the hymn’s message of a promised reward in heaven on its head, mocking the idea of promising salvation after death instead of actually helping those in need, and writing of how imaginary, and ultimately unreliable, such promises appear:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked about something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet,

You will eat, by and by,
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!
(That’s a lie!)

Hill’s "pie in the sky" was intended as an example of the kind of illusory reward that good and meek Christians could expect to receive in heaven, having endured nothing but "bread and water here on Earth," as the song went on, "from the day of your birth."

The song’s immense popularity among laborers and IWW members in the 1910s quickly led to that phrase catching on more widely, so that by the 1920s "pie in the sky" had established itself as a byword for any equally dubious or unrealistic promise of future happiness. Ultimately it became a synonym for anything seen as unattainable, imaginary, or entirely ridiculous.

Joe Hill’s Tragic Ending

Sadly, Hill’s own life didn’t quite live up to the promise that the success of his song might otherwise have inspired either. In 1914, he was arrested and rather dubiously charged with being involved in the robbery of a grocery store in Salt Lake City, in which the store owner had been killed. Curiously—and apparently entirely coincidentally—Hill had that night been treated for a gunshot wound that he later claimed to have been the result of a quarrel over a woman, whom he refused to name out of respect to her. Despite the circumstantial nature of the evidence against him, however, Hill was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to death.

Endless court appeals and even a petition to the then Governor of Utah, Woodrow Wilson, all came to nothing, and Hill was executed by firing squad in November 1918, at the age of just 36. "Don’t waste time mourning," he wrote to the IWW leader Bill Haywood the night before his death, asking instead that he do just one thing: "Organize."

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